Conversation

Replying to
27. Verb for doing science
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
1
28. Dead-end history
Quote Tweet
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?
Show this thread
1
30. Free money
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
4
31. Doing only 1 thing
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
5
32. Memory genres
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
2
4
34. Long-term thinking
Quote Tweet
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
Show this thread
1
1
35. Pandemic live-reads meta thread
Quote Tweet
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…
Show this thread
1
1
36. 4 types of community
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
5
37. Reading the Astonishing Stories project
Quote Tweet
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
Show this thread
Replying to
38. "Thinking for yourself"
Quote Tweet
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%)
Show this thread
1
2
39. Trying to have both sides of a conversation
Quote Tweet
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…
Show this thread
1
3
40. Id theory of narrative animation
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
1
41. Futurecast 2071.
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
2
43. Rant about lack of covid-fallout financial damage maps leading to the mooting of a new religion, Stackocentrism.
Quote Tweet
wish there was a way to see financial damage the way you can see maps of forest fires or bomb damage from wars... covid is such a physically bloodless catastrophe it's really hard to see the extreme invisible damage
Show this thread
1
4
44. Selectorate theory of creative work
Quote Tweet
If you write fiction, you have to choose names for characters and places even if they are not critical to the story. If you do engineering, you have to choose names for variables, and details like shaft diameters even if specific bindings don’t matter. Therein lies a rhyme.
Show this thread
1
1
45. My API
Quote Tweet
Everytime I tweet non-trivial thoughts, I get a flood of links/pointers to work by others that people think I ought to be familiar with/connect to. I appreciate it, but without specific hooks I’ll likely ignore it. If I followed all such leads I’d get no thinking of my own done.
Show this thread
1
2
46. Societies evolve to normalize psychopathic self-presentation
Quote Tweet
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
Show this thread
1
4
47. Caring about money
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
2
48. Wealth and protocols
Quote Tweet
You can comfortably shake hands with anyone between 0.5x to 2x your height, but beyond that, it starts to get tricky. If people’s heights were in proportion to even log of their wealth, I would not be able to shake hands with Bill Gates. He’s in the 10^11 range and I’m in 10^5 🤔
Show this thread
1
1
49. Abandoned thread on 2020 election cold-take questions
Quote Tweet
This QT is my election livetweet thread. Now that things are winding down into a tight endgame with a cloud of murky lawsuits and doubt-merchanting hanging over them... I hereby declare the excruciating lessons learned meta-thread open. Muahahahaha. twitter.com/vgr/status/132…
Show this thread
1
51. Tracking enchantment
Quote Tweet
The idea of enchantment/disenchantment/re-enchantment with the world keeps popping up as salient lately. I suspect there’s a memeplex there that’s a natural successor to premium mediocre and domestic cozy. Feeling kinda lazy about working it out.
Show this thread
1
5
52. Asking questions
Quote Tweet
99% of the questions people ask in their 20s and early 30s are roughly the same seemingly “important” ones everybody has always asked at those ages. And 99% come up with roughly the same answers ranging from pretty dumb to reasonably smart regardless of effort.
Show this thread
1
7
53. Automating project management
Quote Tweet
My patience for project management level of procedural meta thinking is at a lifetime low... just wanna fingerspiutzengefuhl my way through shit in a well-appointed environment that magically translates vague intentions into quality output with nothing in between
Show this thread
1
5
54. Cancel culture vs know-your-place culture
Quote Tweet
In practice, the real alternative to cancel culture is usually know-your-place culture for the masses. Civil-debate-culture is not an actual option. It’s what elites get to enjoy when the masses know their place and stay there quietly without getting uppity.
Show this thread
1
6
55. Trash-talking AGI/super-intelligence stuff
Quote Tweet
I hadn’t seen this critique of superintelligence before. Interesting. It lands roughly where I did but via a different route (his term is much cleverer, “AI cosplay”). Ht @Aelkus idlewords.com/talks/superint
Show this thread
1
10
56. Moar trash talking singularitarianism
Quote Tweet
People always say “smartest people” and “artificial intelligence” in the same breath 🤔 There may be a slight circularity problem in this discourse. twitter.com/mattyglesias/s…
Show this thread
1
1
57. Why large-scale difficult conversations don’t work, and my rule of 5 for fixing everything in the discourse
Quote Tweet
There’s a theory that the ability to have painful conversations in large groups is some sort of valuable and advanced skill that we must practice. I submit that this skill is psychological science fiction. No group larger than 5 people has ever had such a conversation.
Show this thread
1
3
58. The ultimate meaning crisis flowchart
Quote Tweet
Never attribute to a meaning crisis what can be adequately explained by poverty Never attribute to anomie what can be adequately explained by dehydration Never attribute to loneliness what can be adequately explained by not looking hard enough for a good tv show to watch
Show this thread
1
1
59. Herzog-Veblen principle
Quote Tweet
Herzog-Veblen principle: Wildernesses are murderous but lazy places. Savagery does not respect effort. Visible effort marks you as food. The harder you work the more you look like lunch.
Show this thread
1
2
61. "Project managing" network effects
Quote Tweet
When a proto-network is strongly under your control/influence (eg network of stores you can release a product in, large group of employees you can send a prompt to, fans of a movie franchise…), how do you trigger a network effect? Can you project manage a network effect?
Show this thread
1
2
62. Anti-network effects.
Quote Tweet
What’s the opposite of a network effect? Not merely a negative network effect like a contagion or failure cascade. That’s just point of view/subjective. Possibly a positive one for someone else. A true opposite on the spirit of “the opposite of love is not hate but apathy.”
Show this thread
1
4
63. Medium and message in management
Quote Tweet
1. Management by conferences 2. Management by 1:1 meeting 3. Management by walking around 4. Management by slide deck 5. Management by whitepaper 6. Management by project 7. Management by objectives 8. Management by I/O queue 9. Management by firefight 10. Management by absence
Show this thread
1
2
65. Arduino and basic electronics learning project, starting with the Elegoo starter kit and then venturing beyond.
Quote Tweet
Starting to play with Arduino more. First I’ve fiddled with electronic assembly in ~20 years and the biggest learning is: middle-aged eyesight and finger dexterity suck. Reading resistor values and assembling even a simple circuit was more eye/finger strain than I expected.
Show this thread
Embedded video
0:10
18.6K views
1
3
66. Riff on kata-style learning
Quote Tweet
I once attended a talk about “coding kata.” I don’t think the idea ever took off. It works even worse with hardware. Something about engineering seems to defy learning through abstract formal exercises of growing combinatorial complexity. Like music scales or kata. Wonder why.
Show this thread
1
67. Prompt + riff on democratizing experimental science capabilities
Quote Tweet
What’s the cheapest scientific instrument that can get an average amateur to the bleeding edge of discovery work? So not just scutwork that the pros with billion dollars instruments like CERN or Hubble indulgently farm out.
Show this thread
2
2
Show replies