– African societies are based on achieved status – is closely related to Chinese meritocracy (..) shows Africa to be the most socially mobile part of the world. Africans are also the most optimistic about future mobility.
-‘scepticism of authority’. Unlike many societies in East Asia, Africa is much more like Western liberal democracies in its anticipation that political power will be abused
-‘cosmopolitanism’. Because of the heterogeneous and small-scale nature of historical African society, Africans endlessly had to deal with differences – different languages, different cultures, different histories. This is reflected in African languages where the word for “stranger” is typically the same word as for “guest
“Differences of opinion in economics are not largely about the precision of estimated data, a la high energy physics, but about the particular assumptions used by the analyst to move from data to estimated parameters of interest. Taking this seriously is what I mean above by “strategic statistics”: the fact that identification in economics requires choices by the analyst means we need to take the implications of those choices seriously”
“there is often a tension between reporting results truthfully and the decisions taken based on those results”
Deustch in “Beginning of Infinty” says “Like scientific theories, policies cannot be derived from anything. They are conjectures. And we should choose between them not on the basis of their origin, but according to how good they are as explanations: how hard to vary.”
here says an experiment wtih ferrets show that memories are probably stored directly in the neuron, interview with Randy Gallistel who stresses that it would be a paradigm change for neuroscience and also #ai both assuming that memories are the effect of connection between neurons
“The most interesting idea” the idea would be revolutionary, the experiment, if recognised and reproduced, could be an anomaly that neuroscience has to face and accomodate in current theory https://join.substack.com/p/is-this-the-most-interesting-idea
libertarians want to be free from the state, what about religion, corporate oppression, monopolies etc.
Thiel comes out as somebody who just does not want to pay taxes, but “Freedom and (small “d”) democracy are, in conditions of rampant inequality, a cruel sham as Bakunin understood.” this is James C. Scott
Scott again “Nor do I believe that the state is the only institution that endangers freedom. To assert so would be to ignore a long and deep history of pre-state slavery, property in women, warfare, and bondage. It is one thing to disagree utterly with Hobbes about the nature of society before the existence of the state (nasty, brutish, and short) and another to believe that “the state of nature” was an unbroken landscape of communal property, cooperation, and peace.”
this is Tyler Cowen on how there is no stable “libertqrian equilibrium” when a virus kills score of fellow citizens andntherefore is better have an efficient state at the onset of an epidemy that spares everybody much suffering “Given the way government and public choice work, anything that kills over half a million Americans is going to be a big deal for policy, whether we like it or not (Don should be the first to recognize that government will restrict your liberties for far less than 500k deaths!). You want the best feasible version of a response, as there isn’t really a stable libertarian response pattern out there. Trying partial but non-sustainable libertarian approaches will in the end get you more and more statism as the virus keeps on defeating you, deaths rise, and calls for ever-greater state action increase. A lot of what libertarians don’t like about lockdowns in part stems from the “do nothing” response of the first two months of notice that we Americans had when Covid first appeared in China.” from here https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/04/from-the-comments-34.html
Tyler coined the term “State Capacity Libertarianism” by the way
So we are at 2 diverse types of libertarianism here, and I have also quoed an anarchist
“SF author Greg Bear probably closed the book on attempts to define science fiction as a genre in 1994 when he said “the branch of fantastic literature which affirms the rational knowability of the universe””
“Students’ critiques of General Semantics seems to constantly include the following : (1) It’s nice but people can’t or don’t live that way : and, (2) How can General Semantics be used in the ‘real’ world outside of the classroom? ”
building worlds, I guess, I should read on, Heinlein and van Vogt both attended GS groups
Is Adam Smith the capitalist forefather that unveiled to us the Invisible Hand, she decides who stays low or climb high (said with the voice of those green critters in You Story
Bad news, Adam Smith only used the I.H. expression 3 times in his books, two of them he used it to make fun of old things, the 3rd stuck but we are not sure that was not sardonic either
se sei dall’altra parte, quella di ricevere un’offerta da una startup, a questo link puoi trovare dei riferimenti su quanto farti pagare quante opzioni chiedere a seconda dello stage della startup
nei tempi che viviamo non c’è più la netta differenza tra lavoro e capitale, tra lavoratore e imprenditore nell accesso a redditi da capitale, il modo migliore per affrontare la vita è quella di lavorare per avere delle quote di azioni del posto in cui lavori
Questo fenomeno di crescente sovrapposizione tra il ruolo di lavoratore e capitale, si definisce homoploutia. il termine è stato coniato dall’economista Branco milanovich ed è giusto conoscere il fenomeno per capire come funziona la distribuzione del reddito la disuguaglianza nel mondo attuale.
internet barons getting rich via internet platform of billions of users somehow do not trust the internet as it is and enjoy themselves with fancy projects of ariborne points of access which can do without relying on Telcos, without their digging trenches and building aerials.
Facebook built drones offering connectivity, cancelled in 2018, google blimps just cancelled
Was it for some cyberpunkish attempt to free their platforms from regulated telcom space? Make they cyberspace untouchable?
In the end the only one who could really do that is Musk with his constellation of satellites. Satellites are more intangible to government that either drones or blimps in the airspace
Progressiv-ism, -ism like in Illumin-ism which followed the dark ages, Progressivism comes after the Great Depression. The Great depression is the title of the book written by the economist Tyler Cowen. Tyler and the tech entrepenuer Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe, have started the filed of “Progressive Studies”. They did so when they wrote the piece “we need a new science of progress” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ and now there is a page where you can check a lot of contributions to it https://patrickcollison.com/progress
Charlie Stross, SF writer, on reality stickness and ability to forecast into the future:
“You don’t need a science fiction writer to tell you this stuff: 90% of the world of tomorrow plus ten years is obvious to anyone with a weekly subscription to New Scientist and more imagination than a doorknob.
What’s less obvious is the 10% of the future that isn’t here yet. Of that 10%, you used to be able to guess most of it — 9% of the total — by reading technology road maps in specialist industry publications. We know what airliners Boeing and Airbus are starting development work on, we can plot the long-term price curve for photovoltaic panels, read the road maps Intel and ARM provide for hardware vendors, and so on. (..)
(..) However, this stuff ignores what Donald Rumsfeld named “the unknown unknowns”. About 1% of the world of ten years hence always seems to have sprung fully-formed from the who-ordered-THAT dimension: we always get landed with stuff nobody foresaw or could possibly have anticipated, unless they were spectacularly lucky guessers or had access to amazing hallucinogens. And this 1% fraction of unknown unknowns regularly derails near-future predictions.”
Legibility is a “seeing like a state” term, James Scott terminology but it sticks lately. Scott Alexander on the experts, journalism and legibility. In different terms, like Nate Silver put it, the surpirsing gap between what you read in the news about Covid and what you could gather yourself from preprints and experts’ twitter threads
The point of Scott is that experts in public position and journalists with duty to report to the public have to strip down what the want to communicate in order to make it “legible” to the wide audience, so information and even message geto lost in mainstreammedia https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/journalism-and-legible-expertise
this is not what I wanted to write, I got carried away by the legibility concept which is probably misappropriated and used outside its intended reach. Anyway I wanted to say really, reality ius mostly sticky and the part that sticks from a decade to the next moves in ways you can guess with a proper knowledge strategy. )0% stays the same, )% changes in this way, 1% can’t be easily guessed and that probably chages the meaning of all the rest
1500-Pound Goat 