An Autobiographical Introduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this book, I discuss how a group of people got together, realized that their music had the potential to be magic, and created a way to help it realize that potential.In this introduction, I will be talking about how and why this book came to be, so you can know its origin story.The book came out of my time in the Toronto improvising or creative music scene, which I was involved in from roughly 2005 to 2015.I had spent the 1990s mostly playing rock music, with a side order of dishwashing, before making a fairly radical shift to studying ancient gnosticism full time, starting in 2000.Heavi ly influenced by Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, I had come to see ancient gnosticism as the spiritual origin of many of the currents in modern culture that most interested me.I'm talking about things like situationism, Discordianism, Jung, the Church of the SubGenius, the psychedelic anarchy of thinkers such as Robert Anton Wilson, and, of course, punk rock and hardcore music.In fact, I still think that the myth structures and critiques created by these mostly anonymous early Christian writers are the best, smartest, and most visionary challenges to institutional power and hierarchy that anyone has ever come up with, and they set the stage for a lot of what came after.If you want to develop your ability to see through bullshit, you could do a lot worse than spending some time with some of the gnostic writings, like the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Philip.I'll never regret the years I spent doing just that.But-and this is a big but-the gnostic authors don't seem to me to be nearly as strong when it comes to talking about what you see once you've seen through the bullshit.They speak of liberation, but it's never clear (at An Autobiographical Introduction
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.225 | 0.078 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".