bubble-07

Yes, I absolutely agree with your second statement. However, the issue I take with the author is that they say that they are not a programmer, and they're frustrated that they cannot get a programmer to help build a prototype. Being _frustrated_ that people won't work for you _for free_ is delusional. The author could have also decided that their idea was worth enough to them to _learn_ how to program, so they could build a workable prototype, and possibly attract other developers as part of an open source project. However, the author seems more content to just sit there and complain about being "misunderstood." Implementations typically are worth a lot more than ideas, and this is exactly what the author doesn't seem to get.

For all of the political ideologies you listed, we have concrete examples of societies which trend in those directions. Sure, most real societies do not trend toward radical versions of those ideologies, but at least we can each get an okay sense of the first derivative, so to speak, of "goodness" with respect to variation in political leanings.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like anything like "Infoliberalism" has ever been tested (and the author even _says_ as much). Before jumping on the boat of a radical political ideology, I'm sure that any reasonable person would at least like to have an _idea_ of what it leads to.

The major red flag is in the "misunderstood genius" part -- 99% of the people I've ever seen with a claim like that haven't interacted with things enough to have been able to truly test their claims. "Genius" is only "misunderstood" when the person laying claim to it does not do enough to substantiate their argument.

Here, I read some of what they had to say about "infoliberalism" -- the immediate issue that I have with their position is that they make some kind of claim that a few participants in it would naturally lead to a revolution. They then go on to claim that the system is completely decentralized, but also complain that not one other person is willing to join. If their system were truly decentralized, and also something that would provide significant benefits to participants over the existing social/economic/political order, why is the number of practitioners exactly one? All of this screams quackery.

What is the first diagram on this page supposed to depict? Seems like a bunch of unrelated topics with random arrows drawn between them.

Also, the author seems more than a bit arrogant and deluded: http://settheory.net/life -- I would _not_ touch any of this stuff with a 40 foot pole.

Eh, fair enough -- a real experience beats reading about it any day.

Literary labyrinths can be fun to explore, though it takes a certain mindset going in. I'd say that pieces like this are not "ingest with morning coffee" pieces, but more like lazy Sunday afternoon tea with (your preferred equivalent to) "Lofi hip hop mix - Beats to Relax/Study to" playing in the background.

The article _does_ go somewhere, though, even if you wind up in nearly the same place you started. I for one didn't know much, if anything about the artists, places, and pieces the writer referenced, nor that BYTE magazine had such weird pictures, nor about the Chapel of the Chimes, nor what a scrub-jay sounds like, nor that Fiverr had such aggressive advertising campaigns, ... etc.

As a collection of a bunch of little things (which suits the point of the article well), I at least found it interesting.

Okayyy, if you say sooo...

You don't need to take everything you see on the internet as unnecessarily hostile. Heck, I was just trying to make light of what I saw as an absurd situation.

I didn't interpret the article that way at all -- I can understand how somebody saying "hey, look at these neat things I found and learned outside!" could be misinterpreted as "self-important wankery" due to the natural "great for you!" or "who gives a shit?" reactions that kind of thing tends to garner. I at least found it neat _because of_ (not in spite of) the feeling that it was almost as if I was reading from the author's personal diary.

Why such a negative reaction? I legitimately don't get your hostility. Imagine if a kindergartener wrote a book about their day spent playing outside on a Saturday -- would you call that "self-important wankery", too?

I find many of the comments on this article hilarious -- Jesus Christ, HN commenters, can't you recognize the irony of complaining that your attention span is too short to read an article about the joys of paying attention to the world around you?

We tend to prefer simpler theories that still manage to make good predictions. Is it really a surprise that our best theories are simple in light of our aesthetic preferences? The "true laws of physics" could be god-awful, and we could find ourselves in a universe where we're literally incapable of knowing that due to practical constraints. It's also not surprising at all that theories that are aesthetically-pleasing to us manage to have multiple different mathematical formulations -- if we're assuming from the outset that they're not very arbitrarily-defined theories, it seems perfectly natural that multiple interpretations would exist. Nature could be more horrifyingly complex than we could ever imagine, and even if that were the case, it's conceivable that all of the laws "good enough" to make testable predictions would have a nice mathematical structure. Even then, we're nowhere near the "end of physics" -- how are we supposed to know that we've not just been wading around in the shallow part of the pool, only to find a bottomless pit waiting for us just a few meters away?

It doesn't matter if "dark matter is just a hardcoded variable or a hotfix to an existing problem" -- all physics cares about is building a theory of dark matter that can make effective predictions. If a "theory of a simulated universe" can make concrete, testable predictions, then it's a physical theory. If not, it's more of a philosophical theory.