artfulhippo

Supporters and resistors of the utilitarian framing of benefits of (sub)urbanity are both being over-simplistic.

Of course we make decisions on balance of their expected outcomes. The problem is that we can't in general predict outcomes with certainty. So, intelligent decision making is not merely to pick the best expected outcome, but to factor in the range of all possible outcomes on a probabilistic basis.

In this thought experiment, it seems that city-dwelling is highly probable to benefit the disabled kid, but we have less a priori certainty that suburb life is better for the accelerated learner (it may be better for him today, but it's plausible to think that it's long-term good for a smart kid to experience some amount of adversity in a tougher environment compared to a more comfortable sheltered suburban setting, or to learn by example that it's sometimes worth risking personal optimality to serve the needs of others).

So yes, the notion that we should prioritize the needs of the bottom of social hierarchies is worth considering, but it's even more important to factor in uncertainty, to have no pretense of one's ability to predict the future.

How can you resist the dominant ideology without valuing freedom? How can you challenge the norms set by the elite without asserting your right as an individual to take a non-conforming stance? Even if you argue that society would be more harmonious if we all followed a different/better norm, how are you entitled to make a statement that contradicts the current paradigm if you don't value the ability to contradict the current paradigm of society?

I suppose that an alternative basis than freedom is faith; eg "God told me to stand up for divine principles" — but even then, why are you uniquely responsive to God's will?

Seriously, I'd love to understand how you critique the status quo/advocate for change without valuing freedom.

> Consider the average "big block chain" - very high block frequency, very high block size, many thousands of transactions per second, but also highly centralized: because the blocks are so big, only a few dozen or few hundred nodes can afford to run a fully participating node that can create blocks or verify the existing chain.

He lost me in the first paragraph. Does "highly centralized" mean a "few hundred nodes" to you?

When it comes to decentralization, is more always better? Naively, it feels like there's a threshold of decentralization that it's valuable to cross, but beyond which other problems are more worthy of allocating scarce resources towards solving.

So, what is that threshold? or more aptly, what is the purpose that decentralization serves and how can we tell that it's satisfied?

Or is decentralization really an end in and of itself? If so, can someone explain to the unenlightened why?

Money spent on luxuries/social status signaling is money not given to reduce suffering. If you have any sense of empathy for the billions of people living with low incomes, it's obvious that luxury spending is resource misallocation.

Verified Users get a separate priority queue; the real benefit of being a Blue Check is that other Blue Checks will see when you mention them.

Is Twitter a platform or a publisher? If Twitter is a platform, it might make sense to charge the most prominent users the most. But if Twitter is thought of as a publisher, it makes sense for Twitter to pay its top creators big bucks.

Free-to-use is somewhere in between: the notable users get compensated with access to attention, and Twitter benefits from the attention-time of their audience.

So, the underlying point that I think you're making -- that notable users get a fantastic deal on social media at the expense of society -- is well taken.

Let's hope that a new mass communications technology emerges to disrupt this dynamic.

Assuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do you disagree?

Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter. Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists.

People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business.

Actually, in addition to being a business expense, Twitter is a super-addictive dopamine hit ego booster, a game that makes it's high-scoring players feel important.

Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.

As long as Twitter provides news and entertainment, it'll get used. But Twitter insiders and power users (Blue Checks) would be well-served to heed the infamous advice: "Don't get high on your own supply."

I see. Could you say more about meta-meaning?

You're right, but you may want to consider that highly monotone communicators may not actually notice most of the non-literal signals that get passed in typical social situations.

Models be built from something, something related to the modeler's interpretation of their own interface into reality.

That said, it's nice that such a model was made; it's a nice reference / jumping off point. Someone more sensitive to their percepts and the nuances of life would be hard pressed to formalize any model at all; they'd be hard pressed to unfocus from the complexities and responsibilities of social life to do the abstract work of modeling.

This thread, and the author's blog which I've but skimmed, are to me a microcosm of the clash between 2 archetypes that roughly correspond to Science and the Liberal Arts; let's call them Type 1 and Type 2.

Type 1 aims to formally represent the world in patterns of symbols, with maximal simplicity. Type 2 aims to explore the complexity of the world, with maximal nuance. Type 1 finds value in constructing reductive models that are wrong but maybe useful to influence life in the world. Type 2 seeks freedom from models that reduce life into forms that can be easily influenced. To Type 1, the discovery of a computational model or equation or diagram that explains art or mysticism is a Holy Grail to pursue at all cost. To Type 2, art and mysticism are effectively defined as that which is inherently beyond the grasp of a formal model.

With such a gap in outlook and purpose, it's hard to communicate, to convey information that can be integrated across perspectives. Indeed, the gap is so large that the meanings and connotations of words like "reductive" and "wrong" are only worth quoting from a particular frame of reference.

I get what you mean, but I do see a difference between scaling strategies. Imagine if Facebook adopted multi-layer scaling, like Bitcoin and Ethereum are doing. Students and alumni of elite universities would have access to Facebook Layer 1, but non-elites would be stuck on Layer 2. Does that sound awesome to you?

To be more charitable to Bitcoin and Ethereum, they are attempting to be global internet protocols, not companies. From the get go, Bitcoin supporters like Hal Finney envisioned "Bitcoin Banks" that provided access to the Bitcoin blockchain to the masses who can't afford to use it directly, much like ISPs connect non-institutional users to the internet.

Good question. I don't have the answer, but maybe it has to do with the market game theory? I mean, there's easier ways to make money. Like, copypasta smart contracts from Ethereum to EVM-compatible chains. But, to fork Solana or another distributed state machine that's currently in beta and quite unstable (and has an unintuitive programming model) is to take on immense complexity, and therefore liability.

If you have the skills to maintain a Solana fork, how much harder is it to make your own chain? If the difficulty gap isn't immense, it's more upside to build a new Solana-esque chain from scratch than fork Solana, since you can't easily fork the Solana community/brand/legitimacy.

If and when Solana and other fast L1s have stabilized to the point of being simple plug-and-play software appliances, I do expect a host of forks to appear, but to succeed they will need to do more than reset the cap table and get rid of the leaders.

Gas fees have been too high since Cryptokitties in 2017. Actually, even before Ethereum launched, anyone with a calculator could have predicted the scaling issues. After all, bitcoin was never built for millions of consumers to transact onchain.

And yet, Ethereum and Bitcoin have succeeded despite design flaws. It goes to show that you can do much better by serving a niche with massive demand (speculators, darknet users) than trying to build a Product for Everyone.

I don't expect a Product for Everyone to come from the Ethereum or Bitcoin communities, communities rife with tribalism and whose insiders are billionaire ideological extremists, totally out of touch with normies. That much of the media coverage of crypto, such as this article, is inaccurate doesn't help matters; insiders increase their tribalism and anti-establishment angst, and outsiders increase their confusion.

So I do hope that R&D into layer 1 and consensus tech doesn't relent. As it stands, the highest bandwidth chain (Solana) makes significant sacrifices in decentralization -- SOL is hyper concentrated in VC/whale/Core Team hands, and the Core Team plays a huge role as Kingmaker, picking winning projects to signal-boost -- and there is not yet a chain with reasonable bandwidth and PRIVACY.

In the people's imagination, blockchain is a privacy technology. But in actuality, it's a panopticon. Until the gap from perception to reality closes, this market is ripe for disruption.