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griffinreborn.bsky.social
@griffinreborn.bsky.social
110 followers 47 following 38 posts
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doriantaylor.com
to have an information economy, information has to have value

how does information have value? when the recipient of the information can use it to make a decision or take an action that obtains an outcome that is *more* valuable than the cost of the information

so what makes information valuable?
February 6, 2026 at 12:11 AM
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andycruns.bsky.social
The lesson, which they'll always get wrong, is never ever listen to rabid fans of anything. Don't read the comments, don't watch the stupid angry youtube crap, just tell the story you want to tell
January 29, 2026 at 10:12 AM
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snowden.st
Cipolla talks about it in his Laws of Stupidity essay, how societies on the rise seem to manage their constant quotient of stupid people, and how societies in decline let stupid people and bandits take the helm.
snowden.st Snowden St. @snowden.st · Sep 11
Carlo Cipolla’s “Laws of Stupidity” is a great read: ia903402.us.archive.org/17/items/01-...
THE FIRST BASIC LAW The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will however reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that: a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid. b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments. The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stup THE SECOND BASIC LAW Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favor an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because THE THIRD (AND GOLDEN) BASIC LAW The Third Basic Law assumes, although it does not state it explicitly, that human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid. It will be easily recognized by the perspicacious reader that these four categories correspond to the four areas I, H, S, B, of the basic graph (see below). If Tom takes an action and suffers a loss while producing a gain to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in field H: Tom acted helplessly. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain while yielding a gain also to Dick, Tom's mark will fall in area I: Tom acted intelligently. If Tom takes an action by which he makes a gain causing Dick a loss, Tom's mark will fall in area B: Tom acted as a bandit. Stupidity is related to area S and to all positions on axis Y below point O. As the Third Basic Law explicitly clarifies: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving THE FOURTH BASIC LAW That helpless people, namely those who in our accounting system fall into the H area, do not normally recognize how dangerous stupid people are, is not at all surprising. Their failure is just another expression of their helplessness. The truly amazing fact, however, is that also intelligent people and bandits often fall to recognize the power to damage inherent in stupidity. It is extremely difficult to explain why this should happen and one can only remark that when confronted with stupid individuals often intelligent men as well as bandits make the mistake of indulging in feelings of self-complacency and contemptuousness instead of immediately secreting adequate quantities of adrenaline and building up defenses. One is tempted to believe that a stupid man will only do harm to himself but this is confusing stupidity with helplessness. On occasion one is tempted to associate oneself with a stupid individual in order to use him for one's own schemes. Such a manoeuv
January 26, 2026 at 9:41 PM
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themlg.bsky.social
AI is bad at writing for an audience because it can only produce average output. It’s probably bad at coding for professional output for similar reasons.

But a tool giving non-coders access to average coding output is a massive upgrade to their personal toolkits.
January 20, 2026 at 6:06 AM