How did I not realize my daughter published this lovely short piece back in 2017.
Cherry & Chocolate by Amber Velez, published by Drunk Monkeys
The title is familiar but I think I had read a different one and confused it for this one. Reading now - its like finding a treasure you didn't realize you'd misplaced.
And it has a reference to Tesla's pigeon. or dove. Dove sounds better. And a memorable take on welding.
AIs good at helping humans do what they intend << AIs that are good at manipulating humans to do what someone else wants
this is more a tweet than a blog post, but I'm not tweeting now...
saving it here for reference, will frame it more later. these were really cool lawyers who work on human rights and freedom of expression and also they are hopeful for decentralized tech solutions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YsnGkFG7o8
also published on mirror.xyz - but I think I'll keep a copy here all the same. some of the thoughts evolved from the previous "minddump" draft...
The dismal science, also known as Economics, describes behavior as "rational" if maximizes personal satisfaction. Markets are held up as a tool for maximizing everyone’s satisfaction, yet they they inherently anonymize the participants, limiting the “rational” values that can be modeled. Behaviors based on principles or relationships are disregarded - yet non-transactional values that cannot be "bought" are central drivers for behavior in most humans that I care to associate with. I prefer to deal with people I know and trust, to work on things I care about, to buy products that were made in fair working conditions. I strongly want never to buy things that murderers profited from, yet today I often do so. An anonymized marketplace does not allow me to easily act “rationally” based on my actual values. A richer ecosystem of information would provide much higher utility, than the current common model of anonymized transactions.
In math, the shape of the universe follows from the axioms chosen. An assumption of scalar rationality in which all values are transactional
...You write notes down first, then write them up. So, this is writing down, threading out thoughts to sift through later.
Joy in work comes from meaning, and teammates - and most when colleagues share the meaning and core values, enough of the deep context, and share a level of professionalism and skill to make work fly. It is common enough to find shared professionalism or skill, harder to find the shared meaning, and a treasure when all come together. If in addition it pays something, well, it's a plus but it makes little difference to the moment, as long as bills are handled somewhere.
Transactional markets are never going to capture this. Nor do they try to - but why do economists find it legitimate to handwave away the real reasons many of us do work?
Money, according to Economics 101, is useful as "a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, and a standard of deferred payment." And so it is. Economics, however, if measuring real change in the world - something equivalent to the concept of work or energy in physics - should not limit itself to those patterns measurable by scalar and
...Sending these to a contact, made me want to pin them here as well:
A draft of an essay calling for more frameworks for stateless individuals: Citizen or Hostage
Started a framework for grassroots policy formation - Open Public Policy RFCs and wrote about it on medium - Taking Public Policy out of the Cathedral and into the Bazaar
Currently focusing on my WhatsCookin' startup, demonstrating a working model of work-weighted corporate governance, and decentralized tech.
One of the key things to decentralize is trust. I do think we will need a feed of reputation assertions, simple description here - Open Reputation Feed
...If oxidative damage causes aging then we all burn up in the end, Mr Vonnegut
One cannot have subtlety without context.
re The volunteer firement trying to prevent their loved ones from combining with oxygen, in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
...suppose there were a gene that made the bearer feel entitled to other people's things.
would it spread?
And before pointing fingers, remember...the bearer would not think of them as other people's, or that they were taking anything by their actions.
...logic exists (and a given problem is logical) if you can put 100 people in separate rooms with the problem and they converge on the same answer
a logical problem is interesting if they converge over time, but generally do not agree given a very brief time
...male: "I'm going to have a million kids or die trying"
female: "how do I make sure all my children survive and also everyone else I'm related to?"
Unfortunately part of the female strategy is to try to get the "successful" male genes into her sons.
the other weird part about this is that the same 99% of the genes can be directed to one or the other strategy depending on if they are cohabiting with a tiny Y chromosome...
...