Eric Lombrozo Profile picture
Sep 27, 2020 5 tweets 1 min read Read on X
Even if everyone around you is totally brainwashed and wrong about the effectiveness of some practice, sometimes trying to convince them otherwise is futile and you can be more effective doing what you want by blending in anyhow.
In other words, pick your battles wisely. Don't argue and fight over stupid shit just to prove you are right to people whose opinion is irrelevant to you achieving your objectives.
If other people's opinions are always so important to you, it is more an indication of lack of self confidence on your part than anything else. Work on building confidence, not on convincing others.
Using popularity as a gauge for how confident you should be about something can sometimes be a reasonable heuristic. But when this method fails, it fails catastrophically as it leads you deeper into self-deception and self-denial.
This is why politicians end up going nuts. The emperor has no clothes.

"The wise man knows it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world." -Zhuangzi

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More from @eric_lombrozo

Dec 5, 2020
What makes something propaganda isn't that there is no truth to it. What makes it propaganda is that your attention is pointed at it incessantly. Every headline, every broadcast, every person you see everywhere all the time. Regardless of how relevant it is to your own situation.
The most effective propaganda campaigns are rooted in truth. In fact, the only difference between education and manipulation is in how people are encouraged to react. Does it give people confidence & practical, helpful tips? Or does it promote fear and dependence on authorities?
Very effective campaigns lead to feedback loops that play on existing incentives. E.g. media corps want viewship, domain experts want career advancement, sellers of paraphernalia/tools/weapons want sales, etc...

It can become a self-sustaining phenomenon.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 20, 2020
To anyone who has lost a loved one to complications from this virus, my sincere condolences. If there's a way I can help ease your pain, I'm all for it.

Having said that, a thread. 👇
First the obvious. Good sanitation and good hygiene are good idea. And sometimes more extreme measures such as quarantine/isolation may be merited

But let's be honest. People die from complications of infectious disease all the time.

1/11
Stop to think for a moment about how we are reacting to covid19, one of many infectious diseases that kill many people each year. There are many other causes of death & the overwhelming majority of deaths (even from infectious disease alone) are not covid19-related at all.

2/11
Read 14 tweets
Oct 8, 2020
The reason for existence of states is a matter of security and basic geometry.

A short thread 👇
1/4
Land area increases quadratically in terms of its perimeter. Collective defense is an optimization problem. I will demonstrate with a simple model.
2/4
Here we have nine houses on nine square lots. Assuming it takes one person to guard each edge, if each house must provide for its own security, each household requires four guards for a total of 36.
3/4
Read 4 tweets
Sep 28, 2020
Rather than insisting that the president pay his taxes, what about insisting that nobody pay their taxes? Seems much better at this point.
Seriously. I am sick of being taxed without representation. I remember something about this from the late 1700s, if I remember my history right.
For those who believe other people's taxes finance the government services they depend on, remember that the federal government keeps bailing out the financial elite while saddling you with debt and devaluating your savings to pay for it by printing as much money as they want.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 19, 2020
FWIW I have also been threatened and harassed by other Bitcoiners. Yes, it is stupid to be ideologically inflexible and tribal about this shit. But accept that people are going to behave this way. Too much at stake. So we all just need to work around it. Complaining won't help.
It is just the way people are. Blaming anyone in particular is just scapegoating.
I should add, given the current stakes I consider Bitcoiners overall to be *extremely* peaceful by practically any human standards and am pleased there hasn't been a lot of violence.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 6, 2020
Trying to build a business atop a broken monetary system is like trying to build a building atop a foundation that uses broken weights and measures.
No, it's even worse! At least the building will collapse in a fairly obvious manner, even as engineers try to fix it.

With a broken monetary system, everyone lives in a bubble where they fancy themselves genuises for figuring out how to magically make a meter stretch longer. ImageImage
Blockchain mania and "DeFi" is just this phenomenon on steroids. If you struggle to understand why people would build shitty networks where you can farm sushi, it is because they are just copying the example of others who have been doing this at scale for a long time with paper.
Read 4 tweets

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