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

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      All radicals should be encouraged to form institutions. Much moral high-ground posturing and insufferable certitude are rooted in not yet having reproduced pre-ideological institutional pathologies that are the root cause of most things they critique on ideological grounds.

      7 replies 20 retweets 107 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      There is no real defense against mediocrity. Institutionalization is the structural compromise between mediocrity and exceptionalism. An instrument of detente between the self-congratulatory esotericism of self-anointed elites and basic apathy of mediocrities they must rely on.

      2 replies 3 retweets 28 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      “Institutionalize fast” is the “fail fast” of the human condition. The sooner any sort of utopian is forced into a reckoning with mediocrity of humans, the less painful it is. The longer an ideology persists in a pre-institutional intellectual state, the more cancerous it gets.

      1 reply 7 retweets 48 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      Institutions are a means of healthy disillusionment of radical utopian sensibilities, as well as a delivery mechanism for consolation prizes of enlightenment cynicism, compassion, pragmatism, and live-and-let-live survival. Good things humans *only* accept as consolation prizes.

      1 reply 2 retweets 30 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      No aspirational ideal of human nature survives first contact with actual humans. Institutionalization is a means to accelerate that encounter. When the committees form, the fever dream ends, people look at each other, warts and all, shrug, and start trying to get along.

      3 replies 5 retweets 31 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      One reason this works is a very direct analogy to compiling/testing in programming. An institution is basically the compiled code form of an ideology, that must run in clueless brains without crashing so often it cannot function. The clueless are excellent robots.

      1 reply 2 retweets 21 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      Hmm. 2x2: Mediocre vs exceptional. Self-aware vs non-self-aware. MS = sociopath MNS = loser ENS = clueless ES = suicidal, not a stable state

      3 replies 1 retweet 15 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      A great trick is operating at two resolutions where you institutionalize into a pristine order at say 75 dpi, but exhibit organic chaos at 300dpi, with 150dpi as transitional resolution. I know only a couple of institutions that pull off this magic trick. Essence of leveling up.

      2 replies 1 retweet 17 likes
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    9. Ovid 19 BC  🐮‏ @typhoonjim 7 Jul 2019
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      China is an extreme: low resolution China is monolithic, and that's all people imagine from the outside Two resolutions isn't an ideal though, Nazi Germany was famously low res order, high res chaos

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 7 Jul 2019
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      Replying to @typhoonjim

      It’s an amoral condition of rapid evolution for good or bad

      2:35 PM - 7 Jul 2019
      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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        2. Ovid 19 BC  🐮‏ @typhoonjim 7 Jul 2019
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          Not sure it leads to rapid evolution. Chinese military strategy in the late 20th is an example of high res chaos leading to missed lessons and stagnation

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Ovid 19 BC  🐮‏ @typhoonjim 7 Jul 2019
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          Replying to @typhoonjim @vgr

          In times of party unity, the PLA is more professional, whereas in times of internal struggle it is part of political disagreement

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
        4. End of conversation

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