this has pretty much collapsed in the last decade
stacks are eating the world
this has pretty much collapsed in the last decade
Functional specialization = bureaucracy
competencies = inertial habits
"Stack" thinking instead lets technology structure (rather than market structure) drive business org logic
More from Venkatesh Rao
So, yesterday my daughter (9) was hungry and I was doing a jigsaw puzzle so I said over my shoulder \u201cmake some baked beans.\u201d She said, \u201cHow?\u201d like all kids do when they want YOU to do it, so I said, \u201cOpen a can and put it in pot.\u201d She brought me the can and said \u201cOpen it how?\u201d
— john roderick (@johnroderick) January 2, 2021
This is why I never wanted kids. Way too much responsibility for another human’s development. Depending on the child, this might either be the day they discovered who they were or the day that traumatized them into a lifelong fuckup. Either way I don’t want to direct the show.
As far as the can opener goes, it wouldn’t even occur to me to try and turn it into a teachable moment. That sounds vaguely quixotic. I’d just show them how immediately. I think my default is to try and instruct clearly but not demonstrate unless the person is truly disoriented.
I think there’s basically a right answer here: show the kid. If the kid has the aptitude they’ll enjoy the mechanism so much they’ll develop the figure-it-out skill with other devices. If not, it’s a training data point that will build remedial levels of intuition more slowly.
I think perseverance is both misframed and over-rated as a virtue. Misframed as in: everybody has potential for it in some areas and lacks it in others. Aptitude is those areas where perseverance comes easily to you. Meta-skill of knowing where/why you persist is more important.
Poll: where is the temporal center of gravity of all your live projects based on average age of start-dates?
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) January 17, 2021
I suspect a healthy weighted average should be ~ (age-20)/2. So a 30 year old should be at 5, a 40 year old at 10, a 50 year old at 15 etc.
Standard deviation should be ~average/3 maybe, so distribution spreads as you age and accumulate projects and get better at them.
Other things being equal, people get good at starting in their 20s, at follow through in 30s, at finishing in 40s.
No point learning food follow through until you’ve found a few good starts to bet on. No point getting good at finishing until a few projects have aged gracefully.
I’m in the 7+ range myself. Probably 8-9. Slightly less than healthy for my age.
I suspect most self-judgments on being good starters/follow-through-ers/finishers are really flawed because of the non-ergodicity of project management skill learning. You can’t learn good practices for the 3 phases in an arbitrary order. On,y one order actually works.
One other thing I should really clarify and that the @nytimes piece got *severely* wrong: while I believe there are very strong sociological and even causal links between rationalism and NRx (especially in the Silicon Valley homes bases) their ideological and methodological
— (((E. Glen Weyl))) (@glenweyl) February 14, 2021
IMO trying to correct whatever the NYT writer thought he knew/understood is futile. "Willing to be misunderstood by the NYT" should be the default stance unless you want to waste a lot of time correcting an obsolete 2013 map for people who don't care.
The thing is, the NYT still has enough normative cultural power, even as it has fallen from newspaper-of-record, that it takes a particular sort of heretical self-confidence to sort of ignore whatever they happen to be wrong about on any given week, whether or not it concerns you
A subtle shift has occurred in the workings of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It used to be an individual private amnesia re: media ("I'll believe myself when I am certain they got it wrong because I'm an expert, but still believe them when I am not"). Now it's a collective effect
A sort of common-knowledge threshold has been crossed lately. "Everybody knows that everybody knows the NYT is wrong on X across largish subcultures." It's no longer mutual beliefs being validated occasionally 1:1.
More from Crypto
Bitcoin answers that question.
Thread:
1/11
— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) January 11, 2021
An article worth thinking about: \u201cAs changes to the world structure accelerate, China\u2019s rule is in sharp contrast with the turmoil in the West,\u201d says Beijing.
I agree, but I draw a different conclusion. The world is certainly currently going...https://t.co/ugha7ygqqx
World economies currently suffer four major redistribution challenges:
The most important is increasing government stealth use of the monetary system to confiscate assets from productive actors.
/2
That process is exacerbated by "Cantillon Effect" transfers to interest groups close to government ("the entitled class," public sector workers, the medical industrial complex, academia, etc....), which is destroying much of that wealth /3
The shadow nature (see Keynes) of government inflation makes the process unidentifiable, un-addressable and undemocratic.
The biggest victims (America's poorly educated young) are unequipped to counter generational confiscation tactics of today's wily senior beneficiaries. /4
Government control of the numéraire in key economic statistics (GDP, inflation, etc...) makes it impossible for economic actors to measure progress and liabilities. /5
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Where to begin?
So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.

"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991." https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP

OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg
Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a
Oh that's right.
The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.
Donald Barr was also quite a
Donald Barr had a way with words. pic.twitter.com/JdRBwXPhJn
— Rudy Havenstein, listening to Nas all day. (@RudyHavenstein) September 17, 2020
I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."
Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.
