I'll admit the connection is loose, personally found it amusing because:
Mike is the archetypal nihilist (Sociopath or Loser), the other two would potentially be engaging in a Clueless interaction if Mike wasn't there, according to the Scott/Rao theory of jokes, you need 3 for a Loser joke.
The preceding banter seems to be more of a Loser Gametalk: no social status is at stake; it's irrelevant to their white-collar role. Mike's Straighttalk intervention is typical of a sociopath; the wall breaking joke is that these Losers don't know what his real job is. If they did, the pointless but playful debate would have died a violent death-- because it'd get too real
If these were Clueless middle managers debating their value to their company, it might even be out of character for Mike to notice them..
Adhering to the predictable/ritualistic/comfortable nature of "Gametalk",
Here's one question I asked:
"How does Eric Berne's Gametalk as interpreted by Venkatesh Rao signal to the sociopaths that those who engage in them are losers worth talking to? Distinguish between "channels" that Eric has identified as well as new signals that Rao or others have discovered."
"If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)"
On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default.
On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
Imagine 2 or more Taoist priests raised in different cultures each trying to get the others riled up while cooperating to solve a deep technical problem. How do they keep this game fun _and_ productive? Disregarding for the moment the tradeoffs---eg patience-impatience, learn-earn, purpose-technik &c--- that should replace morality-quality questions.
(Iirc there was a (nihilist) electric shock Zen meditation game that uses HRV, but the above framing may take that to another (positivist) level. Getting LLMs in the loop is one other kind of level)
Since you seem to be having fun but not a boomer and maybe even have a day job, don't mind grandfather. he has a vendetta against crackpots, but you don't fit that mold
I think the technical term is "idempotency", please look up fixed points[0] or "Lyapounov"..
(academia.edu feels scammy I did not click. Taleb uses it but I don't read his technical stuff tbh)
yes it is underappreciated..
Eg when applied to the Bethe-Salpeter equation this leads to a condition for the superconductor transition temperature.. (similar to the BEC condition which is much easier to compute)
I'd just like to know, did you have help from an LLM when writing that