Slack comes from surplus. Many of the people I know who created illegible environments where people could explore and slow down, spent “winnings” from other domains to create those spaces. And to get those winnings, they usually had to be legible, to create, or to take from others (unfortunately). Everyone competes and builds and takes, then someone accumulates resources. Their team gets some slack, a pizza party, and a few trust fund kids. People trust each other, because they can and because they have enough. The circle of life.
Institutional measurement and optimization is one of those things which which is easy to critique but hard to suggest concrete improvements to. For example, what should EA do? Not measure, strive, or optimize? No, they must. They haven’t won. And if they’re going to measure, better to measure well. Measurement is the act of making something legible that was illegible before, to count something in the tally which you were blind to previously. The core of the complaint about legibility is that there are parts of us which aren’t legible but which we care about nonetheless. If only we could put their worth on the page too. The thing we all hate is when folks measure what they can, and assume the rest is irrelevant.
The classic way out of a competition or low trust environment is through, to create and win, and build a new environment. What that means for the world I suppose is that it’s important to fight hard for groups who will spend their winnings on something you like.
I feel very uneasy about all this, but it feels like the “god of everything else” analogue to OP’s moloch.
I mostly agree with both of you, but I’ve known about Moloch, slack and legibility for a while now, and wrote my comment in spite of that, so to speak.
The problem with building your own environment is that you’re still inside the old environment. It’s difficult to escape from society and live in the wild because there’s so little wild anymore. You can’t buy your own island and make your own rules on there. Anything you can create, really, is built with bricks manufactured by other people, and they make sure that their bricks have microphones and backdoors, and that you’re only really paying for a subscription to the bricks.
Life likes flexibility, but I think we’re building brittle systems inside which little movement is tolerated.
Measurement is the act of making something legible that was illegible before, to count something in the tally which you were blind to previously
What if they’re not discovering something old, but rather creating something new? Lets say somebody scammed me, but I was happy about the trade. It would only be the moment somebody else tells me “you got scammed” that I’d feel hurt about it. And even if I didn’t get scammed, I’d still suffer if somebody told me I had been. If it’s not things which harm us, but the idea of them, which suggests that interpreting something as bad makes it so. So actions that you’re doing now, which are currently completely harmless, might be interpreted as harmful in the future by one of the systems you’re embedded within.
And what if you love your son with a magnitude of 514 and your daughter with a magnitude of 410? Would you even want to know?
Finally, Revenge porn, doxing, and looking into peoples bedroom windows are all illegal, but they’re just the transfering of true information. This suggests that unlimited collection of information is not a strictly good thing, and this is still not a very common realization. By the way, the arguments I use here are very different from my previous comment, so reading one of them will not help much in understanding the other
Slack comes from surplus. Many of the people I know who created illegible environments where people could explore and slow down, spent “winnings” from other domains to create those spaces. And to get those winnings, they usually had to be legible, to create, or to take from others (unfortunately). Everyone competes and builds and takes, then someone accumulates resources. Their team gets some slack, a pizza party, and a few trust fund kids. People trust each other, because they can and because they have enough. The circle of life.
Institutional measurement and optimization is one of those things which which is easy to critique but hard to suggest concrete improvements to. For example, what should EA do? Not measure, strive, or optimize? No, they must. They haven’t won. And if they’re going to measure, better to measure well. Measurement is the act of making something legible that was illegible before, to count something in the tally which you were blind to previously. The core of the complaint about legibility is that there are parts of us which aren’t legible but which we care about nonetheless. If only we could put their worth on the page too. The thing we all hate is when folks measure what they can, and assume the rest is irrelevant.
The classic way out of a competition or low trust environment is through, to create and win, and build a new environment. What that means for the world I suppose is that it’s important to fight hard for groups who will spend their winnings on something you like.
I feel very uneasy about all this, but it feels like the “god of everything else” analogue to OP’s moloch.
I mostly agree with both of you, but I’ve known about Moloch, slack and legibility for a while now, and wrote my comment in spite of that, so to speak.
The problem with building your own environment is that you’re still inside the old environment. It’s difficult to escape from society and live in the wild because there’s so little wild anymore. You can’t buy your own island and make your own rules on there. Anything you can create, really, is built with bricks manufactured by other people, and they make sure that their bricks have microphones and backdoors, and that you’re only really paying for a subscription to the bricks.
Life likes flexibility, but I think we’re building brittle systems inside which little movement is tolerated.
What if they’re not discovering something old, but rather creating something new? Lets say somebody scammed me, but I was happy about the trade. It would only be the moment somebody else tells me “you got scammed” that I’d feel hurt about it. And even if I didn’t get scammed, I’d still suffer if somebody told me I had been. If it’s not things which harm us, but the idea of them, which suggests that interpreting something as bad makes it so. So actions that you’re doing now, which are currently completely harmless, might be interpreted as harmful in the future by one of the systems you’re embedded within.
And what if you love your son with a magnitude of 514 and your daughter with a magnitude of 410? Would you even want to know?
Finally, Revenge porn, doxing, and looking into peoples bedroom windows are all illegal, but they’re just the transfering of true information. This suggests that unlimited collection of information is not a strictly good thing, and this is still not a very common realization. By the way, the arguments I use here are very different from my previous comment, so reading one of them will not help much in understanding the other