“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”

-E.O. Wilson

Yep. Most of us are mostly unsuited to our current civilization.

Genre fiction: Life with all the boring parts cut out.

Literary fiction: Life with all the boring parts left in, and extra boring parts grafted on after being trucked in from somewhere even more boring.

Glad this did not happen to me.

I like Lorde’s first album as much as any album I listened to in my teens or twenties. “Bravado” and “Tennis Court” from that album might be the best pop songs released in the last twenty years. (You know an album is peerless when the most well-known song, “Royals,” while still being great isn’t even in the top five best songs on the album.)

Anyway, I listen to a wider range of music now than I did in 1994 when I was 18, and I think music in general is better now — with perhaps early Tori Amos excluded. Only “perhaps,” as she was sui generis and there will probably never be an album like Little Earthquakes made by anyone again as it is an artifact of a particular time and place.

Glad I find new, great music all the time. It’s out there.

Often one of the most racially & ethnically diverse places in a town is the Walmart.

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) April 26, 2017

Yep! One of the reasons I actually like going to the WMT near my office.

We live in a world where I could have this delivered to my house in two days but where we cannot provide adequate, affordable housing or health care or education or meaning to even the majority of our citizens.

Whatever happens to us — and much will due to climate change and related crises — we deserve it.

"Intellectual elite"= people selected ability to get:
1 statics, not dynamics
2 actions, not interactions
3 low, not high dimensionality.

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) April 15, 2017

“Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution.”

– Francis Bacon (De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, 1623)

Everything done to make computers easier to use for stupid people makes them vastly more difficult and annoying to use for me.

Also, did you hear about the homeopathy rally in Washington? Though no one showed up, it was still very effective.

If every form of behavior (as Ted Chiang states, summarizing the default view of science) is compatible with determinism, then determinism has no predictive power.

Does determinism fall out of the laws of the universe? That’s a far stretch from what we can and cannot observe. A likely stretch, but still a far one.

This is the usual Crooked Timber intellectual trash heap, with its focus on individual effort to combat the effects of global climate change while ignoring overpopulation and capitalism itself as relevant factors.

For historical reasons, much of the pseudo-left would rather have 12 billion of us living like Cro-magnons during a famine than 500 million us living like fulfilled humans with worthwhile lives.

This I will never understand and those people are my enemy.