Content warning: Stuff that I would prefer to have no opinion upon if that were an option. Culture wars. Figure 1 An interesting question in movement design is how much to embody the change you wish to see in the world in your pursuit of it. Examples If your movement advocates 8-hour workdays, should you work 8-hour days to build it? If you are relentlessly corporate in your pursuit of communism, will you have trouble recruiting cadre? Was it an acceptable trade-off for communism that the Bo...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Figure 1 One of the problems of the modern world is that it is so deep, specialised, and complicated that it is difficult hard to tell real progress in some specialised areas from bullshit. This is a problem in science, but I think, everywhere that anything complicated is happening This leads to the deeper problem that it is easier to seem good than to be good. Sometimes, e.g. art, these can be nearly the same thing. But sometimes, with the production of material goods or the production of ...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Figure 1 A mess of links about the state and its capacity to do things, incorporating institutions, social licence and the like. Participatory budgeting, participatory resource management, lack thereof. Practically speaking, it seems that most citizens would kinda like the state to invest in maintaining a society that was not a crumbling pit of poverty awash in disease and toxic waste and ruled over by robber barons. However, given that they don’t trust the state to get anything right, the...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises
Figure 1 On whether we make things, or allow them to evolve. I thought I first read about this in a passage from Hayek, but I can no longer find it. The idea was that we model ourselves as having more agency than we do. So, imagine the most fundamental unit of human scientific endeavour, the laboratory experiment: Say a scientist wishes to measure the boiling point of water. They might describe the steps in the experiment: pouring water into a test tube, heating it with a bunsen burner, watc...| The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises