It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.
On the subject of careful attention, Good Writing is a Paul Graham post arguing that "writing that sounds good is more likely to be right." It's easy to think of counter-examples, but he says some interesting stuff. I would say it like this: If a writer cares about both readability and accuracy, then any wrangling with the text is likely to improve both. So if you wrangle with the text to make it flow better, you're likely to also find ways to make it more accurate, and vice versa.
On the subject of escaping from the frantic modern world, a Reddit comment, in a thread about weird stuff at sea, about a guy living on a tiny island:
This is the absolute middle of nowhere and there's a tiny coral island with no trees or vegetation just a fuck load of birds... and a cargo container next to a tent. The ship is hardly moving at this point and the captain calls out over a mega phone to see if anyone is there. After a minute a guy who's clean shaven but wearing clothes worn to rags and a deep tan wobbles out of the cargo container.
They ask if he needs help and he says he's good. He "had no food but dried fish and some water distilling thing." Related: Penn Engineers Discover a New Class of Materials That Passively Harvest Water from Air. The article incorrectly says it defies the laws of physics, but what it will eventually do is open up more remote areas for off-grid living.
]]>It's "the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn't right - but having no clear idea how to fix it," Harfoush tells me. "It's reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: 'What Pop-Tart are you?'"
For me, the most striking moment of the movie Zone Of Interest was the soccer broadcast, that right in the thick of WWII and the Holocaust, people were still playing, attending, and cheering for sports events like everything was normal. I think one of the things that's feeding Trump's popularity is a general disaffection with modernity, the sense that our whole way of living is rotten and needs to be knocked down. What's happening instead is that everything annoying about modern life is getting more annoying -- if you're lucky, and if you're unlucky you get disappeared.
One thing that I've learned already, just from the early stages of Trump, is not to judge Germans who didn't "do anything" to stop Hitler. Because there's absolutely nothing we can do. Peaceful protests are a nice way to feel solidarity with our neighbors, but Trump probably loves the attention, and if we do anything with tactical value, it will only serve as an excuse to strengthen authoritarianism. It's only a matter of time before ICE gets in a shootout and Trump suspends habeas corpus.
I continue to think it's a mistake to view Trumpism in moral terms. He and his movement have all the moral agency, all the self-awareness, and all the mechanical inevitability of a fire. It just burns everything that can be burned. Or it's like a rising tide. You can't shovel it back, you can only try to stay above it until it turns. The best case is that 2026 elections actually happen, Trump loses congress and fades away. The worst case is written all over history. One thing that makes me optimistic is that Cambodia and Rwanda are really nice countries now. America will get better, but first I expect it to get much, much worse, and the only thing we can do about it is to survive.
]]>People will say it's always been this way, but I disagree. What we're seeing is the end result of attentional decay caused by social media. Social media is a drug. Full stop. It was crafted in a lab to take advantage of human psychology and pull you in deeper and deeper. And once it has its hooks in you, it starts to fuck with your reasoning skills and push you towards radical and conspiratorial viewpoints. It does this in order to drive "engagement", which for social media companies translates to profit. That "engagement" takes the form of showing people upsetting and controversial content and making it appear organic. People think that what they're seeing is the truth of the world, when really they're being fed a very specific and radical view of the world by social media companies in order to drive up their profit. And this is all without even mentioning the ways that social media deteriorates people's attentional skills by giving them shorter and shorter forms of content with less deep analysis. When you train your brain on such shallow content, your critical thinking skills are going to start weakening.
So yeah. We're living in a world full of addicts right now and people only just seem to be coming to terms with it. Short form, highly controversial content is toxic to critical thinking skills.
]]>Increased idleness means, on the one hand, increased chance of survival, but it also gives humans idle time in which to engage in activities other than self-maintenance. It is in this idle time that humans can do as they wish, rather than as they must, and they can think, talk, and play - i.e. act as free moral agents. In Idle Theory, humans are seen as part-time free moral agents, only free to the extent that they are idle.
This is what happens when we treat public infrastructure like a tech platform... always on, low overhead, minimal headcount. My own diverted flight was just one minor data point in a much larger pattern of problems. The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly. Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures anymore.
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When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.
Two tangents from that post: Kayfabe is a word from pro wrestling, meaning the portrayal of staged events as real, which has become normal in the world of politics.
And an article about the psychology of the resentful right, Weak Men Create Hard Times:
Who goes out of their way to spend hours each day posting slurs on the internet? Who obsesses over harmless cultural artifacts like a silly TikTok dance? The guy who does this (and it's almost always a guy) is not someone who is succeeding in his own life.
What this article fails to understand is the insanity of the whole project of modernity, which is too big a subject for this post, but I'm not going to judge anyone for being a loser, where winning is about conforming to a human-made world that is going farther and farther from human nature. Trumpers aren't wrong to want a simpler world, they're just unable to imagine less complexity without more domination. The author quotes Francis Fukuyama:
]]>Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.