Will James

apparently i'm a life snob.

currently at @getdbt. @instanahq and @thoughtworks alumnus and texas a&m grad

[Will James @wiggzz]

What happened to the following tab? Half the posts are from people I'm not following? Something changed...

[Will James @wiggzz]

@bcherny Hey @bcherny what about enterprise users? I think I was probably impacted by this, a lot of my sessions were spanning multiple days and would likely have been hit by the reasoning pruning bug, I imagine this would cause significantly higher usage with lower prompt caching?

[Will James @wiggzz]

My Openclaw set up: ask for a change in slack mobile. Wait 2 mins, PR is up. Check the dev version of my website where the PR is deployed live. Verify. Approve and merge PR. Change is in prod in 10 mins. This is the future.

[Will James @wiggzz]

Anyone else get the sense the world is accelerating towards something right now?

[Will James @wiggzz]

But, none of that is "provable" scientifically, so people who expect everything to fit within a scientific framework are going to be disappointed, and ultimately end up with a nihilistic view point.

[Will James @wiggzz]

IMO sapiens is what you get when you just look at everything from a purely materialistic perspective. From that perspective, nihilism is inevitable. At least he's internally consistent (though, I do doubt some of his historical explanations, but I'm not a historian).

[Anders K. Hvelplund @Falliblemusings]

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time.

But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay.

That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions.

Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design.
After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples:

On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion."

On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over."

On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us."

On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed."

On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two."

This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty?

And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it.

Now compare Deutsch:
"Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature."

"Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow."

"Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved."

"We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be."

Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence.

The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children?

Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct.

Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going.

Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

[Will James @wiggzz]

Believing in that is what gets you more than nihilism, and opens you up to believing maybe that extra-material reality can break into the material reality.

[Will James @wiggzz]

There needs to be a baseline in primary and secondary education, and that shouldn't be a political statement.

[Will James @wiggzz]

I don't usually post here. But Austin ISD don't have enough money to keep their schools open, so they are consolidating schools, closing smaller or more expensive to operate schools and merging them with under enrolled schools.

[Will James @wiggzz]

Public education is the foundation of a successful democracy because it provides some way for children to break out of their environment through education. If you lock educational opportunity to parental privilege, you are unnecessarily penalizing every underprivileged child.

[Will James @wiggzz]

@malvernlacrosse @NoContextMLAX Literally cannot like this photo enough

[Will James @wiggzz]

@joschi83 What motivated the switch? I've been a long time Android user but used to do some iOS dev so I have some sympathy for iPhone users...