SpaceXponential

Why would anybody in their right mind want to watch a six-hour improvisation? "People did sit through the whole six hours. I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being. The process of it forming before it gels is as interesting as the gelling."

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... See more

...The dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the... See more

Political scientist Russel Hardin (2002) argues that trust is really about encapsulated interest, i.e., a kind of closed loop of each party’s self-interests. Like the real estate agent who sells a house at a reasonable price not because she cares about the client but because her commission is directly tied to the sale price, the drug dealer also... See more

+ Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.

I’m pretty set on promoting life-long education as the most important thing. Getting people to be curious, in this time when you can access almost every piece of information in the world, is the best possible thing to do to try to help all humans.It’s crazy how things feel in the absolute opposite direction right now in regards to the internet and... See more

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