SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.”
Noema • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
Political risks aside, whatever the blockchain of facts could discover about consensus has already been thoroughly demonstrated by Trump Tweets. Trump Tweets have shown us that access to, obviousness of, and even universal agreement on the facts often achieves nothing for public discourse. Everyone agrees on the exact words he said, but their inter
... See moreMike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
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
In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent colle... See more
Todd Presner • The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
Technology, however, is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, even in the nefarious world of the “Darknet” – an encrypted network of secret websites that allows the exchange of illegal assets such as drugs, stolen financial data, and firearms (Reiff, 2020). The great oxymoron is that it is populated by hundreds of thousands of vendo... See more
JENA MARIE ESPELITA • TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology
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 institutio... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
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.