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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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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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75. Internet of refugees
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An agent which learned to play Mario without rewards. Instead, it was incentivized to avoid "boredom" (that is, getting into states where it can predict what will happen next). Discovered warp levels, how to defeat bosses, etc. More details: blog.openai.com/reinforcement-
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76. Big frontiers
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By analogy to “Big Data is when it’s cheaper to store data than decide what to do with it,” (George Dyson) you could say “Big Frontier is when it’s cheaper to experiment with something than determine if it’s a scam”
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78. Experts trilemma
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The expert’s trilemma Express doubt you feel and get lynched now Express certainty you don’t feel, turn out wrong, get lynched later Express certainty you don’t feel, turn out to be right, get celebrated, be expected to be right forever about everything on pain of lynching
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79. Keep Twitter Mediocre thread
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Football stadium is a better metaphor for twitter than public square. It’s just that the field itself is shrunken to nothing and the spectator sport is watching the stands across from you. National Sousveillance League.
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80. Creative procrastination. 2 tweets is still a thread right?
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Creative procrastination is when you feel deep internal urgency to do a thing, but manage to delay and delay because your approach doesn’t feel right. When you finally find the right approach, the first reaction is utter relief that you didn’t succumb to earlier sense of urgency.
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81. Step by step
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Tagging an interesting microtrend that also looks important: a “step-by-step” ethos developing momentum. A general interest in break-king illegible learning processes into their component steps and refining them. A kind of process skill mindfulness. Like 6-sigma but for learning.
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82. Bonus mentality in delivering work
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A thread on cultivating an ‘unexpected bonus’ attitude to work that catalyzes actionable insights, discoveries, inventions, and spillover societal value. Interestingly enough, the trick to this lies in a dilemma within the mundane, everyday problem of valuing effort for pay.
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85. Commentary on evolution of publishing
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So ebooks vs print books have been a wild ride in the last 15y. Don’t have the numbers on hand, but after initial rapid rise, print book empire fought back. cnbc.com/2019/09/19/phy
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75, corrected QT. Internet of Refugees
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Woke up this AM with a weirdly well-formed idea: “Internet of Migrants” based on routing pack(et)s of 2-10 people point-to-point in humane, conflict-free way that uses an IP-like protocol between cities rather than visa regimes between nations (which suffers border buffer bloat).
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86. Conscientiousness vs half-assery and deciding to live with problems rather than solving them
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My week at 33: nominally work 9-5, 5 days a week, chores on day 6, R&R day 7 My week at 46: 7-day cycle - Shitpost and warm-up day - Writing day - Part-work part half-ass-something day x2 - Tinkering day - Outing day - Recovery day Chores only in crisis mode
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87. Stakes vs. costs
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Feels like Sayre’s law increasingly applies to the world at large. “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s
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88. Return on risk
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What’s percent of your income is return on risk as opposed to compensation for effort? I don’t mean in a tax sense of capital gains. I mean any part of your income that’s due to a risk you took with uncertain return that could have been 0. I think mine has been ~15-30%.
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89. Death of insight
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The insight industry has been running in zombie mode on pure momentum for the last few years. Insights without a grand narrative context are like throwing random spices into a mystery pot without knowing what’s cooking in it.
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90. Bureaucracy is good actually
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Bureaucracy at its best is the art of ensuring work never flows backwards in a system where nobody can see very far, by overengineering the output at every stage. It’s the essence of good fat.
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