It is amazing nearly everyone that comments participates in good faith and an eagerness to learn. Grateful! Thank you! 😄
One of the best parts of orienting my thinking towards the public has been learning from those who write to me. Keep it up✊
Some of the things learned on road to 10k:
You don't have to fit into a neat box after all.
My interests are origin of science, industrial policy, political theory, history of civilization, long lived institutions... and our corner of twitter somehow gets this about me!
1/4
If you love discussing ideas in person, and they use twitter, tweets @ each other make for good bookmarks to follow up in person.
When you link something in email people skip, when you link it on Twitter they read.
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DMs don't scale well but DM groups do. Always happy when I receive an invite to a new one.
DMs might get missed. I think there are ways the interface could be better. Is there something like Superhuman but for Twitter DMs?
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Twitter algorithms do treat you differently depending on really arbitrary metrics. I can feel the difference at different scales. Like passing into a universe with slightly different physics. A ball you throw takes longer to fall. An outlet that was harmless become shocking.
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Far more people watch YouTube than like to admit. Not a bad thing! It has facilitated a revolution in the transfer of knowledge: samoburja.com/the-youtube-re…
Here is a thread of all my videos, organized as an overview on how I see the world and where it is going
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Everyone has an implicit theory of history. Usually inconsistent and incoherent without explication and conscious work, it will nonetheless be the basis of much of your action in the world. With this concept in mind, what is yours?
Watch here:
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What is the best methodology to learn something as vast and cross-disciplinary as history?
In this video, we try to bridge the gap from the overwhelming amount of historical facts to a coherent story of what actually happened. Watch here:
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Thinking biological immortality makes things meaningless is cope, but a very human cope. We're stuck mortal so we make the most of these rationalizations.
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To say old age isn't worth it because of frailty is evading the real argument. To equate immortality with being unable to die even if you wish is also evading the real argument.
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A piece of evidence on underlying human preferences: At every opportunity to extend our health-span we do so. Healthy chosen very long, possibly infinite, life coincides very closely with people's revealed preferences.
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Grounding intellectual trust remains an unsolved problem.
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As individuals we cannot perform all the experiments or check all the mathematical proofs ourselves. We neither have time nor is it economically or socially viable.
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If we rely on institutions to preform experiments or check proofs for us, this scarcity of time is reduced to a problem to one of collaborative commons. But managing collaborative commons is an unsolved problem as well!
@vgr 1. It's become well known Crowds can in some circumstances aggregate information stunningly accurately.
An illustrative anecode is Sir Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged.
2. What is less well known is that the mechanism of aggregation matters.
You might aggregate the information through voting or perhaps a market.
It can be as simple as asking many people to cross a park, a clear convenient beaten path emerges from their individual behavior.
In this piece I provide an intellectual justification for transmission of tacit skills through @YouTube. Once written people can use the piece to share their experience of learning without associated negative connotation...
@YouTube Observing online culture, it should be rather easy to write such justifications for Facebook and Twitter.
The writing environment however seems saturated with negative takes. The insight in those seems pretty much mined out.
Thread
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@YouTube A reason for this might be that social media greatly benefits the power users and the very casual users. The former create content, and the latter use it as a phone book. Both of them use it to engineer and recreate their physical in person social lives.