fatdog's comments

Stoicism is fundamentally subversive to the Hobbesian leviathan that has been constructed from within the post-enlightenment university system. It is the foundation of western morality and ethics, (the Bible borrows heavily from it).

Stoicism is not taught in public schools because it would make citizens ungovernable. Most education today is about training dependents, where stoicism teaches a kind of spiritual freedom. No grand conspiracy or anything. When education was elite, students learned elite ideas. Now that it is common, for cohesion they must learn common ones instead. Universities wouldn't have survived centuries if they produced graduates who would overthrow their governments, or obviate them entirely.

To cosmopolitanism, great and principled men are dangerous and anathema. Irony is that its most prominent works were by the rulers and elites of city states. Some people on the alt-right spectrum have taken that strain and created a kind of genre-philosophy out of it, like what John Williams is to classical music, some alt right thinkers are to classical philosophy.

The new Prime Minister Theresa May does not hold any principles that would place limits on the powers of the government. She was a well known "champion of the snoopers charter," (wiki) when she was home secretary. There is a british tendency to be overbearing authoritarians that provides fuel to their various secession movements. Britain is unlikely to maintain its current borders for many years after Brexit.

It is in the interest of every state to discredit Wikileaks, hence Russia "letting slip," they were behind the DNC leaks right after the election.

The intelligence community doesn't get an opinion. Arguably, any comment from them about domestic elections only reduces the legitimacy of their mandate.

The thing nobody really talks about is that the agency in question is a "domestic" security intelligence agency. It has no foreign intelligence mandate (unless that's changed recently.)

Reporters call it "Canada's CIA," but it is mandated by the government in canada to spy only within the country. They are not a police force and cannot arrest their targets. Canada has a bunch of police intelligence agencies. It is hard to see what democratic function a domestic spy agency plays. Maybe there are good arguments for them.

I've had a lot of fancy bottles in a lot of fancy places, but all things equal, I've never tasted a good wine in poor company.

Funniest thing I ever heard about it was a girl from Cornwall saying "Ah, New Zealand, the thinking man's Australia."

Want diversity? Teach diverse people to start companies.

The entire public sector, and most organizations over 1000 people. Bureaucracy is what happens when your dunbar-number sized network overflows and starts to metastasize.

When people say they work for a company that is collaborative and non-hierarchical, I've found it either means they are a manipulative and delusional tyrant or they are the sucker at the table.

People only use email to create a paper trail. It's not a discussion, as a medium it's a set of assertions and challenges.

If you don't have a personal relationship with someone, questions aren't even honest questions, they are signals of liability transfer.

The cc: line is a kind of blackmail where assholes list the people they are performing for, or threatening to scandalize you to.

Everything about e-mail is abnormal.

It's a performance. The only way to win is not to play. Hence executives eschew it.

Good architecture is leadership based on transparent principles.

The hardest thing for a lot of people to hear is, "you're not wrong, but the thing you're thinking about isn't the essential one." Architecture is about finding the principles and axioms that apply to the situation. It also requires an ability to "let go," in that if your design is good enough, you are no longer personally necessary because the rest has been made obvious, and anyone can implement it.

Elegant thinking can seem obvious, and transmits a great deal of understanding simply. The purpose of architecture is to formulate something that benefits in scale to the efforts of multiple cheaper, less experienced people.

volatility arbitrage exists in pretty much every currency, so this isn't a vulnerability, it's a FX trade.

I regret to say I might have some bad news for you.

However, not everyone is ambitious and competitive, but not everyone uses social media. They do seek a sense of approval (or attention), even if it is defracted via a pseudonym. Most social studies are irreproducible bunk anyway.

Our 'real' identities are but a hash away, where you give me a place to contact you and tell you the contents of this sha1 sum: b967696ff8376ccd0feb6170b469e23588d702bd . If you wanted to get fancy, we could start by agreeing on a modulus and a base....

read reports of rate of user growth slowing down, teenagers switching to other platforms, and my own view that it is a millennial demographic phenomenon, like a pop genre.

They can make more money, but imho it will be through value added services on their graph and service diversification, not on user growth against todays advertising model.

Authorities of all sorts love the bully narrative because it legitimizes their demands for compliance. Social media is undermining to them because people don't want to be supervised.

The real reason social media sites die without moderation is not because it alienates people who take bullying, it is that when there is no way to become a moderator, people seek status and power elsewhere. Reddit survives because it is a status pyramid scheme. HN survives because of similar aspiration to be seen as that smart person in front of a VC audience, a kind of Enders Game fantasy.

Facebook and Twitter are waning not because of trolls, but because they have signaled a nannying supervisory role that reduces overall user optionality, and takes away the thing that drew people in in the first place: Hope.

When you truly master something, the understanding of mastery is a surprisingly portable skill.

It can make you seem like a generalist, when in fact you are just a transcendent specialist.

Want a poster of this in every meeting room, maybe sans brain picture in favor of Rodin's Thinker sculpture.

Terrible stories, but they cross into agitprop outrage porn.

Kolmolgorov complexity, conditional entropy, beach holiday write off.

Love how sitting in the passing lane at a speed %10 lower than target causes cascading collisions.

If driving causes cancer, at least the people who drive in the passing lane (the left one) deserve it.

It's actually very widely accepted, and his methods are used in the intelligence community for political forecasting.

It threatens a lot of conventional beliefs, but they are conventional mainly because, as shown, people are sheep.

This is probably the most dangerous video ever produced.