Melting Asphalt

The terms "sameness" and "average" are doing some heavy lifting here. In the grand internet tradition I will memetically unpackage "sameness" and "average" into four related components: (1) things that are BIG (2) things that are HOT (3) things that are COOL and (4) things that are GOOD.

(1) things that are BIG — these are side effects of technological advancement, globalization, the Internet, and frictionless social media platforms. More people than ever before can book a TAP Air flight to Barcelona, stay in a budget AirBnB, and check Google Maps for the same "best cafe near me" that everyone else is going to. Access to the world and to information is more open than ever before, so more people have both the ability to congregate around the top N things (physically or virtually) and the means to do so.

(2) things that are HOT — trends have always been around and always will be. Instagram face, the Kardashian look, hoverboards, heroin chic, microservices, Livestrong bracelets, putting "F*ck" in the name of your self-help book, flat icons, frozen yogurt, Dutch tulip mania — you can localize each one of these into a time period easily enough. Popular because they are new and a momentary cultural touchstone and different enough from the n-1th state of culture.

(3) things that are COOL — what you might call "signaling theory effects". "Ads Don't Work That Way" [1] explains this in the advertising context better than I can, so go read that. Differs from (2) in that the cultural…

A couple years ago I was following random links on the internet and accidentally ended up on some blog where one guy made a comment like this:

>> I really want to make the world a better place, but in the current world I don't even know how or where would I start.

And it resonated a lot, as I've always asked myself how to make a better world too, but you can feel so helpless thinking about it! Like, doing an honest job, being nice to others and recycling is not really making the world a better place: it doesn't change the direction we are going towards, and there's always been people doing an honest job and being nice to others through history. You are just maintaining the trend of what humans do, not finding an inflection point.

I really admire Aaron Swartz, and the ideas shared in this essay are good. But I believe it's too focused on institutional politics, and through the years I've kinda developed a different view myself, so I'll share some additional, complementary ideas:

- Focus first on what you create, not what you consume. We keep trying to raise awareness on small actions for people to do X less wrong, as if putting your grain of sand on the problem currently on the highlight is going to make the world a better place, but... there are too many problems for that to be really transformational (even if it's true that the increased awareness might eventually lead to some bigger movements). We should be most morally pristine with the work we do, and stop trying to…

(Apologies in advance for sounding harsh. I have extreme empathy for the author. But this lesson is so easy to ignore that I had to really amp up the contrast before I could focus on it myself. So it seems worth stating plainly.)

"You must have at least 10% equity in the startup to be considered a founder by Y Combinator. Only founders can come to interviews if invited or attend batch events if accepted." -- https://www.ycombinator.com/apply

If he couldn't attend, it was probably because he didn't have the requisite equity.

Joining as a founding member with less than 10% equity in a startup without a product or customers -- after being ambivalent about joining -- seems like a really bad decision.

One hard lesson I've learned over the years is that status matters. And in the startup world, equity is a huge marker of status, outside of its potential monetary reward. The initial conditions under which you join a project act as a non-negotiable upper bound on how much say your collaborators will let you have on the big picture. Regardless of how much you contribute afterwards.

Some reading on status for other aspirational-Vulcan types like I used to be:

https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707.html

http://www.meltingasphalt.com/social-status-down-the-rabbit-hole

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003J5653Y

Tl;dr - humans are pack hunters. They can't survive outside packs, not really. As a result, the topology of the pack has a powerful warping effect on our…

I enjoyed dumping on Google earlier too. I love firebase, but I've talked two companies I've worked with out of using it for new, mission critical projects. The earlier article made me feel completely vindicated in my recommendations.

I simply have no trust that:

- Google won't randomly cancel firebase (wave, reader, etc)

- Google won't randomly, suddenly jack up the prices for firebase, leaving users in the lurch (appengine)

- When something mission critical breaks or changes, I'll have any way of contacting someone who cares, no matter how much my company is paying for the service. (Google's support forums are a pit of sorrow)

I was reading an article the other day talking about personhood[1]. It makes the point that part of being a member of society is the idea of standing. That is, if you break your word there has to be a way for you to lose out as a result. If there isn't, its impossible for anyone to enter into an agreement with you because you can't be trusted. Forming an agreement requires both sides to have skin in the game.

I don't genuinely believe that google has skin in the game when it comes to cloud services for small-to-medium customers. Its just too easy for them to drop the ball, stop answering emails and leave customers in the lurch. They've done it again and again. I'd say its the default way Google operates.

Thomas Schelling from The Strategy of Conflict:

> Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in textbooks are the…

I find it interesting how often stuff about Julian Jaynes and his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind gets posted here (and I guess on Reddit and back in the day Slashdot).

FWIW, the submission link is part four of a four part series which begins here: https://meltingasphalt.com/mr-jaynes-wild-ride/

Anyway, after reading it a couple of times and going on a major sort of semi domesticated water fowl chase which included a bunch of other authors, I've come to the conclusion that Julian Jaynes was rather hard done by and that much of the criticism of the theory of the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind doesn't exactly have respect for epistemic responsibility. Instead it's coming from folks with no direct knowledge of the work (i.e. they never read it or didn't read it with serious intention) who are instead reacting to the title / synopsis and/or what various third parties said the theory was about.

So setting that sort of criticism aside, I arrive a slightly different conclusion than: "Probably wrong — but worth reading anyway. Preposterous — but worth taking seriously." Instead I'd say "Probably not entirely wrong — but worth reading anyway. Difficult and Problematic — but very much worth taking seriously and spending the time, energy, and effort to really understand and fully consider".

Edit, now that I've made it through the whole series, let me say that it's a worthwhile read.

> straddles that fine line between insanity and genius

That sounds about right. In any case, I highly recommend reading Jaynes’s book for yourself.

Daniel Dennett: “I think first it is very important to understand Julian Jaynes’ project to see a little bit more about what the whole shape of it is, and delay the barrage of nitpicking objections and criticisms until we have seen what the edifice as a whole is. After all, on the face of it, it is preposterous, and I have found that in talking with other philosophers my main task is to convince them to take it seriously when they are very reluctant to do this. I take it very seriously, [...]” http://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf

Richard Dawkins: “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between.” (in The God Delusion)

etc. (cf. http://www.julianjaynes.org/julian-jaynes-theory-quotes-reviews.php)

> I can't comprehend such a state without saying everyone back then was 100% schizoid

Sounds more like a problem with “modern” models of consciousness and sanity, rather than a problem with past people. This was recently on Hacker News: http://priceonomics.com/how-culture-affects-hallucinations/

Semi-related, I like this blog post: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more-players/