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.
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
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…
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.
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://yakcollective.org/projects/astonishing-stories/…
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%)
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…
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.
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.
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…
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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…
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.
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.
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
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.
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 @Aelkushttps://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm…
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…
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.
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
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.
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?
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.”
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
Test of differential bar for my yak rover build. Two 90-degree ball joints, two turnbuckle linkages, 3d printed bar and side brackets, nice red box from iPhone case for chassis. We make progress.
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.
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.
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.
Scenario Z: Covid is never brought under control, mutates too much every season to be managed like the flu, and goes endemic with higher base fatality rate and is too costly to chase with vaccines. Joins the top-3 ranks of steady modern killers alongside heart disease and cancer.
Starting a new maker adventures thread. Soldering! My previous thread on experiments with the Elegoo mega2560 starter kit are here twitter.com/vgr/status/133…
Gonna make a thread of my ongoing slow journey (emigration? perhaps…) to Web3, along with my covered wagon full of Web1 and Web2 stuff. Including NFTs, DAOs etc. So if those topics annoy you, you can mute this thread.
I've been noodling on an idea for a while that I've been reluctant to do a thread on for... reasons that will become obvious, but let's yolo it. I call the idea "charismatic epistemologies." Aka... how successful people explain the world, and how those explanations fail.