Low Rents Research

  INTO THE MIND OF THE CREATOR Anti-Apophenia and Deliberate Noise in Justin Posey’s Beyond the Map’s Edge A line-by-line method for separating signal, subterfuge, and over-reading in the poem Low Rents  ·  lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com ABSTRACT Justin Posey’s Beyond the Map’s Edge poem presents an unusual interpretive problem. It is not simply a riddle, and it is not simply a literary coda to a memoir. It is a route-making instrument surrounded by a deliberately noisy information environment: a memoir, photographs, illustrations, interviews, a map, a legal apparatus, a cryptographic precommitment mechanism, a public commentary stream, a Forrest Fenn inheritance, and a community already trained by a decade of Fenn-style over-reading. The result is a puzzle that invites the same pattern hunger it appears to warn against. This paper argues that the poem is best read as a high-parsimony route poem with bounded midstream ambi...

  INTO THE MIND OF THE CREATOR Hidden in the Reasoning Theory of mind, salience, and the adversarial psychology of concealment in Beyond the Map's Edge Low Rents   ·   lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com ABSTRACT Concealment is a contest between two minds, and a hider wins or loses in the act of modeling the searcher. This paper applies the cognitive science of that contest to Justin Posey and his hunt, sharpened by his 2014 Sunlight Basin solution to Forrest Fenn. Drawing on theory of mind and the documented ceiling on recursive mentalizing, the curse of knowledge, the game theory of hide-and-seek and salience, the science of misdirection and inattentional blindness, and Posey's own pre-hunt record, I argue that an able adversarial hider does five things, and that Posey's statements show him doing all five: he avoids the salient locations that both seekers and naive hiders are drawn to; he places the cache just past the threshold where searcher attention and ef...