Some ground rules:
This account is for playing with ideas with an eye towards the βlong view,β ideally focusing on questions which would be of interest even to cultures far removed from ours in time and space. In this narrow sense I donβt want this account to be βpoliticalβ. 1/
if I had been born in the 1940s I think one of the great disappointments of my life would have been finding out the truth about Venus. my impression is we really got like a 1st-percentile planet relative to what people were imagining at the time
if you think youβve discovered a dispassionate mathematical formalism which explains and justifies some common-sense feature of human sociality, you ought to be able to translate insights from that system *back* into common-sense language, making them vastly more intelligible.
the Pet Shop Boysβ βThe Dictator Decidesβ is an interesting example of a song thatβs straightforwardly, unashamedly, successfully about something other than one of the Usual Topics
A single calendar year in 2025 βcontainsβ more human life than a year in 100,000 BCE, simply because todayβs population is thousands of times larger.
The graphic divides history into ten equal βblocksβ of experience: each block represents 170 billion people-years.
Digression: Dean is literally editing something worth billions of market cap to GOOG on google docs, and everyone is (correctly!) very implicitly certain that they don't need to worry about GOOG peeking at it.
This is a genuine, important thing our society has achieved.