SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
- 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
from Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by The Atlantic
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.
from Wittgenstein’s Revenge by Mike Elias
𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙙 & 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙜𝙜𝙡𝙚𝙨
More from C Thi Nguyen »
“And Suits offers the following definition of what it is to play a game. He says, “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them.” …And the way I think of [games] sometimes, after S
... See moreWe need a new “epistemic currency,” common to everyone. Fortunately, one already exists, and it’s more fundamental than facts: Trust.
from Epistemic Reserve Notes by Mike Elias
- 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 unifo... See more
from Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by The Atlantic
- On a blockchain network, nothing is assumed to be trustworthy except the output of the network itself (Werbach, 2018). On any transaction, there are three elements that may be trusted: the counterparty, the intermediary, and the dispute resolution mechanism (Botsman, 2017). Simply put, blockchain tries to replace all three elements with software co... See more
from TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology by JENA MARIE ESPELITA
- “Trustless trust”, as an expression, conveys a trait of blockchain being inimical to trust, when in fact it is the contrary. Not only does blockchain thrive on trust, it is able to “generate” trust in circumstances where there is none, such as impersonal cases brought about by the scale of a network typically found in collaborative transactions don... See more
from TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology by JENA MARIE ESPELITA
TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology
11 highlights
- Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, distinguishes two kinds of cryptoeconomic systems: objective and subjective. In an objective system, the protocol’s operation and consensus can be maintained at all times using solely nodes, knowing nothing but the rules of the protocol itself. Subjective systems, on the other hand, require more additional k... See more
from TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology by JENA MARIE ESPELITA