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Maybe I’m a high modernist
I became aware of the terminology “high modernist” by reading Scott Alexander’s review of Seeing Like a State by James Scott. Scott A: But the High Modernists were pawns in service of a deeper motive: the centralized state wanted the world to be “legible”, ie arranged in a way that made it easy to monitor…
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Quotebag #117
Paul Ford: The entire world of emulation is filled with references to very specific things that you should not seek out, that you must never Google, that you should definitely not obtain. Summerspeaker: If suffering proves absolutely necessarily for conscious and intelligence, then at that point I’d conclude it’s best to just wipe out life…
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Effective altruism
I’ve largely reached the conclusion that the agenda of the effective altruism movement has a phase one which consists of gradually adding effectiveness to altruism, at some point to be followed by a phase two which will consist of gradually subtracting altruism from effective altruism. Basically, effectiveness is to effective altruism as efficiency is to…
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That’s the real reason there’s no viable business model for journalism. All this talk of ad blocker blockers and micropayments and DRM misses the point. To work for money is to work for money.
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Autonomy, Diversity, Society
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“America is a Christian nation”
It is a nation without an official religion. That’s precisely why it’s home to the (unfortunately, in my opinion) least secular society in the free world. The absence of an official religion is why America became a magnet for those members of European sects that actually believed in their theology, as well as becoming a…
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Democracy is not Enough – Rip it up and Start Again
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Free culture movement under attack
The free culture movement and the pirate movement are two quite different things. The latter is fair game for ostracism by those who value Rule of Law. Free Culture, however, is not about expropriating things into the public domain but creating things that are born public domain, basically a (largely failed) effort to bring the…
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Intentional economic calculation
The market is remarkably good at allocating resources efficiently. The only problem is that the market magic doesn’t work on criteria of efficiency that aren’t dollar-weighted. I suppose it’s one of those normative vs. positive things. Since (1) it doesn’t seem possible to harness the market mechanism for solving person-weighted optimization problems and (2) I’m…
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Quotebag #116
Richard Stallman: Any speech recognition running on a server that isn’t yours, you can’t trust. Emmi Bevensee and Kameron Fein Just because illicit activities are not included in the GDP of a nation does not mean that they are not a part of the national economy or that they are somehow subverting it. Charles: SMART…