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Wolf Tivy Profile picture
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Jan 2, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two…

This is really interesting. I'm getting a strong "engineers doing government" vibe.
I've been quietly thinking about this kind of thing for a few years, though in a different way to mr Cummings. Here's some of my thought, on making an engineering-grade science of social technology:

wolftivy.com/engineeringgra…
One of the big things that needs to happen to build engineering-grade sociology is that we need more engineers building social technology and thinking about it in a technological way, and a friendly and powerful patron supporting the discourse of social technology.
You can see then why mr Cummings' efforts are exciting for this. He wants more engineering thought in government, and has the power to support a nascent discourse in the area.
While we're at it, here are a few more links to bits of my way of thinking:

wolftivy.com/scientficengin…
wolftivy.com/socialtech/

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More from @wolftivy

Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Nov 26, 2021
People get sick sometimes with transmissible viruses like cold, flu, and COVID. We can either accept that gracefully, or radically transform society for the worse before being gracelessly forced to accept it anyways.

Let it rip.
In Feb 2020, lockdowns and extreme caution were warranted. We didn't know how bad the virus was, and we thought our society could fight it.

By June, when lockdown enforcement became a politicized double standard, it was obvious we weren't going to win without a miracle.
Many hoped for a vaccine miracle. But the vaccine only partially helped. By then the vaccine was politicized too, and political tensions were at highest for decades, so no one was in a position to publicly notice that the virus was, on the grand scale, simply not that bad.
Read 8 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Nov 5, 2021
Was talking to a friend the other day and this came up again. I'm going to refine the take:

"Based" is becoming what the boomer counterculture was. Radical and interesting at first, but rapidly taken over by imitators and yuppies and people for whom it's a fashion scene.
A fashion scene can definitely be the coolest underground social phenomenon, but it's just that.

The trouble is that because such a thing is so obviously a pile of resources for the taking, anything built on it will be fake, because fakers are faster than substance.
And this is the ultimate condemnation. Once its coolness of something becomes legible, it's all over. It's either already established with a centralized hierarchy (eg apple computing) or it's getting eaten by grifters and watered down (boomer counterculture).
Read 7 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Nov 3, 2021
Mainstream computing will become highly controlled and integrated with the dysfunction of our political-economic order.

This just raises the importance of irrational guerrilla computing projects that preserve self-sufficiency and freedom of spirit at the cost of utility.
The reason is subtle: it's not that guerrilla computing will ever become politically significant in itself, but maintaining some ecosystem of life outside the totalitarian borg-state is necessary for overall ecosystem resilience, and for the training of new dynasties.
New dynasties sweep in from the steppes and deserts when the borg-states become decadent. They are formed out on the fringes where life is hard but free. This generalizes to new ideas, paradigms, and religions. Not just new elites.
Read 7 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Oct 21, 2021
Class oppression in America is largely based on access to secret knowledge that is never written down. This knowledge forms character, habits, social networks, info bubbles, and what positions you get herded into.
This is partially an evolved response to the social/legal inability to discriminate directly combined with the necessity of class hierarchy and distinction. But I wonder whether it has always been this way.
Most people's self-concept is a false consciousness that basically justifies and perpetuates their own oppression.
Read 6 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Sep 18, 2021
The reason architecture, the arts, etc collapse between 1914 and 1945 is the obvious one: the people who built things like that lost the wars. Even on the "victorious" side, the people who won were the factional enemies of this aesthetic.
The reason everyone is confused about this is that it isn't polite to admit that the wars were actually a disaster.
Besides the arts, see also: lost accents, food knowledge, medical knowledge, scientific norms, education, etc.

The institutions that survived the wars were the (often deliberately) crappy wartime starvation version of EVERYTHING.
Read 9 tweets
Wolf Tivy Profile picture
Jun 19, 2021
Why America needs immigrants to survive:

because America is a dysfunctional vampire-state that destructively consumes human capital.

We've been limping along on prewar central European fumes for decades. At some point, we run out.
People act there there is some infinite pile of high-quality human capital overseas, and we can just plunder it indefinitely. It doesn't work like that. At some point, you have to get good at generating human capital.

America has never been good at this.
Human capital generation looks like free independent productive subcultures sharpening themselves over generations.

Instead, we aggressively converge everything into the monoculture, shuffle off the high-quality people into Harvard, and apply their efforts to nonsense. Few kids.
Read 8 tweets

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