Ahh fuckit part of my @threadapalooza thread had a clear subtopic and wanted to be its own thread.

Here's the thread about "membranes" as a metaphor for groups of people.

15a/ Membranes. Monists go on about how everything is one, which is true in a sense but also have you noticed that some things are inside and some things are outside? The role of skin, or the walls of a house, or a windshield on a car, is it keeps inside in & outside out.
15b/ Membranes can be applied to groups, and we can talk about a few different kinds of membranes that you might see around a particular group of people:
- closed membrane
- closed web
- semipermeable membrane
- open network
15c/ Closed Membrane: eg a company, family or country. Maybe a way to join it, but you need an active & explicit invitation by the members, whether that’s a job application or a marriage or an immigration process. Lots of intentional community houses are also like this.
15d/ Closed Web: consider a friend group. You don't exactly need an invitation from everyone in the group to join, but you do need to make friends with *someone* in the group. Polycules (except polyfidelity) work similarly, usually.
15e/ Semipermeable Membrane: ~anyone can join; there might be a requirement like buying membership, but you can just do it. Or going vegan. Or there might be a requirement of actually showing up, like Kevin Kelly's description of the Camp 4 scenius: https://t.co/2OzvIg58K4
15f/ (note that semipermeable membranes do need to eject people sometimes, but only if the person’s presence is actively disrupting the group, either asshole-style or by undermining the norms, eg by arguing using blatant logical fallacies at rationalist parties)
15g/ Open Network: doesn’t have clear boundaries at all (not a membrane) and is more of a description of an emergent cluster in people-space. The region of twitter I hang out in is sometimes referred to as “strangely earnest twitter”.

https://t.co/doandfMsJF
15h/ How many ppl have heard of the phrase “strangely earnest twitter”, or identify with being part of it?

It existed before it had that name.

It overlaps with many other seemingly-unrelated twitter networks.

Rather than joining such a group, you find yourself in it.
15i/ There are probably more types than this, but this is an initial typology that seems helpful for thinking about the nature of groups. All of these types are necessary, *and* you're gonna have a bad time if there isn't clarity about the nature of a particular group/membrane.
Click below to return to the original @threadapalooza chain:

https://t.co/z4FO4Nacxu

More from Economy

On Jan 6, 2021, the always stellar Mr @deepakshenoy tweeted, this:

https://t.co/fa3GX9VnW0

Innocuous 1 sentence, but its a full economic theory at play.
Let me break it down for you. (1/n)


On September 30, 2020, I wrote an article for @CFASocietyIndia where I explained that RBI is all set to lose its ability to set interest rates if it continues to fiddle with the exchange rate (2/n)

What do I mean, "fiddle with the exchange rate"?

In essence, if RBI opts and continues to manage exchange rate, then that is "fiddling with the exchange rate"

RBI has done that in the past and has restarted it in 2020 - very explicitly. (3/n)

First in March 2020, it opened a Dollar/INR swap of $2B with far leg to be unwound in September 2020.

Implying INR will be bought from the open markets in order to prevent INR from falling vis a vis USD (4/n)

The Second aspect is now, that dollar inflow is happening, and the forex reserves swelled -> implying the rupee is appreciating, RBI again intervened from September, by selling INR in spot markets. (5/n)
https://t.co/9kpWP7ovyM
Long rant: This @WSJ article bemoaning the decline of price theory is really worth highlighting. The economic theories and so called "laws of economics" that the WSJ consistently and religiously defends, are the source of their authority, power and privilege.


So called economic "theories" like "you get paid exactly what you are worth" and "markets are perfectly efficient" and "when wages rise, jobs fall" and "raising taxes on the rich kills jobs and growth" and "increasing justice decreases economic efficiency" and...

"Government intervention in markets always creates more harm than good" and "any regulation that constrains corporations kills growth and productivity", etc etc are effectively a protection racket for the rich. It is a set of internally consistent and mathematized conjectures...

That are all demonstrably nonsense. But getting people to accept these "theories" as laws of nature and immutable, timeless truths is the most effective way our current economic elites have found to maintain and enhance the status of the powerful and persuade the weak and poor...

to shut the fuck up and accept their lot in life. Now, FINALLY, some economists- are actually beginning to look at the real world evidence to determine whether these propositions actually describe anything real here on planet earth. Let me save you some time. The answer is NO.

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"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)