SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
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
“Meaningless” is how some people put it. It’s just too easy to peek under the hood and realize there’s no master plan or final destination.
Molly Mielke • callings
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
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
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
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
+ Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
Kevin Kelly • Scenius, or Communal Genius
In our reality, Ted Nelson served as a muse rather than the Internet’s architect. Legend has it that he conceived of Xanadu as an antidote (or amplifier) for his attention deficit disorder. He dreamed of a word processor that allowed users to surf through and freely explore associations, related material, and alternate contexts of any given piece
... See moreCharles Broskoski • Counter Currents: Are.na on Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines
Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
The structure of games is not that the points are valuable, but that the attempt to get those points, the attempts to win the game and the game’s terms sculpt some kind of interesting or beautiful activity.
New York Times • A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life
I love this! Nguyen follows this up with
“The philosopher Talbot Brewer, in his book, “The Retrieval of Ethics,” says something like we’ve lost sight of how important activities are and we’re just obsessed with how important the output is and the product is. And that’s partially because we’ve been swept up in this hyper-industrialized product-oriented world where we think, look, the thing that I’m trying to achieve is the thing that’s valuable. And I think what we lose sight of is how interesting it can be to be caught in the process of doing something.”