Human Stuff

A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense.

— Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It was striking how many of Elon’s early tweets about Twitter’s issues seemed to pin Twitter’s underperformance on engineering problems. Response times, things of that nature. But Twitter’s appeal was never a pure feat of engineering, nor were its problems solely the fault of engineering malpractice. They were human in nature. Twitter isn’t, as... See more

I’m betting on people. I’m betting that people will refuse to abandon their souls to the machine, and refuse to forget who they truly are. People just need, in Plato’s words, anamimneskein —”to be reminded.” And that’s a process that is best done in genuine encounters.

When fed a chunk of information, a computer processes it in the same way on each occasion, whether it’s been at work for five minutes or five hours, whether it is located in a fluorescent lit office or positioned next to a sunny window, whether it’s near other computers or is the only computer in the room. This is how computers operate.

But the same

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Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy

It is a human trait to organize things into categories. Inventing categories creates an illusion that there is an overriding rationale in the way that the world works.