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Replying to
Yeah I don’t get this. a) Money for nothing is the best kind of money. b) Humans have always lived off money for nothing, be it burning dead ancestors as fuel, or even vegans eating hardworking plants that make their own honest glucose out of sunlight and inorganic chemicals. t.co/k8N9B5pgOu
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Funny how “normalcy washing” can disguise speculative aspects. I’m currently exploring buying a house and it seems like the most dangerously speculative thing I’ve ever considered doing. Betting on economic future of a *dingle* geography over 30 years 🤯
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Yet nobody calls that speculation even though it is anchored in a government-sanctioned local-supremacism fantasy that’s wilder than any other gamble I’ve ever entertained.
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A few versions of this “unfair externalized suffering” point in replies. I think it’s revealing. It’s a mental model that presumes not changing has no costs. Let’s unpack that a bit…
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Replying to @vgr
Don’t people who say that usually talk about a very narrow type of speculation where being right and profiting from it means a large groupe of people (presumably unfairly) suffering from it? Do people criticize the concept of speculating in general?
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I think what’s going on here is a tension between two unilateral impulses — working to maintain a status quo or working to change it. Neither is a consensus or democratic behavior. Both operate through non-shared agency (to stop things or do things) as fait accompli behaviors.
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Replying to
I think there is a devolved theorist vs experimentalist vibe in it too. Sort of “theorists/speculators are wasting time when they should just get down to work and run the experiments”.
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There might be two forms of speculation being conflated: speculation in the form of “what ifs”/imaginative thinking, and speculation as a form of trading. The latter is quite clearly experimental and has one “that’s just speculation” opponent. The other is more theory-ish.
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I think th conflation is what makes it interesting… otherwise it’s either pure gambling or pure fantasy. Speculation is bets based on weakly grounded imagined futures.
Replying to
Huh. I’d always viewed those as two related, but distinct, definitions. *googles* And it turns out that they are, but I like the portmanteau-of-meaning.
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