Friday, December 09, 2022

If you want a question answered on the Internet, post a wrong answer first

If you want a question answered on the Internet, post a wrong answer first. 


If you want to be made a troublemaker just say what you mean at work. Where leaders are vindictive. They never forgive men or women who challenge them because they believe they should be able to act with impunity 


We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion Wired

Wired: “Elon Musk’s platform may be hell, but it’s also where huge amounts of reputational and social wealth are invested. All of that is in peril…But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts.  It’s easy to calculate Twitter’s economic value as a company: That’s underpinned by reported ad revenue, $4.51 billion last year (and plummeting fast). But there’s a far, far vaster realm beyond that, what an economist might call the secondary value of Twitter. That encompasses the cash people make out of connections or prestige they develop on Twitter, but also the intangible wealth now vested in its communities and in the sense it offers to people of having a place in the world. That human currency cannot just be ported over, unchanged, to Mastodon. There are whole nations whose political discourse occurs mainly on Twitter. The amount of reputational and social wealth that stands to be lost if Twitter collapses is astounding. Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world’s biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured…”


Enough is Enough: How Do You Know When It’s Safe to Stop Researching Case Law? Serena Wellen – Law Next


Serena Wellen – Law Next: “…Researching complex legal issues can easily take 10 to 15 hours or more per matter, especially when you factor in the high volume of search results, the review of irrelevant documents, and the fear of missing relevant ones. Because one can’t be 100% certain that there isn’t a more relevant or authoritative case law citation or other relevant document waiting to be found, attorneys oftentimes struggle to know whether their research has exhausted all avenues. Fortunately, next-generation legal research tools address these pervasive pain points by reducing the abyss of information that attorneys must wade through for every matter and making searching easier and more intuitive…”



Robot Landlords Are Buying Up Houses Vice


Did physicists create a wormhole in a quantum computer? Nature


Strange coincidences: Are they fluke events or acts of God? Los Angeles Times. “Senseless, accidental if you believe in accidents.” –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow


Book Review: An Unflinching Critique of the Eugenics Movement

In “Control,” geneticist Adam Rutherford grapples with the dark history of eugenics and now its engineered implementation


Which condiments or sauces are worth being obsessed with?


Why life on Titan is such an important question


The House of Representatives is making its first film ever, on economic inequality


What would Rene Girard say?  (Couples with the same name, WSJ)

 Are you a brokenist?  And is there a category “Straussian non-brokenist”?