Sharon

Curious infovore, flailing dilettante

["Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @BretDevereaux]

My analysis/review/discussion of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is up at @ForeignPolicy

https://t.co/bhBt3aLAzg

[Sharon @sharontakes]

This is why the best writing is always about refactoring perception and making the obvious and the commonplace look different. Everything else is cliche.

[Nabeel S. Qureshi @nabeelqu]

Wittgenstein's critique of many philosophical problems that they're like frame control: basically, the words you use trap you into a certain way of seeing the world, and from *that* perspective the problem appears impossible to solve. The phrase 'solve alignment' is like this.

[Aporia @aporia9n]

Picking which game to play is harder than ever because the rules keep changing every 6 months.

We were raised being told that becoming a lawyer, doctor, banker, consultant or climbing the corporate ladder was the ultimate success: stability, status, upward mobility, steady earnings growth, respectability. Then we were told learning to code was the best leverage in the world, right before the AI gurus started saying coding might be one of the first skills getting automated.

Now everyone says go all-in on AI, but even that feels speculative. Are you actually building durable leverage, or just doing temporary arbitrage until OpenAI / Anthropic ship your entire workflow as a feature? Everyone says quit corporate and start a company, but entrepreneurship now feels like the most crowded trade on earth, with everyone using the same tools, the same playbooks, the same AI agents, the same “build in public” advice. Everyone says build an audience, but then your identity becomes the product, the algorithm becomes your boss, and every part of your life slowly turns into content inventory.

That’s why ambitious people are so cooked right now. Not because they lack options, but because every option comes with a convincing bull case, a terrifying bear case, and a guy on the internet monetizing both.

No obvious map, no trusted authority, no stable definition of winning. Just 10,000 possible lives, all constantly repricing in real time, and the quiet suspicion that the one you picked might be the wrong game.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

Seems like metamodernism had this huge moment a few years ago- peaked at Loki, Everything Everywhere All at Once and a bunch of pop culture cashing out this idea all at once. I also can't really tell what has come after if anything?

[Pape Léon XIV @Pontifex_fr]

Lorsque l'être humain est réduit à une performance, une marchandise ou une statistique, une profonde souffrance intérieure surgit inévitablement. De nombreux jeunes vivent aujourd'hui sous le joug des attentes et de la performance, plongés dans une compétitivité exaspérante qui engendre anxiété, peur de ne pas être à la hauteur et désorientation.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

@joerainey @Structionai Yess, excited to see what @Structionai comes up with next!

[Sharon @sharontakes]

It was mindblowing for me to realize that America built the Empire State Building in merely 2 years in the 1930s and now takes decades to build train stations. @Structionai represents a 0-1 moment for the construction industry and I'm excited to see that reverse the trend!

[Joe Rainey @JoeRainey]

For +2,000 years, construction has stuck to the same tech: blueprints. Instead of innovating beyond, tech incumbents have locked our builders into 2D drawings and profited off their toil.

Announcing @StructionAI: the only company working to build beyond drawings and specs.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

@kunalb11 Yes, people who are described as being able to accumulate resources indeed accumulate more resources. Perhaps not everyone solves for the same thing in life.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

Upper middle class people in developed societies are already post-scarcity for basically everything except positional goods. But Keynes’ leisure society isn’t here. Why?

Maybe because people basically only care about positional goods at the end of the day. Status is scarce.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

Seems like there’s no better way to stop coveting something than to actually get it.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

@TheMindScourge @MacaesBruno What periods of American history contain the streak of authoritarianism you describe? Is it McCarthyism?

[Sharon @sharontakes]

@TheMindScourge Refreshing take on things. I’m no Japan expert but I do think if they can stave off or supplant demographic decline with automation, they’ll be one of the only nations in the world to undergo technological modernity and retain their core values and culture.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

It should be most obvious to residents of San Francisco that tech progress isn’t the only ingredient in enabling human flourishing

[Sharon @sharontakes]

The bitter lesson implies that humans don't know how to model and specify behavior as well as they thought.

Every task which we can only replicate through deep learning and not explicit programming is a task that we have insufficiently good theory for.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

@ArmandDoma OTOH, resident critics of other regimes are less free to critique their governments and societies than those who live in liberal societies so that is an asymmetric weakness in perception terms at least.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

@ArmandDoma That's not actually a weakness of liberalism as much as it is a short-term aligned, long-term misaligned capital incentive? The companies producing content have shareholder obligations and they can't reasonably convince any board to set aside a 1B+ market for artistic freedom.

[Sharon @sharontakes]

The long march from ignorance to knowledge (less ignorance) also drained the world of true intrigue and mystery. This knowledge brought us unfathomable riches. But as an eccentric preacher once said, man cannot live on bread alone.

[The Mind Scourge @TheMindScourge]

America in the 20th century was an Atlantic state. It looked to Europe, and (to a lesser extent) to Africa

But in the 21st, it’s a Pacific and Latin American state. It’s reorienting west towards Asia and the western hemisphere generally

I’m not sure how aware Europeans are of the current US dynamic, but American attitudes towards Europe are not particularly positive. Tech sees it as a joke (the Brussels raj of “got a loicense?” and “moar regulation!”). MAGA is cynical about it entangling the US in unnecessary wars. There’s popular sentiment that Europe is a “museum” full of “europoors” unenlightened by AC.

Biden was born during WWII. He came of age during the US’ “maximum west” period. That made him sympathetic to European issues and even invested in tribal European conflicts like the Anglo-Irish one

Future presidents won’t be aligned in this way. America’s center of gravity is moving south, away from the east coast. Culturally, the northeast hemisphere is in relative decline. What is the last idea out of NYC that you remember? Americans are becoming a sun people. Trump underscored this by moving to Florida.

In this part of the country, you don’t think about Europe so much. Latin America is much closer.

Europeans should not fool themselves. Trump is not a temporary aberration. The writing on the wall was clear with Obama’s “pivot” - but for a variety of reasons, from contingency to politesse, the shift was not made explicit until now. But it should be obvious to all, now, that the US is getting out of Europe. This is a permanent change, and won’t be reversed by a future - even Democratic - administration