> Our only hope for beating China, at this point, would be to recreate an "opium wars" situation where the whole population becomes dumb and stop caring. (A bit like what tiktok and X are doing to use at the moment, but with much more social control.)
Might be more accurate to say that the PRC has successfully done an opium wars situation to the USA with e.g. fentanyl precursors.
I remember when some lady called Obama "Muslim" (in the same tone of voice as she'd say "demon" or something) and Mitt Romney took the microphone from her and said "no, no, we disagree politically but he's a good man."
Shows how poorly those politicians understood the constituency they were fomenting. He was boo'd for it by people that had come to see him specifically, and about 15 years later, republican voters built a scaffold outside the Capital they were breaking into while chanting about hanging the Republican vice president.
I feel like American politicians often play with fire without understanding its nature as something that burns.
As someone who hung out on IRC way back in the 1990s (and internet-knew Limor from Adafruit back before her handle was Ladyada) I associate this writing style with the culture of a lot of the hacker-related IRC channels I used to hang out in back then.
Some of the same people from that era did in fact turn out to be tech founders and maybe that's how it got carried over into the Twitter-verse, but it predates that.
Corroborating. It goes way back to the early 90s IRC and MUD cultures, from which many of us sprung. Limor came to the scene a bit later, but the culture was well-established.
Most of us would code shift when writing in other milieux, some weaned ourselves off the habit when our work started interfacing with nonreceptive readers, and a few retained the affectation to make a statement (or an anti-statement!).
It's amusing to see the style resurface in a new generation though. I guess it's no more odd than when 20 year olds unknowingly emulate the dress and mannerisms from when their parents were young. We just smile and recall the age when we thought we were being different too. :)
It goes back before that. There were well known Usenet folks who adhered to the style. The 1970s-and-earlier Arpanet was before my time, but I'm sure it existed then too ;).
You know, I was trying to remember if anyone from Usenet did similarly, but I couldn't think of anyone.
I was a bit post-Great Renaming into well post-Eternal September. And we may have followed different groups.
The style arises spontaneously in isolated individuals and groups of course (at least since e. e. cummings!), but it was pervasive-to-universal on IRC and MUDs.
I do wonder how it trickled into there though. The most boring answer is probably the correct one. it was slightly easier to type and kids are naturally flexible.
Not much later, I remember her hanging out in #hack in the '92-93 timeframe (first as lem0n then later as ladyada).
She was like the "kid" of the channel regulars (which is an extremely relative designation because there were a lot of teenagers just a couple years older than her).
I also remember her going to one of the 2600 meetings at the CambridgeSide Galleria that I went to with morgen and wil wheaton that must have been either in 1993 or very early 1994 (it was definitely prior to the first HOPE in 94). IIRC Limor was being chaperoned by RogueAgent and theora/Sarah Gordon.
Sounds right. I was only an occasional attendee at the Galleria, but the timeline makes sense.
H.O.P.E. brings back memories though -- I was very uncertain that that Poland Springs jug would contain the explosives taped to the Clipper chip. I remember wishing I was sitting several rows further back for that moment. :)
Yes, exactly what I've been thinking about. I remember a conversation I had here a few years back where a few of us were sharing how growing up on forums like 4chan had implanted in us a deep nihilism and cynicism, and how that was being mistaken for stoicism, when really it's just being emotionally stunted.
I've been thinking about this modern idea of stoicism along the same lines you've written here. Basically it seems like a lot of self help is directed towards this idea of regulating and controlling yourself, often by trying to overcome our inherent flaws as humans, which I don't necessarily disagree with. However, take for example this from the article:
> has given the name ‘negative visualisation’. By keeping the very worst that can happen in our heads constantly, the Stoics tell us, we immunise ourselves from the dangers of too much so-called ‘positive thinking’, a product of the mind that believes a realistic accounting of the world can lead only to despair. Only by envisioning the bad can we truly appreciate the good; gratitude does not arrive when we take things for granted.
This is fighting an uphill battle. Rather than work against our own psychology, it seems to me that the better thing to do is to leverage our irrationality to great affect, which is what positive thinking and self actualization does. "Fake it til you make it" genuinely does work.
I'm starting to feel like the better path to take is the one that fully acknowledges and embraces all of our sloppiness. I've been doing this with my ADHD: rather than trying to leverage system upon system to normalize my behavior, I've tried giving up on that entirely and instead focusing more on directing things like hyperfocus in productive directions. I've been trying to put aside this lie I've been telling myself that I can be some strong independent man forging his own path, and spending lots of time with people, asking people lots of questions instead of going home to read on my own. Rather than try to master my willpower when it came to weight loss, I accepted my weakness and threw away all the snacks in the house.
I think stoicism still has its place in attempting to prevent e.g. self harming behavior in response to e.g. anger or depression (blowing up on someone for example), but I feel lately like it's a pointless lie to pretend we can go through life without letting other people affect our emotions; or if not a lie, then that to try to do so cuts us off from an absolutely critical aspect of human existence.
> I think stoicism still has its place in attempting to prevent e.g. self harming behavior ...
Stoic sources actually state explicitly that Stoic ethics is all about preventing "self-harming behavior" arising from our emotions. They just have a much more expansive definition of what's "self-harming" than modern society does! Raw emotional responses are seen as mere facts of nature that cannot be meaningfully avoided and repressed, but they can still be subjected to reasonable judgment, and then accepted or critiqued. The common modern idea that Stoicism is merely about emotional repression and a totally "unemotional" stance is quite a misconception.
> The common modern idea that Stoicism is merely about emotional repression and a totally "unemotional" stance is quite a misconception.
Honestly, I blame Mr. Spock. Another thought I've been chewing on is emotional repression from a certain crowd of people who grew up as socially isolated nerds and / or autists that identified strongly with what they perceived as hyper rational characters like Spock. Sprinkle in high technology and the fact that these characters succeed at things nerds love and you get hero worship and emulation. Then add in all the masculine marketing we get from "stoic" characters like the dude from Drive to get another layer to the equation.
I do feel like there's a turn happening in the economy, or at least, some new scene growing. Or maybe I'm just finally becoming aware of it. That being, rejection of monopolized products.
I've never seen so much activity around Linux, for example. Or, I follow a content creator called SkillUp who just launched a videogames news site with revenue purely from subscriptions, and apparently they got way more subs than they expected. And as has been mentioned, lots of indie games have been getting funding lately, and a relatively small studio just crushed the game awards circuit.
It does seem that the venn diagram of "roko's basilisk" believers and "AGI is coming within our lifetimes" believers is nearly a circle. Would be nice if there were some less... religious... arguments for AGI's imminence.
I think the “Roko’s Basilisk” thing is mostly a way for readers of Nick Land to explain part of his philosophical perspective without the need for, say, an actual background in philosphy. But the simplicity reduces his nuanced thought into a call for a sheeplike herd—they don’t even need a shepherd! Or perhaps there is, but he is always yet to come…best to stay in line anyway, he might be just around the corner.
I strongly recommend "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sonle Ahrens, it gets into how important writing is as a part of the process of thinking and learning.
Maybe you’re the person I’ve been looking for but I’ve yet to find someone that actually maintains a zettelkasten that isn’t a researcher/author and doesn’t come to the conclusion that it’s a huge waste of time and energy.
I just had the same thought. I searched for the book mentioned, and as soon as zettelkasten popped up I lost interest. I've read about zettelkasten so many times, but I can't get myself to actually try it, it seems like doing organization for the sake of declaring "I'm very organized", regardless whether it's efficient or not.
I had this same issue with my original zettelkasten system in org-roam. Also it had become just, a locally indexed wikipedia.
This book is probably not the greatest resource for establishing a zettelkasten, but it is very good at demonstrating how a good externalized writing system is critical for getting good learning done and finding unique insights. Also, it addresses the wikipedia issue I had specifically. As another person mentioned in this thread, making the notes more like proper publishable writing (even if just a sentence) made a big difference.
I've found it somewhat valuable in two ways and unhelpful/misleading in another:
1. Making small notes is so intuitive and low-pressure. I was already essentially doing before but in the form of various lists of "ideas" or "thoughts on _blank_". You can't reliably decide where you would've put something, it becomes a mess. The fact its a single directory of .md's with a phrasal titles is a great organizing constraint.
2. Being able to find old thoughts/ideas easily and link them together lead to the clarification of a lot of my more unique ideas because of the ad hoc link-language that emerged.
The big problems are the rabbit hole of manic articles promising too much, and the fact that after a while you simply have too many half-baked two-year-old notes that the whole thing becomes limiting and your declare note bankruptcy.
So, first, most would say the purpose of a zettelkasten is to write. The book goes into this, that your notes eventually just get incorporated into manuscripts, and that your notes should be written as well as if you were writing a manuscript itself.
However, what really clicked with me about the book was the hypothesis that true human thinking can only be done externally, through writing, due to the limitations of our brain as a platform. The book lists out things like recency bias and short term memory limitations that get in the way of proper, structural thinking that results in actual insights. Whereas maintaining a zettelkasten, or a simulacrum of one at least, externalizes your thought process and allows you to achieve genuinely your maximum potential for thought.
The arguments went beyond the normal ones about the recorded benefits of note-taking for learning, memory, and creativity, and got into the aspects unique to a zettelkasten that make it an enabler for thinking. However the book also pitches this as a productivity boost for authors and researchers, and doesn't really seem to care about people who are just learning for the sake of learning (but it does make a solid case that building a zettelkasten makes learning more fun).
Personally I've been reading criticisms of the book as a way to learn how to maintain a zettelkasten that I agree with: it's not specific or clear enough, and it defines too many different kinds of notes (and not all at once; some note types are defined like 3/4 of the way through the book). For me it was just a very convincing argument to stop trying to make my brain do things it isn't good at - stop beating myself up trying to memorize super detailed facts, let my external system handle that. Stop worrying about forgetting bits and bobs of the various books I've read, let my external system slowly create a map of ideas of everything I'm reading. Stop over-optimizing all my note taking systems and just scratch shit into a paper pad, to be indexed as a good zettel later (or just thrown away if I decide it's not helpful).
So, though I do intend to use this system to fuel my blog, I think I'd still find value in it just in feeding the conversations I have as well. I'm deeply interested in non traditional politics, leadership, and activism, and with this system I've adopted I'm finding myself make connections I don't think I'd have made before; for example this very idea of externalization and scaffolding of human thought as a means to make up for our flaws, I'm finding similar threads in all sorts of things I read now.
If you're interested in zettelkasten, I would recommend a different resource for learning how to actually set one up (just, the internet plus chatgpt is probably fine, plus some FOSS software). I will say, if it's taking too long, whatever you're doing is too complicated. It should take a single click or button press to make a new note, and it should be very easy to scan through your notes and make links every once and a while, and making a link should be no more than a highlight, a button click or press, a search, and a confirmation. If you're anything like me, you may spend more time setting something like this up and agonizing over it than you will using it... that's why I moved from org-roam to trilium, so I could just stop hyper optimizing and start using the damn thing.
That sounds like a beauty building, and perhaps the market for such things is quite small now, but those artisans still exist. In Japan there's plenty of master carpenters and woodblock artists, including one American man that moved there like 40 years ago and dedicated the remainder of his life to the craft.
In Taiwan I've met indigenous woodworking artists. They sell stuff in markets all the time, plenty of it incredibly intricate. Incidentally, many temples here are also covered in beautifully layered granite carvings.
Are dictators hypnotists? Are they wizards? If the regime functioned on the existence of a single man in a single chair, and EVERYONE around him wanted him gone, why does it take the military force of a different country to make it happen? Why isn't it the responsibility of the people in that country to remove him from power?
Might be more accurate to say that the PRC has successfully done an opium wars situation to the USA with e.g. fentanyl precursors.
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