If someone’s only definition of freedom is “I can do whatever I want if I have a lot of money” and they tend to Bask in Reflected Glory (BIRG) — they are easy prey to the psychopaths who convince them on some Freedom of Speech Platform +
Americans’ exposure to economics is limited to a 15-week course in school, focused on US-centric, outdated free-market principles. The curriculum neglects behavioral economics, socialism vs communism, global trade, and… tariffs. +
Yet another Coordination Problem example, Aslice — a music revenue-sharing platform launched in 2022 — closed. It encouraged DJs to report setlists and pay a % of their fee to the artists they played (à la GEMA-Vermutung). Top-paid DJ refused to participate +
I wonder how Peterson used to work as a clinical psychologist with his patients back in the day? Imagine a 15-minute session with Elon Musk: Ah, doc, I have this sort of crisis of… Peterson: It’s the prior axiomatic interpretive structure you have. Then you have the chaotic potential +
Among other things, we probably have just avoided French cinema industry annihilation. Had the far-right RN party secured an absolute majority in the French parliament, their agenda would have limited government funding exclusively to “patriotic films”. Eerily similar to what has already happened to the +
Dune — the book, the films… especially the latest ones — are about violence as the only virtue. On a real planet with a real war in a real Europe, killing and maiming real people as you read this, dismembering civilians and mercenaries alike in the most horrific ways… People watch +
We acknowledge there are many different truths. I’m certain that the truth exists for you and probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth. This is because many people merge facts about the world with our beliefs +
Our current economic system does not serve humans well. As a community (fighting cruel wars in XXI centuries) or as the individual (born to compete against others, running through kindergarten to nursing home on SSRIs, painkillers and Ritalin) +
Have I missed something? Is it now normal for white, post-doc women to elbow-kick their love interest and colleague in the solar plexus? And a black male one at that? In a jaw-dropping scene of a Netflix series viewed worldwide? And the man passively folds in half, choking, +
Hats off to the colleagues at Haut et Court for pooling in an impressive amount of resources and talent to shoot the “Constellation” series for Apple+. However, the end result turned out as a pseudo sci-fi light-horror semi-drama that toys with quantum mechanics in low Earth orbit +
Wear the same outfit for a month to notice that no one notices. If it’s clean — no one cares. Even if your jeans got holes. Even if you’re a woman, certain that you need a new dress and a matching handbag every day. People +
Yann Le Cunn, a Chief AI Scientist at Meta, writes that only a few book authors make significant money from book sales, so most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison. +
We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”. Free markets’ invisible hand will correct? +
Have you received “the call” from COP28′s final plenary assembly to “transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner”? No? Why not? By the way, the UNFCC gives us a 67% chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C, if global +
“I’m a consumer, what’s wrong with that?” The way you consume? The quantity? The fact that luck gave you an opportunity to NOT be an animal, to use that neocortex to create a better world, maybe? +
As of 13 September 2023, UNESCO has verified damage to 289 cultural sites in Ukraine: 120 religious buildings, 27 museums, 109 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 19 monuments, 13 libraries… In Odessa alone, a city near and dear to me from childhood +
Fascinating how the film “Limitless” by Neil Burger starring Bradley Cooper paints a dreamy picture of a struggling artist with an external solution to everything — a pill, stolen by the artist — to be used by the artist to pursue: 1) money 2) sex 3) power… and his art? +
When I saw a “person missing” announcement in my Facebook feed, I somehow didn’t quite understand… “What’s going on? How so?” The usual, the so commonly trivial was going on — the death of an interesting person who did so much for Russian culture. +
You know what? Russians still living in Russia, the remaining 140 million of them, don’t care about the war. Nor do they care about their rulers or the Western sanctions. Or the Western companies having left or banned. Russia is stuck in yet another historical +
Everybody thought: first AI would do physical labor, then some cognitive labor, then the really hard cognitive labor, like programming… And then, last of all, but maybe never, because it’s magical and human… was creativity +
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