Yogi Jaeger
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yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Yogi Jaeger
@yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
570 followers 32 following 360 posts
🇨🇭 in 🇦🇹 Life beyond dogma! Free-floating systems thinker & natural philosopher. Antifragilist extemporanian metamodernist. Open science, society & living […]

[bridged from https://spore.social/@yoginho on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
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yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
For more background:

Here is Wimsatt's book "Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings."

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674015456

And Wimsatt's Wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Wimsatt
Cover of Wimsatt's book "Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings" with Arcimboldo's "Vertumus" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertumnus_(Arcimboldo)) which is a head consisting of a collage of fruit, vegetables, and flowers.
November 19, 2025 at 3:12 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
I've finished the first draft of my paper about William Wimsatt and his multi-perspectival realism.

I think every practicing scientist today should know about his philosophy. It will make you a better researcher, I guarantee. And it will help you feel […]

[Original post on spore.social]
Re-Engineering Wimsatt for Limited Beings Johannes Jaeger Abstract Science is the best way to get a robust grip on reality. The best, at least, that limited human beings have devised so far. Yet, not even scientists quite seem to understand how scientific knowledge is produced. This is not only a philosophical but also a practical problem, as our misunderstandings affect the quality of our research and limit the directions it can take. In light of this, it may be good if we reflected a bit more on how we do science — to become better researchers through philosophy. Here, I provide an accessible introduction to a philosophical approach that achieves precisely this: William Wimsatt’s multi-perspectival realism. It disabuses us of widespread but misleading myths and idealizations concerning science, such as the idea that it can approach a “view from nowhere” — complete and objectively detached knowledge of the world. Wismatt proposes an alternative view based on his thorough studies of actual research practice. It cuts deeply into the layered yet messy structure of reality, and the improvised but potent tools we have available, as limited intelligences, to explore it. Wimsatt reframes science as an irregular yet adaptive process rather than a cumulative repository of unchangeable facts. His philosophy provides a workable and grounded middle way between constructivist relativism and objectivist realism.
November 19, 2025 at 3:03 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Dear @tidal.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

Tons of artist profiles on your platform are already spammed with slop, and you don't seem to be able to catch up with cleaning up.

This will open the floodgates ...

I want music by artists I like, not Joe and Karen and their fucking AI.
Tidal side panel showing a new "Upload" option. Why!?
November 18, 2025 at 7:55 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
@ljrk

Not even close ... 😞

Help! Maybe someone would have a spare ticket for me?
November 17, 2025 at 7:24 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Donauauen, Wördern.
November 16, 2025 at 3:31 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Großer Sonnleitstein
November 15, 2025 at 3:06 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Gegen einen angeblich wertfreien Journalismus und für mehr Haltung:

"Wenn jemand sagt, dass es regnet, und ein anderer, dass es trocken ist, ist es nicht Ihre Aufgabe, beide zu zitieren. Es ist ihre Aufgabe, aus dem Fenster zu schauen und herauszufinden, was […]

[Original post on spore.social]
November 14, 2025 at 7:35 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
For a bit of context, this is how I set this up in the Introduction:
November 13, 2025 at 3:08 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Is this too mean?
"Generative entrenchment complements robustness. It focuses on downstream consequences rather than the intrinsic trustworthiness of an insight. The two usually go hand in hand: most entrenched insights are also robust because they are more likely to persist if they are stable to begin with. And this is how it should be. But, sometimes, they are not. In these cases, their failure can lead to the collapse of whole sections of our perceived knowledge — which is either a disaster, or a scientific revolution. One of the most famous examples of the latter is Max Planck’s realization that blackbody radiation is quantized, not continuous, which led to the development of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. This is illusory robustness (as discussed in section 3): most scientists at the time took the continuous nature of radiation for granted. In contrast to this radical but productive change, the contemporary standard model of cosmology with all its mysterious dark matter and energy — an exercise of curve-fitting with too many open parameters — appears to be heading towards disaster: a fragile edifice with few alternatives at the moment. Similar things could be said about superstring theory, another large theoretical construct which almost completely lacks robustness, since it is not amenable to experimental validation at all. These major branches of cosmology and physics may have to be scrapped altogether."
November 13, 2025 at 2:26 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
To all you holists in the ontological slums that are the special sciences. Here's your Bill Wimsatt quote for today. It's a long one, but worth parsing in detail, so you can embrace "the new messiness," which, really, has always been there; we've just been ignoring it at times…
Quote from William Wimsatt (2007), p.322: "By now, pace Quine (high priest of Ockham's eraser), I hope I have traced some surprisingly well-marked paths through the ontology of the tropical rainforest inhabited by primitive 'folk-methodologists' of the biological and social sciences. I have tried to provide a beginning and partial manual for the arts of the inexact sciences. Denizens of these 'ontological slums' seemed always on the verge of eviction, as philosopher-kings plotted how to practice urban renewal on their neighborhoods. But in the last three decades, increasing numbers of 'hard scientists' — mathematicians, physicists, economists, and some biologists, with interests in fractals, chaos, computer simulation, visualization, and non-linear dynamics, are moving into the area and proclaiming themselves 'holists'. New developments of theory in these areas have helped to make messiness and ontological profligacy fascinating, attractive, and even respectable. But not any mess will do. There are standards, some with roots in traditional methods and others transplanted from scientific practice, for how one should do it. And many exemplars of 'the new messiness' do not fare well."
November 11, 2025 at 12:12 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Eine dieser Schlagzeilen heute im @derStandard spiegelt die Wirklichkeit der #ki, die andere ist völlig losgelöst von der Erde...
November 7, 2025 at 7:09 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
#vienna
November 5, 2025 at 9:19 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
I've always suspected it: "literature review is an enactment of symbolic violence and, in the process, of epistemic theft."

Don't you dare review any of my work! I'd rather remain undigested.
November 5, 2025 at 7:53 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
November 3, 2025 at 7:04 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Zwentendorf nuclear plant. Completed in 1976. Never switched on due to the referendum of 1978.
October 28, 2025 at 3:06 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Die #pva lehnt weiterhin 70% der #mecfs an. Dann darf man noch anrechnen, dass es viele Patienten (wie ich), trotz partieller Arbeitsunfähigkeit, gar nie probieren.

https://www.moment.at/story/warum-werden-so-viele-antraege-auf-berufsunfaehigkeit-abgelehnt […]

[Original post on spore.social]
October 27, 2025 at 7:23 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
October 26, 2025 at 4:43 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Bill Wimsatt is the best philosopher of science of recent times. And the most underrated.

This is possibly my favorite Wimsatt quote!

"Ontological genocide was practiced upon whole classes of upper-level or 'derivative' entities in the name of elegance, and we […]

[Original post on spore.social]
If you are a scientist, you may not know his name, but Willard Van Orman Quine is one of the most important analytic philosophers of the 20th century. And he made an argument that still has a big influence on how we do science today. Wimsatt’s somewhat flowery quote above is about that argument. Quine’s question was simple. He asked: what is there? His famous answer: everything! We have seen this kind of philosophy before: it makes perfect sense, but is also perfectly useless. To be fair, Quine also has some more practical advice regarding our ontological commitments — what we should consider real. This advice is relevant to the working scientist: keep it simple, Quine says, and only accept those abstract entities as actually existing that are absolutely indispensable for your theories. He calls this minimalist approach desert landscape ontology (Quine, 1948, 1951). It is what Wimsatt calls out as “ontic fundamentalism.” Desert ontology is ideally suited for reductionism, and the Greek take on scientific theory. It engenders the “ontological genocide” that Wimsatt is lamenting. Only the laws of physics were considered fundamental, and so it was mostly entities from the special sciences that got eliminated on Quine’s advice. And there was little resistance among philosophers or scientists against this conceptual massacre.
October 22, 2025 at 12:36 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
On Nov 5, I'll activate this installation with dialogues:

Zwentendorf-Feiertag
Der erste ökologische Feiertag Österreichs
5.11.2025, 16.00-22.00 Uhr
#volkskundemuseumwien

Otto Wagner Areal, Pavillon 1, Baumgartner Höhe 1, 1140 Wien

#thezone #artscience
*** I was looking for something ... (Part II) Repurposing their installation on "Volkskultur" at the Volksundenmuseum in the Otto Wagner Areal, The ZoNE collective turns its focus to the idea of a popular movement for the common good. Drawing inspiration from one of Austria’s most remarkable civil society achievements — the anti-nuclear campaign at Zwentendorf — the collective asks what such a movement might look like in these polarized and fragmented times. Edited archival images from the protests surrounding the Zwentendorf power plant become speculative spaces, inviting reflection on what future collective victories we might one day celebrate. In reactivating the installation, The ZoNE collective adds new notes and provocations, questioning what a national holiday should commemorate today — and how we might choose to celebrate it.
October 22, 2025 at 11:58 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Bill Wimsatt is the best philosopher of science of recent times. And the most underrated. I'll be posting quotes as I'm going through the book for my ch13 of #beyondtheageofmachines, and a paper that I'm writing.

This one is so long that I'm posting it as a […]

[Original post on spore.social]
Quote from Wimsatt (2007), Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings, p.12: "The roots of the views offered here are diverse. The rich backwoods of evolution (Darwin's 'tangled bank') is a heterogeneous, multi-level tropical rainforest, with converging overlapping branches, and patterns of intersecting order, residents, and connections at a variety of levels, but no single stable foundational bedrock that anchors everything else. Yet this multiple rootedness need not lead to 'anything goes' perspectival relativism, or an anti-naturalist worship of common sense, experience, or language. It yields a kind of multi-perspectival realism anchored in the heterogeneity of 'piecewise' complementary approaches common in biology and the study of complex systems."
October 21, 2025 at 4:33 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Correfoc in Sant Just Desvern. The best way to reconnect to our old hometown.
October 18, 2025 at 10:49 PM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Hard at work for the retreat of EMBL Barcelona on the Costa Brava.
October 17, 2025 at 10:38 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
#mecfs Remember the Disappeared.

I am still disappearing, on and off, after two years of this.

What kind of society throws millions of people under the bus?
Screenshot of Tweet by Christoph Ströck @cstroeckw: If all ME/CFS patients lived in one place, it would be the largest city on Earth, a vast, silent city the world chooses not to see, pretends doesn’t exist. When you get this disease, it's honestly like you’re pulled into a black hole, beyond the event horizon, and disappear.
October 15, 2025 at 9:55 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Every time you say your chatbot
"thinks, reasons, means, understands, creates"
a little kitten dies.

And every time you say
"AI agent"
a whole species of cute furry animals goes extinct.

SO. JUST. DON'T!

Algorithms have no agency,
don't think, don't […]

[Original post on spore.social]
Page 1 of Spotlight 1.1 of the UNDP Report 2025. Title: Humans have agency, algorithms do not Author: Johannes Jaeger Page 2 of Spotlight 1.1 of the UNDP Report 2025. Title: Humans have agency, algorithms do not Author: Johannes Jaeger Page 3 of Spotlight 1.1 of the UNDP Report 2025. Title: Humans have agency, algorithms do not Author: Johannes Jaeger
October 8, 2025 at 11:05 AM
yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy
Vienna folks: our arts&science collective, #thezone, hosts an event:

I WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING ... STUDIO CONVERSATIONS

Fri 3.9/Sat 4.9, 1-9pm.

As part of the open studio program at the Creative Cluster, artists Bronwyn Lace & Marcus Neustetter, and […]

[Original post on spore.social]
Flyer for our event with golden bones on it.
October 2, 2025 at 3:40 PM