I give a talk on AI-generated images, and I use this image of the Tank Man from the Tiananmen Square protests as an example of a powerful image that could be called into question.

I've had two organizations in the past year tell me that they didn't want to publish the image 1/ They don't want to publish because they want to remain "politically neutral" or "don't have the budget" to protect themselves against backlash.

There's no such thing as politically neutral. And deliberately not publishing this image is doing the job of authoritarian censors 2/

I've been thinking about this more.

When someone critiques an otherwise good thing because it "doesn't scale," what exactly are they saying? 🧵 1/

https://twitter.com/kate_sills/status/1532820700704059392

The foster care example is interesting, because:

1) Being a foster parent to even just one child is a worthwhile act
2) If you are concerned that there are other children who also need foster parents, you can encourage/persuade/help more people to become foster parents

.@Aella_Girl makes a really interesting distinction here: aella.substack.com/p/learning-the… I've noticed this difference too, but from the other side. It seems like what @Aella_Girl identifies as "good thinking" is what people would call executive dysfunction.

E.g. the brilliant Fields Medalist who could not/would not buy a blanket.

quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-…

There have been a number of good responses to this thread, but far too many responses were knee-jerk critiques of critique. I think there's an interesting point here. Let's dig in:

https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1486025977738055681

First thing, Chaum's DigiCash was heavily patented. There was a version called MagicMoney that got around the patents but only for experimental use. I have no idea what the current state of the patents is, but it's definitely something to look into if this is a serious suggestion

Are we too fond of governance? Do we confuse group decision-making with justice and fairness?

Here's why that's the wrong approach, and we should consider the entire spectrum of possible solutions instead: I'll use two examples of great organizations that I actively participate in. As a participant, I have ZERO participation in group decision-making for these organizations. This is a really important distinction!

It's really disappointing to realize that hardly anyone can distinguish Trump from Amy Coney Barrett. The political machinery moves on, regardless, even though they could not be more different. By all accounts, Barrett is a brilliant person of character. Take a look at this letter, written a few years ago, in which all of the Supreme Court clerks who worked with her when she was also a clerk, unanimously said she would be an excellent justice to a high court. law.nd.edu/assets/253073/…

The state, money, and private property are all social technologies which have made life much better than before. Arguments against them (and I include my own here, especially against the state) should not only touch on the morality of them, but also consider the tech. I was talking to someone about a utopian community in which people would earn community points for doing certain tasks. The question came up: who decides what tasks are worthy of doing? A committee? Is it voted upon?

This is what the social technology of money solves.

I wonder if the authoritarian mind simply does not understand rights and boundaries. Not that they disagree - that they don't *understand* them in any form. Consider this: In police brutality, domestic abuse, and sexual assault, there's the idea that it matters what the victim did, in a moral sense. For instance, did you call the police a name? Did you wear a short skirt?

I wonder if we could ease out of quarantine by merging household groups every few weeks. For example, the first week your household gets to choose 1 and only 1 other household to interact with. Two weeks later, the new super group can choose another super group to interact with. If anyone in the group tests positive, the super group splits back up into individual households and starts the progression again.

what if famous tech people aren't heroes and aren't villains. what if they're people who sometimes get things wrong, sometimes get things right, sometimes are assholes, sometimes accomplish good things (sometimes while still being assholes) Also, making a good product is independent of being a good person. Making something that people want, or even that people need, doesn't alone make you virtuous. Plenty of people have done that and been awful.

About quarantine and libertarianism: All you need for an effective quarantine is binding contract plus the initial ability to choose your community. If the future quarantine plans are consented to, there's no conflict between libertarianism (or even anarchism) and quarantine. To put it another way: I can consent at an earlier time to quarantine, to be forced to stay in isolation at home under certain conditions. There's nothing contradictory about that.

I think natural rights should be defined to the things you are owed (in a moral sense, i.e. you would be wronged if you didn't have them) even if no one promised them to you.

This limits natural rights to essentially bodily autonomy* and the direct effects of your body. There are a lot of rights that you only have because someone (society in the case of property law, a specific entity in the case of contract law) promised you something. For instance, there's no such thing as a natural mineral right.

I think a lot of my opinions aren't even a choice.

E.g, I really like programming and I think I'm good at it. That alone gets me pretty far into feminism - just merely thinking that I should be able to pursue the thing I like doing without having more trouble than a man would. Another example: I noticed a lot of women tweeting against the (very stupid) work-long-hours-in-your -twenties-or-you-wont-succeed tweet.

It's not that women dislike long hours more. It's that they often cannot work them due to childbirth and childcare, and they succeed anyway

I really don't understand the idea that society is currently forcing us to keep quiet about things we know to be true, or preventing us from exploring things that could be true. It's wimpy as hell. If you think something is true, pursue it. If other people don't like that you're doing it, and withdraw from you because of it, that's their prerogative.

Every once in a while, I realize that I have huge disagreements with the Bay Area startup culture. It's always surprising to me. As a libertarian-leaning software engineer, I would have expected to find "my people" One of the more innocuous examples recently was when @AOC tweeted about how companies do fine without cities giving huge tax breaks and other special treatment. I thought this was great! VC Twitter disagreed.

This is a good example of how people cannot for the life of them comprehend that libertarianism is not meant to be a philosophy of everything. Let me explain.

https://twitter.com/andrewtwalk/status/1204767795201871873

Libertarianism in itself is not a philosophy for how to live. For instance, for the question "should I make a particular donation to charity or not?" libertarianism says nothing. "Should I have sex before marriage?" Libertarianism says nothing. "Should I recycle?" Nothing.

Thinking about freedom of speech in terms of political philosophy, I think there are two common mistakes that people make. First, they argue for "free speech" on the basis that openness and access to new ideas is valuable. This is true, but this isn't freedom of speech. Freedom of speech means you have the right to speak, it says absolutely nothing about an obligation of someone else to listen.

I'm not experienced with management, but here's one thing I've noticed: Don't confuse having the right to make decisions with *being* right, and vice versa. 1/ That's why "Disagree and Commit" is so great! It makes the dividing line very clear. tomtunguz.com/disagree-and-c…

I'm excited to finally share what I've been working on! It's a smart contract platform called Zoe, and it makes it impossible for users of your smart contract to lose their money because of a bug you wrote. link.medium.com/R1k6Mu0SP0 Zoe enforces what we call "offer-safety." This means that we can guarantee that a user will either get what they wanted, or the user will get a refund.

Governance track is about to start in B10! #Devcon5 Lane Rettig kicks it off with an overview of governance

I'm about halfway through @Snowden's memoir and it's amazing how much of his life is about accomplishing things while opposing arbitrary, petty authority. He even gets his GED to avoid the rules of high school. At one point he realizes that... the CIA has been violating federal labor laws during his class's training (unpaid overtime, denied leave, etc.) so having little to lose (and his classmates having a lot to gain), he emails the head of the school. No response. He emails the head of the school's boss, and HIS boss