lariati

I think this partially a myopic view from young people.

I remember being a little kid and watching a week long show about the JFK conspiracy on either one of the big 3 networks or PBS. Area 51 alien conspiracy is so ubiquitous I don't even know how you would track it 30 years ago.

Alex Jones that is banned from youtube for all these crazy conspiracy theories he puts out use to be on practically nationally on AM radio stations for hours a day. The Art Bell show was broadcast nightly for decades and was maybe even more insane than Alex Jones.

It is telling that the people who are weaponizing this concept of "misinformation" do not point it at all at Bigfoot researchers. What is more "misinformation" than the idea of giant apes running around the US forest? Of course, that doesn't count because there is no political gain to be had.

The whole process is so transparent.

We basically have epistemological certainty as long as their is political gain to be had from the certainty. JFK assassination is probably the best example. The theta/time decay has all evaporated on the political gain from the conspiracy so that no longer matters.

Noise?

If we follow the science then what does "misinformation" mean in an information theory context?

It has no meaning at all. Since it basically has no meaning it does make it quite a good word in a propaganda context. We can make this word mean whatever we want.

It is a shame we don't use the concept of noise or a noisy channel in a wider context.

I suspect in reality all these narratives are basically fiction.

We know we are really bad at tracking knowledge work productivity but we will make up narratives based off bad data.

I imagine the real story is that the productive people are just as but not more productive at home vs the office and the slackers are walking their dog more instead of walking around the office.

"Office slackers waste time in different ways working from home, everything else basically the same"

I feel like any nytimes article I read is practically written by an algorithm.

"Since the pandemic began, Americans’ happiness has cratered"

As if this isn't mostly because of the disruption to normal life caused by the pandemic?

To me, there is this small group of very loud social media addicts/writers that would be perfectly happy for this pandemic experience to go on forever since it always provides content to write/post about while basically everyone I know in person is utterly burnt out on the whole experience.

Totally agree. At least on KDE I really don't notice any difference in performance and always have both installed.

I use Firefox 99% of the time though. I think it is something about the tabs that I like better but it is a minor difference and purely based on personal taste.

So he is basically going to get bored and binge watch shows on Netflix for 3 days.

The irony to me is I would think curating a website like that is as big a problem as anything. That is going to take up way too much time and space in your brain.

Get rid of the blog, Netflix and social media then most the problems will go away.

No one is doomscrolling arXiv.

Exactly and the vast majority of people were racists at the time who I am sure did not agree with the protests.

Something has gone wrong though with this trucker protest because people should have already been arrested. LBJ wasn't granting himself power to deal with civil rights protests.

IMO now it is going to turn into some kind of Canadian Reichstag fire.

Some headline like 2/3rds of Canadians want the government to make sure there is never another Reichstag fire is just a matter of time.

The irony is this is exactly why the US is a republic and not a democracy.

Direct democracy is 100% mob rule but no one really cares to read the Federalist Papers or the mountain of thought that was put into this at the start of the US.

These truckers did nothing other than grease the wheels of authoritarianism anyway.

This is the last real protest in Canada. Next time, these "emergency" powers will either be immediate or these new powers are just new permanent government powers.

2/3rds the citizens will practically be demanding that this never happens again.

A lesson in why Ben Franklin said that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

I would just add Neil Postman's Technopoly as a much easier read.

I have never been able to get through either of those Ellul books and have tried several times. I am not even sure if it is Ellul himself or translated French thought in general I find so painful.

Of course but people just like to puppet nonsense and are ignorant of our own history.

This for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_b...

Or what about the vice president shooting one of the founding fathers dead over what was basically a twitter war for that time? Lol yea we are more extreme and divided now. Give me a break.

Because the cyberpunk values and predictions couldn't have been more wrong.

It didn't even take 25 years to make 1984 look like an improvement in privacy and surveillance compared to what we have now.

If the idea of happiness is never having to leave the house then the past 25 years have been great.

The whole point of a prediction market is to try to uncover hidden information like this.

I remember this idea was floated after the 9/11 attacks. A spike in a terror attack odds would be an early warning system as someone with inside information on a terror attack tried to profit from it. This idea was shot down somewhat quickly though.

It is really a different animal than the stock market in a sense although the stock market still operates on information vs noise trades.

Girard was a Stanford professor. His Uncommon Knowledge episode from the Hoover Institution is quite interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk

I do agree though, the article is pretty lame.

Comedy and what people find funny though has such huge variance.

There are many professional comedians that I don't find funny at all but enough people do that they can make a career out of it.

To me, it would be like trying to classify music with a good or bad label. It is so subjective to taste.

I am 50 and have never owned a television myself.

I have never had a Netflix account.

At this point, I have been offered pretty nice TVs for free more than once.

If you really get use to living without a TV though it feels like it has negative value to have one IMO. Even more now with Netflix and long binge watch series with disappointing endings.

Of course, I don't get to participate in the conversations about how much show X ending sucked after wasting a week of my life on it.

You obviously don't understand the pricing mechanism and utility of basically a decentralized equity valuation engine. I mean that is what the stock market ultimately is.

These articles are pointless. No one is going to bother reading Brian Arthur of all people to have any clue.

Just the same dumb conversations over and over and over.

Investing in a company though is basically doing a crowd sourced valuation on the future cash flows of the company.

It doesn't matter if you see it that way or not. Your buying and selling is still voting in a sense on the valuation of the future cash flows of the company.

Buying and selling BTC is like buying or selling gold. There is no future cash flow to value. It is purely pricing based off supply and demand.

Not to mention the "market cap" is complete fiction.

I think you can notice this best on a new coin. I was looking at chia for whatever stupid idea they had with proof by useless storage.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/chia-network/

If you go to the 5 year market cap chart, it goes from 0 to 342 million when offered. That is 342 million dollars out of thin air backed by nothing.

Now it is at 248 million but there is no future cash flow that is being valued at 248 million by the market as it was an equity. It is really -94 million but the 248 million is still being summed into that bogus total market cap.

I don't see the moral argument at this point though with fentanyl.

Nothing quite robs one of agency like death.

Before fentanyl, I don't think I would be for full legalization. At this point though non-legalization seems immoral.

The potency has also become quite outrageous.

As if drinking straight moonshine is somehow a better experience than a bottle of wine because the proof is higher.

I love philosophy but I just don't agree. I love history also but I think that is just as much a waste of time for kids.

A teenager in the modern world has just not lived long enough to put these ideas in any kind of context.

It just becomes an exercise in memorization and test taking.

I think of my 16 year old self contemplating the ideas of Schopenhauer. What could be a bigger waste of time? Just preposterous, just making kids hate the subject.

I have listened to François Chollet say that all intelligence is specialized intelligence.

I suspect the question really doesn't make sense if that is true.

We just have this bias/mind projection fallacy that intelligence is a general physical property of the brain that can be measured. I just suspect this is not true.

Like athletic ability doesn't generalize well. Of course, someone not athletic at all is never going to be a great athlete in anything but it makes no sense to compare Lance Armstrong to Patrick Mahomes in some general athletic context. Putting a number on a general athletic ability index between the two would just be total nonsense.

Thanks so much. That is an amazing level of choice in the example code. I need this right now as a type of statistical strength training.

Same here. I really feel like I should curate a twitter profile but it is just bad for my mental health.

To me, it feels like a small library of really cool books but the library happens to be housed randomly inside of a giant lunatic asylum.

I mean Marshall McLuhan's entire career is practically about this.

A medium of communication is not neutral. A book is not just word of mouth stories written down. There is a feedback loop in there that a book becomes something entirely different.

I mean if we take things to extremes and make a platform that we can only communicate with 4 letter words, what words do you think are going to dominate engagement and take over the platform?

Crypto has to periodically 10X though for this to happen.

The narrative has a type of theta/time decay as there is just no way for the majority to 10X their investment periodically.

I think it is also very hard to think about the global entertainment dollars that have been locked up for the past 2 years. It is an enormous amount of money and as the pandemic fades people are going to splurge on the non-digital services and goods that they have not been able to for the past two years.

The pandemic fading throws the whole process that has pushed crypto to these levels in reverse.

The fact crypto has continued to make new highs is basically meaningless as far as the future is concerned.

You also can't separate that this all became popular during a global pandemic and people love to gamble.

I think its easy to underestimate the amount of global entertainment dollars that have been on the sidelines the past two years.

It is a fashion trend that will turn to dust as the pandemic fades. No one is going to want to be reminded of the pandemic in two years when people were so starved for entertainment they were buying these stupid ape pictures.