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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 Jun 10
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      Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Margarita

      This is the sort of idea that can be a) dangerous in the hands of the ignorant b) even more dangerous in the hands of "I fucking love science!" type moron cheerleaders c) incredibly powerful if you've actually done the work to understand how things like absorption spectra workhttps://twitter.com/margaritaevna95/status/1270879498058321925 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Margarita @margaritaevna95
      For example, how can a telescope measure the composition of the planets orbiting a distant sun? How can we be sure of it? Solipsism and Cartesian skepticism allows us to draw boundaries and conditions on the degree to which we can rely on scientific instruments.
      Show this thread
      8 replies 14 retweets 97 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      This particular example is particularly powerful for me. Spent my PhD years working on interferometric space telescopes for exosolar terrestrial planet detection. The stack of assumptions underlying the instrumentation is *incredibly* deep.

      3 replies 0 retweets 58 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      Once you've worked through the math of huygens-fresnel principle, deconvolutions, etc etc. to figure out how you might pick up the incredibly thin signal that says "planet" you realize how fragile knowledge is, and how amazing it is that we can get to *any* confidence

      2 replies 3 retweets 66 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      Solipsism seems indistinguishable from superstition on one side of knowledge, and inseparable from it on the other side. You appreciate knowledge *more* because it is so contingent on fragile leaps of faith about the properties of glass, electrical circuits, weird equations, etc.

      3 replies 3 retweets 43 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      One reason I'm an unrepentant STEM supremacist is that I think it's *necessary* pre-work before you can meaningfully tackle humanities and social sciences with any sort of depth in 2020. The primary value of STEM is not knowledge but establishing a connection with instruments

      4 replies 11 retweets 82 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      You know how they say "you don't know your own country until you've traveled to other countries"? STEM is that for the experience of being human. Until you've experienced being inhuman (telescope, microscope, prime numbers), you don't understand the human experience either

      2 replies 9 retweets 79 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      Imagine galileo first looking through a primitive telescope at jupiter's moons, or saturn's fuzzy "horns" that would take some inspiration and telescope improvements to resolve into rings... it's not a simple matter of "believe your eyes." That's utter bullshit.

      1 reply 2 retweets 25 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      What experience at edge of technologically extended being in the universe does to you is drive a sort of shallow derealization of surface sensory being. Telescopes make you see your eyes as just integrated telescopes in your body that are just as trustworthy or not as telescopes

      1 reply 4 retweets 54 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      This was one of Hannah Arendt's best insights, that the invention of the telescope changed the meaning of what it meant to be *human* the boundaries shifted and shrank, the ego got yet more decentered. Instruments de-anthropocentralize the human condition.

      1 reply 12 retweets 75 likes
      Show this thread
    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      All those glorious space images you see? False color from other parts of the spectrum. Assertions that mantis shrimps see way more colors? Fragile deductions from eye-optics circuitry that is now in doubt.

      2 replies 2 retweets 37 likes
      Show this thread
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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      Some of this has belatedly leaked through into humanities and social sciences (see for example the "inverted spectrum" argument in philosophy of mind... which required Newton's prism experiments to even construct... or Searle's Chinese room, which requires computers to imagine)

      6:10 PM - 10 Jun 2020
      • 24 Likes
      • Jesus Rivera ajinomoto GP ☃️A Thousand Merry F**kin Plateaus🎄 yoshiki Melo Magolego Arlyn Culwick Rahul Ramchandani rad
      1 reply 0 retweets 24 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          I bought my first telescope in 8th grade, in 1988, spent years glued to it. Now I own 2 binoculars (haven't lived in good skywatching areas in decades). Every time you use an instrument to connect to reality differently, you become a better human, with a smaller identity.

          2 replies 4 retweets 57 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          But paradoxically, the more your identity shrinks as a result of this process, the greater your confidence in what's left. It will likely last longer than the last layer that was peeled away. It strengthens your solipsism.

          2 replies 1 retweet 29 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          Solipsism is in one sense a sort epistemic confidence graph as you go radially outwards from the void at the heart of being. At your current boundary, the confidence of knowing falls of a cliff. The smaller the boundary of self, the steeper the cliff.

          3 replies 1 retweet 20 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          So growing solipsism, in the context of a ego being shrunk by an instrumental connection with reality is a sign of a *growing* scientific sensibility. (not a necessary result of "doing STEM"... in fact shallow talent can grow the ego in a narrow prowess/procedural identity sense)

          2 replies 0 retweets 17 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          pic.twitter.com/LrXJEXUBTd

          1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          One of the fun things about playng twitter with a decently large following is that you can get as esoteric as you like and trust that at least a few people will be able to follow the whole line of argument (whether they agree or not) simply by virtue of the law of large numbers.

          1 reply 2 retweets 41 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          That's the most valuable thing about having ~36k followers... not the tweet that gets 500 likes (meh), but the 10 tweet esoteric thread that at least 1-2 people actually read to the end, grok in their own way, and appreciate. Large n twitter is basically rare fish fishing.

          4 replies 5 retweets 76 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 10
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          Btw, rare fish in a statistical sense not necessarily "beautiful mind" sense which would just be self-congratulation in disguise. More like the kid in Slumdog Millionaire who just happens to know a bunch of game show answers through law of large numbers random experiences.

          3 replies 0 retweets 28 likes
          Show this thread
        10. End of conversation

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