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Love your writing and musings. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Were this only an era problem. Then it would just be a passing fad, even if "passing" was

Love your writing and musings. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Were this only an era problem. Then it would just be a passing fad, even if "passing" was longer than a human generation. I could handle that. However, there are in this (and other eras) non-dominant cultures of high-trust where the incidence of rough equivalent types of malfeasance or even the expectations of them occurring are noticeably lower. Many rural cultures, for example. So I was trying to concisely express the era doesn't define everyone in every culture. Now if I could understand why such non-dominant cultures do not scale and dominate, I think it could be the beginning of a beautiful civilization, to cop a line from Rick.

dredmorbius 6y ago
Fair points. My friend Woozle noted a few years ago an epistemic paradox: > Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media. > We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep... Shoshana Zuboff put this more succinctly, in the 1980s, in her Thid Law: > Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control. And you can find far earlier examples, say, Sun Tzu's "On the Use of Spies" (book 13), and of course "All warfare is based on deception." So yes, the practive is not merely modern, and not a passing fad. "Build it and they will come" turns out to be a curse. Non-dominant cultures may advance by out-surviving adversaries. The Angles were subordinate to the Romans, the Song Dynasty and Poland to the Mongolian Empire, Egypt and Persia to Macedonia. Direct combat is expensive and risky. But an utter failure at self-preservation (or in securing suitable patronage) tends to end badly. To invoke another mid-century classic, Huxley's Island. "Here and now, boys!"

dredmorbius 6y ago

Fair points. My friend Woozle noted a few years ago an epistemic paradox: > Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media. > We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_epistemic_systems_gain_social_and_political/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep... Shoshana Zuboff put this more succinctly, in the 1980s, in her Thid Law: > Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control. And you can find far earlier examples, say, Sun Tzu's "On the Use of Spies" (book 13), and of course "All warfare is based on deception." So yes, the practive is not merely modern, and not a passing fad. "Build it and they will come" turns out to be a curse. Non-dominant cultures may advance by out-surviving adversaries. The Angles were subordinate to the Romans, the Song Dynasty and Poland to the Mongolian Empire, Egypt and Persia to Macedonia. Direct combat is expensive and risky. But an utter failure at self-preservation (or in securing suitable patronage) tends to end badly. To invoke another mid-century classic, Huxley's Island. "Here and now, boys!"