SpaceXponential

Objective systems seem desirable, relying entirely on machines and not fallible and opportunistic humans. There is, however, a catch – machines may be running the code, but humans are acting on it. A subjective system might be able to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate transactions in a way that an objective one could not. Concepts... See more

Eno's contention is that there are four areas – religion, art, sex, drugs – in which this kind of surrender is prized. "These are areas where you stop being manipulators of your surroundings and become recipients. In religion, you stop being you and you start to become us. With drugs, you go from being you to being part of everything. In lots of... See more

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of... See more

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

...“blockchain trust” can be defined as generalized trust, since it does not deal with personal relationships; it is a form of distributed trust, because the truth is ensured not by a centralized body but through a consensus of all the participants; it has both affective and cognitive aspects of trust, due to the fact that although human elements... See more

Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onwards, they no longer inform — they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth. Truth illuminates the world, while information lives off the attraction of surprise,... See more

The notion of epistemic sanctions clarifies what we might really mean by “consensus” in the context of public discourse — universal mutual listening , rather than universal agreement.

“Universal mutual listening” happens when publishers compete on the basis of trustworthiness, instead of on the basis of ‘facts.’

Competing on the basis of ‘facts’

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