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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 Mar 28
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      Thinking of the “Old McDonald had a Farm” nursery rhyme Also “for want of a nail the kingdom was lost” Complex systems are a bitch to shut down. Essential services = ripples of dependence extending outwards from the most time-bound in time and social graph space.

      3 replies 4 retweets 31 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      Once you allow that a few people (doctors, firemen, cops) must be able to respond to certain “emergency” events within tight hard real time bounds (minutes to hours) you end up with almost everything and almost everyone being essential if you push out the time horizons.

      2 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      At sufficiently large (n, t) every service becomes essential 🤔 Many doctors, nurses working this hour = a few cafeteria workers and janitors working today = delivery services (laundry, supplies) working this week etc Wakefulness rippling outwards in time and social graph

      2 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      3 bad things would happen at different time scales if world were to 100% stop People needing emergency help would die within hours to days People who must live off investments (retirees) would die within weeks People living paycheck to paycheck would go destitute in months

      1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      People who like to rail against “growth” as a cancer seem to think it exists only for billionaires buying their 2nd yachts with rentier capital gains income and that the world can’t stop because they demand luxuries Nah, the world can’t stop because all levels depend on it

      3 replies 2 retweets 16 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      There are less complex modes of civilization that don’t have this “cannot stop” character to them. But they can only sustain orders of magnitude fewer people, and those people won’t love as long, or survive as many emergency events, or feast/famine cycles as we typically do.

      2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      The question of min viable tech stack/civilizational scale required to sustain modern standards of living has interested me for a while. Follow-up new question: how much can we shrink those minima if humans can rewild ourselves a bit. Not full-on solo survivalism, just like... 5%

      1 reply 2 retweets 8 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      Alt way to phrase that question: how can we increase max duration entire world can pause without critical systems failing or people dying? Right now it’s probably 1 minute. And that would take intense coordination and advance planning. And luck (nobody needing CPR for 1 minute)

      1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      Problem gets easier if you segment it. A shark sleeps one half of its brain at a time. Humans sleep about a third of the planet at a time. But human *systems* with min-viable staffing never sleep. But maybe an entire city could figure out how to sleep, systems and all, 5min/week?

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      When this shit is done, this might very well make for a good next Apollo mission for humanity: teaching our world how to truly sleep. On purpose. Regularly. From top to bottom. Around a minimal definition of essential achieved with maximal automation.

      1 reply 2 retweets 28 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
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      Seems like a deep and important complex systems habit. The best we can do now appears to be relatively shallow regional rituals of “public holidays” and “weekends”.

      8:20 AM - 28 Mar 2020
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      • ifrit Divia Eden Alan Cyril “Frank/Handy” Dempsey Rahul Ramchandani Alex Bowles _ RichardT ian hines Tom James
      2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
        1. pt‏ @pouyatafti Mar 28
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          a form of "chaos engineering" for society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering …

          0 replies 1 retweet 1 like
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        2. Kyle R. McNease‏ @KyleMcnease Mar 28
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          But couldn’t you analyze spaces where this occurs and scale up? Some rural areas close most things for the weekend. Also, religious communities have found a way to scale “rest/sabbath” until it reaches even livestock. Chick-fil-A shuts down once a week. That’s a petite example of

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Kyle R. McNease‏ @KyleMcnease Mar 28
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          Replying to @KyleMcnease @vgr

          a rather complex system, comprised of human behavior, vast logistical chains, and dynamic market influences. Maybe you could utilize an evolutionary algorithm to help assist in building larger examples for us to see?

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
        4. End of conversation

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