This is an open thread for everyone. If there is anything on your mind, or anything you wanted to ask or talk about, post here! I recently decided to stop using all Facebook products as well as Twitter, so you are now my primary connection to the outside world:
During the current winter lockdown (EU-based) I've had bouts of crushing loneliness. I've also come to the (honestly quite chilling) realization that despite how important relationships are to me, I've never been intentional about fostering/deepening human connection.
Your writing resonates and feels authentic, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that cluster of topics.
Everybody is talking about decentralized platforms to replace the functionality of social media. The other possibility is to look for overseas platforms that have some independence from US infra providers.
Arguments for this are spread inside other posts as well eg middle-eastern revolts without the platform taken down. Foreign platforms were used, the situation is bad but far from home, so no issue was brought up.
The mentality is that you roam to a place that doesn't care about your opinions to have an uninhibited online presence. Somehow this sounds less bad than a place that actively tries to silence your opinions.
Of course, I applaud the attempts to launch decentralized solutions because one of the motives is bringing change to your local living environment for the better.. Either that or the aversion of reading/working in other languages is high.
Anyway, this just happens to be the harder path in comparison to alternative ideas. I find this uncharacteristic of the human/engineering mentality, we're lazy.
Don't read into this too seriously please, it's just some rambling.
I haven't yet tried your suggestions in "On stress and comfort" for improving one's mood - I must do so! - but I seem to be having good success with omega 3 fish oil capsules, which by now have a bunch of scientific evidence backing their use for treating depression. I'm really excited about them. I want to point out three additional things about their use: one, the medicine colestyramine interferes with their absorption, even though this isn't stated on the medicine information leaflet or in some online databases of interactions, so if like me you take colestyramine, try to leave at least 6 hours between the colestyramine and the fish oil capsules. (I would recommend always consulting any provided information and then at least TWO online sources of interaction information, whenever adding a new supplement or medicine to your daily routine, because adverse interactions aren't always widely known.) Two, you really need to eat a meal or snack containing fatty foods at around the same time as you take the fish oil capsules, to prime your body to absorb the omega 3 fatty acids in the fish oil capsules. And three, evidence suggests that the best time to take them is in the evening, because they can help sleep as well.
What are some good Signal, Mastodon, Urbit, whatever groups? I'd love to just exit the left of center mainstream, but all the good content still lives there, and there's a discoverability problem (feature?) with all the decentralized stuff.
We don't want the world to burn. What's our Schelling point and our North Star? "Get good at life", yeah?
(I'd prefer Jesus Christ, but even then there are very many fake Christians who want to burn the world out of resentment. And there are many decent non-Christians.)
This is a great move. The only thing I'm on is Twitter...For crypto. Other than that, it's a hot mess. We'd all be better off if it was shut down. Social media in general.
First off, I've been thinking more thoughtfully about how I consume media and organizing my time more effectively thanks to your writing. I already have five books chosen on one subject - the period of Reconstruction - based on your blog post about how to organize my reading . So thanks for that mental model.
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner: Finished - Excellent. I was told this if you can only read one book about this era it should be this one. That's accurate.
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War by Joanne Freeman: - Finished - Not explicitly about Reconstruction but intimately tied to the build up to the Civil War and the violence that followed during Reconstruction. A little dry, but short and an easy read.
Remaining:
Grant by Ron Chernow
Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. DuBois
The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane
I've been trying to understand the outrage on hacker news / twitter / etc about the trump twitter ban (by both loonies on left and right).. It surprised me, how many ppl think this is a bad move.. Then I realized.. European and American attitudes toward free speech is totally different, just as they are diametric opposite when it comes to gun laws and also fairly divergent when it comes to free market regulation, environment and food standards.. We truly see the world differently in many ways.. Re free speech, I think the 2nd half of this article gets to the point really well:
Free speech isn't a rule of nature. It's an invention of humans. It's a nice (and seemingly necessary idea) for a civilized society to function, but the American's resistance to tinker with a 200-300 year old idea (even a bit) is perverse and borderline insane to me. Society functions completely differently today compared to how it worked when these ideas took root at first. It logically follows that as you change parameters of a system (connectivity of humanity + speed and cost of spreading dangerous and incorrect ideas via platforms like twitter) our notion of free speech should evolve too.
I think, the historically very strong (compared to other countries) libertarian influence in American intellectual discourse creates a dangerous blind spot here that really doesn't help this debate.. Just as libertarians argue for the magical invisible hand of free market to solve everything (which is conclusively and provably false), they pollute the free speech argument with the same non-sensical idea: bad ideas will be combated with better ideas in the market of ideas. This is obviously not true for several reasons.
1. Firstly, (and again obviously) this presupposes that in the population there's roughly an equal propensity for complex information processing, which is necessary to form informed opinions on most important topics of today's world (climate change, nuclear deterrence, power dynamics and minority groups, animal rights, effective altruism, etc, etc). This is clearly not the case.
2. We know from cognitive psychology how incredibly hard it is to change someone's opinion, especially if it's linked to his/her identity at some level (which most opinions we care about in public discourse - see above - are).
3. We know that the platforms in question don't optimize for information correctness when generating the feed but instead for engagement metrics (because, more engagement means more time spent there, which translates to more ads showed in our face to buy shit we don't need). Plus we know that abhorrent and outrageous content spreads an order of magnitude faster than boring, true, complex content on these platforms. Given these two facts about the nature of these platforms and information spreading on them, how on earth would a good idea stand a fair chance against the torrent of unchecked bullshit and conspiracy theories? How on earth this childishly naïve libertarian idea of free market of ideas would ever materialize? It won't, it cannot, it does not. Hence we have ppl believing in 2021 that the earth is flat, that vaccines cause autism and that the 2020 US election was fraudulent.
Overall, Americans need to get over themselves and simply realize that what some old wrinkly blokes thought 300 years ago isn't the pinnacle of great human ideas and certainly not the software we should be running our incredibly complex modern societies on. They had some nice idealistic ideas (which they violently disregarded btw), that have brilliant insights that need further work and updating, just like every other part of our moral landscape. In this case, it's quite clear to most ppl outside the US, that if you combine classical free speech with the amplification of modern social media platforms you get Trump and Capitol hill chaos and you get looting and riots too (yes this goes both ways).
Let's move onto the question of how. How exactly it is best to moderate free speech? Clearly the blunt and ad-hoc censorship is suboptimal (even if it's currently probably necessary). But zooming out it becomes evident that Trump is just the ugly symptom of the larger problem here (unchecked free speech + amplification = recipe for disaster) and without a comprehensive discussion and policy around this, it'll get worse.
There currently are many reasonable things many reasonable people believe but can't say because they'll lose their jobs. On the other hand there are completely looney things that completely looney people can say with no consequences that the rest of us have to put up with. This isn't an impartial debate on what speech out to be acceptable. It's a power struggle, and some people want to curtail expression as an instrument of that struggle.
Sure and that's clearly the wrong way of going about the problems at hand. Yet, I doubt, that if from tomorrow (by miracle) everyone could say what they want (without fearing the repercussions regarding their personal status/wealth/whatever), we'd end up in this utopia that the limitless free-speech advocates seem to envision. Instead, I imagine we'd end up with civil war. The US has tried that once and you still have deep rooted racism in the south hundreds of years later (not to mention the ppl on twitter who cheer for seeing a confederate flag in the capitol).. So I doubt that letting free speech run its course until blood is shed is a wise way of moving forward.
Why not stay on Twitter and continue to use it as a public square until such time as something forces you off platform? Is this a decision of principle?
For my personality, I can't do gradual changes. For example, I tried quitting smoking gradually for years, and then stopped cold turkey and never came back. For me these changes have to be an all or nothing thing.
Also this is a principled thing. They've crossed a line for me.
i’m really sadden, but how do we rebuild decentralized communities? i loved twitter because you, and others like solana, cyantist, webdevMason, etc taught me so much about investing, start ups, libertarianism, software engineering etc. it was an incredible place to learn, while banning right leaning accounts doesn’t apply to me, how long before they come for my ideas, how can we make sure no one has this power of censorship again in a decentralized world? and more important where can we build a community were i can learn from the people i love while not supporting people like dorsey and their platform
I'm currently reading The NeXT Big Thing about Jobs and NeXT. I highly recommend it. Part of the book is about NeXT vs Sun, and the different approaches they took. I don't mean to make this sound self-aggrandizing (it really isn't) but I made *all* the same mistakes at RethinkDB that Jobs made at NeXT, except on a much smaller scale. The reason it isn't self-aggrandizing is because most founders make these mistakes. Just the scale is different. Strongly recommend you read the book.
Let's make new platform in Lisp! (jk, had to write that since I found you looong way back through Emacs blogpost). I am glad you are leaving behind this abomination of platform (tw). I was joining various networks and groups in past year or so, nothing did stick to the wall. So currently I am just reading you and Moldbug on substack and that's kinda it sadly. If something pops up I will be more than glad to join.
I guess for many of us leaving Twitter / FB will come with a huge FOMO effect and also the severance of (mostly artificial, but no less useful) social ties. Moving to new platforms and asking good friends to do the same will break some of the weak ties (which are very useful for finding references, jobs, etc.) and will also deepen the echo chambers most of us are in. Just my 2c.
Sounds very optimistic knowing how much people have invested in their social graphs and recognizing the behavioural inertia (i.e. most people only move out when there's napalm everywhere), but I do agree that most likely the strength of the new social ties on any new platform (Odnoklassniki, hehe) will be substantially higher than in the mainstream social networks.
The topic I'd like to discuss with honorable author of this thread and its community is the permanent silencing of POTUS by major social and communication platforms. Personally I'm yet to take a strong position on this. On one hand these are private, for profit organizations, with shareholders, customers and for the lack of better word values. Also they're free to decide who can and who cannot use their services, just like all of us are at liberty to choose whom to welcome to our private residences. Finally, freedom of speech is never absolute, nor was it meant to be. One should not scream "fire" in a crowded theater, when there is none. One should have no platform to trigger violence, descrimination and such. These were the arguments supporting the action taken. The counter argument is that such deeds seriously deminish reputation of the office of POTUS which will have long lasting effects. Another thought is that a revolution against tyranny (real or imaginary) is never legal from perspective of existing laws, and thus, by definition is always unlawful and often violent. And yet, during arab spring and other colorful revolutions of the past decade these platforms never silenced opposition and often were instrumental in regime changes. Isn't this a school case of hipocracy (not that I'm surprised by it)? To what point private enterprises should provide platforms to elected officials or any citizen for that matter? Should there be a line where "dangerous" individuals be excommunicated? Perhaps the answer lies in competition between various platforms and their respective censorship policies or lack of there of. But then, our social fabric will be even more fragmented, with each group following its own tunnel.
I think the argument that these are simply private companies and they can do whatever they want is obviously bad on its face. They're enjoying unprecedented network effects, so the barriers to entry for other actors are enormous. You have a small cabal of companies and they're clearly colluding-- they make the same exact moderation decisions within days and often hours of each other. Even if you could build an alternative-- google and apple kicked Parler off their app stores. Ok, they're private platforms. But then AWS (!!!) decided not to provide Parler with its services.
So the argument gets progressively more shady. You effectively live in a world where you cannot build an alternative because people will kill you in the infra level, distribution level, and moat level. That's some fucked up, repugnant, authoritarian shit.
OK, I realise how it looks, but I truly believe there is a more innocent explanation behind some of this stuff. They are making the same decisions because those are the obviously correct decisions to make, and it's basically the same content on all platforms that they're removing. Like take for example Alex Jones. Some people probably think, as I used to think, that he's a basically harmless eccentric conspiracy theorist who has said some offensive things. No, he's more than that: he's alt-right. Look into what he's said. As for President Trump, well he broke the Twitter rules many times, I haven't seen any real dispute about this - the only reason he was allowed to stay on the platform for so long was that his tweets were considered "historically significant". But the incitement of violence domestically - and yes, I admit, it's a judgement call, but as a non-American and thus somewhat detached observer, I happen to agree with Twitter on this - crossed a line. Parler got kicked off by Apple because Parler users were literally talking about shooting police officers. That's not OK. Blue lives matter, yes?
Well no, probably not, but remember people actually have to report specific violence-inciting tweets for Twitter to take any notice. I very rarely report tweets from people to the left of me, and I strongly suspect many other liberals and progressives simply never do that. So it might be up to the right to do that. And also, it can take Twitter days to process reports. With all that being said, I'm not trying to justify Twitter's double standards - I see them, particularly with regard to transgender topics, and they infuriate me.
Re reporting, that's a reasonable argument for small accounts. But there are massive accounts on Twitter that advocate for genocide (Iranian leaders) and concentration camps (CCP), let alone hate speech wrt race/gender. I simply don't buy the argument that they're impartially applying rules. It's not even remotely close.
So, do you object to the censorship itself or to one sided implementation of it? The hypocritical enforcement is obvious, but IMHO that's entirely different argument.
Mechanics are well established and not subject to debate. The question is of ethical nature. To what point a civilized society should tolerate a freedom of speech. Should we have limits to what's allowed. If we do, mechanics becomes secondary and enforcement of private actors is a lesser evil than one arising from government's censorship body. Do we want people shouting "death to jews" to freely roam our streets, digital or physical? Yes, said businesses enjoy enormous network effects and almost monopolistic powers, but do we want them to be anarchistic in nature or exercise some restrain? The weak point of democracy is that it can elect a dictator with horrific consequences. Shouldn't this design flaw be addressed? We already have plenty of flat Earthers, QAnons and other irrationally unscientific sectants. Do we want these ideas to go mainstream with all respective consequences?
Free speech mechanics are also well established and not subject to debate. John Stuart Mill published On Liberty in 1859, but really people figured it out during the Enlightenment. Literally every time we develop a new communications technology, from printing press to social media, existing power structures find it inconvenient and invent reasons to curtail expression. The Catholic Church was fucking pissed when Martin Luther pinned his theses door and everyone reprinted and shared it. Now it's the Woke Church. It was too bad then, and it's too bad now.
The problem is that when we decide to draw a line then we are left with the problem of needing to decide which side of that line every piece of content falls. Ideally, we'd have a neutral 3rd party entity that could do this at scale but that seems pretty infeasible. Worse still, different countries disagree on where the line is, which makes the situation complicated in a global platform.
There's also the argument that Publicly Traded companies are not really private. We all know about the revolving door of people that work for these companies and the USG, regulatory barriers that protect these companies from competition, government pensions dependent on their performance, and even the Fed's been buying their bonds lately. How many times in the last 4 years were Twitter and FB dragged to Congressional Hearings where they were basically threatened to get in line or face extinction via regulation? Does anyone really believe those in government did not use their influence to coerce these companies into censoring their opposition?
After this fiasco, I think we should consider any person in government publicly calling for the censorship of anyone, and especially, a political rival a gross violation of the First Amendment.
It feels like yesterday, when everyone believed the First was sacred and part of the secret sauce that made us into the most powerful country in the world. Propaganda can be a bitch.
On one hand, it's the most toxic force in modern society. Personally, I believe it's almost entirely responsible for the Trump phenomena, the Trump derangement phenomena, the regression of social progress into woke culture, and a myriad of other things. No question that media institutions help with all of it, but the power of Twitter is that it speaks perfectly to pseudo-intellectuals with short attention spans, which is the entire middle class (and above) in this day and age. It's made celebrities of some of the most hateful people on the planet, people who would otherwise have no platform whatsoever as they couldn't string together two ideas in a discussion or long form text.
But on the other, it has a monopolistic position in its particular specialty of public political discourse, and there's nothing else even close in being able to reach a massive number of people. I run a blog, but almost all my engagement comes from social channels — practically no one is running RSS anymore. Substack and co. might be a little better, but your subscribers stay fixed without other channels for promotion (e.g. Twitter).
Twitter's deplatforming of wrongthink is concerning, but I'm not sure that checking out is the right answer either. If enough people quit, it'll become less important, but I'm not sure that I see that happening anytime soon, and in the meantime, it'll just mean an Overton Window that keeps sliding further into the realm of depravation. Hopefully something cracks eventually, but in the meantime there's nothing to push back on the Twitter elite continuing to influence public policy in destructive ways.
What pushed you over the edge, and do you have plans for expanding your readership sans Twitter, Facebook, and co.?
I don't want to live in a world where a couple of corporations can turn off anyone's digital identity at will. That sounds dystopian. I think we need to build alternatives that are better. My guess is that in a year or two the social media landscape will look very different than it does now.
I hope you're right, but I have a hard time seeing it myself. Alternative and/or decentralized alternatives have close to a decade (remember Disapora ~2011?) and plenty of reason to take off, and yet have had negligible traction during that period. Humans like easy, and are willing to give up a lot in pursuit of that.
Again, hope to be proven wrong — the internet really was a better place when people ran their own decentralized blogs (even when they were LiveJournal or MySpace) compared to what it is today — but IMO we need to be cognizant of the practicalities involved.
This is gonna be famous last words, but I genuinely believe the people making the alternatives just weren't good enough. Mastadon is hard to use and has an awful UI. Parler has an awful, broken UI. Urbit is impossible for anyone to figure out. Diaspora's pitch was that it was distributed. That isn't good enough! It has to be a good social network. Federated infrastructure is just table stakes. One question is, can you make it a good experience *and* be federated. It's possible the answer is no, but I think we're nowhere near close to fully exploring the space of possibilities there.
Fair enough. Although, I should say that I was playing with Mastodon a bit today, and overall it seemed quite good to my eye — slick look, pretty normal signup procedure (once you get by server select), and generally so Twitter-esque that most people should be able to use it by muscle memory (to a fault even — "toot"??!). Very high quality for OS software not funded by any central maintainer.
It's not going to fail because its UI isn't good enough. It's going to fail because it can't offer the same network effects, and no one in the general public cares about its value add through decentralization.
I’m still stuck on your recipe for hiring rock star engineers who solve the hard probs in 15 min, and like “how the fuck do I even identify who those people are, to get to interview them?”
Not all problems worth solving require the smartest people to solve them. How to handle the issue of easy but valuable things not being done because we don't have enough (or any) decent engineers to do them? [This is a longstanding problem at Google, where only solutions to hard problems get rewarded so almost nobody bothers fixing the easy stuff, no matter how much impact it would have.] One approach is to outsource the work (like Google has done with vendors) but that has its own issues. Is there a better way?
If you zoom out to a longer time horizon (e.g. ~500 years), the world where two megacorps can turn off anyone's voice at will sounds dystopian to me. At this point I think these platforms are actively harmful.
I disagree, I think it's highly likely. I think there is a good probability the social media landscape will look very different in the next 18 months. At least 70M Americans are pretty mad at Twitter right now.
It seems extremely optimistic to say the technical problems have been solved. More decentralized alternatives exist but they look a lot like email, and email is not to a significant degree decentralized today. There also exist fully distributed alternatives but they are far from usable and not even I want to use them, despite how badly I want us to decentralize things.
Is there a specific protocol you're thinking of which you believe has solved things?
I was thinking of Mastodon, which (as you say) is like email. But I think email is a decentralized system, even if in practice most people now use one of the large providers. It's come to resemble an oligarchy, which is still better than the autocracy of Facebook et al. I don't think we yet have a more decentralized system that email that is actually usable but that's hard to build & if we wait for it, we'll just end up living with Facebook.
I know what you mean, but for my personality, I can't do gradual changes. For example, I tried quitting smoking gradually for years, and then stopped cold turkey and never came back. For me these changes have to be an all or nothing thing. But YMMV.
I wanted to ask about your opinion on the essential things one should acquire to make an impact on technology? How to shift the path of technology? What are the paths to work on great futuristic tech products?
This is a very complex topic that I can't answer in a comment. I'll try to write about it. Not sure when-- this is something that would take tremendous energy to put down on paper.
In Peter Thiel's Zero to One, he says that we are not making great technological progress in general, except Information Technology. What's your take on that?
I'm very sympathetic to that argument. If you look at what we're doing relative to the 20th century (splitting the atom, building dams, going to space, etc.), the 21st century is looking pretty dire thus far.
Did you see that AWS is blocking Parler from their services because they don’t believe they are doing enough to manage speech on their platform? Scary precedent, maybe scarier than the Twitter/FB actions IMO. AWS is so dominant that they become the de-facto speech police if this kind of stuff goes without pushback. I used to think that free speech/libertarian philosophies would never become a real differentiator in the market, but I’m starting to believe that it is more possible it will become a major differentiator.
I did. One way to look at it is that COVID accelerated remote such that we did five years worth of work in a year. Perhaps this will accelerate distributed infra in the same way.
Which projects seem the most interesting or promising in providing solutions to users who can't trust central tech platforms?
For a while, de-centralized tech seemed unnecessary, it's a pain to use (IRC much?) and people running tech platforms will be neutral enough, right? However, after seeing AWS ban Parler, it seems centralized tech platforms can't be trusted. As such, I'm really curious which projects seem the most interesting or promising to you in providing solutions to users who can't trust central tech platforms?
never thought i’d see the day where the left embraces capitalism lol. while you can’t force AWS to do business with anyone bar discrimination (which this may be) rebuilding your own data centers, laying miles of fiber, building routers, coding your own web servers just to speak on the internet is insanity
this looks interesting, what happens if a small community only has one node and it gets taken out, is the data recoverable ... will have to research mastodon more. is there an investing & crypto community on mastodon ?
I live in DC and have worked on the Hill so I'm mostly just sad about the events of this week. Not sure at all how to deal with the awful political culture we have or even how to begin to bridge divides. Utterly demoralizing week.
If we zoom out, this is likely a historic change. Like the invention of the printing press, steam engine, etc. We can't go back, only forward. A lot of things will break before they get fixed again. I just hope to god it's not gonna be bloody.
What's a thing you're especially high conviction about that others are missing? Also, is it "easy" for you to be contrarian, sometimes curmudgeonly, because of your personality? And does that make you more or less right in your thinking?
It's very easy for me to be a contrarian because I think my psychology is different from other people. I've always been kind of a troll, pushing people's buttons. I hate working for big corporations, so I organized my life so I don't have to (small personal burn rate, etc.) When thousands of people call me names online and go through details of my life, it doesn't bother me at all-- it energizes me. So there isn't any "bravery" here. I think I'm just weird.
During the current winter lockdown (EU-based) I've had bouts of crushing loneliness. I've also come to the (honestly quite chilling) realization that despite how important relationships are to me, I've never been intentional about fostering/deepening human connection.
Your writing resonates and feels authentic, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on that cluster of topics.
Which cluster specifically? What questions are you struggling with that you'd like my help to answer?
The cluster of relationships, connection, loneliness, etc.
Sorry if that's too broad/unfocused – I'd still be curious to hear your perspective.
Have you struggled with any of those? Have you had any pivotal points that were especially meaningful wrt to that cluster? Any lessons learned?
I have struggled with these, of course. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll see if I can write about it.
Everybody is talking about decentralized platforms to replace the functionality of social media. The other possibility is to look for overseas platforms that have some independence from US infra providers.
Arguments for this are spread inside other posts as well eg middle-eastern revolts without the platform taken down. Foreign platforms were used, the situation is bad but far from home, so no issue was brought up.
The mentality is that you roam to a place that doesn't care about your opinions to have an uninhibited online presence. Somehow this sounds less bad than a place that actively tries to silence your opinions.
Of course, I applaud the attempts to launch decentralized solutions because one of the motives is bringing change to your local living environment for the better.. Either that or the aversion of reading/working in other languages is high.
Anyway, this just happens to be the harder path in comparison to alternative ideas. I find this uncharacteristic of the human/engineering mentality, we're lazy.
Don't read into this too seriously please, it's just some rambling.
That's effectively emigration instead of revolution ;-)
I haven't yet tried your suggestions in "On stress and comfort" for improving one's mood - I must do so! - but I seem to be having good success with omega 3 fish oil capsules, which by now have a bunch of scientific evidence backing their use for treating depression. I'm really excited about them. I want to point out three additional things about their use: one, the medicine colestyramine interferes with their absorption, even though this isn't stated on the medicine information leaflet or in some online databases of interactions, so if like me you take colestyramine, try to leave at least 6 hours between the colestyramine and the fish oil capsules. (I would recommend always consulting any provided information and then at least TWO online sources of interaction information, whenever adding a new supplement or medicine to your daily routine, because adverse interactions aren't always widely known.) Two, you really need to eat a meal or snack containing fatty foods at around the same time as you take the fish oil capsules, to prime your body to absorb the omega 3 fatty acids in the fish oil capsules. And three, evidence suggests that the best time to take them is in the evening, because they can help sleep as well.
Also consider using algae oil, which gets the same effect at a lower cost: https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-1565/algal-oil
What are some good Signal, Mastodon, Urbit, whatever groups? I'd love to just exit the left of center mainstream, but all the good content still lives there, and there's a discoverability problem (feature?) with all the decentralized stuff.
Unsolved problem for sure. I don't have answers yet.
We don't want the world to burn. What's our Schelling point and our North Star? "Get good at life", yeah?
(I'd prefer Jesus Christ, but even then there are very many fake Christians who want to burn the world out of resentment. And there are many decent non-Christians.)
Why can’t we go back to running blogs and using rss readers again?
You can read newsletters through rss via Feedbin, FYI. It's great, worth $5/mo.
Or for free with the feed reader of your choice (I like BazQux) via kill-the-newsletter.com.
Call me old fashioned, but I'm still a big Feedly user. Probably 80% of my information comes from RSS.
Me too. I use feedbin and pipe twitter, newsletters and rss feeds through it.
How about telegram?
It would be interesting to know what values you bring to the world. Maybe there is a post on this that I missed?
Also, as you told about your 1-year goals could you plz tell about your more long-term goals.
Working on it.
This is a great move. The only thing I'm on is Twitter...For crypto. Other than that, it's a hot mess. We'd all be better off if it was shut down. Social media in general.
First off, I've been thinking more thoughtfully about how I consume media and organizing my time more effectively thanks to your writing. I already have five books chosen on one subject - the period of Reconstruction - based on your blog post about how to organize my reading . So thanks for that mental model.
Post the books!
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution by Eric Foner: Finished - Excellent. I was told this if you can only read one book about this era it should be this one. That's accurate.
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War by Joanne Freeman: - Finished - Not explicitly about Reconstruction but intimately tied to the build up to the Civil War and the violence that followed during Reconstruction. A little dry, but short and an easy read.
Remaining:
Grant by Ron Chernow
Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. DuBois
The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction by Charles Lane
thank you!
I've been trying to understand the outrage on hacker news / twitter / etc about the trump twitter ban (by both loonies on left and right).. It surprised me, how many ppl think this is a bad move.. Then I realized.. European and American attitudes toward free speech is totally different, just as they are diametric opposite when it comes to gun laws and also fairly divergent when it comes to free market regulation, environment and food standards.. We truly see the world differently in many ways.. Re free speech, I think the 2nd half of this article gets to the point really well:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-03-19/free-speech-in-europe-isn-t-what-americans-think
Free speech isn't a rule of nature. It's an invention of humans. It's a nice (and seemingly necessary idea) for a civilized society to function, but the American's resistance to tinker with a 200-300 year old idea (even a bit) is perverse and borderline insane to me. Society functions completely differently today compared to how it worked when these ideas took root at first. It logically follows that as you change parameters of a system (connectivity of humanity + speed and cost of spreading dangerous and incorrect ideas via platforms like twitter) our notion of free speech should evolve too.
I think, the historically very strong (compared to other countries) libertarian influence in American intellectual discourse creates a dangerous blind spot here that really doesn't help this debate.. Just as libertarians argue for the magical invisible hand of free market to solve everything (which is conclusively and provably false), they pollute the free speech argument with the same non-sensical idea: bad ideas will be combated with better ideas in the market of ideas. This is obviously not true for several reasons.
1. Firstly, (and again obviously) this presupposes that in the population there's roughly an equal propensity for complex information processing, which is necessary to form informed opinions on most important topics of today's world (climate change, nuclear deterrence, power dynamics and minority groups, animal rights, effective altruism, etc, etc). This is clearly not the case.
2. We know from cognitive psychology how incredibly hard it is to change someone's opinion, especially if it's linked to his/her identity at some level (which most opinions we care about in public discourse - see above - are).
3. We know that the platforms in question don't optimize for information correctness when generating the feed but instead for engagement metrics (because, more engagement means more time spent there, which translates to more ads showed in our face to buy shit we don't need). Plus we know that abhorrent and outrageous content spreads an order of magnitude faster than boring, true, complex content on these platforms. Given these two facts about the nature of these platforms and information spreading on them, how on earth would a good idea stand a fair chance against the torrent of unchecked bullshit and conspiracy theories? How on earth this childishly naïve libertarian idea of free market of ideas would ever materialize? It won't, it cannot, it does not. Hence we have ppl believing in 2021 that the earth is flat, that vaccines cause autism and that the 2020 US election was fraudulent.
Overall, Americans need to get over themselves and simply realize that what some old wrinkly blokes thought 300 years ago isn't the pinnacle of great human ideas and certainly not the software we should be running our incredibly complex modern societies on. They had some nice idealistic ideas (which they violently disregarded btw), that have brilliant insights that need further work and updating, just like every other part of our moral landscape. In this case, it's quite clear to most ppl outside the US, that if you combine classical free speech with the amplification of modern social media platforms you get Trump and Capitol hill chaos and you get looting and riots too (yes this goes both ways).
Let's move onto the question of how. How exactly it is best to moderate free speech? Clearly the blunt and ad-hoc censorship is suboptimal (even if it's currently probably necessary). But zooming out it becomes evident that Trump is just the ugly symptom of the larger problem here (unchecked free speech + amplification = recipe for disaster) and without a comprehensive discussion and policy around this, it'll get worse.
There currently are many reasonable things many reasonable people believe but can't say because they'll lose their jobs. On the other hand there are completely looney things that completely looney people can say with no consequences that the rest of us have to put up with. This isn't an impartial debate on what speech out to be acceptable. It's a power struggle, and some people want to curtail expression as an instrument of that struggle.
Sure and that's clearly the wrong way of going about the problems at hand. Yet, I doubt, that if from tomorrow (by miracle) everyone could say what they want (without fearing the repercussions regarding their personal status/wealth/whatever), we'd end up in this utopia that the limitless free-speech advocates seem to envision. Instead, I imagine we'd end up with civil war. The US has tried that once and you still have deep rooted racism in the south hundreds of years later (not to mention the ppl on twitter who cheer for seeing a confederate flag in the capitol).. So I doubt that letting free speech run its course until blood is shed is a wise way of moving forward.
Thanks for sharing; you might enjoy this as m b a lead to solution to the problem you articulate. https://youtu.be/9QGrffjOFko
Top books everyone must read?
+1
Why not stay on Twitter and continue to use it as a public square until such time as something forces you off platform? Is this a decision of principle?
For my personality, I can't do gradual changes. For example, I tried quitting smoking gradually for years, and then stopped cold turkey and never came back. For me these changes have to be an all or nothing thing.
Also this is a principled thing. They've crossed a line for me.
just two week break to c l e a n s e
well this aged poorly
i’m really sadden, but how do we rebuild decentralized communities? i loved twitter because you, and others like solana, cyantist, webdevMason, etc taught me so much about investing, start ups, libertarianism, software engineering etc. it was an incredible place to learn, while banning right leaning accounts doesn’t apply to me, how long before they come for my ideas, how can we make sure no one has this power of censorship again in a decentralized world? and more important where can we build a community were i can learn from the people i love while not supporting people like dorsey and their platform
We will build alternatives, and they will be better than the current iteration of social media. Don't let them get you down!
Thank you for this white pilled (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjN5GPAVDnY) attitude
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/README.md exists already. You just need to start using it.
and how to make serendipity in a decentralized world
What are some of your learnings from creating RethinkDB and eventually failing to create a sustainable business around it?
I'm currently reading The NeXT Big Thing about Jobs and NeXT. I highly recommend it. Part of the book is about NeXT vs Sun, and the different approaches they took. I don't mean to make this sound self-aggrandizing (it really isn't) but I made *all* the same mistakes at RethinkDB that Jobs made at NeXT, except on a much smaller scale. The reason it isn't self-aggrandizing is because most founders make these mistakes. Just the scale is different. Strongly recommend you read the book.
Let's make new platform in Lisp! (jk, had to write that since I found you looong way back through Emacs blogpost). I am glad you are leaving behind this abomination of platform (tw). I was joining various networks and groups in past year or so, nothing did stick to the wall. So currently I am just reading you and Moldbug on substack and that's kinda it sadly. If something pops up I will be more than glad to join.
I'm looking into it (not the Lisp part!)
I guess for many of us leaving Twitter / FB will come with a huge FOMO effect and also the severance of (mostly artificial, but no less useful) social ties. Moving to new platforms and asking good friends to do the same will break some of the weak ties (which are very useful for finding references, jobs, etc.) and will also deepen the echo chambers most of us are in. Just my 2c.
If everything is designed right it will be the Twitter users feeling FOMO, not the users who are leaving, and weak ties will be re-imported.
Sounds very optimistic knowing how much people have invested in their social graphs and recognizing the behavioural inertia (i.e. most people only move out when there's napalm everywhere), but I do agree that most likely the strength of the new social ties on any new platform (Odnoklassniki, hehe) will be substantially higher than in the mainstream social networks.
I agree it's a long shot. But we've got to try.
The topic I'd like to discuss with honorable author of this thread and its community is the permanent silencing of POTUS by major social and communication platforms. Personally I'm yet to take a strong position on this. On one hand these are private, for profit organizations, with shareholders, customers and for the lack of better word values. Also they're free to decide who can and who cannot use their services, just like all of us are at liberty to choose whom to welcome to our private residences. Finally, freedom of speech is never absolute, nor was it meant to be. One should not scream "fire" in a crowded theater, when there is none. One should have no platform to trigger violence, descrimination and such. These were the arguments supporting the action taken. The counter argument is that such deeds seriously deminish reputation of the office of POTUS which will have long lasting effects. Another thought is that a revolution against tyranny (real or imaginary) is never legal from perspective of existing laws, and thus, by definition is always unlawful and often violent. And yet, during arab spring and other colorful revolutions of the past decade these platforms never silenced opposition and often were instrumental in regime changes. Isn't this a school case of hipocracy (not that I'm surprised by it)? To what point private enterprises should provide platforms to elected officials or any citizen for that matter? Should there be a line where "dangerous" individuals be excommunicated? Perhaps the answer lies in competition between various platforms and their respective censorship policies or lack of there of. But then, our social fabric will be even more fragmented, with each group following its own tunnel.
Sherlock.
I think the argument that these are simply private companies and they can do whatever they want is obviously bad on its face. They're enjoying unprecedented network effects, so the barriers to entry for other actors are enormous. You have a small cabal of companies and they're clearly colluding-- they make the same exact moderation decisions within days and often hours of each other. Even if you could build an alternative-- google and apple kicked Parler off their app stores. Ok, they're private platforms. But then AWS (!!!) decided not to provide Parler with its services.
So the argument gets progressively more shady. You effectively live in a world where you cannot build an alternative because people will kill you in the infra level, distribution level, and moat level. That's some fucked up, repugnant, authoritarian shit.
OK, I realise how it looks, but I truly believe there is a more innocent explanation behind some of this stuff. They are making the same decisions because those are the obviously correct decisions to make, and it's basically the same content on all platforms that they're removing. Like take for example Alex Jones. Some people probably think, as I used to think, that he's a basically harmless eccentric conspiracy theorist who has said some offensive things. No, he's more than that: he's alt-right. Look into what he's said. As for President Trump, well he broke the Twitter rules many times, I haven't seen any real dispute about this - the only reason he was allowed to stay on the platform for so long was that his tweets were considered "historically significant". But the incitement of violence domestically - and yes, I admit, it's a judgement call, but as a non-American and thus somewhat detached observer, I happen to agree with Twitter on this - crossed a line. Parler got kicked off by Apple because Parler users were literally talking about shooting police officers. That's not OK. Blue lives matter, yes?
Surely they apply the same level of rigor to insane leftist accounts and platforms, right?
Well no, probably not, but remember people actually have to report specific violence-inciting tweets for Twitter to take any notice. I very rarely report tweets from people to the left of me, and I strongly suspect many other liberals and progressives simply never do that. So it might be up to the right to do that. And also, it can take Twitter days to process reports. With all that being said, I'm not trying to justify Twitter's double standards - I see them, particularly with regard to transgender topics, and they infuriate me.
Re reporting, that's a reasonable argument for small accounts. But there are massive accounts on Twitter that advocate for genocide (Iranian leaders) and concentration camps (CCP), let alone hate speech wrt race/gender. I simply don't buy the argument that they're impartially applying rules. It's not even remotely close.
So, do you object to the censorship itself or to one sided implementation of it? The hypocritical enforcement is obvious, but IMHO that's entirely different argument.
Mechanics are well established and not subject to debate. The question is of ethical nature. To what point a civilized society should tolerate a freedom of speech. Should we have limits to what's allowed. If we do, mechanics becomes secondary and enforcement of private actors is a lesser evil than one arising from government's censorship body. Do we want people shouting "death to jews" to freely roam our streets, digital or physical? Yes, said businesses enjoy enormous network effects and almost monopolistic powers, but do we want them to be anarchistic in nature or exercise some restrain? The weak point of democracy is that it can elect a dictator with horrific consequences. Shouldn't this design flaw be addressed? We already have plenty of flat Earthers, QAnons and other irrationally unscientific sectants. Do we want these ideas to go mainstream with all respective consequences?
Free speech mechanics are also well established and not subject to debate. John Stuart Mill published On Liberty in 1859, but really people figured it out during the Enlightenment. Literally every time we develop a new communications technology, from printing press to social media, existing power structures find it inconvenient and invent reasons to curtail expression. The Catholic Church was fucking pissed when Martin Luther pinned his theses door and everyone reprinted and shared it. Now it's the Woke Church. It was too bad then, and it's too bad now.
The problem is that when we decide to draw a line then we are left with the problem of needing to decide which side of that line every piece of content falls. Ideally, we'd have a neutral 3rd party entity that could do this at scale but that seems pretty infeasible. Worse still, different countries disagree on where the line is, which makes the situation complicated in a global platform.
There's also the argument that Publicly Traded companies are not really private. We all know about the revolving door of people that work for these companies and the USG, regulatory barriers that protect these companies from competition, government pensions dependent on their performance, and even the Fed's been buying their bonds lately. How many times in the last 4 years were Twitter and FB dragged to Congressional Hearings where they were basically threatened to get in line or face extinction via regulation? Does anyone really believe those in government did not use their influence to coerce these companies into censoring their opposition?
After this fiasco, I think we should consider any person in government publicly calling for the censorship of anyone, and especially, a political rival a gross violation of the First Amendment.
It feels like yesterday, when everyone believed the First was sacred and part of the secret sauce that made us into the most powerful country in the world. Propaganda can be a bitch.
The secret sauce that made the US into the world's dominant country was that Europe tore itself to shreds during WW2.
re: “ One should not scream "fire" in a crowded theater, when there is none.”
Here’s a good read on that:
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough
I've struggled with the Twitter question myself —
On one hand, it's the most toxic force in modern society. Personally, I believe it's almost entirely responsible for the Trump phenomena, the Trump derangement phenomena, the regression of social progress into woke culture, and a myriad of other things. No question that media institutions help with all of it, but the power of Twitter is that it speaks perfectly to pseudo-intellectuals with short attention spans, which is the entire middle class (and above) in this day and age. It's made celebrities of some of the most hateful people on the planet, people who would otherwise have no platform whatsoever as they couldn't string together two ideas in a discussion or long form text.
But on the other, it has a monopolistic position in its particular specialty of public political discourse, and there's nothing else even close in being able to reach a massive number of people. I run a blog, but almost all my engagement comes from social channels — practically no one is running RSS anymore. Substack and co. might be a little better, but your subscribers stay fixed without other channels for promotion (e.g. Twitter).
Twitter's deplatforming of wrongthink is concerning, but I'm not sure that checking out is the right answer either. If enough people quit, it'll become less important, but I'm not sure that I see that happening anytime soon, and in the meantime, it'll just mean an Overton Window that keeps sliding further into the realm of depravation. Hopefully something cracks eventually, but in the meantime there's nothing to push back on the Twitter elite continuing to influence public policy in destructive ways.
What pushed you over the edge, and do you have plans for expanding your readership sans Twitter, Facebook, and co.?
I don't want to live in a world where a couple of corporations can turn off anyone's digital identity at will. That sounds dystopian. I think we need to build alternatives that are better. My guess is that in a year or two the social media landscape will look very different than it does now.
I hope you're right, but I have a hard time seeing it myself. Alternative and/or decentralized alternatives have close to a decade (remember Disapora ~2011?) and plenty of reason to take off, and yet have had negligible traction during that period. Humans like easy, and are willing to give up a lot in pursuit of that.
Again, hope to be proven wrong — the internet really was a better place when people ran their own decentralized blogs (even when they were LiveJournal or MySpace) compared to what it is today — but IMO we need to be cognizant of the practicalities involved.
This is gonna be famous last words, but I genuinely believe the people making the alternatives just weren't good enough. Mastadon is hard to use and has an awful UI. Parler has an awful, broken UI. Urbit is impossible for anyone to figure out. Diaspora's pitch was that it was distributed. That isn't good enough! It has to be a good social network. Federated infrastructure is just table stakes. One question is, can you make it a good experience *and* be federated. It's possible the answer is no, but I think we're nowhere near close to fully exploring the space of possibilities there.
Fair enough. Although, I should say that I was playing with Mastodon a bit today, and overall it seemed quite good to my eye — slick look, pretty normal signup procedure (once you get by server select), and generally so Twitter-esque that most people should be able to use it by muscle memory (to a fault even — "toot"??!). Very high quality for OS software not funded by any central maintainer.
It's not going to fail because its UI isn't good enough. It's going to fail because it can't offer the same network effects, and no one in the general public cares about its value add through decentralization.
Regarding expansion-- I don't know yet. It's a problem to be solved, but at least there is now a concrete problem I can try and attack.
I’m still stuck on your recipe for hiring rock star engineers who solve the hard probs in 15 min, and like “how the fuck do I even identify who those people are, to get to interview them?”
These are not most ppl in Silicon Valley. But top top people are.
How many "top top" engineers have you met?
Around ~100 sounds right, give or take.
Not all problems worth solving require the smartest people to solve them. How to handle the issue of easy but valuable things not being done because we don't have enough (or any) decent engineers to do them? [This is a longstanding problem at Google, where only solutions to hard problems get rewarded so almost nobody bothers fixing the easy stuff, no matter how much impact it would have.] One approach is to outsource the work (like Google has done with vendors) but that has its own issues. Is there a better way?
What finally put you over the edge?
If you zoom out to a longer time horizon (e.g. ~500 years), the world where two megacorps can turn off anyone's voice at will sounds dystopian to me. At this point I think these platforms are actively harmful.
What's the likelihood that a decentralized Twitter-like service will become a viable competitor within the next 5 years?
Seems highly unlikely. The technical problems have already been solved but the network effect is very hard to overcome.
I disagree, I think it's highly likely. I think there is a good probability the social media landscape will look very different in the next 18 months. At least 70M Americans are pretty mad at Twitter right now.
If you hear of developments in this space, please share! I'm interested to participate in such experiments.
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/README.md is available now but I just don't see those 70M Americans actually switching to it. Co-ordination problems are very hard to solve.
It seems extremely optimistic to say the technical problems have been solved. More decentralized alternatives exist but they look a lot like email, and email is not to a significant degree decentralized today. There also exist fully distributed alternatives but they are far from usable and not even I want to use them, despite how badly I want us to decentralize things.
Is there a specific protocol you're thinking of which you believe has solved things?
I was thinking of Mastodon, which (as you say) is like email. But I think email is a decentralized system, even if in practice most people now use one of the large providers. It's come to resemble an oligarchy, which is still better than the autocracy of Facebook et al. I don't think we yet have a more decentralized system that email that is actually usable but that's hard to build & if we wait for it, we'll just end up living with Facebook.
https://joinmastodon.org/ -- a twitter alternative -- is already proving to be a strong contender
Brave decision. How do you plan to deal with FOMO or maybe only missing out? I really get a lot of great inputs from Twitter.
I don't know yet. This is a problem I'll have to solve over the next few weeks/months.
Maybe as a suggestion, if not too late... you could have done it gradually, one by one over a couple of months, it's usually easier to handle?
People usually fail when they aim for sudden and complete change in their life.. start eating healthy, doing sports 5x a week, read each day etc. :)
I guess it's a matter of persistence. It'll help you to already think about what will you do in moments of "crisis" now.
I know what you mean, but for my personality, I can't do gradual changes. For example, I tried quitting smoking gradually for years, and then stopped cold turkey and never came back. For me these changes have to be an all or nothing thing. But YMMV.
Interesting, I am just now in the process of smoking only sometimes. Totally does not work, so I get what you mean.
It is only possible for me if I do not buy a pack.
What do you think about Urbit? Are you maybe going over some time in the future?
I haven't tried it yet, but will in the next few days.
I am trying to figure it out atm, but got some issues booting a comet and am not really familiar with the ethereum gas prices
Thanks.
I wanted to ask about your opinion on the essential things one should acquire to make an impact on technology? How to shift the path of technology? What are the paths to work on great futuristic tech products?
This is a very complex topic that I can't answer in a comment. I'll try to write about it. Not sure when-- this is something that would take tremendous energy to put down on paper.
Thank you and sorry for the vague question. That would be great and helpful.
Hi Slava,
In Peter Thiel's Zero to One, he says that we are not making great technological progress in general, except Information Technology. What's your take on that?
I'm very sympathetic to that argument. If you look at what we're doing relative to the 20th century (splitting the atom, building dams, going to space, etc.), the 21st century is looking pretty dire thus far.
Did you see that AWS is blocking Parler from their services because they don’t believe they are doing enough to manage speech on their platform? Scary precedent, maybe scarier than the Twitter/FB actions IMO. AWS is so dominant that they become the de-facto speech police if this kind of stuff goes without pushback. I used to think that free speech/libertarian philosophies would never become a real differentiator in the market, but I’m starting to believe that it is more possible it will become a major differentiator.
I did. One way to look at it is that COVID accelerated remote such that we did five years worth of work in a year. Perhaps this will accelerate distributed infra in the same way.
Yep. Hopefully it does. Just saw that Stripe suspended the Trump campaign account as well :/ not a bug Trump fan but it’s all very worrisome.
Which projects seem the most interesting or promising in providing solutions to users who can't trust central tech platforms?
For a while, de-centralized tech seemed unnecessary, it's a pain to use (IRC much?) and people running tech platforms will be neutral enough, right? However, after seeing AWS ban Parler, it seems centralized tech platforms can't be trusted. As such, I'm really curious which projects seem the most interesting or promising to you in providing solutions to users who can't trust central tech platforms?
never thought i’d see the day where the left embraces capitalism lol. while you can’t force AWS to do business with anyone bar discrimination (which this may be) rebuilding your own data centers, laying miles of fiber, building routers, coding your own web servers just to speak on the internet is insanity
Have you considered using Mastodon? It is FOSS and allows anyone to host their own server node in the network.
Yes, but the UI isn't good. I don't think the platform is good enough.
this looks interesting, what happens if a small community only has one node and it gets taken out, is the data recoverable ... will have to research mastodon more. is there an investing & crypto community on mastodon ?
I live in DC and have worked on the Hill so I'm mostly just sad about the events of this week. Not sure at all how to deal with the awful political culture we have or even how to begin to bridge divides. Utterly demoralizing week.
If we zoom out, this is likely a historic change. Like the invention of the printing press, steam engine, etc. We can't go back, only forward. A lot of things will break before they get fixed again. I just hope to god it's not gonna be bloody.
What's a thing you're especially high conviction about that others are missing? Also, is it "easy" for you to be contrarian, sometimes curmudgeonly, because of your personality? And does that make you more or less right in your thinking?
It's very easy for me to be a contrarian because I think my psychology is different from other people. I've always been kind of a troll, pushing people's buttons. I hate working for big corporations, so I organized my life so I don't have to (small personal burn rate, etc.) When thousands of people call me names online and go through details of my life, it doesn't bother me at all-- it energizes me. So there isn't any "bravery" here. I think I'm just weird.