Whenever I travel I am reminded of just how good a life I have be virtue of being born American.
I’m kept alive, fed, clothed and connected by a vast web of abstractions undergirding modern civilization thanks to the value of my passport and the exorbitant privilege of the dollar.
Constructs like private property have given rise to elaborate norms of obligation, honors, debts and expectations that enable coordination mechanisms like markets. This seems like a good thing from
All of this feels so astonishingly fragile. We listen when our bankers fret about “rules based western civilization” being under siege because we know those rules are what enables the niceties of our lives.
All it takes are a few assholes breaking the rules and the fabric frays a little more. Blessedly capitalism has its own immune system that is happy to attack all types of hostility.
If you are not integrated into the body politic of the dominant civilization you generally know it. I’ve found those outside of it generally wish they could be assimilated from simple envy. If you want these benefits be prepared to be assimilated to the rules and values of civilization.
Your alternative is struggle to hold yourself apart by your own rules and insist others abide by them. This has generally required coercion, violence or shame in the past.
You can say no to benefits simply by opting out. To be left alone is to accept your status and stay outside of the great game of civilization. But to accept the benefits is to in some sense accept to accept that there are rules. You can’t break rules if you don’t know their importance.
“If not in this lifetime then the next” is a pretty decent organizational principle for keeping folks from giving in entirely to the nihilism of their situation.
But what happens if no one thinks that there are any consequences? I am not actually sure what we do with a generation who never has to suffer the consequences of their actions.
This used to be a problem merely about in theory about the elderly and is now a very salient one for the young. There are fewer costs to acts of social disobedience.
Shame and guilt can be fully litigated through contracts and arbitration right? Right? I can’t say being neither Jewish nor Catholic but I’m not optimistic.
If you never suffer any consequences for bad decisions then do you keep making them forever? Did you know that Hall and Oates “Rich Girl” isn’t even about a girl? Do you care? Are you wondering who Hall and Oates even are?
You’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far ‘Cause you know it don’t matter anyway You can rely on the old man’s money You can rely on the old man’s money It’s a bitch girl but it’s gone too far
The song is actually about a spoiled fast-food chain heir who was an ex-boyfriend of Daryl Hall’s girlfriend, Sara Allen. Fun right?
I do not care for podcasts but I listen to a Bloomberg podcast called Odd Lots for entertainment. I’m an avid participant in the niche in-group you might have once called Financial Twitter. The hosts of the podcast Joe and Tracy are part of this community as well.
Usually I listen to it for the fun expert guests who come to do commentary on their corner of the markets. Today’s episode was titled how the American workforce got hooked on adderall. Which I personally think is a very provocative title.
Over the last few years, users of the popular ADHD drug Adderall have been frustrated by regular shortages in getting their prescriptions filled. Various regulatory and supply chain factors have contributed to the inability of producers to keep up with demand. But this raises the question: why is there so much demand in the first place? How did a significant chunk of the labor force — from tech workers to Wall Streeters — begin using the drug as an aid for their work and everyday lives? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Danielle Carr, an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, who studies the history of politics of neuroscience and psychology. We discuss the history of this medicine and related medicines, what it does for the people who take it, and how market forces opened the drug up to almost anyone.
My impression of Danielle Carr was of a nuanced thinker with a lot of historical insight who happened to have haplessly taken on some academic moralizing about whether the wrong class of person might be abusing stimulants. I’m perhaps the wrong class of person to be commenting as I don’t use any stimulants stronger than a cup of coffee in the morning.
I was struck how the narrative eventually came to demonizing market demands in contrast to the I’m sure completely neutral national health systems. The theory being we might keep better track of the vulnerable in such a system struck me as classist. Adderall may be an American healthcare market issue only because those poor London bankers have another go to black market stimulant. We just don’t mind because they make money.
Moral panics around pharmacological intervention seem to be a flavor of the decade sort of thing. Prohibitions catch on when the wrong kind of person gets themselves into trouble of abusing something that was otherwise contained to social sanctioned consumption.
Perhaps in less inclined to judge on these things because I don’t witness the abuse but I also think paternalism is the excuse schoolmarms and aristocrats love in equal measure.
only a few people seem to be thinking clearly about the powerful ai future. if your world model is built entirely off of samples from this app you are going to end up confused. if it’s built with zero samples from this app, you will also be confused
I was raised by a good hippie so I couldn’t help but reach for a little LED Zeppelin joke about green text training our desires and fears. .
“Been dazed and confused for so long it’s not true, wanting AI never bargained for you. Lots of people talk but few of them know the soul of the green text was created below”
There are many nodes and each signal you toss to the algorithmic winds sails to exact audience you are calling. Scream loud. Run the solo that shows you are a live one. Act on the systems. Reach out and take it.
“You may not like it but eating a burger in the back of a casino in a strip mall in Montana while reading an economics lecture by Deidre McCloskey is actually female peak performance”
Maybe it was the positive effect of a bunch of fat and protein but I was in the zone afterwards. I was able to pull together a bunch of disparate connections on a specialty niche where I’ve had some very promising investments.
I, for a brief shining moment, realized I was almost certainly one of the most expert and well connected people on the planet for something.
So much of not getting eaten by change is simply accepting that you feel absolutely bonkers an enormous amount of time. Learning to live with it isn’t as easy as it looks
If you are lucky and smart and open minded a straight line can appear through what was other completely disparate things. It’s funny that we call putting a line through things regression right? Simplifying things is funny like that.
Learning to act when you see a through line is almost all of the battle. “Noticing things” is only useful insofar as it something you take action on.
I felt as if I had no clear path at all yesterday on anything and then today I did. I didn’t see some kind of perfect Delphic vision of the future. I just realized that work I’d set in motion three or four years ago has yielded results and if I was able to keep going with other people who saw it too then I had done what I could.
The board needs to see that we are doing “something” and so management consultants have done a lot of paddling aggressively. Everyone is making money of artificial intelligence right? Well, wrong.
My belief is that this is a result of not having adequate developer tools at the enterprise level so no processes are repeatable or simple yet. Not for lack of trying in a frenzy of weird media panics around whether chat bots are gods or just malign spirits. Which like lol.
This isn’t something that gets solved overnight. Value accrues in strange ways to very particular forms of automation. Whether that gets bought up in bidding wars over core technologies over time or in simple breakout solutions isn’t actually as predictable as you’d imagine it. It’s very much about people who build things that other people want in reasonably reliable ways.
But right now a lot of software is being built in silly and not terribly repeatable ways. It reminds me a little bit of having been at a specialty retailer trying to figure out ecommerce and making a bunch of mistakes. Eventually the market solves it and then it demands a return on investment.
I spent the day on binging a monomyth in service of focusing some attention on where we might be going if this is in fact a Cambrian explosion era. If you need a synopsis I’ll extract it from Twitter if I can find the toolsets. If you know the toolset please share them.
The fellowship of the ring will not doom the hobbits to torment and death
My assumption that property rights underlined some of this still stands. If you’ve been holed up in Middle Earth (me too nice place unclear though unclear if I’m a Hobbit or an elf or a dwarf or a wizard or an orc Or Tom Bombadil) everyone thinks Mordor somehow their pet theory or sin. It is industrialism or fascism or some combination of horrors because history becomes legend and legend becomes myth. I don’t know. Ask an autist.
Hug a hippie. Be kind to a hipster. But fight to the death for the hackers. Or pick a princess who likes trade disputes in the galactic empire. I can’t translate all the monomyths in one day.
If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of one of my information dumps, you know me to be a science fiction reader. It’s one of my true passions and most consistent hobbies.
I am very well read in the space through this love and it has proven to be an enormous advantage for a career in technology startups. It’s very rare to meet a builder that hasn’t in some way come to that love through imagining the future as it could be.
While I love classics from Asimov to Heinlein and I read everything from space opera to hard tech, my first true passion for genre fiction was cyperpunk. I saw a networked world of computation and I fell in love.
So it is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of one of the giants of science fiction, cyberspace progenitor, father of the tech singularity and mathematician Vernor Vinge.
His 1981 novella “True Names” was perhaps the first story to present a plausible concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk stories by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others. Many innovators of modern industry cite “True Names” as their keystone technological inspiration.
It’s through the vision of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson that I saw what computing could do to help us build.
Cyperpunk wrote many imaginative paths for artificial intelligence. Gibson’s Neuromancer and gave us early crypto culture. Neal Stephenson showed us a virtual world atop our current one in Snowcrash. The metaverse emerges.
I’ve lived my entire adult life online after an entirely analog childhood. I am straddling that small gap of in-between human. I helped build some small parts of the network of the internet. I am a citizen of the network state. I am all these things because of Vernor Vinge.
Humanity shines with tools and we had found in math a way to give an explanation of the workings the world. That our meager intelligences learned to compute and then to build computing machines astounds me.That we continue to build something more with those insights astounds me further. The acceleration of that started long before me.
Networking our computation has taken us so far and so fast. It reflects the best and worst of us. Vernor explored “what if“ futures that went far behind our contained cyberspace. We wouldn’t have modern singularity thought about what could happen if artificial intelligence really will emerge amongst us without Vinge’s work. The Zones of Thought series is a mind bender.
Vernor is as close as nerds have to a prophet. Here we are seeing the power of artificial intelligence dominate our human great power debates from culture to business to government. Everyone who makes things has an opportunity here to own building this.
I know that in whatever moment we are about greet (singularity or not) that I remember that we humans build technology from the imagination of Vernor Vinge.
No matter how alien the future may seem, we humans have build it first. Don’t you want to be a part of that?
If you are an autist of any stripe still attempting to operate in the field I will broadcast to you. You may need to make a pilgrims and it will just be an information dump but I’ll do my best. You have to put it together yourself but the old web is not fully broken.
The maze of information is winding and the roll ups and bureaucracy winds on and off the Silk Road. Literal and metaphorical. I don’t even know how many of you bought drugs on the old internets and how many of you bought Uranium. I have nothing but Netflix and communist literature. Lots of people have opinions on drugs and whores. I am not one of them truth be told except I’m of the firm opinion whores shouldn’t side with empire but I’m not in Burke’s Peerage so what do I know.
Maybe there is a world where Bridgerton actually happened and some autistic king and some colonial wife really do live in harmony. I don’t know I’m a William Gibson fan. Pour one out for information wants to be free homies. The nerds shouldn’t have been weaponized and whatever capitalism is doing should probably check in with reality.
How to tell what a company does
You are caught in someone’s opinion. None of us know who is influencing us except the sort of dorks who map carefully and most of the nerds have day jobs. The only ones who see it are just doing their best to allocate the attention and resources. Lots of people are doing chaos magic. Maybe stop? Or summon better demons.
Any number of nerds are caught in elaborate webs of inferences. A lot of them are left wingers. Precious view are genuine communists. But also some sincere ones are out there. Most are happy to be in the recursive loop of reality in which we maintain our lives. Some of us are banging on the cage.
Something must have acted as a catalyst on a set of wrongly presumed dormant inputs in my mind yesterday.
A catalyst works by lowering the activation energy required for a chemical reaction to occur, making the process more efficient without being consumed itself
I credit the wide availability of accessible artificial intelligence tools for this magical ease in myself. Programs like PerplexityAI (my preference for asking questions where I need precision in my answer) and ChatGPT (my preference for open ended queries) make it effortless to connect ideas and intuition.
Even a vague input like “story about a town that turns rhinoceros as metaphor for authoritarianism” is enough to get me off to the races with Eugène Ionesco and reopen the intuition library of my mind. This era of easy connections is giving my own inference powers a huge level up.
I can bring up “schizophrenia and capitalism” as a mere footnote and my past reading is immediately available and accessible on my phone with simple cross checks. It’s beyond liberating.
Just a few titles on the topic of schizophrenia in radical poststructuralist scholarship I have in my own library
I can see why it would be disconcerting for powerful institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge that someone like me can go down elaborate scholarship tangents without any guidance.
Sharp readers will enjoy that the examples I use here include Deleuze and Eugène Ionesco. Those who are unfamiliar with why this feels salient and ironic please feel free to go down a few rabbit holes of your own. I’m sure you too will connect the dots as swiftly as I did.
