From the perspective of a Canadian, this feels like an absolutely mad-cap crazy comment. What did you live through?
EDIT: with as little judgement as I'm sincerely trying to have, I would strongly recommend reviewing your information diet and neurotypical predispositions to investigate why you might believe this. (E.g. I am predisposed to support an underdog, and need to gutcheck myself on that regularly)
What I lived through, was Biden taking office. My information diet does not consist of American news, or any election coverage. All I am saying is that in the end, power transferred, without the use of force, he willingly gave up power. And I also acknowledged that he always disputed the results, which from a certain perspective makes his ultimate concession, more indicative of his respecting the system.
Sure. Just like Hitler offing himself; just an expression of trust in the system! "Oh no, I lost in the marketplace of ideas, time to make the ultimate concession!"
> I’ve never said that just because you’re invoking the Nazis you’re losing the argument. If you’re going to compare somebody to Hitler or the Nazis or raise the specter of the Holocaust, be sure you’ve got your facts right. But there’s nothing categorically wrong with Biden’s — or anyone else’s — comparison of Trump calling people vermin or talking about blood poisoning to Hitler.
Trump went because House/Senate Republicans at the time hadn't yet done the 180 they have since; the support wasn't there. It has nothing to do with his faith in the democratic process.
But in the end he went. The system worked exactly like it was supposed to. There is room to challenge results, that keeps the system honest. When he lost the challenges, he willingly stepped down.
This is exactly how the system is designed to work.
I understand the visceral hatred of Trump, but I don't know why every conversation about him has to degrade the same way this one has, with people using emotional-manipulation like evoking Hitler.
I believe that when people are in high contact with things that look to the uninformed like serendipity, it's a sign of something in them as a sensory organ, and something they are tapped into in the information environment... though perhaps we don't have good enough language to label it yet.
Whatever a "sense of smell" is for information (and surprise, and comedy, and aliveness...), this confirmed to me that Stewart Brand totally has it.
I actually loved this, and felt moved. While reading, my mind fired rapidly through dozens of personal memes (i.e. tags for my regularly trod thought-paths) that I keep in my knowledge-base. This is the 30mb text corpus where I log all my work and peer conversations and thoughts, and (amongst other things) where I think through what I would consider my spiritual practices... my sensemaking around complex systems, including Daoist teachings. This text basically entangled itself with the work I am doing at the outer edges of my own knowing, where I am working on my rawest and most fragile but precious thoughts.
I don't think this is trite, I think there is something in this that is in contact with "living structure" (in the Christopher Alexander sense[1]), and much exists outside the edges of the text.
To those who dislike this, I am genuinely curious: Would you say you dislike metaphor? Do you tend to feel disconnected and lacking resonance with poetic writing?
EDIT: I experience this writing as giving me many quiet A's, or perhaps a smell of A's in a given direction of thought. I interpret others here as getting either B's or U's, in the sense of this A/B/U system: https://openresearchinstitute.org/onboarding/A_B_U.html
Agreed, I found this essay engaging and emotional. While I can see why the unusual style might not be someone's cup of tea, I don't agree at all with the criticism that this is bad writing. It had a Haruki Murakami ethereal feel that I am quite fond of.
Regarding other comments in this thread, the moral panic over AI writing has mostly passed me by. While I certainly have a philosophical preference for things written by an actual human, I don't care to invest the bandwidth in analyzing every single thing I read for hints of llm patterns. If I like it, I'll keep reading. If not, I won't. Sometimes discontinuing a piece of writing also aligns with obvious AI use, but that is generally a secondary issue.
Do you mind me asking what type of system do you use for keeping these notes, the 30mb text corpus with conversations and journaling? Are you using txt, an app like Logseq? I flip flop between apps for this sort of thing and then annoyingly the building of a "system" sucks up my time rather than writing and logging and reflecting. It's a struggle for me any advice would be much appreciated :)
Thanks for asking! I have become an infinitely better human and friend since starting.
I used Roam, but would like to migrate to Logseq for reasons of privacy and self-sovereignty :)
My most helpful meta tags are:
[[People I Meet]] for quick descriptions of everyone I meet, even if they don't get their own page
[[versus]] for dualities I notice and want to track, like [[expansion vs collapse]] [[away vs toward]] [[linear vs cloud narrative]] etc
[["as" metaphors]] metaphors that return a lot, like [[religion as seed]] or [[god as hologram]] or [[empathy as gravity]] etc
[[reminds me of]] which I sometimes use to make connection, but often just crossed
[[self comment]] for tracking my comments around the internet
[[new tag]] for tracking when a significant new tag occurs to me for first time
[[methinks]] (for my inline thoughts on articles whose content I paste into a page, which I do for most things I read, so I can always find the content that shapes me, and my own thoughts/highlights in relation to that)
[[toread]] [[towatch]] for books and films/video
[[tears]] [[fears]] [[fave snacks]] [[star sign]] [[faves]] and a "family" bullet for things that are important in their family life.
And every day, my optional top-level bullets are: todos, finds, logs, thoughts (pretty much everything fits under these, and most under "logs", because I like to track context of where I was, who I was with)
I started just using logs every day to keep track of things I did, because during pandemic I felt like I was doing nothing at all every day except being depressed. Everything grew from that :)
The exciting and interesting to me is that we'll probably need to engage "chaos engineering" principles, and encode intentional fallibility into these agents to keep us (and them) as good collaborators, and specifically on our toes, to help all minds stay alert and plastic
If that comes to pass, we'll be rediscovering the same principles that biological evolution stumbled upon: the benefits of the imperfect "branch" or "successive limited comparison" approach of agentic behaviour, which perhaps favours heuristics (that clearly sometimes fail), interaction between imperfect collaborators with non-overlapping biases, etc etc
> Lindblom’s paper identifies two patterns of agentic behavior, “root” (or rational-comprehensive) and “branch” (or successive limited comparisons), and argues that in complicated messy circumstances requiring coordinated action at scale, the way actually effective humans operate is the branch method, which looks like “muddling through” but gradually gets there, where the root method fails entirely.
> a firefighting truck was responding to a separate incident on a flight that had aborted its takeoff and reported a strange odour on board. Air traffic control recordings suggested the odour on the plane had made some flight attendants feel ill.
Not making light of this, but I imagine there is another story of the person who had some strange scented product that led the flight attendants to play it safe and phone it in. There may very be someone whose strong cologne or forgetfulness to leave a chemical at home resulted in 2 deaths :(
It may have been a fume event which is very dangerous for everyone onboard.
> A fume event occurs when bleed air used for cabin pressurisation and air conditioning in a pressurised aircraft is contaminated by fluids such as engine oil, hydraulic fluid, anti-icing fluid, and other potentially hazardous chemicals.
Anyone else think that if you're going on an airplane, you shouldn't be wearing cologne or perfume? Antiperspirant/deodorant, absolutely. But giving yourself a strong scent when you're going to spend a few hours tightly-packed with other people feels rude.
Speaking of privacy, there's a cost to fame and notoriety in societies in which these systems exist. imho markets like this, taken to their extremes, incentivize small local communities, local governance, and very effective communication across boundaries between communities, since they have an event horizon that means individuals needn't be known outside -- where you never want to be known too much as an individual outside your circle of community.
I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there
I don’t doubt the intelligence of the OP though I question their wisdom and I doubt they know how to surf. They are more or less correct in their assessment of the current state of things and where things are heading, but this would entail a significant existential risk. Having an natural aversion to our own destruction is probably a sensible approach going forward.
again, grateful for the better words :) it's funny, I'm pretty charismatic in my community spaces IRL, but I constantly displease the HN hivemind
i think i need more patience -- i seem to fall into a certain tone due to my low expectations, and it's likely a self-fulfilling process which i am complicit in
EDIT: with as little judgement as I'm sincerely trying to have, I would strongly recommend reviewing your information diet and neurotypical predispositions to investigate why you might believe this. (E.g. I am predisposed to support an underdog, and need to gutcheck myself on that regularly)
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