He’s compelling to some people because he notices genuine failures. But in my framework these failures come from the collapse of the verification–deliberation–accountability cycle. Fix that and the system can work, ignore it and nothing will.

LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language.
It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.

5/Its easy (or difficult to swallow) this as corruption/crony capitalism. But in a new paper w/ @segoddard.bsky.social in IO, we argue these interactions suggest something much more fundamental -- a shift in the international order which we call neo-royalism.
www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mxthh...

Dream job. Though for safety, the best job approaches this but gives you maybe one quick task per day to do, so you can say you "worked" and have a record of efforts. Prevents anyone from discovering you're being paid for nothing and getting fired.

I started grad school when I was 26 and did some tutoring on campus. The undergrads I tutored were basically children. I'd finished undergrad, had a "real" job for a few years, and was engaged to be married, and these 18-20 year olds just clocked as kids to me. Any older man pursuing them is a creep

Goddamn so much of the system relied on high integrity and professional shame and once that was stripped away by lack of consequence it was just a ticking bomb right.

We thought the system was protecting us and we could fuck around electing anyone.

But we were supposed to be the system.

The window reflecting the interior ceiling at top makes this look like the largest (and only) indoor airport in the world.

but it’d also be a mistake to credit that vanguardist as having done most of the work. all the geese do the work. in intellectual life, successful reinvention, resurrection, reintegration require a great deal of creativity. /fin

it’s great that the growing frontier of firsts paves the way for somewhat — only somewhat — easier reinvention and transformation down the line. it’s like how the goose at the apex of the migration wedge does experience a bit more air resistance. 2/

cumulation is a bad model of intellectual life. every idea has to be constantly reinvented, remade as something fresh and real and relevant, live in contemporary minds. that is most of the work. 1/

Chasm City is next chronologically, a story that alternates between pre-The Prefect time (and not on/near Yellowstone/Glitter Band) and post-Prefect but pre-Revelation Space on Yellowstone. Parts of the Revelation Space series get a little more context from reading Chasm City first.

My daughter, age 6, upon seeing an older picture of me: "Why does dad look like that?"

My wife: "Well he had more hair back then..."

Daughter: "No, he's wearing jean *shorts*! Ugh!"

I've never been fashionable...

You absolutely have to bribe your top quintile with goodies, because 1) it limits zero-sum brain disease spread 2) it creates a powerful constituency for a public services floor, & 3) the admin/cognitive load of means testing means they'll get theirs anyway, so you end up subsidising them regardless