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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      You're either ignoring tech side and building a big-tent coalition that includes anti-nuclear people (typically 1960s style climate doves). This is basically choosing to build a larger, but fundamentally hamstrung capability, like "okay, space program, but no rockets" or worse...

      2 replies 4 retweets 33 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      ... you are ignoring the numbers with the assumption that it's a technical/engineering detail and that engineers/industry can meekly go and do whatever politicians decide needs to be done, within the constraints they decide are politically expedient to impose.

      1 reply 5 retweets 34 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      But setting aside green part, the GND document smells to me like a cocktail of 2 poison pills. The "green" part is a poison pill for the "new deal" part and the "new deal" part is a poison pill for the "green" part. But maybe I just don't understand power of political charisma?

      3 replies 2 retweets 20 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      I saw this argument in the Atlantic that this approach is "smart" because while economists prefer broad macro-measures, voters prefer one labeled, legible measure after another, like "medicare for all", "free community college" https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-winning-climate-strategy/576514/ …

      1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      This is a case of putting political feasibility ahead of technical feasibility. Just because "the people" demand faster horses does not mean you can get to the invention of the car by supplying a series of faster horses.

      1 reply 6 retweets 32 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      This is depressingly common. Politicians are so aware of Overton window issues and the "physics of voting" they keep sacrificing technical plausibility in order to preserve political possibility. Another example of incoherence is demanding that algorithms explain themselves.

      1 reply 7 retweets 39 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      I think we're going to see this increasing divergence between science/engineering ideas of good attacks on complex problems and political ideas of good attacks. There's a reason politicians keep going back to Apollo as a charismatic megafauna reference point for science/tech...

      1 reply 5 retweets 33 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      Rocketry was the last popularly legible sector where you could pose politically feasible goals while conveying a cartoon technical vision that did not create implausible design spaces for the tech community. Everything since: computing, genetics, neuroscience, AI, is illegible.

      1 reply 7 retweets 43 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      It seems weird, but Kennedy's "Moon in a decade" was fundamentally more coherent a technical proposal than something like "decarbonize without nuclear energy to hit 50% emissions target by 2030."

      3 replies 7 retweets 39 likes
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    10.  🤯‏ @krrishd 10 Feb 2019
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      Replying to @vgr

      is it the nature of rocketry as a science vs these other fields that you think makes the difference in being politically coherent AND technically good, or is it something else?

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 10 Feb 2019
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      Replying to @krrishd

      rocketry is both technically simpler (high-school math conveys the basic ideas) and popularly explainable (visual geometry of what's proposed is clear: moon and back), and most importantly, easily empirically verifiable via public sense: moon photos and live astronauts back.

      10:02 AM - 10 Feb 2019
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      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
        1.  🤯‏ @krrishd 10 Feb 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          makes sense, i hope the political/democratic nature of things doesn’t require us to be in the stage where the “visual geometry” of climate change becomes “stop the floods” but i have a little more faith than that

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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