SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
Taleb’s notion of rationality-as-risk-management liberates “rationality” from conflicting sets of rhetorical expectations, and replaces them with a common set of market incentives .
Market incentives create the kind of consensus the information age demands, and also the kind of people who can tolerate it .
Mike Elias • Pascal’s Market
The metaphor of risk management creates good-faith discourse.
In a market, everybody knows their ideological opponents are making an honest effort to understand — or, l iterally paying for the luxury of not making that effort.
A market is a mechanism for establishing cross-ideological trust.
Note that Wall Street bulls never characterize bears as “in
... See moreMike Elias • Pascal’s Market
The main thing crypto challenged me to consider was the definition of art itself. What I consider to be art is different from what the crypto world calls art. To me, art is more than an aesthetic image. Inputting a prompt, generating an image with a style transfer, for example, isn’t enough to be art. Drawing, and then generating, a thousand ... See more
Wendi Yan • An Artist in Crypto
Mountain climbers educated in the Alps discovered the vertical walls of granite in Yosemite in the 1930s and began to scale these monoliths. By 1941 climbers occupied a new permanent camp set up in the north side of Yosemite Valley, Camp 4. ... the geography of this scenius is unremarkable. Camp 4 is a nondescript, bland, dusty campground. Bui... See more
Kevin Kelly • Scenius, or Communal Genius
To establish a Fact, someone must decide what context is relevant to include, and what to exclude.
The trouble is, there is no objective way to decide what context to omit. Context omission is inevitably subjective — it’s whatever the omitter decides is irrelevant.
Mike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
The metaphor of risk management uses financial incentives to empower our nobler epistemic instincts.
While the metaphor of Facts excuses us from the responsibility of exercising personal judgment, the metaphor of risk management uses financial incentives to empower our nobler epistemic instincts to overcome our lazier ones.
... The employment of gree
... See moreMike Elias • Pascal’s Market
This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (nationa... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
I think of my friends with wild creativity and technical skills, who aren’t at all interested in participating in the conversation in the art world, with no intention to be remembered for their art, or anything. Something about the idealism of web3, its insistence on a narrative of revolution now, its urge to change the course of history right away... See more