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stray bits...

A Language of Meaning and Action

There is really only one question, ever.

Given the state of the world to my knowledge, what should I do next?

Answered shallowly, the answer may be

   order pizza for dinner
   drink a beer
   finish a task on my list
   continue or start a conversation with a friend
   post on social media
   edit a plan or a poem
   shoot a gun, make love, spend money

The attraction of the shallow answers lies in how do-able they are.  

Social media beckons, a feed as linear as time and digestible as sugar.  Familiar routine offers a menu of known actions. Work, as defined by others, is also chunked into digestiible slices and returning a liquid reward, feels perhaps healthier.  And expression - artistic, conversational, musical, or the written word feels like a missing mineral, that we didn't realize we craved until we taste it.

How to weave these small next steps into the pattern we want - and what does that even mean when one moment we want to remake society and the next we want an ice cream sundae?

In our professional lives most of us have known patterns, best practices, colleagues to guide us, and a mission prescribed by our

2 min read

Untitled post

walking over a bridge in san jose, costa rica after talking to an Israeli ex-pat in the hostel and preparing for RightsCon tomorrow, i realized why i haven't been writing, at least one of the reasons

the work is not so much to pull a thread of sense out of my tangled thoughts - that is work, but its the good part

(oh wow as a side note wordpress has gotton so awful about interrupting while i'm trying to write, i may switch but all my things are here. moving this to a plain text editor)

the bad part, or the hard part, is framing thoughts for an audience, in particular an audience that in my opinion has actively harmful frameworks and assumptions embedded. its exhausting trying to think of how they are thinking, being bothered at it, and then trying to talk in a way that will be convincing or compelling. that is why i do not write more, i think. also where to do it and probably no one in particular wants to read it anyway! the part about voice and personableness might have not a little to do with it as well!

but back to the frameworks.

2 min read

artistic gene

Feeling very lucky today to have such strong, creative, independent daughters

Not to mention artistic:

https://www.instagram.com/carmelita_levin/

Expression through art is so valuable, and it reflects a synthesis that is hard to capture in linear form.  

There was a period when I didn't post about my family much, partly because i didn't like how facebook manipulated and monetized connections, and  - this may sound weird, but doing human rights work it made me afraid that if I showed connection to them someday someone would retaliate against my family, like they do in other places.  But I think now, that I never will be that influential, and anyway the information is already out.  So I will start to share, and celebrate my family, just a bit.

1 min read

Soul is Rational: Why we need SBTs

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

1 min read

Thinking in the Open

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

2 min read

ideas, essays and frameworks

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

1 min read

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