Ian Vanagas

When things are innovative, nobody really cares what they look like. 

I turn down  almost  all of these Zoom invitations. Too  many  of them embody presentations, and I prefer more interactive modes.

Choice architecture (described as “Libertarian Paternalism” by its advocates) seems to merely dress up authoritarian high-modernism with a thin coat of caution and empirical experimentation. The basic and dangerous “I am more scientific/rational than thou” paternalism is still the central dogma.

The ballet is a stylized parade of myths from the distant past, but for Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: “After everything, the violin will remain.”

Our relation to ideas is an inextricable symbiosis, like that between plant and pollinator, a mutualism in which neither can survive without the other. At the dawn of civilization, a covenant was made between humans and these alien entities that live in our minds—honor and respect each other and all will flourish beyond their wildest dreams.

Perhaps no other civilization, either in antiquity or today, was so fond of legible and governable social realities (than the Roman empire).

The number of them that actually learn all the important stuff in under a month is zero. The number of them that have a self-guided strategy to learn what is relevant is almost zero.

David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.