Thoughts - 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

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How to Bell the AI Cat

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

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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

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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.

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Mr Rosewater

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

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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.

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a scientific definition of logic

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

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From the Evolution Desk...

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...

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Sense and Cents

The power of making sense...

The positive side of capitalism is a free flowing distribution of efforts and resources

Downside is that it is subject to both parasites and cancers

The real thing is the flow of information, effort and fixed resources. And this flow is more interesting if one starts with information rather than an anonymized proxy for resources. So information about what efforts are going on, how one can contribute, and what the intended outcome will be, allows people to optimize their contributions. trust networks, transparency and long term voluntary relationships minimize parasitism and cancers.

This is sort of a draft, will polish this later...

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good intentions

...not combined with good patterns/best practices not only pave the way to hell, the road is a bit bumpy.

in a hospital, the nurses not only desire not to kill patients, they check 3 times that the actions they take are correct

similarly best practices are important, esp when combined with power. Some of the greatest harm right now is coming from excessively powerful leaders who at one point had good intentions.

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