throwaway_7274

I’ve been starting to think that a lot of the variance in how people see the world can be explained by whether their attention is drawn to first-order localized effects, or nth-order distributed effects. This is not the same thing as optimism vs. pessimism, but it sure is correlated!

“…and does not have wings.”

You have so much "freedom from" in a world with strong, effective, well-designed regulation. It's unreal. How amazing is it to be able to buy pretty much any food product and eat it without wondering (almost ever in your life!) if it's been tampered with. How amazing is it to have your bank deposits insured up to $200,000. How amazing is it to be able to fly safely anywhere in the world and know it'll be totally perfectly fine with 99.99999% probability. I love regulation.

It’s been interesting finding out just how many people in tech have the same chip on their shoulder as Syndrome, the villain from The Incredibles.

‘Tech’ culture has been getting nastier, more vicious, and more zero-sum for years now. It wasn’t even all that long ago that I remember feeling hurt when a friend of mine sneered about “tech bros.”

But I get it now. I see a certain type of guy in an AWS fleece and instantly judge him, round him off to some kind of bully. Harsh, unsmiling, tweaking on stims, telling you to cry harder. Or maybe he’ll open up tell you his theory of how we need eugenic breeding facilities on the moon, or which countries we need to “glass.” It’s gotten so ugly.

I know this seems mean, too. Coming out of nowhere. Strawmanning or whatever you call it. Literally inventing a guy to get mad at. I’m aware of the irony. I don’t know. I guess it’s another kind of mourning, and I don’t know how to express it. I thought tech people were supposed to be like Woz.

adderall

This kind of philistinism sucks.

Is this performance art? Pretty disrespectful to meat-proxy a response to someone engaging with your, uh, work.

Edit: plausibly there’s no human in loop here at all, in which case fair play, I guess.

I would rather read Polglish or text machine-translated from Polish than Claudese.

Which recent demographic shifts?

Fat cat (checks notes) math professors have had it far too good for far too long. If they think they’re so smart, why didn’t they get a real job and raise venture funding for a scammy startup?

If you instead offer probabilities as answers, it picks the right one with high credence.

I'm sure Graeber is right about the ahistoricity of the orthodox just-so story of money, but I've always wondered if perhaps he misread the kind of claim that story is actually making.

What if economists don't really intend to make a factual historical claim? What if it's more like the principle of virtual work, if you take the analogy? What if it's saying, look, here are two possible configurations of the world: one with barter and one with monetary exchange. One of these configurations is "more stable" than the other. That's a reasonable explanation for "why" we use money, if you read "why" in a non-causal way.

Or maybe economists are straightforwardly careless historians. I don't know!