James Piereson on the history of Conservative/Libertarian philanthropy. (more)

Rusty Guinn: Knowledge Takes the Sword Away. It is the most powerful justification we humans have for signing on to corruption – that it serves a greater truth. And whether you believe in it or not, the “greater truth” of a news media and social media industry hopelessly derisive toward political conservatives is absolutely one of the reasons the election of Trump was able to break us. (more)

see (2019-05-31) Strickler The Dark Forest Theory Of The Internet

Peer production (also known as mass collaboration[citation needed]) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the labor of many people is coordinated towards a shared outcome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_production (more)

Portfolio site created by Scott Belsky. 2010-09-24-BelskyActionMethod https://www.behance.net/ (more)

Alan Kay on the history and where it went awry. The three largest intertwined visions of the computer future we were committed to, all burst into view in 1962: Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect”, and JCR Licklider’s “Man-machine Symbiosis” and “Intergalactic Network” via ARPA funding. This was all the same community. (more)

Tyler Cowen: Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort. (more)

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Tim Ferriss and Matt Mullenweg in Antarctica: Exploring Personal Fears, Bucket Lists, Facing Grief, Crafting Life Missions (Purpose), and Tim’s Best Penguin Impressions (#578). If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are living now? (more)

anon blogger

Clay Shirky on Nomic Game. Instead of looking for the places where game users are currently suing or fighting one another, forcing the owners of various virtual worlds to deal with these things one crisis at a time, I want to ask the question "What would happen if we wanted to build a world where we maximized the amount of user control? What would that look like?"... While real world political culture has the unfortunate effect of being either/or choices - uni-cameral or bi-cameral legislatures, president or prime minister, and so on - the online world offers us a degree of flexibility that allows us to model rather than theorize. Wonder what the difference is between forcing new citizens to have sponsors vs. dumping newbies into the world alone? Try it both ways and see how the results differ. This is really the argument for Nomic World, for making an environment as wholly owned and managed by and for the citizens as a real country - if we're going to preserve our political Freedom-s as we moved to virtual environments, we're going to need novel political and economic relations between the citizens and their environments. We need this, we can't get it from the real world. So we might as well start experimenting now, because it's going to take a long time to get good at it, and if we can enlist the players efforts, we'll learn more, much more, than if we leave the political questions in the hands of the owners and wizards.

aka Business Web? or unmanaged EcoSystem? (more)

Cory Doctorow book, started as "ThemePunks" serialization. 2005-10-11-DoctorowThemepunks ISBN:9780765312792 (more)

Tiago Forte system of highlighting+

Digital Garden hosting service based on the engine I built for myself, now available for you. http://flux.garden (more)

AppliedDivinityStudies: Is Time Working for or Against You? Finance is the most obvious example, but it’s not an isolated case. Lots of things grow and compound (compounding), far beyond the effort you put into them. (more)

Omicron variant, Delta variant, and the Need for More Accurate Hospitalization Data. We now have six laboratory studies showing a decreased ability of Omicron to infect lung tissue, providing cellular level support that Omicron is less likely to cause the dreaded viral pneumonia prompting admission for supplemental oxygen or mechanical ventilation. So why then is the U.S. seeing a surge in hospitalizations that looks poised to surpass last winter’s high? Possible reasons include the following: (more)

Scott Alexander: All In All, Another Brick In The Motte. One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do a very good job of it. So here is a clean new post on the concept that adds a couple of further thoughts to the original formulation. (more)

Due to a combination of high levels of immunity and the reduced severity of the Omicron variant has rendered COVID-19 less lethal than influenza (the flu) for the vast majority of people in England (more)

A covid-19 surge in Western Europe has U.S. bracing for another wave. Infectious-disease experts are closely watching the subvariant of omicron known as BA.2, which appears to be more transmissible than the original strain, BA.1, and is fueling the outbreak overseas. (more)

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J.C.R. or "Lick" was an American psychologist [1] and computer scientist considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history. He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style Interactive computing, and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer, with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. He did much to actually initiate all that through his funding of research which led to a great deal of it, including today's canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet... In 1960 his seminal paper on ManComputerSymbiosis foreshadowed interactive computing, and he went on to fund early efforts in time-sharing and application development, most notably the work of Douglas Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and created the famous On-Line System (NLS) where the computer mouse was invented. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider (more)