Good. Having grown up in a household with incompatible parents thats a good thing.
108 karma · joined June 28, 2025
One of my Grandfathers just stopped taking medication and going to the docs. And died quite peacefully within a couple years of retiring. Death and decay is just natural and quick. While my other grandfather has been kept alive 30-35 years post retirement popping a tray full of pills everyday, having gone through dozens of surgeries and has had hopeless quality of life post retirement.
The med-industrial complex is a run-away train that is detached for any moral system. It can't even produce any morality anymore. Because its not efficient or rational to do so :)
The West took thousands of years to learn how to get along with other cultures and they are far from perfect. Population level Learning takes that much time. Always the hard way.
Say our chimp brain can update 100 of its beliefs a year. That rate drops drastically the larger the chimp troupe gets. So institutions and populations update beliefs maybe 2-5 times a decade. Culture/Religion/Social Norms all take centuries.
There is no free lunch. Things will take their own sweet time.
It reduces the difference between who is loosing their mind and who is reaching enlightenment to 0. So everyone living inside that super structure can't tell anything anymore.
Trump doesn't care whether he is right or wrong but whether he is capturing attention. His chameleonic loyalty (to Israel, to Russia, to Evangelicals, to Bannon, to Carlson, to Kanye, to whoever) isn’t strategic in the traditional sense it’s opportunistic in the Attention Economy sense: Who will give me the most juice right now? And he became president using this strategy so everyone follows it. So this generates all kinds of confusion. We need changes that shift the focus away from purely attention monetization and weaponization.
But the rationalists are all like the other guy is monetizing and weaponizing things so I shall too.
Next gen is already pretty anti-reality, cuz of the kind of reality they have been born into. Everything that can be monetized or weaponized has been. In the name of Efficiency and Scale. Sort of the new religion of a shallow rationalist.
In such a reality dominated by Attention Merchants and Attention Warlords, trapped in an arms race by the Algos to carve up the finite pool of human attention, it’s hard to tell awakening from breakdown but maybe learning to tell the difference is part of the work.
This time around its this weird micro nation with 300K people that has got it into its head, it can exert global influence by throwing oil money around. But this is not the football world cup. Historically there are really no examples of such small countries exerting so much influence before it is all shut down by larger powers.
Expect ofcourse with the Vatican. But that is centralized religion with "citizenship" across borders. Qatar meanwhile barely has enough people to defend a town, and already experienced a backlash in 2017 with a blockade. This is the second round. Watch them retreat back to sports by the end of the decade.
Small countries and Geopolitical Power are not compatible.
You can look up how to ride a bike, play a violin, or cook a meal for 200 people. But knowing about something isn’t the same as being able to do it. A good library or even Google can give you knowledge. But only practice gives you competence.
When you deal with anyone who knows their job, things are on their finger tips. That comes from Practice.
Practice, feedback, and iteration matter more than just information access.
So it is not about memorization and regurgitation. Its about deliberate practice being required for competence or skill development.
Herbert Simon (Turing+Nobel awardee + pedagogist) had more relevant thoughts on this than Einstein, who brilliant as he was, wasn’t an expert in education.
Here's his famous quote on the subject - "The criticism of practice called drill and kill, is prominent in constructivist writings. Nothing flies more in the face of the last 20 years of research than the assertion that PRACTICE is bad. All evidence, from the laboratory and from extensive case studies of professionals, indicates that real competence only comes with extensive practice. In denying the critical role of practice one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence. The instructional task is not to "kill" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest."
Don't tell your kids memorization has no value. Instead tell them to use AI to stay motivated when interest in Practice dips.
For profit social media is totally possible. But a "healthy" version won't happen until govts reform social media such that Attention is demonitized or remonitized.
The post is right in that Attention has been monetized by social media companies. How much Attention you pay to something and how much Attention you receive both got monetized. They monetized Attention by adding View, Like, Share and Follower counts to everything.
And those counts started acting like Currency does in the real economy.
For example a key feature of Currency is that it acts as Store of Value. That value can then be exchanged at whatever time for something else in the real economy.
But in the real economy the Money Supply is regulated and controlled by the Central Bank. Why did that happen?
Before Central Banks (a very recent invention) showed up individual Banks printed their own currency. If they printed "too much" all kinds of strange phenomenon started emerging in the real world. For centuries no one connected that back to how much money was being printed. Because people had no idea what the level of the money supply was. Just like on social media there is no tracking or visible signal of the global Money supply and interest rate setting to control it.
So any time there was a price rising in the market, bank runs, bubbles in the market people would blame everything under the sun other than those responsible for money printing. After centuries of chaos Central Banks started emerging to control what individual Banks could do. Same story will repeat with Attention(which is acting just like a Currency).
This is why Elon and Trump rush to start their own Attention Banks cause they understand better than anyone being able to print a store of value that everyone else uses gives you power.
This is also why having China influencing the money supply (Attention) of US is via TikTok is non-optional.
So people eventually land on 2 paths forward - 1. Demonetize Attention - which is what the post is talking about
2. Remonetize Attention - where there is tracking of how much Attention anyone can receive, and how much Attention anyone can pay. Similar to what controls exist on Banks in what they lend and how much cash they need to hold. And Banks can then run for-profit without doing as much damage as they did when they controlled the money supply.
The way Wall Street works has so many built up issues like some grand old legacy system. People are just stuck within its super structure are like circus animals within a circus. The circus animal (both left and right) don't change how the circus works. The circus will die out in its own sweet time. Just like any living organism/complex dynamical system. It's born - grows - peaks - dies.
Therefore don't waste time and energy getting too over attached to impermanent things, especially ones reaching the end of their life cycles.
What happens on social media is of the herd, by the herd, for the herd. As Nietzsche would say like organized religion it produces nothing but a herd or slave morality.
It will loose steam just like organized religion.
If you ask them why things like Morality, Justice, Love, Forgiveness, Beauty, Empathy, Cooperation etc emerge their framework to explain reality and transformation starts breaking down.
Philosophers (and of late Psychologists a much younger field) have been telling us right from the time of Plato(mind = appetite vs spirit vs reason) to Hobbes (reason vs passions) to Freud (id vs ego vs superego) to Kahneman (System 1 vs System 2) to Haidt (Elephant-Rider metaphor) etc that our minds are imperfect machines.
So the simplicity of the message doesn't guarantee reception. The assumption is such unreliable machinery can receive messages perfectly. And that assumption constantly breaks down.
So from Baldwin you get to philosophers like Charles Taylor who tell us - the Church, one of the worlds oldest surviving institutions (not by accident), had to deal head on with this problem, since different minds interpret their messages very differently. Some minds we know in the "name of almighty god" will happily do whatever they feel like. Power has many ways of exploiting Love. So what do you do?
Judge them, label them, name and shame them? That was the first reaction and it was done in public as a large spectacle. But the system then evolves to private spaces where the act confession happens to a trained priest. If well trained, such people don't just put the focus not on shame and guilt but on growth. So until the person feels safe and encouraged to Recognize and talk about harm caused, which is what is supposed to happen in the intentionally architected safe space of a confessional (very similar to therapy), then there is a possibility for growth.
But if you notice the architecture today has totally flipped, the chimps are running around naming and shaming each other full time. So we have lots to learn from what has been tried out in the past. Charles Taylor is a good starting points for people interested in this stuff and how to create such possibilities in the real world.
All you have to do is look at how terrified the Chinese are of dealing with any kind of Uncertainty/Complexity/Problems without neat answers in a textbook and you learn quickly there is nothing interesting going on in China under the surface.
Techbros barely have contact with normal people, are surrounded by sycophant's and opportunists, and have very narrow intelligence and knowledge. Their reality is warped. And their predictions are worthless.
If they don't capture a share of the finite pool of Attention someone else will. In this case prospective investors, employees, customers etc etc.
It's the same logic that drove European colonial expansion. Then the scarce resource was Land, Gold, Silver, Oil etc. Today it's Attention.
This why anyone whose success is tied to Attention Capture has to constantly produce Content all the time. There is a reason why Trump or Elon or Altman are constantly talking to the press or the plebs. Not because they give a shit about them, but because they believe Attention Capture has become fundamental to success, and they can out maneuver anyone who has captured less Attention.
They have growing armies of people (narrative maintenance depts) dedicated to this shit production pipeline internally and externally. So it's like a trap they all fall into. With no exit in sight without harming themselves.
Freedom of speech and liberal democracies are not magic because there are blind spots to how they emerge (on the back of slavery/invasions/looting/repression etc)
How to make suggestions about development to anyone else if that has been the route to development in the first place?
Western Philosophers recognize and talk about this all the time. But ironically talking about it freely hasn't made any diff because the solutions are very uncomfortable to democractic societies - https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-violent-exhaustion...