Sixian

Part 2: How to cultivate a point of view

This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.

In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth. The rhythms and seasons of nature help us orient and make sense of when we are. Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is... See more

The curators asked if ‘a sharp object could be an erotic object – or a square object or something that is not round, or that does not have a smooth texture?’ It seemed that the answer was generally no: curves were essential.

2. Product ValueIt’s easy to collect data to make product improvements or find one or two key insights from a data set. These add value, but it’s not a network effect... With a true data network effect, you see direct, constant increases in product value with new usage and thus new data.

We’re lost in the garden of forking memes, and the idea of linear progress along a single historical time line seems like a quaint artifact from a much simpler era. Grand visions of the future are few and far between; the pop cultural landscape is littered with post-apocalyptic dystopias. If we want to make sense of how we got here, we have to... See more

Transparency Creates A Steep Power Law James: And so we’re back to the power-law problem. Which is that some people are very charismatic and other people just aren’t. Some people are really fast, and smart, and interesting to listen to and some people aren’t... And these attention systems we have today — and this identity of the individual with the... See more

You can't do it. You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or... See more

Both the harsh whispers of the Puritan work ethic and the desperation of children not to disappoint their parents (neither new nor insignificant) emphasize that in exploring their own future, humans have always been stalked by a sense of doing the forbidden.