Conversation

A test of whether you’re wasting time on social media. Take whatever ennobling activity you think you could be doing instead and ask how its relevance, meaning, and practical value (both selfish and selfless) might evolve over the next 20 years as the Great Weirding continues...
2
51
Almost nothing makes the cut. Health, close relationships, math skills, hands-on technology skills: these are more important than, and crucially, not future-fragile dependent on, the course of the great weirding. Everything else depends on how the GW evolves.
Replying to
Betting on social media, going long on it, is in a sense a bet that the Great Weirding will gain energy and creative-destruction power. Whatever happens, will happen here. You’re on the ground floor of the future here.
1
15
If you make a list of everything else you could be doing and sort it into 2 piles: depends on/does not depend on, Great Weirding future, almost everything is in the first pile. The second pile is the things I listed.
3
4
Another test: would making X “social media context-aware” make a difference to what’s hard about X? X = Writing a book? Yeah, a social-media-aware book is hard in a very different way. X = Designing a Mars rocket? Not really, though Elon Musk tweets about his.
1
5
If social media could alter the nature of X, then investing in the social media context of X sufficiently is higher value than waldenponding to do unreconstructed-X. If not, then it’s a hedge to GW. Go for it. Solve the hard thing about X. It’ll have value whatever the GW does.
2
14