Sam Liebeskind

If democracy is this challenge of people coming together to figure out the kind of shared lives they want to forge, then the behaviors that they use to negotiate difference are going to flow from the commitments they have to each other. So when my husband and I fight, we fight like we want to stay married. We may deeply disagree about things, but... See more

To understand the social consequences of LLMs and related forms of AI, we ought consider them as social technologies. Specifically, we should compare them and their workings to other social technologies (or, if you prefer, modes of governance), mapping out how they transform social, political and economic relations among human beings.

With a few exceptions, by far the most important component of successful speech communities is that its moderators have faces . A core feature of bulletin boards, comment threads on blogs, and publications is that the boundaries of acceptable speech are enforced not by tech executives, the farcical Facebook Supreme Court,[xii] or distant buildings... See more

there’s a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from thinking too much while doing very little.

In a sense, the most important decision for any group to make is how to allocate their attention. In any online discussion platform, a deliberative consensus protocol can be used to focus attention on the most informative conversation threads and on comments that stand up to scrutiny, thereby promoting deep, honest, informed, and intelligent... See more

The difference between schools and libraries

From John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education (via Austin Kleon):

To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.

For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do

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