The centralization of Western culture. A story of a wonderful culture, and its ongoing childhood disease.

There is a charming theory of why Northern Europe benefited more from the enlightenment than southern Europe. It starts with Martin Luther. Once his detachment from the catholic church was a fact, he got to work translating the bible. He even had to invent a complete german grammar to do it.

Luther saw literacy as a religious duty, since it was the only way to get a personal connection to the word of God.

Why is science broken?

That it is broken is beyond doubt. Universities are selecting clever hacks who can publish 5 bad papers per year over polymaths. Most fields haven't seen meaningful progress in decades, and the pure inflationary bloat in just about everything spells doom. As I wrote about yesterday, society is inundated with what I call controlmaxxing. Formalization, specialization, standardization, quantification, and so on.

At a deeper level, this can be defined as "optimizing for exploitation", as opposed to exploration.

Here's a strange thing I realized a couple of years ago.

Most (social) sciences are split into a quantitative and qualitative camp.

It's not just about methodology though. These camps are so different that they're almost unable to talk to each other. In economics: Neoclassical vs. austrian

In education: School effectiveness research vs. pedagogy

In general: Statistical plug-and-play research vs. eclectic ad hoc mumbo jumbo.

(OK, it's not all bad, but the vast majority of published science now seems to be garbage)

Blockchains were not the big innovation of #Bitcoin. On the contrary:

Public ledgers have been around for centuries. Everything a blockchain does can be done faster and cheaper on a centralized model. This was the *price* Nakamoto paid to make Bitcoin’s incentive structure work. "It is outside the realm of possibility that a technology designed specifically to eliminate third-party intermediation could end up serving any useful purpose to the intermediaries it was created to replace." -@saifedean

I watched @ShellenbergerMD's two debates on crypto. They were both interesting and painful to watch, and though I expected both of these reactions they were triggered for slightly unexpected reasons.

Here's how this looked from the perspective of a bitcoin maxi. Backstory:
Shellenberger wrote a piece/thread on crypto. It was a real Gell-Mann moment for me, having followed Michael for a while, and a reminder of how it can look from the outside.
He challenged critics to debate him, and they were all too willing.

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1595177474606125057