I agree we would really benefit from a radical simplification our entitlements. Going through the simplified and unified but still arcane ACA application process personally brought this home for me, especially when I realized it is a system that can become a single entry point to multiple varied entitlement programs that formerly each had their own different qualification rules. Digging into it I saw that one of the goals behind it was to get more of the people who are entitled to Medicaid into Medicaid, the biggest barrier being that it takes a college degree and several days of dedicated…
My favorite quote from one of my favorite books, Anathem by Neal Stephenson (copied from GoodReads): "Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their…
> “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the…
That's interesting about aphantasia. I knew some people have incredible visualization ability far past the normal amount, but I never knew that some people have none at all. I think my visualization ability is about average, although I do very well with visual thinking. Not sure what the correlation is there. I've been a prolific reader since about 11 years old. I would say that in general, I don't try to visualize what the author writes. Whenever the author spends a lot of time going into setting up the environment with lots of visual details, I only lightly skim that. I don't bother…
I think the most prescient prediction he made about AI is this from Anathem. The concrete prediction is that the internet will become filled with AI written crap, and that anyone wanting to use it will have to filter out an enormous amount of AI nonsense, before they reach any useful information. To translate: reticulum means internet, syndevs means computers. > “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a…
Neal Stephenson's Anathem (2008) has a great throwaway section on this: > “Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said. > “Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him. > “Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap…
Neal Stephenson's Anathem: “‘Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,’ Sammann said. “‘Crap, you once called it,’ I reminded him. “‘Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose…
There's a similar theme running in his "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" book where a fake nuclear attack and subsequent social media storm leads to a collapse of the internet and the emergence of its replacement based on human or automated editors filtering out all the "crap". This then leads to confirmation bubbles where people believe whatever they want to believe because their edit streams lock them into whatever they want to hear. Ku clux klan like militias taking control of rural parts of "Ameristan" and people keep on remembering the victims of a nuclear attack that never happened. He…
“Inter-universal Geometer" - This seems to refer to the Geometers from Neal Stephenson's Anathem[0], or is at least inspired by the same concept. "Inter-universal" probably refers to the fact that math, analogous to geometry, holds true regardless of the rules of one's universe. (Math is a set of "if these rules apply to a system, then these other rules must apply" statements.) Just seems a little weird to me that the article was so specific about so much, but left that bit ambiguous ("What does it mean? His website offers no clues."). Edit - Did some digging, apparently his website offers…
On the flipside of this, thanks to archivists such as yourself, I've saved myself some time by developing a research perspective that first assumes ideas I've come up with may have been independently discovered in the past. This may be obvious to others, but for me it has been a game-changer for getting "to the meat" of problems, so to speak. Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree…