SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
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
One of my closest friends says his love language is deep attention. When I’m confused about a situation, he listens to what I have to say, directs me with careful questions, and then goes away for a few hours. Eventually, he comes back with a question or framing that slices through my fog. I treasure his speech deeply. The attention that undergirds... See more
Jasmine Wang 🌱 • Attending to the Other
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
NOEMA • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
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
The pressure to perform and live up to the expectations of others is not a new social phenomenon — nor a bad one. **^^But the way it manifests at the internet’s global scale increases its intensity tenfold — especially for young people. The goal is no longer to simply live up to the high expectations of your parents and peers — online you could be... See more
Molly Mielke • callings
We think of ‘facts’ as being somewhat equivalent to data — they’re observations, which in theory anyone could verify.
But observation is just one of three essential ingredients required to make a Fact.
The other two are:
- 1) Context omission, and
- 2) Trust, in the one omitting the context.
Mike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
+ Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
Kevin Kelly • Scenius, or Communal Genius
... another reason for the crisis of community, which is a crisis of democracy, is digitalization. Digital communication redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public. This has highly deleterious... See more