When you encounter a broadly confident person, ask what that confidence is rooted in. Typically they’re good at one narrow complex thing and have inappropriately extended confidence beyond that. Engage on the narrow complex thing if interesting, politely disengage elsewhere.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 9, 2020
contrarian recession coming
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 7, 2020
a new centrist mediocrity conformism arises 😎
basic normies please rejoice with some weak sauce cringe partying
Winning is a cognitive bias
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 5, 2020
Anarcho-spaceist. Utopian ideological goal of getting to be a spacefaring species by mildly-leftie-ancap means. Some superposition of Le Guin and Iain M. Banks. Earth as Urras and Mars as Anarres, with the very GSV, named Left Hand of the Compliment, orbiting between them.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 1, 2020
long-term thinking makes people unhappy because it almost necessarily means they’re thinking about big problems
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 24, 2020
the only future thing you can be fairly sure about is that the big problems of today won’t go away miraculously and will last as long as you expect, probably longer
Free line:
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 21, 2020
“I’m not gaslighting you, I’m actually the clicking sound tipping you off!”
You’re welcome. Also, this will reveal who hasn’t actually looked up the reference to the movie. https://t.co/Vl3wfNLWaq
Laws of institutions
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 15, 2020
Law 0: They *will* emerge, even if nobody wants them
Law 1: They *will* get captured, regardless of values
Law 2: Once captured they *will* do bad things, even if they only contain good people
The only real question is how soon there are consequences
Primal widget: the most powerful piece of technology almost everybody carries almost all the time in a given milieu
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 6, 2020
Backwards from today:
smartphone
wristwatch
umbrella
kerchief/towel
pen
hat or turban
knife
sword
bag/basket
walkey-pokey stick
Am I missing any?
The trick is to not live in a single simulation
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) September 30, 2020
If something is worth doing for free, it’s worth doing nerd-out obsessively-compulsively for free.
— Venkatesh RÅØ (@vgr) September 21, 2020
“Free” implies the purest kind of surplus leisure energy. It should be unshackled from ordinary ROI thinking. You’ve *already* accepted zero returns. So why hold back?
I have no problem with reality falsifying my beliefs but I really don’t like my fiction rotation cache being invalidated by new historical moods.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) September 13, 2020
I don’t think I can enjoy Yes, Prime Minister or The Simpsons ever again. Even Hitchhiker’s Guide is under threat now.
Never trust anyone with a legible aesthetic
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 5, 2020
None of us has more than part of a partially correct answer to any complex question.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 16, 2020
But if we sincerely and humbly work hard together, we can at least discover the whole of a completely wrong answer, and ride it to absolute disaster.
“I cut the cake, you pick your half” is basically the only good political idea anyone has ever had. Everything else is either derived from that, or self-serving behavior dressed up to look like an idea.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 9, 2020
You know what would be worse. A weird anticorona virus that forced us to always be in tight huddles always with 6 people less than 6 feet away. In crowds of minimum 50. Except to go to the bathroom. Social closening. That sounds horrifying.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 6, 2020
Good time to be a futurist. Since all old futures have been trashed there’s demand for building up a whole new set of futures. Most futurists will fail though since they were trained in adjacent possible variational futures, not blank-modes futures.
— Venkatesh “sergeant mode” Rao (@vgr) May 2, 2020
Everybody is sure their predicted future has arrived.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 26, 2020
So you now live in a socialist libertarian authoritarian statist ancap monarchist democracy with high-tech Stone Age apocalyptic dysto-utopian Chinese characteristics.
Exactly what I predicted.
There will be sourdough.
start with the humans you have, not the system you want
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 5, 2020
The purpose of crisis prep is not to see you through any imaginable crisis but to buy you time. Applies to both resources (financial and non) and intellectual (scenarios, contingency plans). The stockpile running out is fine. Wasting the time it bought you is not.
— Venkatesh brrrRao (@vgr) April 2, 2020
Week 1: Thing happens
— Venkatesh “wanna go brrr” Rao (@vgr) March 28, 2020
Week 2: 100 people produce good daily takes on Thing, causing firehose
Week 3: 1000 people start curating the 100, now you have to filter the 1000 to find the best summary of the 100
Conclusions actually worth drawing from Asian experience: wear masks, bow, namaste, test-and-trace, improve health surveillance tech
— Venkatesh “wanna go brrr” Rao (@vgr) March 25, 2020
Conclusion people are really eager to draw: democracy doesn’t work! Find the One True King!
If we can’t make cruise ships work there is no hope for space ships
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 10, 2020
my 6-word media doctrine:
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) February 24, 2020
aggregating audiences bad, aggregating creators good
My own initial reaction to gpt2 helps me understand why pre-modern tribes reacted to being filmed and shown the footage like the camera was stealing their souls. Except, I *like* the idea instead of being horrified by it. Unfortunately as untrue for AIs as for film cameras.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) February 20, 2020
Believing things takes a lot of energy. You can measure the fragility of a system by the energy it takes to believe in it. Or alternately, how believable it is at non-striving slacker energy levels. Good systems are 80% believable at 2o% peak energy level.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) February 13, 2020
When you get near 100% confident in a belief, you internalize it, which means it sinks into the unconscious. To hold a belief consciously is to hold it with non-trivial amounts of doubt. The doubt level of stuff you say tends to be matched. We rarely mix confidence levels.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) January 21, 2020
Time dilation/contraction perceptions are at least 2d, where first dimension is event stream and second dimension is information abstraction level. So you can dilate at one level, contract at another. This idea is ubiquitous in folk wisdom but surprisingly missing in the research
— Venkatesh *atchoo* Rao (@vgr) December 31, 2019
The problem with the idea of a “Purpose-driven life” is that 99% of life is Purpose-resistant.
— Venkatesh *atchoo* Rao (@vgr) December 29, 2019
Admire people with anaerobic courage, the kind that can drive for long periods without hope while souring the soul
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 25, 2019
I think the Great Weirding has finally hit the tech stack. Everything I’m seeing happening to the consumer web experience seems in some way a response to the huge stress test the web 2.0 tech stack endured in 2015-18 due to major pattern failures
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 19, 2019
One way to interpret political outcomes in the great weirding is that people seem to vote against candidates who act like they know what’s going on.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 13, 2019
Most people are not lazy enough. The kind of relentlessly effortful living conservatives love to preach is unnatural except perhaps for hummingbirds. Half of survival of the fittest is the patience to wait for the steals and deals and moments of unreasonable leverage.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 2, 2019
What was the last phenomenon, observable as a stream of discrete events, that “popped” from background to foreground for you, and what if anything triggered the pop?
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 30, 2019
Example for me: fancy water bottles trend. Now I notice them everywhere. Noticed when I got one as schwag.
Twins born on 11:59 PM and 12:01 AM could have different birthdays 🤔
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 30, 2019
My dream algorithm
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 30, 2019
1. Auto-cluster tweets per user (shitposting, representing, thought leadering, shilling, sharing, thinking aloud) and auto follow/unfollow dynamically based on that.
2. Live filter resulting first-pass output by mood (restless, serious, beefy)
A good hack to find interesting ideas to work on is to start with a word that seems to pick out an important concept, but has been rendered annoyingly vacuous by abusive overextension. Examples: strategy, meaning, irony. Other examples?
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 7, 2019
The S-curve of the Great Weirding is entering its terminal plateau level. We’re entering the permaweird.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 6, 2019
If it weighs you down it’s a taxonomy, if it frees you up, it’s an ontology https://t.co/NxMWucezE2
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 5, 2019
That feeling that all your peers have figured out something important you haven’t and moved on in some way, leaving you behind? It’s universal.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 1, 2019
It’s the human galactic red shift. Everybody has figured out something unique and is receding from everybody else.
Happy Halloween 💀
When the signal gets noisy and processing it gets expensive, most people go tribal to cope but a few turn into asshole free riders arbitraging across tribal epistemologies.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 20, 2019
We should call this truth hacking.
A defining American trait, and the neatest bit of elite inception in history.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) September 29, 2019
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ― Ronald Wright
The @meaningness model of how meaning fell apart (choiceless –> systematic –> countercultural –> subcultural –> atomized) and how it can be reconstructed (fluidity) rhymes well with my monotemporality –> atemporality –> multitemporality model https://t.co/fPzYVeV36K
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) September 16, 2019
“You divide, I choose” remains the single most basic principle of voluntary social organization. It really should be an entire academic subdiscipline by itself, like prisoner’s dilemma
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) September 2, 2019
Tldr: don’t debate, don’t seek common ground. Just try to keep the game going as long as possible exploring common NEW ground.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) August 31, 2019
An annoying thing about picking words to use for things is that major uses that came before are often inconsistent. For example, the word “atemporality” means interesting but slightly different things in the ways @bruces @GreatDismal mean it, versus the way Ursula Le Guin used it
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) August 27, 2019
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Wonder if a good management theory could be constructed out of all the behaviors conspiracy theorists *think* Big Corporations are capable of.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) August 2, 2019
Humanity’s last message broadcast to the stars will be “the actions of a few do not reflect our values as a species or who we are as a planet.”
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 24, 2019
Wikipedia has a list of gods of time. Damn. 30 years ago this would have been many tedious trips to the library, and *if* you got lucky you might have found a reference work containing such a list. Sometimes you just have to stop and marvel https://t.co/R1Y8oYNsCc
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 23, 2019
6 stages of recovery
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) July 20, 2019
1. Chill, eat, sleep
2. Basic triage ordering to get to minimum functional potential
3. Escapist leisure to more orderly places (TV/fiction)
4. Advanced order restoration, short of OCD
5. Energy reboot with exercise
6. Low-stakes creative work-play (poiesis)
My best aphorism is also my worst nightmare: Civilization is the process of turning the incomprehensible into the arbitrary.
— Venkatesh “Tactical in LA” Rao (@vgr) July 12, 2019
Ever since I thought that thought I’ve been trying to unthink it. It is not a comforting thought. Turns history into a horror movie.
All radicals should be encouraged to form institutions. Much moral high-ground posturing and insufferable certitude are rooted in not yet having reproduced pre-ideological institutional pathologies that are the root cause of most things they critique on ideological grounds.
— Venkatesh “Tactical in LA” Rao (@vgr) July 7, 2019
Two types of problems.
— Venkatesh “Tactical in LA” Rao (@vgr) July 7, 2019
A: Those that are hard because nobody knows how to actually solve them yet
B: Those that are hard because those who know how to solve them don’t care enough to do so, and those who care enough don’t know how to solve them
B takes starter luck to crack
Shit, just realized I operate with an unconscious 2x2 in how I engage with people online. X-axis: harmless to dangerous, Y-axis, can’t take seriously/can take seriously. Dangerous+can’t take seriously is the basic avoidance category if you want to have a good time online.
— Venkatesh “Live from DTLA” Rao (@vgr) July 5, 2019
Bitcoin is such a comically perfect dark age hedge. It’s like it was invented for a tropey cyberpunk dystopia novel.
— Venkatesh “Tetris” Rao (@vgr) June 22, 2019
Editor to author: “Seriously? A decentralized digital currency that requires burning lots of energy and goes up when nations crumble? Isn’t that kinda lazy?”
There’s something like an uncanny horoscope effect, where if a fairly weak theory fits you personally very strongly, you’ll be tempted to assume it’s more broadly, deeply true than it is. Some mix of confirmation bias and attribution error.
— Venkatesh “Tetris” Rao (@vgr) June 20, 2019
You don’t create tools or toys specifically for infinite games. You view existing things in functionally unfixed ways. The finiteness is in your head not the object. https://t.co/F1AWn5zmLH
— Venkatesh “is moving to LA in a few weeks” Rao (@vgr) June 18, 2019
Indukhtion might be my first Hindi-English pun.
— Venkatesh “is moving to LA in a few weeks” Rao (@vgr) June 7, 2019
Defined as: experiences viscerally revealing the reality of dukkha to you for the first time (in both everyday Hindi sense of sadness, and Buddhist theology sense of existential suffering).
I also considered indukhtrination.
Future-predicting life hack: find people who are interested in similar things as you, but orbiting the void closer-in than you. Put them in your superforecasting SIGINT portfolio and then just wait.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 28, 2019
Authoritarian Right: Seeing Like a State
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 27, 2019
Authoritarian Left: Seeing Like a Cell
Libertarian Right: Seeing Like a Token
Libertarian Left: Seeing Like a Network
20th century corporatism: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 22, 2019
21st century corporatism: libertarianism among nations, fascism within nations
I increasingly judge people via negativa. By the things they pointedly ignore or are silent about. It’s the opposite of political correctness. It’s Conveniently Silent. CS.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 22, 2019
Many things I had filed in my mind as “signs of apocalypse” are happening/have happened in last few years but it doesn’t feel apocalyptic yet.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 18, 2019
This is like reverse of Hans Rosling graphs effect, where many things are technically getting better but it doesn’t feel like it.
I am beginning to *really* dislike appeals-to-better-nature rhetoric of the “do better” and “become good” variety. If you can’t work with people within the 3-sigma natural range of moral variety, you’re almost certainly going to do harm overall trying to work with them at all.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 6, 2019
All externalities are one of 4 things:
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 1, 2019
1. Plausibly deniable intended outcomes
2. Unexpected, but welcome (or tolerable) outcomes
3. Evidence of your cluelessness if you genuinely think you don’t have any responsibility for them
4. Genuine surprises
We’re gonna see a new institutional underground of reimagined secret societies, lodges, fraternities, sororities etc. Not like medieval ones associated with universities, religions, or nobility. A cross between those and hacker collectives, hawala networks etc.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 27, 2019
Though a bit idiosyncratic, the shortest definition of intellectual I’ll sign on to is “magical thinker” (ht @bhudgeons for connecting those dots for me). The essence of it is a layer of experimental belief that’s a degree removed from senses, phenomenology, and action feedback
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 22, 2019
Idea: doomsday clock that runs on kairos rather than chronos. Every tick-tock is a semantically marked up real-world event that is appended to a live global gaming card feed with some tags and computed metrics like threat points, time horizon, etc. Narrative dice.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 20, 2019
Every science is a degenerate habit of thought. Magical thinking is the creative discipline of resisting the lure of that degeneracy. The best way to do that is to convince yourself that science has a general method to it. Methodicity is actually the mark of magical thinking.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 19, 2019
Perhaps no human activity has as big a gap between private and public texture as “research”. Research in private is a an endless stream of sketches, vague ideas, random experiments, jokes, nerdy OCD behaviors etc. Research in public is unreadable bureaucratic papers.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 17, 2019
Outer doubt: Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy, Discworld, Discordianism
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 16, 2019
Outer confidence: Getting Things Done, Inner Game of Tennis
Inner doubt: Finite and infinite games
Inner confidence: Impro, War of Art
(these are generic; there are domain specific-ones in each too) https://t.co/HqoPWF4JF7
I’m gonna start verbing scope creep as creepscoping. Suggests a furtive nighttime moving of boundaries.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 31, 2019
I’m trying to creepscope “paleo” to accommodate a low-carb vegan/vegetarian diet for example.
Scale of social coordination levels
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 31, 2019
Byzantine consensus
Consensus
Disagree and commit
Derping
Consensus trap
Live and let live
Agree to disagree
Mutual incomprehension
Garden of forking paths
Light speed mutual retreat
Bubble multiverse
UAMI: Unilaterally Assured Mutual Incomprehension. The equilibrium that results from one person both refusing to explain themselves or make the effort to understand the other.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 31, 2019
Daddy of agree-to-disagree and granddaddy of disagree-and-commit
It’s a good thing.
Trying to present all sides of a story is just not as good as simply telling all the stories separately. Why present a false synthesis when you can present a truer confusion?
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 31, 2019
I have this vague itch to build a series of clocks as a hobby, but *without* a modern clock for reference. Eg build a mechanical clock, but use an hour glass to cal9brate first run. Bootstrap time all the way to atomic.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 15, 2019
Project: start, restart, plan, replan, repair, finish, review, refactor, abandon, backburner
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 13, 2019
Habit: start, rehearse, refine, stack, unstack, fall off wagon, get on wagon
Process: start, inspect, complicate, simplify, pause, resume, rewind, redo, restart, slouch, hustle, bg, fg
You need 90% energy in processes that won’t terminate till you die, but aren’t habits or projects. Each also has an associated “system” that grows continuously over your lifetime, and ideally reaches perfection 1 minute before you die.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 12, 2019
There’s a family of interesting related arguments:
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 9, 2019
“You are not enough people” (Vonnegut theory of marital conflict)
“Reality has a surprising amount of detail” (John Salvatier theory of physical reality)
“Everything is harder than it looks” (David Wong theory of effort shock)
I’m in the non-apocalyptic camp of climate change believers. I don’t believe even the worst case will make the world uninhabitable. Let’s say that’s a 5% likelihood scenario of maybe 90% species loss and even 90% human population decline. But what do those numbers *mean*?
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 7, 2019
Actually, lemme try mapping the 8 metaphors
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 6, 2019
Mechanistic: GTD
Brain: BASB/PKM
Organism: Blitzkrieg model
Culture: Improv theater
Psychic prison: Waterfall
Instrument of domination: OKRs
Flux: Distributed+parallel computing
Political system: Agile
When someone reaches for the prefix “post” to describe the evolutionary future of X it means they are having trouble seeing how emerging technologies might transform the *mechanisms* of X but have more clarity on the content.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 2, 2019
Damn, my GTD game has completely fallen apart in the last couple of years. My workflow is a global quantum entangled state of things moving along. I’m more wave function than set of particles 😕
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) March 2, 2019
I need a quantum GTD where actions collapse work wave one schrodinger cat at a time
Do you want to be part of the problem or part of the other problem?
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) February 12, 2019
“When in doubt, choose to live” — Lu Tze in Thief of Time
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) February 12, 2019
Seriously, if we can’t make up words willy-nilly, or borrow them from random languages and underground emoji codes wtf did we even build the internet for? The whole point of the internet was to act as a complexifier of language 🤬
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) February 8, 2019
The crossword are probably the only mainstream puzzle format that requires a full-blown postrational civilizational OODA loop running in your head. You can solve sudokus with pure rationality, but crosswords require you to understand both the zeitgeist, and others’ maps of it.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) January 31, 2019
There’s really only 4 ways to connect with someone of a culture/ideology you hate at an intellectual level (none guaranteed):
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) January 23, 2019
1. Develop a taste for their food
2. Develop a taste for their music/cultural output
3. Weather a mortal crisis with them
4. Sleep with them
Slowly, slowly, oh mind
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) January 7, 2019
Slowly everything unfolds
The gardener might well flood the garden
But the fruit will only ripen in its season
— Kabir
Trying something inspired by @jeremyzilar idea of unfollowing everybody and rebuilding deliberately.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) January 2, 2019
Mine is less extreme. I unfollowed almost all *except* current mutuals. So almost everybody in this ‘ground state’ is a mutual. Went from ~3k to ~770. Will build back slowly.
My kind of thinking “infects” healthy thinking like a parasite that won’t go away 😎
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 30, 2018
All 4 horsepeople troll rationality with a specific trolling aesthetic. Pararational trolling is being annoying in juvenile way. Meta is “owning” and post is “trivializing”. Infra is “confusing”
Post-capitalism challenge is to invent a way to do 3 things at once:
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 25, 2018
a) keep pace of economic life as fast as it needs to be via consumption automation
b) use the automation to make it sustainable environmentally
c) decouple pace of human life from pace of economic engines
Always-already Great Weirding
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) December 21, 2018
“This is broken”
“This is how it’s supposed to work”
“This is a terrible bug”
“It’s actually a feature!”
“This is a crisis!”
“This has been the plan all along”
“This isn’t normal”
“Actually it’s always been this way, you just didn’t notice.”
Idea for adversarial press briefings: reporters type in questions that go on a leaderboard, and vote on what they want answered. Top question goes first. Questions stay on top till majority marks them ‘answered’. Nice and decorous.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 16, 2018
Few leaders would have the courage for this.
Saving the world is a job for professionals
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) November 11, 2018
Making it worth saving is a pastime for amateurs
The problem is all the damn amateurish professionals and professional amateurs.
They go around all mixed up, threatening the world AND trashing it, so it’s not worth saving from them
Golden Rule of Mediocrity Orientation: You can always create slack and room to maneuver by lowering your standards somewhere
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 3, 2018
If your thing can’t provide at least half the value when half-assed, (or worse: actually makes things worse if applied with less than 100% conscientiousness), it is actually a liability. Almost no frameworks and methodologies more complex than 2x2s pass this test.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 2, 2018
Universal Basic Income = Universal Basic Insanity: everybody is allowed a basic life budget for being crazy. For most people, solving for “good life” works out to less than 100% sanity. It is insane to want everybody to be 100% sane.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 1, 2018
1980s: Think global, act local
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) September 9, 2018
2010s: Think global, act spooky*
*ly at a distance through entanglements
Civilization: a stage of evolution that begins when a species first makes a pocket out of some kind of dough, stuffs it with some sort of filling and deep fries or bakes it. That’s the first step away from barbarism. pic.twitter.com/FvEVBJsVQR
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) August 27, 2018