SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
Digital Wellness and
sensemaking and
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... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
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
... 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
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
The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:
Kevin Kelly • Scenius, or Communal Genius
Science holds all knowledge as tentative and uncertain.
While people tend to accept this in theory, the metaphor of Facts connotes certainty and permanence, and inspires a fervor often indistinguishable from religious fundamentalism.
The metaphor of Facts thus creates a countercurrent to the spirit of science in public discourse and everyday life.
Mike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
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.