Andrei Stoica

The Sacred and the Profane

In his seminal 1957 The Sacred and the Profane, Romanian historian Mircea Eliade discusses the nature of religious experience. For the religious person, Eliade argues, the sacred becomes as a “fixed point,” a central frame of reference, around which their lived experience revolves.

To quote Eliade:

Revelation of a sacred

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Once front-running other participants in financial markets or cultural production becomes a common strategy, trends become inefficiencies – temporary blips of difference or spikes in value that are bound for correction. Being early as a meta is replaced by catching people offsides. Betting on the return to the mean.

The World Wide Web is what I know best (I’ve coded for money in the programming languages Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, Clojure, and XSLT), but the Web is only one small part of the larger world of software development. There are 11 million professional software developers on earth, according to the research firm IDC. (An additional 7... See more

at an institution, you can’t just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same page. This, however, doesn’t mean that you should abdicate your judgment and get in line.

I like the approach Sholto Douglas expressed in his interview with Dwarkesh Patel:

If I’m trying to write some code and something

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The technocracy has evolved radically. Technical knowledge based on science has replaced military and theological knowledge as the source of power, but the distance is not as large as you might think. In modern technocratic power, the distinction between hard-edged scientific knowledge and softer ideological paradigm knowledge is blurry. We have... See more