1/ I cannot put into words the heartbreak I feel when I look at what’s unfolding in our country.

We're approaching a precipice. If we don’t find a way to reach some sort of working consensus the situation is only going to become more intractable and quite frankly more dangerous.
2/ The behavior of risk assets in the face of all this uncertainty is perhaps the most alarming data point in a sea of bad news.

There simply is no discernible relationship between value metrics and price. The signaling mechanism sending information between the two is broken.
3/ The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would have described what we are living through today as "hyperreality," a condition in which what is real and what is fiction or narrative are so entangled that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
4/ The danger with this is that we disassociate from the world that nurtures and sustains us to such a degree that we sleepwalk our way into tragedy, expecting someone else to "solve the problem."

This presumes that someone else is "in charge."
5/ But I think what is becoming clear is that no one is in charge. There isn’t a hidden intelligence at work steering humanity across the chasm.

To the extent that the system has taken on a life of its own, it is steering itself and us towards the abyss and not out of it.
6/ If we want a different outcome, we will have to make sacrifices. This means elevating our country's interests above our own.

We’ve spent the last 4 years tearing each other apart and what has it done for us? It’s left us vulnerable.

This is a luxury we can no longer afford.
7/ I’ve done nearly 200 @HiddenForcesPod episodes with people from all different backgrounds and walks of life in order to get my arms around the problems & opportunities we face as a society.

None of this means anything if we don’t recognize the power we have to change things.
8/ This means working constructively with those who put forward a positive vision for the country and not feeding into the partisan hysteria or exploiting the nihilism in our marketplace by promoting schemes for profiteering or personal gain.
9/ We should all keep this in mind going forward.

Societies much older than ours have gone down similar paths. It did not end well for them.

It would be foolish to think that we are somehow different.

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More from @kofinas

3 Oct 20
1/ There is an odd defect in the human mind that allows people living under an enormous dam to suffer little anxiety as the reservoir behind it gradually fills to the brim and the concrete walls crack from the mounting force.
2/ In such circumstances, most people will go about their daily business. The specter of sudden catastrophe will remain unthinkable to them, if only because it has not yet happened―as if the ravages of time were positive evidence, instead of something to worry about.
3/ In the aftermath, the same defect will cause survivors of disaster to blame it all on the trigger event, the unforeseen engineering flaw or earthquake or storm that finally burst the dam and brought the water crushing down.
Read 4 tweets
27 Sep 20
1/ We are entering a period in world history where long-standing territorial disputes—so-called “frozen conflicts” mediated for years by the credible force of American intervention—are igniting in violence.
2/ The chaos in Nagorno-Karabakh could easily get out of control and spread beyond the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, becoming yet another proxy war that ropes in Turkey, Russia, and possibly Iran.

3/ There are many such flashpoints around the world. The Taiwan Strait is another. Any breakout in violence there could quickly rope in the United States and its Asian partners into a full-blown military conflict with China.

nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chin…
Read 7 tweets
26 Aug 20
1/ "At the so-called grassroots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented...
2/ ...by the “gold bugs,” the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and controlled, but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment.
3/ All too often the assumption prevails among our politicians and intellectual leaders that the judgment of the people about such things must of necessity be right and ... to pretend that these demands are altogether sensible and to try to find ways to placate them.
Read 6 tweets
17 Aug 20
1/ In this @HiddenForcesPod, @M_Heffernan and I explore our unhealthy relationship with uncertainty by tackling some of the misconceptions we hold about predictability & the dangers associated with trying to extrapolate from the past an unknowable future.
2/ History, after all, is an incomplete data set; we know this because the future is full of things that have never been here before.

New technologies, new drugs, new genes, new people, & new horizons that were previously unimaginable.

3/ And yet, whether it’s the on-air financial host pumping & dumping stocks to his viewers or the policymaker forecasting unemployment figures & growth rates, false prophets abound.

By speaking in certainties, they exploit our fears, providing answers where only doubt can exist.
Read 4 tweets
3 Aug 20
1/ A little over a week ago, we learned that the Trump administration had ordered the Chinese government to close its consulate in Houston, accusing diplomats there of assisting in acts of economic espionage and attempted theft of scientific research.

nytimes.com/2020/07/22/wor…
2/ The next day, @SecPompeo delivered a monumental speech in which he declared the failure of 50 years of engagement with China and called for the free world to stand up against this “new tyranny.”

3/ The secretary's references to containment and the comparisons he makes between the CCP and the USSR are important, but so are those rejecting any notions of American decline and the inevitability of China’s rise. Image
Read 6 tweets
6 Jul 20
1/ On this week's @HiddenForcesPod I speak with philosophers @BrandonWarmke and @JustinTosi about the phenomenon of grandstanding, which they define as "the use and abuse of moral talk for the purposes of self-promotion." bit.ly/HF_144
2/ Although grandstanding is a spectacle most commonly associated with those on the political left, the practice of grandstanding is a bipartisan phenomenon.

Its increased prevalence in public discourse has dangerous implications, many of which we explore in-depth today.
3/ Grandstanders aren't concerned with doing good; they’re concerned with looking good.

They want others to think that they are morally superior, and they’re willing to go to great lengths to prove it, including using moral talk as a tactic for punishment & intimidation.
Read 6 tweets

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