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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 Apr 19
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      The earth is a ball of solid rock with a molten core ~6,500km in diameter, with a thin, layer of air of about 10km sticking precariously to it. Beyond, it’s harsh vacuum and hard radiation. About 0.15%. That thin layer and a modest magnetic field are all that sustains life.

      8 replies 26 retweets 149 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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      Sometimes I think mutual human consideration/kindness is like that. In absolute terms, a pathetic slice of space sandwiched between a rock and a hard place. But it is everything. Lose that and you lose humanity. The rock is brutish animal nature, the hard place is certain death.

      3 replies 6 retweets 83 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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      Here’s the odd thing: when you’re young you generally don’t appreciate this enough, but you feel every hardship more deeply, and almost always react with harsh unkindness. It’s ironic, you create the very conditions that make coping harder.

      1 reply 2 retweets 50 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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      But when older, you generally appreciate the thin atmosphere of kindness more. You realize it’s all we have. This is the “mellowing” even tough guys go through. You have a thicker skin, you feel same hardships less, but you appreciate kindness more even though you need it less.

      2 replies 1 retweet 37 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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      It’s weird but though I personally need kindness a lot less now than 25y ago, I am more distressed by the general lack of it. Especially when much younger people are needlessly cruel/harsh to each other. But I guess I survived and so will they. But it seems so unnecessary.

      1 reply 2 retweets 45 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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      Problems get harder with age until they get impossible, and then you die. But until then, the thin atmosphere of kindness/consideration humans are capable of creating for each other is 90% of what makes life worthwhile. It’s the basic substance of humanity. Yet we undervalue it.

      1 reply 3 retweets 52 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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      We go from needing it a lot but not appreciating it enough to not needing it much but appreciating it a lot. That’s the irony of the human condition: we carefully skirt its essence as we chart our courses from cradle to grave. Suspicious of the very atmosphere that sustains us.

      1 reply 0 retweets 31 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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      Makes me sad at our spiritual stupidity. Many go through life entirely dismissing this substance of humanity as mere superficiality that can be dispensed with, and then fruitlessly search for substance elsewhere, only to be disappointed at the vast emptiness of “deeper” things.

      7:11 PM - 19 Apr 2020
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      • Christopher Yang Olaf Munger World Rhys Cassidy Desireeeee Hall LUKE AYMON Wilson Tom Swapan Jain
      4 replies 3 retweets 50 likes
        1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 19
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          And this is why I have such a strong reaction to the Trump era. Personally it has barely affected my life in any major way. But at the same time, it feels like a steady, relentless, and fundamentally pointless poisoning of the substance of humanity, and calling it “strength”

          4 replies 4 retweets 61 likes
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        2. Meera Swamy‏ @mnswamy10 Apr 19
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          True. Reminds me of Aldous Huxley “it is bit embarrassing after 45 years of research and study that the best piece of advice I can give people is to be kinder to each other”. Not sure i am quoting exactly correctly but the substance of his words

          1 reply 5 retweets 20 likes
        3. Cameron Brown‏ @gribbly Apr 19
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          “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” -Kurt Vonnegut

          0 replies 3 retweets 22 likes
        4. End of conversation
        1. Gideon Moss - chiralarihc‏ @egonotis Apr 19
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          Well put. It also makes the economic models whereby everyone is expected to act in their own self interest seem very naïve.

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        1. Sid Goyal‏ @ssjsid Apr 19
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          Dispense with the mere superficiality and then glorifying it as the secret of success for being rich and powerful is where this really goes wrong. This influences even those with the propensity of being kind to hold back *smh*

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