Society & Politics - Thought Overflow...

Open to (or: sticky ends)

DNA fragments may have single-stranded bits at the end, hungry to pair and bond with any complementary strands they encounter.

These ideas are sticky in that sense, for me - despite my overcommitted state, I would eagerly connect over them, and find some way to align efforts:

* small-d democracy in schools, workplaces, corporations. I have some models in place...
* accountability mechanisms especially permissionlessly verifiable ones
* earned governance; agency to the beneficiaries of impact or philanthropy to rate it
* children and civilians are people, criminal mafias do not "own" the people around them, and children must always be protected. international legal efforts to provide teeth to this, and stop recognizing criminals just because they have guns, or excusing the killing of children because 'war' or 'terrorism'.
* if an innocent person is harmed, *someone* should pay for it. it can't just be a thing that happens
* ways to harness efforts and collaborate that don't rely on anonymous money only, but do recognize effort and choice of who to associate with
* if you have a great idea to help people in general, make sure it *actually* helps *some* people right now in the process of building it

ha several of those may be

How to Bell the AI Cat

published at https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/26/how-to-bell-the-ai-cat/

A Logical Conclusion...

this piece makes me happy every time i reread it. it was born out of frustration with fintech bros

A Darwinian Argument

“You must die.” The woman spoke dispassionately, her face blank.

The jowly man chained at the ankle squinted across the room at her. His glasses had broken in the struggle, so were there subtle clues to read he might have missed them anyway. His face betrayed a racing chain of emotions, flickering from fear to contempt to calculation. Which of his enemies sent her?

continued...

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

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.

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

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

the selfish-ness gene

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.

Theoretical Certainty: a story

When doing a startup, you talk about it everywhere, with everyone. At least I do.

I went hiking today on a familiar trail; but the monsoons had changed things and I found myself going up and down the canyon looking for the turnoff.

A couple sitting on a rock seemed friendly - we started chatting. The man, older, was a theoretical physicist with strong opinions. He seemed sure where the trail should have been, that the monsoons had wiped it out.

He was also sure that I was a socialist, after I explained a bit about my ideas for work weighted shared governance. Then he expounded on why only top down models could possibly work given his experiences in Poland and Germany. I'm not sure what the woman thought as she couldn't seem to get two words in edgewise. He seemed to conflate countries and companies, and to be arguing against many things I did not say.

I cannot prove yet that bottom up accountability can beat a top down authoritarian structure, so I cannot say with certainty that he was wrong in his assertions about corporate models. He definitely was wrong about the hiking trail, though. I found the

Municipalism - exhibit 1

Wrote a quick LTE this morning - I am such a Municipalism fan right now - ------ In a small ray of hope during this contentious time, our city government seems to be genuinely responsive to the neighborhoods. A group of Rio Vista neighbors asked for the city's help to restore the natural desert and block off wildcat trails; as a result, parts and rec staff brought us brush that they've trimmed in other parks and coordinated with a volunteer group of neighbors and civilian conservation core folks to distribute the brush according to a plan that will help restore the ecology.

And when the traffic stops that were used last time to help protect trails wound up scaring some horses, the city adapted and gave us low key wooden sawhorses instead. Its this - government responsiveness to regular people - that gives me hope. --------- (posting this with a delay to see if the LTE makes it in first)

A Darwinian Argument

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