The first 10 on today’s playlist:

I am not anti-economics. There could be a valid field of economics just as there could be a valid, productive field of evolutionary psychology. Both of these are things that could exist. That they do not now says nothing about their potential or validity.

Now, though, both fields would have to be burnt to the ground and rebuilt nearly from scratch. Is that likely? No. But it’s still worth fighting for and thinking about alternatives.

breaking news as corporate America discovers that “blockchain tech” is just a slow fucking database https://t.co/dQwVXh1K5z

— Katherine Wu (@katherineykwu) November 12, 2018

Relatedly, wonder when corporate America will realize containers and Kubernetes are just very slow fucking clusters?

Here’s something I absolutely guarantee: I can create a cluster that’s 10x as reliable and a thousand times faster than anything you can build with containers and Kubernetes. Want to bet me? I’ll put $100,000 on it. I am completely serious because it’s an easy $100,000. (Skin in the game and all that.)

My guess is that a society can’t survive as a cohesive polity when everyone demands their own individuated identity with its own label. That seems to lead only to fracture and dissolution. Is there a path that doesn’t lead this way with everyone having their own private and fiercely-guarded identity and pronouns? Perhaps, but it’s a narrow and perilous one.

Sure is easy to sell things to people, though, if they all believe they are the specialest thing to ever exist, isn’t it?

Capitalists don’t care if the planet burns and a quarter of the population dies as long as profits are made and product moves. And completely individuated pseudo-identities are firmly a capitalist idea just as much as shareholder meetings or IPOs.

I receive and have received some pushback when I said that in general society was getting more prudish and that even so-called liberals are trending this way as well. Nevertheless, that is what’s occurring.

Jonah Disend, founder of innovation firm Redscout, explains further: “The concept of a master bedroom is becoming obsolete because we have a different relationship with sleep now—we don’t hang out in the bedroom the way we used to.” Disend notes that millennials are driving this shift. Their relationship with privacy is radically different from those of the generations preceding them—though digitally nonchalant, they’re prudish in person.

I don’t know what explains the extreme prudishness, exactly, but it’s definitely increasing.

I want to write a three-volume series of philosophical history.

The first volume will be Full Throttle Aristotle.

The second will be Descartes Before the Horse.

The third will be Kant Stop Now.

Who will fund me? Come on, let’s do this.

Regarding all my talk about meta-rationality and other epistemologically-related arcana the other day, something I wanted to point out is that when scientists prattle on about how the universe is deterministic, they are not only wrong but provably wrong.

Quantum mechanics demonstrates firmly that certain things are fundamentally unknown and unknowable. There’s no hidden variable. (Read about John Stewart Bell and Bell’s Theorem and later experiments related to this for more info.) This means that the universe is definitely not fully deterministic in the sense that most scientists mean. This is not speculation, or an opinion. This indeterminacy is built in, and don’t be confused by physicists et al. telling you that Schrödinger equation is deterministic. This is a prevarication, an elision of the truth, because even though Schrödinger’s equation is deterministic (it absolutely is), what they don’t tell you because it bothers them (and, really, everyone) is that the wave function collapse is completely non-deterministic and the end observational state is only one of a “selection” of probabilities that can be calculated (by the again, completely deterministic) Schrödinger equation.

I don’t really understand why physicists and STEM types have to lie about this, but they do. Probably because when you realize there is some base level of indeterminism built into the very structure of the universe, it makes the underpinnings of much of science a great deal shakier.

If you don’t buy all this, just look how some scientists have proposed the absurd superdeterminism in an attempt to preserve determinism.