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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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43. Rant about lack of covid-fallout financial damage maps leading to the mooting of a new religion, Stackocentrism.
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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
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44. Selectorate theory of creative work
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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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45. My API
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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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46. Societies evolve to normalize psychopathic self-presentation
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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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47. Caring about 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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48. Wealth and protocols
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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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49. Abandoned thread on 2020 election cold-take questions
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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…
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51. Tracking enchantment
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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.
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52. Asking questions
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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.
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53. Automating project management
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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
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54. Cancel culture vs know-your-place culture
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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.
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55. Trash-talking AGI/super-intelligence stuff
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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
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56. Moar trash talking singularitarianism
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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…
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57. Why large-scale difficult conversations don’t work, and my rule of 5 for fixing everything in the discourse
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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.
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58. The ultimate meaning crisis flowchart
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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
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59. Herzog-Veblen principle
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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.
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61. "Project managing" network effects
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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?
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62. Anti-network effects.
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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.”
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63. Medium and message in management
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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
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65. Arduino and basic electronics learning project, starting with the Elegoo starter kit and then venturing beyond.
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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.
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66. Riff on kata-style learning
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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.
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67. Prompt + riff on democratizing experimental science capabilities
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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.
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68. Covid Scenario Z
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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.
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72. Web3 101 explorations thread
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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.
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73. Charismatic epistemologies
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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.
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74. Lean storytelling
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Storytelling has gotten so damn efficient due to screen media. A well-scripted modern TV show moves along incredibly briskly. It’s like Lean Storytelling. Shortest path through the beats of the hero’s journeys. It’s barely even writing. It’s amygdala assembly programming.
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