Andrei Stoica

But it's also true that right now is a great time to do something ambitious. Robin Hanson calls the present "the dreamtime", following a concept in Aboriginal myths: the time when the future world order and its values are still liquid, not yet set in stone.

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking. But to make the content accessible? To

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They believed, that instead of trying to change the world outside. The new radicalism should try to change what was inside people’s heads. And the way to do this, was through self-expression. Not collective action.

— Hypernormalisation

This idea clearly spread and maintained to the present day. Where putting a graphic on a hat or shirt is “impacting... See more

Nara's meticulously staged domesticity is less an earnest embrace of tradition and more a savvy recognition of the internet's underlying logic: to succeed in the future, one must cloak themselves in remnants of the past.

Nara’s audience loves her nostalgic conservatism because it reorients them away from today’s particular brand of anxieties – clim... See more

Here is how Plutarch, classical biographer par excellence, described his attraction to the stories of great men:

We may say, then, that achievements of this kind, which do not arouse the spirit of emulation or create any passionate desire to imitate them, are of no great benefit to the spectator. On the other hand virtue in action immediately takes

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Similarly, in his analysis of the architectural profession in the 1980s, Robert Gutman notes that architects were increasingly pressured by clients to economically justify the aesthetic elements of their designs, in part because clients were increasingly organizations rather than individuals:

2. Most of the newcomers to the realization that govt is paralyzed (Ezra Klein, Dunkelman etc) think that the red tape jungle can be pruned, or organized with better feedback loops (Pahlka). This is falling into Gore's pit. There's a fatal defect: the operating system is designed around legal compliance--instead of human authority to make tradeoff ... See more

So why is there a lag between what tech is needed now and the tech that is explored in some of these hugely-funded research programs? Developers and the intended users of peacetech seem to have different "starting points". Engineers are not trained on global conflict resolution and peace processes and are more interested in - or incentivized to - f... See more