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My purpose in posting about this article on Outcome Orientation as a Cure for Information Overload is to give it a place in my public feed so that I can come back to it later, and to attract the attention of others who also think seriously about these sort of things.
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Reading this blog on a washing machine installation and software estimation, that the unknown of a PVC wall in a U-bend spigot inlet caused a problem reminds me of when we moved into our house. We had the same issue with the drainage from a sink overflow dripping into the cupboard below. The previous occupants had tried taping over the spigot, and lined the cupboard with waterproof tape too. They had never checked to see if there was a hole where the water should be flowing! Lesson: check your understanding of the system, and make sure that the basics are right before plastering on multiple fixes.
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Reading Dominic Cummings, including this on storytelling and culture making:
People who change big things see bits of the future already here and redefine the mainstream by taking risks, not worrying about looking silly to people who just talk and copy each other all day. It’s impossible to know how these complex dynamics will pan out so people should just try to build as much of what’s needed as possible and see how the cards fall. SW1 is always super-mimetic when crises come so work on building things that seed the memes.
Seize the memes of production! Sense-making and culture building are changing. If you want to make a dent, then you need to figure this out.
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/tsp-5-what-comes-in-2025-6-as-both
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Jasmine Sun on oral vs literate culture, LLMs, and politics:
We are clearly returning to an oral-first culture. First, social media accelerated conversation, focusing on instantaneity over permanence and collective consciousness over individual belief. Second, video has overtaken text on every online platform (much to my personal dismay). Most people have lost the focus to read a 1,000 word article, but have no problem listening to a 3-hour podcast. Now, LLMs are in the process of obsolescing literary precision, too. Why write concisely when people will just read a summary? Why learn a system’s mechanics if an AI can do everything for you? We no longer need to convey thoughts via structured grammars. The LLM, as a universal translator, has solved legibility.
2016 was a turning point for oral culture. Peak Trump, peak Twitter, the death of the text and the fact. When we all lost our minds to the collective unconscious, the birth of a worldwide “vibe” that could shift together as one. And at the risk of sounding hyperbolic: I think there is a correlation between oral culture and authoritarianism, between a less literate population and strongman leaders. When people don’t evaluate ideas separate from their speakers, power gravitates to the most magnetic voice in a room.
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Frupidity:
But frugality has a dark twin – a reckless, shortsighted impostor that mistakes cost-cutting for efficiency and penny-pinching for wisdom. Enter frupidity, or stupid frugality – the obsessive drive to save money in ways that ultimately cost far more in lost productivity, morale, and sanity.
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Interesting twist on empathy from Agnes Callard’s “Open Socrates”:
If empathy is the psychological power to import the feelings of others, it follows that empathy is a prerequisite for revenge. … If this is surprising, that is because we usually use the word “empathy” in a laudatory way that conceals the existence of what we might call “dark empathy.” When I channel your feelings, I can react to those feelings in a way that reverses their valence for you. Thus, I can empathetically import your joy, and be pained by it (envy), or empathetically import your suffering, and be pleased by it (Schadenfreude). … But there is a common ground: all forms of empathy, be they dark or heartwarming, begin with my feeling what you feel. Empathy is not a virtue, but a power. Almost every adult has this power to some degree, though some of us have more of it than others, and it can be used for good or ill.
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Sunday reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 📚
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TIL: The last person to be transported into chattel slavery in the USA died in 1940. An example of the Great Span
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“What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an under-dimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.”
