SpaceXponential

In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.  In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions... See more

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.

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Process is the new god; not product. Anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash‐up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution. Digital Humanities means iterative scholarship, mobilized collaborations, and networks of research. It honors the quality of results; but it also honors the steps by means of which results are obtained... See more

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action.  ...  The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective... See more

We reached a head at a certain point. Our disagreements with Stuart were about what type of person should be on the platform, what they should be doing, and what’s allowed. We wanted anything to be allowed and there not to be a hierarchy, or telling someone what’s important or not. Stuart was very much the opposite, and he wanted to control the... See more

We must learn to attend without language for what it is we are experiencing. There are so many worlds that we do not have language for, that perhaps humans will never develop language for, strain as we may. So many beings -- animals, trees, mountains, and rivers -- have no place in any sign system we might design, no expressive agency in any human... See more