thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
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User ID: 1131
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Seconding this.
You may also want to try to look at it as an experiment: a couple of weeks where you can really test how far you can optimize this particular human being. How far can you drive it? Grow its muscles? Strengthen its tendons? Find the optimal sleep/eat/workout plan?
This sort of curiosity got my 5k time from 30 minutes to 23 in the span of a month. It was also great fun--both mentally and physically.
Happy National Day of Mourning, fellow Americans!
As a naturalized American, and out of curiosity about recurring public rituals, I decided to spend some time this morning to research this holiday. The historical parts, what with it being rooted in Anglican religious tradition and carried over by early English settlers as early as 1610 make for a charming story: I imagine a group of people, all unfamiliar with the new land they've settled, and right on winter's doorstep, giving each other support over a feast. Forgiving past grievances, reaffirming existing friendships, renewing familial ties--all in an age when cold, hunger, and even minor accidents lead to death, death, death.
This spirit resonates with me despite my utter disbelief in any higher power. There's something very potent and healthy in expressing gratitude, though I can't quite put my finger on it.
However, my curiosity turned into bafflement, then into distress upon getting to the Criticism & Controversy part of the wikipedia entry.
Since 1970, the United American Indians of New England, a protest group led by Frank "Wamsutta" James has accused the United States and European settlers of fabricating the Thanksgiving story and of whitewashing a genocide and injustice against Native Americans (...)
Professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin is somewhat harsher: "One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting."
The way I read this and other parts of that section is that modern day Americans should, instead of giving thanks, focus on exploring their guilt and practicing atonement for the wrongs done to Native American nations. In other words, Thanksgiving should revolve around guilt instead of gratitude.
It's utterly baffling to me. Why should I feel guilty for anything as a newly-minted American? What part did I take in any of the violence that happened centuries ago? In the same vein, why should the majority of contemporary Americans, whose families immigrated here hundreds of years after these sad events took place, feel any guilt?
(I'm not very well versed in history, so perhaps I'm wrong, but it appears that the great immigration period ("After 1820, immigration gradually increased. From 1836 to 1914, over 30 million Europeans migrated to the United States.") began at the tail of the great Native American termination this appears to have fizzled out around 1850 (eg. Trail of Tears))
All this guilt has to me a definite, Old World flavor: Christianity. The original sin, the sin that one cannot cleanse oneself of, the sin that one must regularly and harshly atone for. What's baffling is the paradox that this reactionary agenda of mourning and atonement for the actions of one's ancestors is pushed by left-leaning individuals that would often identify as progressive and usually want to have nothing to do with religion or tradition.
Once, at work, when I raised my point, I was rebuffed by a coworker who stated, more or less, that White Americans should be guilty because they benefit from the fruits of the violent extermination of Native Americans. But isn't this a slippery slope? Who decide where this stops? Should I also feel guilt about Roman conquest? Or, going farther, the many petty conflicts that occurred between the Tigris and Euphrates?
All in all, this whole line of arguing for guilt seems not only like a sloppy argument, but also an inelegant weaponization of guilt to exert control. I'm sad that in my professional circle of East Coast tech workers, even wishing "Happy Thanksgiving" is frowned upon.
But enough sadness. Here's what I'm grateful for right now: the opportunity to share this unique virtual space with so many people whose opinions are so radically different than my own, and who adhere to an uncommonly high bar of discourse. Being here is intoxicatingly challenging and mind-expanding.
Tonight, at dinner, I'll drink a quiet toast to you all.
Happy Thanksgiving.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
1yr ago
Identity politics.
It doesn't matter what happened or why. It also doesn't matter what you think or what your friends think (and how they think "it"). The only thing that matters is what someone felt and who someone is. That's the goal of the interaction you interfered in, walked right in with your boots muddy with logic, and hands dripping with questions.
It's a branch of collectivism, of elevating the whole over the parts, and simply put: you were an individual interacting with a multi-bodied organism, which rejected you as any body does a foreign object.
Meat. How do you know you're getting the good stuff and not some ultra-processed slop filled with cheap, rotting bits o' this and that?
It seems like this choice is a spectrum.
On one hand, you have the raw stuff: steak cuts, chicken thighs, pork chops, etc. Things that look like meat. Here, you can discern quality by figuring out the origin.
On the other hand, you have spam and spam-like products. It's probably sat in that can for months. It's probably a mix of all sorts of meats and meat-things, along with a bunch of chemicals that aren't too good for your body.
But what's in between? Like, if I buy ham at the store, how can I discern whether it falls more into the ultra-processed category or rather into the raw stuff category?
(I'm trying to be more systemic about my diet and part of the equation seems to be minimizing ultra-processed foods. This is easy with stuff like chips, sweets, soda, etc. but not so much with meat.)
Edit: My thanks for the excellent advice!
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
but I as a rational skeptic do not assume it is unbroken.
And yet you assume you have access to other people's mental models.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
To add to this, there's also the element of betting.
Humans, even rationalists, have to make decisions without the time to obtain perfect knowledge. It's only prudent to place bets if you think the upside might be big and the downside small. In other words, there were probably rationalists in the OP's sample that donated/took money from SBF while thinking this is all likely going to blow up in their face. This isn't the case of conflicting beliefs--it's playing the odds.
Plus, the characterization of "rationalists" seems to me a faulty generalization. There are probably very few people who make their life revolve around rationalism. But rationalism isn't some monastic order that stamps out mentat-like Rationalists, so in the real world, "rationalist" describes everyone from hyperlogical baysian wizards to folks who like a good argument and enjoy eating popcorn while watching the Culture War eat itself.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
SRE is my day job :). Worked at one of these behemoths at some point, specifically deep on the infrastructure side of things.
You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.
None of these companies ever even dreamed of it. It's all about cheap hardware, multiple replicas, and the ability to reroute traffic between failure domains.
Change is unavoidable and constant.
That's the thing--it's not constant. Like I mentioned earlier, companies do holiday code freezes so the rate of change decrease to a very small amount. Even security patches can be split into critical and non-critical, then those critical patches can be further split into "requires downtime" and "nothingburger."[1]
So if there's a feature freeze at twitter, then the rate of change is drastically reduced. And if people leave/get fired, that reduces the rate even further. And if you ignore all but the critical patches, then the rate begins approaching zero. That's a lot of "ifs", but all of them seem like good decisions with positive impact, also based in an accepted industry norm (code freezes), so I'm betting that management at Twitter will go down this path.
But let's wait and see! We're trying to infer what's happening inside of a black box. If my reality leans toward my bet, what I'm expecting to see is, over the course of the next year:
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multiple instances of graceful degradation: users missing avatars for a few hours; intermittent general slowness; a few instances of data loss for a small group of users.
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multiple instances of planned downtime.
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a few instances of unplanned downtime, but no longer than 1-2 days.
Now, and correct if I'm wrong please, if reality leans toward your bet, what I would expect to see is:
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multiple instances of unplanned downtime, ranging anywhere between a few hours to days, maybe even 1-2 weeks.
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at least one prolonged outage (>4 weeks)
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almost constant degradation of service: twitter being noticeably slower; multiple days when users can't log in; multiple instances of data loss for large (single digit %) group of users.
Let's see what happens!
[1]: Also, you reminded me about an oft overlooked source of change: shit expiring. Certificates, but also licenses, generators, and whatnot. These are silent killers, because they're hard to track and require manual work. I'm still counting them into my "low or no change" bet--that's where I would expect to see unplanned downtime that's fixed in a couple of hours.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Yes! Don't underestimate the culture and how attracts/rejects people, especially in a company that's been around for years.
Anecdotally, big darling companies like Twitter employ very few hacker-ethos-type people. If they do, they're mostly siloed into doing expert work that's quite disconnected from the rest of the organization. Again, anecdotally, the silent majority seem to be folks who enjoy the high income and the upper-middle class life it affords them: raising kids, walking their dog, soldering expensive custom keyboards, etc. The loud minority are very often strong left of center folks, especially in a place like CA, who are always advocating for eg. renaming the "master" branch to "main" because of how offensive the former is.
(Again) Anecdotally, at one of my jobs, the number of people who identified them as lightly hacker-ethos-aligned (eg. pgp keysigning party, linux user, 2600 reader, etc.) number at most two dozen in a trendy, CA-based place that, at the time, boasted 12000 engineers. I suspect more strongly aligned folk just avoid Big Co. altogether.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
Just wanted to push against messages like this, because this sounds like something from "revenge of the nerds."
Big systems like Twitter's have accumulated multiple layers of redundancy in case of failure over the years. There's probably quite a bit of automation to take care of the steady stream of problems like faulty hard drives or network cards. It can probably keep on going for quite some time this way.
Also, the biggest source of incidents? Change.
If so many Twitter engineers have left/been fired, then I imagine the rate of changes introduced into the system is approaching the level of a code freeze--basically a ban on introducing changes to the system around the holidays because they want to minimize risk even though it carrier a very high cost.
In this state, I would expect a skeleton would be able to keep things running for months. Especially if you can get some really good ones to tackle the 'black swan' type incidents that actually do require some clever thinking to fix--but again, this is all about pushing the systems back into a stable state (less risky) rather than "fixing forward" (more risky).
What I would be worried about is sabotage that can fall under plausible denial. Stuff like setting a primary key on a database column to an int32, which will hit the limit in weeks/months and is annoyingly hard to fix. But maybe by then Musk will have a larger set of solid engineers working at Twitter.
Careful, that Patriot Visa might pull in a hundred million new Americans if you don't add a cap to it.
Semi-joking. I've met a handful of fellow immigrants who would probably qualify. It's amazing how Hollywood/games/books can somehow pass on certain values that hook a person on the other side of the globe. Though perhaps not so amazing when you consider how so many cultures fall on the other side of the argument about "does a citizen belong to a state?" and similar.
Twitteratti Visa - To apply, one must show proof of the ability to serve as a mook in the CW. The applicant is graded according to how much time they can spend on Twitter, how good their skills are at finding low-quality, unreplicated social-science papers that prove their point, and finally, how long (in minutes) can they sustain a righteous anger.
This is a time-limited visa for two years. If the applicant is able to earn 250k retweets, the visa can be extended for another two years. After those two years, they can apply for a Green Card, but only if at least 500 other mooks swear on the logins that the applicant has never indulged in both-sideism, logical thought, or education.
edit: It appears I hit the wrong "reply" link. Meant to reply to the OP.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
(...) but a round-headed red-faced plumber from UK does, and shits on Russia unconditionally, including on aspects vastly beyond his cultural milieu.
That is spot on and comically true. Thanks for the laugh, fine way to start the day.
It's amazing how much of that comes through even in The Brothers Karamazow, specifically the scene with Mitka, Grushenka, and the two Pans, where the elder Pan finally retreats, but not without one last show noble dignity. (Also, constantly calling everyone pan. Jesus Christ, that's tragicomic given how this remains a cultural taboo to this day).
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Another way of looking at the problem is through opportunity cost: could you invest the money you saved into more important things? It could be index funds, or EA charities, or a trip to see a long missed friend.
Money could also be translated into time: is there something you'd rather do instead of moving and making the money you need to pay for the move + increased rent?
Something to meditate on perhaps.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Thanks for sharing that. I understand a little bit more about where you're coming from.
It seems we're more or less aligned on the ends. I'm not sure about the means--for one, divvying people up into cities/states/nations doesn't appeal to me, since I'd rather do the categorization based on culture or at least "big ideas" such as "should the citizen be the property of the state?" But I guess it'll shake out in future discussions, which I'm looking forward to.
I would add, though I cannot search for sources right now, that there's a meme in Russian culture that's been around for some low number of centuries at least, where Russians consider other slavs as "lesser slavs" and themselves as "higher slavs." It shows itself in a disdain for other slavic cultures as less sophisticated, and in elevating the Russian culture/science/history as the pinnacle of slavic culture.
(Big, unverified historical arc warning) Every time Russia annexed a place like Poland, whether it was during the Partitions or in the aftermath of WW2, it basically treated Poland like place from which to extract resources and human labor and nothing more.
I think the situation surrounding this meme is particularly poignant because Poland as well as many other Eastern European states lean strongly toward European culture. Not slavishly though--there is both a respect and awe of Western Europe, but it's mixed with (growing) respect and awe for slavic culture and a slight, often humorous dig at Western European culture as being "fancy." Kind of a "together, but separate" kind of deal.
Edit:
Also, over the past decade, for reasons I cannot untangle, Poland has been heavily revisiting it's 20th century history. Speeches are made, monuments built, streets renamed for WW2 or anti-communist heroes. Seriously, comparing Poland of the 00's to Poland of '22, there's monument upon monument dedicated to WW2 or people murdered by the communist regime. Big or small, prominently placed in the capitol or secluded on a forest side road, the country is awash with monuments remembering historical suffering. I suspect this country-sized load of historical anger is now finding an outlet.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Isn't it all a matter of tradeoffs though?
What I mean is, do you think it's possible to make policy decisions that don't have undesirable side effects?
Take business as an example. You can't spend too much time on thoughtful deliberation, because you must react to multiple competing inputs and try to respond to them in line with your strategy as much as possible. You must make choices that are really only bets about the state of the world now and what you think is the future. Then, tomorrow, you can only hope you'll be perceptive and fast-thinking enough to avoid making the mistakes you made yesterday.
Except in terms of national policy, "tomorrow" might mean "next year". It's a big ship, hard to turn around, especially because it's captained by consensus.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Coming from a place of curiosity: How are these duties managed? By which I mean: who defines them, where are they defined, and who is the judge/enforcer? How do decide to make tradeoffs, like for example in a situation where you would have to renege against your duty to your ancestors in order to fulfill your duty to your family?
In other words, what makes these duties concrete to you?
Christians and others of the Abrahamic faiths have their books that codify their duties, and they have their priests, that act as judge/enforcer and guide. I'm sure other religion provide similar frameworks. Humanism, especially of the EA kind, has their own version of this. So where does yours come from?
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Surely there are people skilled in the dark arts of communication, advertising, and psychology which know how to translate* the sorts of things we discuss into a form consumable by the average person. Given that these disciplines are not new, surely there is a handbook of basic principles for crafting such messages? Do we have any practitioners of the dark arts that can provide such resources?
This assumes the problem is that the information is presented in a form that's too complicated for average people to consume. What if, instead, it's a matter of desire? In other words, what if people just don't care about this stuff? At the risk of steering into cynical territory, what if most people are happy to let a small minority fight over Big Questions and leave them free to eat waffles, watch a good movie, go on a date, etc.?
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Yeah!
I used to hate twitter because of how its Algorithm was a constant pressure to turn my brain into mush, but now I actually have hope that it will evolve into something better, a little closer to the better boards on 4chan. And I'm glad that chaotic neutral Elon came around and gave the overton window a solid fucking kick.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Boosting this.
I lead a fairly active lifestyle, making sure to get adequate exercise. But on a friend's suggestion, I went to see a PT about my posture, which has turned into a multi-month journey into addressing various imabalances and weakeness that I never thought about because I took many things for granted, eg. a painful left knee while running, problems with stretching my hamstrings etc.
Turns out, I was using my body suboptimally, which lead to favoring certain parts over others, which then lead to minor but evergreen injuries. A good PT can easily spot these and, given their experience, figure out a good plan for addressing these problems.
As far as how to find a good PT, the only heuristic I've learned is to look for people that had training at the https://instituteofphysicalart.com/. Not sure if true, but I get a vibe from them that they are the rationalists of the PT world.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
You make a good point.
I like to frame this in two ways: what's good for me and what's good for the other person.
To use the bad drive examples from OP, consider that it's not good for me to waste my mental energy on getting angry at some random bad driver. It's not worth to have a worse day because of that. But, it's also not good for that driver to not receive feedback of their mistake. So what I strive for is to notice my anger and express it, eg. honk at the driver, then carry on happily.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Those communities are often first or second generation, though. Little Italy is effectively dead, as are the Irish diaspora communities, and the only Jews who retain their culture have organized themselves as a micro-nation (the Hasids you mention). As your evidence for the patchwork of liberalism, you are looking at the insular communities that are recent arrivals to America, which have yet to be filtered by liberalism.
Are you arguing that culture should not change?
But look elsewhere in America, at the 3rd generations, whether Germans in the Midwest or Chinese in California, and there’s no such patchwork to be found. It’s all some pesticide-ridden GMO monoculture crop, planted and picked and served at a corporation.
Yes, 3rd generation children of Germans or Chinese immigrants are not like native Germans or Chinese, but that's kind of obvious, since they've become American. But, at the same time, they've impressed some of their culture upon the broader American culture. As for the monocolture GMO crop, either I don't understand it, or you're making an appeal to aesthetics. Just as an example, the amount of regional music that the US produces is staggering.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Can you give an example of this happening?
This is exactly what I'm arguing is not happening.
Disney and other popculture factory farms can produce a steady stream of easily digested drivel, but I cannot see it as something that would actually eat away real culture.
But once that's done, suddenly those are the only aspects of your culture that anyone knows about, and, arguably, are 'allowed' to care about. You've been very carefully and slowly hemmed in to a sanitized, corporatized, and, yes, homogenized version of your own history
Who is doing the "allowing"? Who is doing the "hemming in"?
I can somewhat see your point working in a world that's very top down, where there is one or a handful of extremely powerful actors that does the allowing and hemming in. But I don't think that describes our world. Even within a monolithic industry like Hollywood, there are multiple actors vying for dominance, which tends to produce variety instead of destroying it.
Yes, I have experienced the sadness of seeing my friends and colleagues willingly abandoning their own reason and plugging into the pre-made stream of drivel produced by giant media outlets. But I have also experienced the joy of meeting individuals happily having their own original thoughts. (It's why I love themotte and the larger rationalist sphere).
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
I don't know how you made that jump.
I made it from this argument: " It might take generations to melt them, but it is happening nonetheless, because the laws are the same, the economics are the same for everyone."
In other words, if everyone is influenced by the same economic and political forces, then everyone is being pushed toward the same set of outcomes. If you leave that process going for a while, then humans become grey uniform goo that settled into some local maximum, hence no "new" or "different" things can be made.
There are no ways to enforce these shared norms. Imagine you live in an imaginary, hypothetical world where heroin, or murder, or dumping your garbage from the balcony is legal and normal. You and a group of friends agree that this should change, and you "form a group" and "promise" not to do that. So what? Your kids are still hooked on heroin, there is still garbage on the streets, and there is still a chance of getting murdered, because there are others who didn't agree and defectors.
Ah, you see, I am not arguing for not enforcing norms, but for a minimal set of open norms that allow individuals to express themselves, whether it be owning guns, being gay, partaking of the shrooms, etc. But I'm afraid that it's easy to misconstrue this as a call for post-modern, "reality is subjective" free-for-all, but allow me the benefit for the doubt. I am against that.
I feel like we're talking about two side of freedom. You're talking about "freedom from" as in: freedom from rotting in thy neighbor's garbage, freedom from having your kids being sold heroin, etc. I'm talking about "freedom to": freedom to stick your penis into another man's asshole, freedom to inhale smoke containing nicotine or THC, freedom to worship whatever deity/ies you wish, etc. Would you agree that this is the case?
The way I see it, the latter form of freedom requires the first one. But, for the latter form to truly blossom, the first one must be kept to a minimum. So yes, murder, rape, harming children* and other unilateral infringements of individual freedom must be outlawed. Totally agreed here. But not much more than that. Otherwise, you would increasingly stifle human expression.
This is where I see the beauty of a place like NYC. A basic set of laws ensures that people are not murdered (at least frequently) and that the garbage is (more or less; recently, sadly, it's less) taken care of. But because there is not much more than that, people can live in any weird way they want to, whether it's being a drag queen or an ultra-conservative jew. This, I believe, is core to "globalist liberalism", and something that is well expressed in the Bill or Rights, which I'm not bringing up for its legal standing but for its spirit, the spirit of freedom of expression as long as that expression isn't about yelling fire in a crowded theater or stoning unbelievers.
So, going back to the example you gave, the one about the EU and gay rights in an Eastern European country, let's first take away the label of gay rights, because that's just the outer layer that's not important. It could be anything else like ethnicity or abortion stance, or whatever. We basically have two minorities, the one that is arguing that a norm against X should instituted as law, and one arguing that X should be permitted. This might be the crux of the matter: X does not damage the commons. It is not a unilateral infringement of others' rights. Thus, I am against instituting a ban on X and for allowing to people to segregate into cultural groups aligned with what they think about X.
Now, aside from that, which Eastern European country are you thinking of? I happen to be from that part of the world and a little bit of the various cultures that people it.
- Children are a special case. They are human, but not fully so for many years since they need that much time to exercise and perfect their ability to reason and judge. So they cannot be treated as equal adults in society. But that leaves them to the mercy of their parents, some of which are far from adults themselves. How much should the state be allowed to here? I weakly lean toward "more", but I'm not sure if the benefits outweigh the costs of state mismanagement.
thomasThePaineEngine
Lightly Seared On The Reality Grill
2yr ago
Interesting points.
Starting from the end, I think you oversimplify the economics & laws angle. If humans were simple optimizers, then yes, they would all behave in a set of uniform, most optimal behaviors. There would be no new businesses, no new music, no new books, etc. Everyone in New York would just run laundromats, irish pubs, and sell hot dogs, to name a few things. But that's not really the case in reality--the laws, in the city and in most places in the US at least, are liberal enough for individuals to tinker, try new ideas, and find new ways of expressing themselves whether it's through commerce or art or whatever.
That's where I see the beauty of liberalism--let it provide a minimal set of laws that ensure more or less stability and... leave the rest up to people. In practice, given zoning and licensing and bureaucracy, this doesn't exist, but even in the much faded, weaker version of it that we have, we still see a ton of creative destruction. Much of it is garbage, but that's the cost of having monkey brains hitting two stones together until they find just the right stones that give sparks. This process, though, is made stronger by a steady stream of immigrants--whether internal or external--even though yes, after some n number of generations, they will likely meld in. However, by then, they will have very likely left a mark on the place.
I'm not sure I get the argument about surface diversity. If I set aside the EU angle, I don't see why it matters for a country to be able to be against gay rights? Like, if you live in Liberaltopia, there's nothing stopping you from not associating with gay people. There's nothing stopping you from forming a group with other people and having each other promise that you will not do gay things or associate with gays. There's also no size limit imposed on your group--it could be just your friends or half the country. Why would you want the state to interfere and set up some laws against gay people's freedoms? Surely, if gayness is in anyway bad, well, then in the free market of ideas, gayness will fade away while your non-gay group will grow and prosper?
This applies to other topics around enforcing culture.
I still admire the man for what he did with Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and that he even dared to touch problems like Neuralink or the Boring Company.
To me, he seem's like Chaotic Neutral incarnate. After the Twitter deal, I readjusted my expectations and turned up "Chaos" from 4 to 9 and frankly admit to myself: I don't have a clear model of this guy's thinking process. The closest archetype I can shuffled him under is the Trickster, or one who shares amazing gifts but exacts a (often humorous) price.
So what I'm looking at now is how this whole deal will end. From the technical side, I made some predictions in this comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/33114?context=8#context
But for the "success of Twitter" side, I can see a few exits, none of them bad in my book:
Twitter implodes. Nothing of value was lost. The scene fragments and re-knits itself on a different platform within the next couple of years.
Twitter continues as is, except it's not powered by #StayWoke-tshirt-wearing people. Things continue as they are now, except more chaotically, and the fires of the Culture War burn brighter.
Twitter succeeds. It becomes a global public square like techno-optimists have dreamed about, and proceeds to seed American/Enlightenment culture far and wide (including Mars).
The more fun-loving side of me sees this whole thing as a battle of wills, where both sides are trying to nudge reality toward their version of reality. Musk firing a bunch of Twitter workers? Good--most of them were in essence deadweight, and I'm not only talking about community event organizers, but also all the engineers building wacky prototypes concocted by unimaginative product managers. Must making jokes while all this play out in slo-mo? Good, at least a bunch of journalists get to earn money for cranking out GPT-3-level outrage stories about Bad Musk. Acquaintances talking about how bad Bad Musk is? Good, I get to get into interesting discussions or at least note which people in my circles outsource their thinking to the media.
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