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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 21 Oct 2020
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      33. Long-arc narrative recessionhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1318411552098111489 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      Hmm. Can any long-arc extended universe type stuff be traced to the 1920s? Especially in genre fiction? Considering a hypothesis that it was a slump decade for EUs.
      Show this thread
      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 23 Oct 2020
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      34. Long-term thinkinghttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1319819179491381248 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 23 Oct 2020
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      35. Pandemic live-reads meta threadhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1246565978021842944 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1233210973793574912 …
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 1 Nov 2020
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      36. 4 types of communityhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/971454478825046016 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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
      2 replies 1 retweet 5 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 20 Nov 2020
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      37. Reading the Astonishing Stories projecthttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1329875894605758464 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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 https://www.yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/ …
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      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 24 Nov 2020
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      38. "Thinking for yourself"https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1056603055309778944 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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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      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 24 Nov 2020
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      39. Trying to have both sides of a conversationhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1330917074500141057 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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 https://twitter.com/leftistexe/status/1330386159176982529 …
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      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 25 Nov 2020
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      40. Id theory of narrative animationhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1331673021367480320 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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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      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 30 Nov 2020
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      41. Futurecast 2071.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1333473709659570176 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 13 Dec 2020
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      42. Data personhoodhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1338237296164814850 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      See also... this idea is becoming more popular by the decade. https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas …
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      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 21 Dec 2020
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      43. Rant about lack of covid-fallout financial damage maps leading to the mooting of a new religion, Stackocentrism.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1341099812687466496 …

      Venkatesh Rao added,

      Venkatesh Rao @vgr
      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
      1:16 PM - 21 Dec 2020
      • 1 Retweet
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      • cybernetic surveillant Illcomeupwithsomethingcleverlater jack_nemetz Kyle Marc Steinberg Alycia Lee
      1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
        1. New conversation
        1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 30 Dec 2020
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          44. Selectorate theory of creative workhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1344414044027981825 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          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.
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 14
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          45. My APIhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1157733517100404736 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          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.
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 14
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          46. Societies evolve to normalize psychopathic self-presentationhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1309988191114416128 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          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 reply 1 retweet 3 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 14
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          47. Caring about moneyhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1314983875546767362 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          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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          1 reply 1 retweet 2 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 14
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          48. Wealth and protocolshttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1322666563107917824 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          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 🤔
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          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 14
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          49. Abandoned thread on 2020 election cold-take questionshttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1324124260382568454 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          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. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1323779406750314496 …
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jan 14
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          50. 3D printing metathreadhttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1300671637486841857 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Starting a 3D printing index thread. 1. First serious experiment, which went wrong... https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1297280695350341633 …
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          8. End of conversation

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