If I had to explain myself as a figurative “very small shell script” it would be: a bot that tries to stay adjacent to, but not at heart of, the hardest problems being solved by humans at any given time. If civilization is a moving bottleneck/traffic jam, I am First Rubbernecker.
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I also appear to have been obsessed with applying the small-shell-script metaphor both to myself and people who annoy me, for several years.
Possibly I annoy myself to the point I want to replace myself with a very small shell script. mobile.twitter.com/search?q=shell
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The locus of “hardest problem” is subtly different from “where the action is”. Sometimes they coincicide. The latter is locus of highest agency where Men can be Real Men, Women can be Real Women, etc. It’s where the spotlight shines, where the BIRG lighting is strongest.
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It is also different from “Most Important”. Humans generally don’t have a clue where the Most Important problem is. Even when (and perhaps especially when) they agree strongly. You can detect Most Urgent that way, but Most Important takes the wisdom of hindsight.
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Most Important/Most Urgent is where institutions ponderously do the biggest, most bureaucratic things.
Sometimes this coincides with Hardest, but usually not. When they coincide, hardest is not usually front and center.
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Hardest tends to be where people are growing the most in interesting, disturbing ways. Not along any single legible vector like intelligence or morality, but in ways that undermine the very definitions of the eigenvectors of being human.
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