As I go about packing and running errands for my flight, I'm going to do "one [non-expert] hot take that I think various niche mutuals won't like"-per-like. So, surfacing my subjective, socially-obscured beliefs — or pissing off people who otherwise like me.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1205357296714280962 …
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8/ Bitcoin is the best thing to ever happen to cypherpunks. I can't conceive a better way to make cryptography mainstream. (TLS does not count) Stereotypes aside, people to my left participating by ridicule alone are creating a potentially dangerous vacuum if success continues.
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9/ Banning is bad, actually. I've been repeatedly wrong about this over the past few years because in the moment: "fuck these monstrous assholes." But I don't think social commons are merely romanticized goods — they're vital.
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10/ Unfortunately, twitter, facebook, et al are not social commons — they just mock them for adbucks. We pretended otherwise because engagement is stimulating. But pressure-release banning benefits no one more than
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11/ Creating a true open platform is hard because: 1) engineering distributed and decentralized low-latency is hard; 2) we crave low-latency; and, 3) we're so wildly promiscuous with our attention that faux-free tends to win the resource battle. (I want to be wrong.)
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12/ Give people cookies. If you can't do so because it is (quiet reasonably) exhausting, just ignore them. But the "do you want a cookie?" nonsense is not good at winning friends and influencing people because it rejects the premise that you need to do either — which is wrong.
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13/ The idea that the left is culturally ascendent calls forth a lot of facts not in evidence...unless you define "the left" as "in favor of human rights," which is admittedly not wrong by contrast. But again, banking on replacement fails to consider power grabbing is dynamic.
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14/ The current generation of bots exploit our fast-and-frugal cognition; the next generation will exploit our deliberative systems, too. Everyone needs to let go of the idea that bot-or-not matters because it either doesn't or classification is too costly.
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15/ You absolutely can punch down — no problem there. The issue is when you do so in a way that conspicuously favors punching in that direction with no relationship to harm done elsewhere and generally.
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16/ Everyone needs to shut the fuck up about signalling and counter-signalling. It's a god damn moral and cognitive prion.
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17/ Almost no one believes in the anything resembling a blank slate theory of the mind. A whole fuck load of people believe in barely-modernized versions of phrenology.
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18/ Assholes are legion and being kind really is revolutionary. But that doesn't make it easier; it doesn't mean you should always turn the other cheek; and, it doesn't mean it's ever going to be a solved problem. It's humanity's sisyphean task.https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1065115774057013248 …
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19/ People who shout "knowledge is power!" seem to give information sharing (Gutenberg and everything after) very little credit for historical socio-technological progress while affording the economic system that most favors them the maximal benefit of considerable doubt.
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20/ Woke" in the way the anti-woke use it is a real thing but time spent by the latter criticizing the former wildly exceeds what could be reasonably called a proportional response. Mostly it's what snobbery looks like in realpolitik form.
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21/ Anti-union and pro-billionaire attitudes are the best and most obvious examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
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22/ The overwhelming majority of the Bay Area is not tech-bro. Too many of the loudest people in tech with considerable power who don't get sufficient pushback are.
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23/ Vegans are genuinely commendable. Granola stereotypes are weird machismo deflection. We're the big bad in every story — engineering literal slaughterhouses for glutinous consumption. The predator in me snuffs that recognition out relentlessly.
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24/ If you try to draw a line between antifa and the far right, you’ve probably connected a lot of other dots poorly, too.
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25/ The premise of gun rights as a guard against tyrannical rule is defensible. The defense would be much stronger if it’s loudest defenders didn’t vocally celebrate tyranny so much. (Even then it seems pretty weak to me.)
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26/ Subjectivity implies different things have different meanings to different people because prior experiences crystallized as beliefs have different relationships. You can’t coerce someone to adopt your concept as a singleton. Trying is at best futile.
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27/ Everyone connected to the Sokal-squared fraud (even those merely delighting in schadenfreude) embarrasses themselves. They’re not carrying the torch of enlightenment or whatever — they’re carrying tiki torches.
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28/ re:26/ “Microaggression” is an example of a term that is either communicatively useful or detrimental depending on your skin color. Since there are currently way more white people in the US, it probably replicates and reinforces racism, on balance.
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29/ Yes, I know it’s supposed to mean “individual-level” in the sense of micro/macro, but that’s not how it’s received (see: 26) so it’s basically “so you’re thinking of voting for mayor Pete”-quality communication.
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30/ People who reject the existence and prevalence of microaggressions and *understand* it as intended are called “racists”
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(Okay now I’m super nauseated from typing in airport-bound Uber)
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31/ The people who complain the loudest about filter bubbles suspiciously curate the social media presences near the limit of homogeneity. Very often, they're just as technocratic as the people they condemn.
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32/ Private schools create more socialization-induced problems than public schools do and it isn't even close.
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33/ At once, racism explains more than the right admits and less than the left asserts. But you'd be a fool to claim either that racism isn't a persistent issue or these errors are equally bad. Or you'd be a racist.
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[okay. Shitty boingo airport Wifi is to spotty on my laptop and I hate phone tweeting. Tbh]
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34/ People who call and reach out for “civil conversations” don’t care about the conversation part, only the pretense of *their* civility that they’re asking you to commit to.
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35/ The past is important to understand but given the combination of technological progress and hysteresis, at society scale it’s all basically n=1. Somehow only the left and cryptoland seems to believe this.
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