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This might be my most popular tweet ever. Recipe: basic 2nd order Pohl's Law take ("job of sci fi is to predict traffic jams not automobiles"), with a dash of Cunningham's Law ("post a wrong answer to get the right one") plunked right into set of active derpquake faultlines 😝

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Aug 4, 2018

Just hit me that at say $3/gallon and say 40mpg, it would be cheaper for a self-driving gasoline car to just circle around than park anywhere at more than $3/hr. At say $0.5/mile fully loaded operating cost it’s not worth parking above $20/h. The loitering car cloud is coming.

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Ah, pulling a Taleb, are we? Twitter: where the intelligent become contemptuous.

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Twitter: where you can no longer sustain the illusion that the intelligent aren't contemptuous by default.

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That's become a bit of a motif with you and ,I Sindre, and I'm coming around to your thinking on the matter. I think it becomes an argument for long-form pieces and good internet hygiene. In Taleb's case, his feed grew to way too high of a contempt-to-info ratio.

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Not something I can prove, but if you spent that much time on Taleb's feed he's more or less openly admitted that's about branding. I also don't bother to follow him, since most of his quality ideas filter in through retweets. Not a fan of the bigmouth grandpa brand, myself.

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The fact that that kind of branding works -- Cp the Dilbert guy -- grieves me. I still like Dilbert, and I still see grandpa T's earlier work as some of the best books I've ever read. Long live long form. And. . . don't meet your heroes.

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Yeah well most of my Roman OGs thought murderous conquest,keeping slaves and treating women almost like slaves were pretty much OK. You know, much like 30-40% of modern Americans.

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But despite those things being Obviously Terrible now and Arguably Pretty Bad then, I hesitate to bigoteer. They lived in a time when violent subjection to foreign barbarians was more than a political talking point, and we have about 2 millennia of moral and ethical work on them

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(And we are still terrible at both, all the same.)

11:39 AM · Aug 5, 2018Twitter Web App