i recently lived for three days mostly on CVS sandwiches and minute aid not because i couldnt easily afford better but because while i _recognize_ better food and can get it, i take no real pleasure in it; in fact i relish what my indifference to it represents
i am a natural ascetic. you cannot compete with this
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as I've written before--I can't find the thread--pseudonymy is easily defended. it has had a substantial tradition in american discourse since the founding
and there are very good reasons for maintaining it, even--*especially*--in a political context
the thought foremost in my mind is, education is going to become much more important for our children. not as a means of earning a living but as a means of becoming realized and independent humans in a dehumanizing age
the notion of education in the latter 20th century being wholly a matter of practical knowledge rather than of personal development has always been exaggerated
but set aside practicality; imagine a world where bodily survival and provision are not dependent on such learned skill
there is still a purpose to education in conveying to children the ways of living, thinking and acting and speaking, that we have found worthy
that is, the point of such education is guiding a child to becoming the kind of person who it is worth being for a lifetime
i was curious if or how they might justify any such moves
explicitly calling it "compelled speech" in a public statement is much more assertive than I'd expected
i wonder where this new respect for speech freedom is coming from ha ha
but fr i hadn't expected this and it feels like a big deal
it's the first meaningful rollback of Awokening policy, and MIT doing it in these terms gives significant elite cover to other schools that might _want_ do it
this isnt just netflix or doritos this is every product
the main reason it tends to be more pronounced in tech products is that tech products have vastly better and cheaper telemetry than legacy industries and it's easy to run sufficiently-powered A/B tests on consumers
facebook in particular was when i was there incredibly well-developed in this kind of measurement; their internal tooling and organizational practices in product analytics were afaik the best in the world
it was an exquisite organizational and technical accomplishment
i won't get into details although I don't think it's much of an industrial secret
but basically, the impact of every feature change and every product team could be rigorously measured and tracked and usually were
there was a ton of upside to this but perhaps one major downside