Good boy
So if you are reading the history of the 20th century, and come to the 1930s, and you ask yourself “how could people have allowed this to happen”, well, this is how. IYIs too smart for their own good, accepting a guaranteed disaster to prevent an inconvenience.
There is also the small matter of DC city government not being allowed to spend $1.1B of its own money — which it had already collected! — because who needs police and public schools? The colonies revolted for less.
📚 Finished reading: Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds. Learned much about Wittgenstein and even more about Popper. Both were wrong, as all philosophers are, but I can’t help thinking Wittgenstein was more wrong than Popper, being so obsessed with language which — turns out — is merely the most superficial layer of human intelligence and one that’s fairly easy to emulate. I do wonder what “little Luki” would have made of LLMs.
Some pre-weekend reading:
Sentences to get depressed about:
The Great Multitasking Panic of the Late Oughts ended, like all panics, not because we found a solution, but because we just…stopped panicking. […] Most of our fears ended up being right, but by then we weren’t afraid. Grandma got an iPad, and it was game over.
From Adam Mastroianni, excellent as always.
This is explained, sort of, by her being descended from Serbian cat people. At one point in the movie a very catlike woman addresses her, in Serbian, as moja sestra — “my sister.”
I am always on the lookout for an unexpected mention of my people, and Alan Jacobs delivered.
I always thought it was good news when an RSS feed on my “Paused and Defunct” list woke up, but it looks like sometimes these feeds wake up as zombies. The latest one is Thought Catalog which I followed for the occasional post from Ryan Holiday but is now dead as a website and posting random articles like this on its feed.
Fortunately Ryan Holiday still has a blog, doing his part to prevent the web from becoming auto-generated slop.
Anyone interested in the writings of Nassim Taleb will enjoy this crash course on the Incerto from John Goodman.
Good boy
Earlier this year I mentioned the anonymous X account Crémieux as a proponent of the concept of “National IQ”. Now we know the person behind that account, and the truth is in fact quite boring. This is the line between having a pseudonym and creating a sock puppet. (↬Sasha Gusev)
As I pass the Microsoft Authenticator matryoshka doll gauntlet of one number matching push notification after another, the immortal words of Arthur C. Clarke come to mind: Any sufficiently thoughtless technology is indistinguishable from torture.