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3. Bullshit jobs and culture wars
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Culture war wrangling has unfortunately become a key element in my consulting. It is now the 4th, and youngest manifestation of bullshit jobs. Bullshit jobs evolve in one of 4 ways: automation, outsourcing, trumpification, and now: wokification. Only the first 2 are survivable
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4. On Grift
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Grifts are undertheorized, and too often conflated with long cons, scams, frauds and other more blatant soft crimes. Lemme offer a definition. A grift is a scheme that profits from the existence of a real problem without actually addressing it.
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5. Learning as rental over ownership
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Stuff you learned and forgot feels like rent paid. You lived in it for a while but are now left with no equity in it. Most schooling only rents you some knowledge for a while.
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7. On snobby Holmesean case work with singular features
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I'm becoming more snobby about work than I can probably afford to be from a financial perspective. Like Sherlock Holmes, I require "singular features" to take a case. I can spot the consulting equivalent of a "evidence of cheating spouse for a divorce case" a mile off now.
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7. Wealth/success monoculture in the US
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Been reflecting on wealth and success (in conventional sense, which may involve some combination of wealth, fame, accomplishment, historic impact, etc) lately. Both are things I am not personally very motivated by. But they are not things I have a problem with either.
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9. Taking things seriously
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The older I get the more it sinks in that 90% of effectiveness is just taking a thing seriously enough. That translates to just wanting the thing itself rather than adjacent things that may or may not happen as a side effect. Most things sort themselves out if you’re serious. twitter.com/vgr/status/127…
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10. Blue-collar mutual influence innovation network (BCMIIN)
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A thread on innovation theory pointing out some connections that have been clear in my head for years, but I’m realizing are not even visible to many people interested in the topic. I’m always surprised when I have to point these things out and pass along these references.
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11. 100 Micro Predictions
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Secular shifts: Maskchic Fat households Dedensification 2x WHM 0.5x business travel Virus-limited economics Last-mile automation Suburban dark kitchens Dumbwaiters Healthcare deregulation Premium mediocre —> disaster hedonism Domestic cozy —> hardcozy trad Deconsumerization
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Replying to
13. Traits of culture warriors
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3 traits I’ve noticed most often in people who get cripplingly invested in culture warring: - Lack of strong individual interests outside of group affiliations - Sense of humor restricted to amirite and mockery - Totalizing (hedgehog) aesthetics
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14. Uberrationality
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Can’t recall where I saw this (help?) but rideshare drivers typically don’t work longer during surge to maximize revenue while there’s more money to be made. They just work till they hit their daily income target and go home. I think I’ll call this uberrational economic behavior.
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15. Memetic r/K theory
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So... I’ve been trying to find supporting arguments for my intuition that even though death rate is far lower than Spanish Flu (2%) and European Black Death (25-30%), the civilizational damage is comparable. I’ve found a pretty good one...
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16. On Zoomblesse oblige
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Been thinking a lot about the API as a metaphor and the peace above vs the war below (both Covid and protests/riots/looting) API as storefront glass: read-only aspirational life API as great filter on social mobility API as defensive perimeter against viruses and violence
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17. On independent research
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I was briefly calling myself an independent researcher: somebody who self-funds spec R&D on their own ideas. In theory it’s something like indie-research : academic research :: blogging/self-publishing : traditional publishing. But the idea doesn’t really work.
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18. More on independent research
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Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it. twitter.com/vgr/status/119…
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19. On the perils of having an uncalibrated brain
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The longer I spend online, the more true this feels. A big consequence of social atomization is that increasing numbers of people lack a sense of how their thinking stacks up against others. They are either very impressed with themselves OR ridiculously underestimate themselves. twitter.com/vgr/status/126…
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20. Financial lensing effect
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Very large quantities of concentrated capital can bend truth rays and warp epistimology and ontology. There is a financial lending effect by which you can detect the presence of large cold masses of money that otherwise can’t be seen
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21. Beliefverse
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Doubt-impedance matching. To persuade smart people, you have to start from a posture of genuine doubt that matches theirs and work both of you into belief together. Belief is a relationship variable, not an individual one. It is founded on mutual information, not private.
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22. Uncertainty regulation as a basic drive
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I've heard of 3 hypothesized "basic drives" for living things: seek pleasure, avoid pain, minimize energy. I don't know that any of them is based on anything more solid than Freud-level hand-waving, but I think there's a fourth one: regulate uncertainty.
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23. Judging people by the topics they choose to talk about
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You know that line about judging people by their actions rather than their words? What about people whose only non-trivial output is words? (assume their actions are boringly uncontroversial, like say living basic middle class life funded by job at paper factory) Here’s a way.
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24. Extended brain stuff
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A megatrend hypothesis inspired by several microtrend that I think are related: a) waldenponding b) rise of heavy duty information management methods like @fortelabs BASB (build a second brain) c) conversational media eating authorial media d) "hivebrain" jokes/references
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25. Nerdos vs thymos
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If something is worth doing for free, it’s worth doing nerd-out obsessively-compulsively for free. “Free” implies the purest kind of surplus leisure energy. It should be unshackled from ordinary ROI thinking. You’ve *already* accepted zero returns. So why hold back?
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26. Cargo-cult selection hypothesis. Civilization is the process of turning sociopathy into good manners
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Observation: psychopaths are often charming/reassuring and can put you at ease in a trusting, vulnerable state. Hypothesis A: Psychopaths learn to fake norms of trustworthiness and reassurance Hypothesis B: Societies evolve to normalize psychopath behaviors as norms for all
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27. Verb for doing science
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We need a verb meaning “doing science” in elemental, non-institutional, non-bureaucratic sense. Something like “investigating” Not “research” since that’s overloaded with methodological baggage from professionalized publication-oriented science. Small-s, no exclamation point.
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28. Dead-end history
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I can no longer remember what the topline narrative of the NYT was like back in 2014, before the current creeping mix of trump-kremlinology and woke clickbait took over. What was the narrative back when people like Friedman and Brooks were still in charge of it? Anyone remember?
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30. Free money
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It really is very hard to care about money past the point it stops being a source of immediate anxiety. People capable of caring enough to solve for money past their personal anxiety point have a kind of superpower. It might even be the defining trait of entrepreneurs.
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31. Doing only 1 thing
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Prioritization is the communism of attention management 😖 Do or do not. There is no priority. Once you make a list of things that need doing, and prioritize them according to any metric at all, you can guarantee you will want to do something that’s not in the list at all.
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32. Memory genres
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Here’s a spectrum of “memory” genres 1. Autobiography 2. Family history 3. Personal memoir 4. Subcultural history 5. Public life memoir 6. Participant history Prediction: All of it is in trouble. Our cultural memory processes are breaking.
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34. Long-term thinking
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long-term thinking makes people unhappy because it almost necessarily means they’re thinking about big problems the only future thing you can be fairly sure about is that the big problems of today won’t go away miraculously and will last as long as you expect, probably longer
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35. Pandemic live-reads meta thread
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Pandemic live-reads meta-thread. I have reasons I’m reading these right now and finding them useful for current headspace, but I’ll save those for a blog post. First one was history of Astounding, the legendary sci-fi magazine. twitter.com/vgr/status/123…
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36. 4 types of community
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1/ I’ve concluded there are 4 types of relationships meatspace communities can have with digitization, which I call a) Circled Wagons, b) Resurrected, c) Atomized, and d) Precipitated.
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37. Reading the Astonishing Stories project
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The Yak Collective @yak_collective has been doing a futures project called Astonishing Stories, led by @SachinB91 and @WabiSabiFutures to explore near-future scenarios. The output is a series of short stories being published as an evolving anthology yakcollective.org/projects/aston
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38. "Thinking for yourself"
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In practice “thinking for yourself” = Being redpilled: Leaving large, loose tribe for small, tight one (60%) Ignorance-veiling: Maintaining composure and 50-50 bothsides priors about everything (30%) “Critical thinking” Ritual, absence-of-evidence skepticism (9%) Real (1%)
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39. Trying to have both sides of a conversation
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People really like to have both sides of conversations. You’d think this is a sort of stylized performance element but it isn’t. Many people have a real style that a,punts to: have both sides of a conversation, get mad when live counterparty goes off script, to force them back on twitter.com/commiefairie/s…
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40. Id theory of narrative animation
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Plot and character are in some ways the commodity elements of fiction, and how-to books spend 90% of their words on those. But good genre fiction usually seems to center a non-basic element: LOTR: fake languages Culture: names of ships Star Trek: species This seems important.
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41. Futurecast 2071.
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US history as synecdoche for world history really begins in 1854. Not coincidentally that was peak UK too. Everything before that is mostly provincial backwater prequel stuff. Bleeding Kansas, Perry in Japan, US tech at London world fair (1851) were the turning points.
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