The best thing you’ll read about the great $140,000 poverty debate, and the fallaciousness of reasoning endemic to the kind of people who get off on calling out other people’s fallacies. by #DanDavies https://backofmind.substack.com/p/ways-of-vibing

@Phil you really rock that!

i’m so jealous of how you’re free of envy.

only democracy can make the world safe for technocracy.

expiation. lustration. ablution.

pretty dumb of the United States to abandon its (however notional) commitment to universalism in favor of chauvinism at precisely the moment when a chauvinistic world order would render it an also-ran.

almost 150 years ago we invented the phone.

the latest innovation has been to uninvent it, by inventing the phone tree, customer service center, etc.

i now drive miles to talk to people whom, thirty years ago, i’d have conveniently phoned. it’s increasingly the only way to talk to a capable human.

the present is different than the past, but that doesn’t render it superior. its shape derives from path dependence and lock-in much more than it is the result of some ill-defined collective “revealed preference”.

was King Midas wealthy or poor?

a frozen conflict is not the same as a peace.

the first prerequisite of a peace is mutual agreement as to the borders.

humans are better at organizing the doing of things than organizing a refraining from things they would otherwise do.

instead of applying incentives to try to get people not to do a thing, consider whether you could apply incentives to get them to do some alternative things.

@Phil i think it’s less your introversion or curmedgeonliness than maybe you are also in a less common position, at least sometimes. when you give an in-person talk, you are a kind of node connecting real human. lots of other roles can have that characteristic. but they are roles not occupied by the vast majority of humans, i think.

it’s not so much that digital media divide us as they dissolve us. the space of what you can interact with is constituted ever more sparsely of humans.

incentives matter, but disproportionately to the worst people.

“think tanks” should be entirely obsoleted by organizations called “political parties”.

there are a lot of people i could work in concert with who i wouldn’t want to share a sleeping bag — or a tent, or even a big tent — with.

we need more tents.

you need the kind of state you are willing to trust to be more than a night watchman. of the people, by the people, for the people.

technocracy alone, however sophisticated and data-suffused, is not adequate to the task of governing a human society. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9484.html

(an old post, but relevant to some recent conversations.)

shouldn’t it really be spelled “ewwwbermensch”?

“the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies.” @jasonkoebler https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-could-drink-piss-better-than-any-human-in-history-grok-says/