I used to live there and was told its deliberately a mess streetwise to get potential attackers lost but this may just be an urban legend or smthg

Tokyo/Kyoto seems a counterexample to some extent re the organic bit, though I'm no expert? It seems just as heavily planned and political as Tokyo. It is still a traditional/modern pairing

Little do the asymmetrics know, theyre doom is already sealed by the tendency of the rate of asymmetry to fall. By an inexorable dialectical inversion the asymmetrics shall be asymmetrized.

All academic papers should be titled “an essay concerning the various characteristics of trade, employment population and their effects upon the common weal”

Don't forget the micro-asymmetrics, who are very much the invisible heroes of the Bluesky ecosystem. I may only have 100 followers, but I follow even fewer, tending towards that apotheosis of social media engagement: the poster with a single follower, who follows no-one at all.

The Singularity.

(I'd limit the claim re Plato to Western philosophy, idk what was going on elsewhere except China a bit but I'd stand by the broader point)

The replaceability of philosophers probably increases drastically with the number of philosophers + general societal literacy and education. Plato probably wasn't replaceable and most contemporary philosophers probably are just due to the amount of educated literate people with phil interests

the counter to this is that in such cases the model is rigorous but its application isn't but I do think there is a certain affinity between idealizing rigor and assiduously and precisely built cloud castles

Not Jacksonian but Gordon Wood gives an account of people passing around a bottle of wine at a trial lawyers and accused included. Absolute madlad era

As a side note I think the conflation of rigor and reason is interesting. Its possible to adhere to very silly procedures with absolute rigor (which is probably true of certain types of a prioristic mathematical modeling)