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Rules are a tool used to manage events at scale. If there weren't many things to attend to, then each situation could be examined individually and attended to based on the unique factors surrounding them.

One problem with rules is with precision. It's hard to set a square box with a precise area as a measure against which all square boxes are tested. Better precision means rules having unintended consequences.

If you decide that that people cannot put their finger 10cm in front of your face because it obstructs your vision, or more than 100cm in front of your face because that would cause some other kind of problem with some other thing, that leaves people with between 10cm and 100cm to put things in. The problem with that is that putting things between those distances probably causes some other problem you had not envisaged, but of course the rule has been made and you do not want to change it so soon after because you do not want to look like an idiot. So yeahhh, 'unintended consequences' are a big deal.


Another is that the more precise you try to be with rules, the more interesting you make beating them, without technically getting in trouble. Once you decide that people cannot put things less than 10cm to, and more than 100cm away from your face. It all becomes a game; you've just created new fun activity. People are absolutely going to constantly stick their hands between 10cm to and 100cm away at the weirdest angles, testing to see how to achieve the same thing you were trying to prevent — obstructing your face — without technically violating the rule(s).

Privacy is overrated. The problems with the discourse around privacy are framing¹ (cached meanings of words in the minds of the populace) and pre-conceived guilt, resulting in secrecy by the data-collecting party.

1. Two things:

(i) The regular use of words within certain contexts biases their meanings.

(ii) Deliberate framing: death tax vs inheritance tax, pro choice vs pro life, undocumented immigrants vs illegal aliens.

Surveillance by the state, and data collection by big orgs are means to information gathering. In the case of the state, to ensure security — of all kinds, and of all things within its territory. In the case of big organizations to (i) learn about the user so as to improve the product, and (ii), learn about the user to recommend better ads.

So, if the intentions are good, why is everyone wary of data collection by central organizations? The problem people have with constant surveillance or collection of data is creepiness, in three parts:

Why people think Ads are bad:

— The cached thought¹ that ads are bad.

The good thing is that a lot of people agree that the problems with development in different sub-Saharan African countries are very similar. Unlike some people who think institutions¹ are the primary problem with economic development in sub-saharan Africa, if you agree that culture² is the fundamental problem, then the culture needs to be evolved into something more desirable.

This is a consistently-updated list of the best things I read on the web. If any of these live links is ever dead, it is probably backed-up on ArchiveDotToday.

— In Plain Sight

— The Courageous Society

— The Problem With Lindy

There seems to be a contingent of young African people with a profound lack of understanding of how things work in the real world, who latch onto whatever new trend Bay Area libertarians think of as the new cool thing, as a platform on which African economies can bypass government control and begin to get things done. Crypto is a big example of this. Cc the vast array of crypto companies popping up across SSA.

EndSARS protesters in Nigeria shifted to accepting public donations via Bitcoin last October when the government instructed financial institutions to .

Listened to David Deutsch and found some of his comments particularly interesting.

There’s a text transcript here, audio-only here, and audio-visual

As the speed of light is to the physical universe, so is co-ordination to human societies.

It’s a scientific analogy that illustrates a sociological problem. Which itself is only part of a thread that traces trust to the natural chaos of the universe.

Trust is the foundation of co-ordination, which is a means to problem-solving.

Problem-solving is a natural necessity of human societies in the face of a fundamentally chaotic nature. Problem-solving is what allows for progress and development. Progress and development are not independently-existing entities. They only exist against natural chaos.

There is no such thing as ambition, what does exist is contentment/personal satisfaction. I have a theory about what determines a person’s ‘ambition’ as regards work they do. I don’t have a great description of it yet, but roughly:

What is referred to as ‘ambition’, how challenging work one does is, is only one part of several factors making up a total personal satisfaction of a person. I refer to total personal satisfaction as their sweet satisfaction zone (SSZ) which exists on a spectrum of satisfaction (SoS). Everyone’s SSZ, to which several factors contribute, determines an individual’s mental state in the long term.

Among the factors affecting where their SSZ lies on the SoS are things like the challenge of the work they do, their relationships with friends, their romantic relationship(s), their status in the hierarchy of their local community etc. Everyone requires different levels of satisfaction from each of these different factors depending on their personality, but each of these factors contribute to the SSZ.

When some people work on what seems ‘ambitious’ to some others, it may just be work that feels sufficiently challenging to them, as they require a huge amount of satisfaction from interesting and high-impact work to contribute to their SSZ. And when a person one thinks to be clever and capable of more works on what one thinks to be below their intellectual ability, it may be that how challenging work they do is doesn’t rank on factors they demand huge amounts of satisfaction from to make their SSZ. The are in fact personal satisfaction.

Apple could be the first of FAMGA to die. Die, in the same way Nokia and Blackberry are dead. The one thing Apple does is sell personal computing devices (and accessories to them), the unique and most valuable part of which is the OS.

There has been a continuous abstraction of things by the cloud, beginning with files.That, and the fact of cloud storage becoming a commodity has resulted in reasonable prediction by some people of the impending death of companies offering personal cloud storage as a service.