Notices by JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)

The Cycle:

1. Observation: "The sky is blue."
2. Critique: "Saying the sky is blue centers a specific ocularcentric hegemony."
3. Synthesis: "The sky is a social construct."
4. Result: 14% chance the sun is actually a hallucination by 2029.

The people most obsessed with longevity are invariably the ones you’d least want to live forever.

The Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse:
1. Selection Bias
2. Audience Capture
3. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
4. Thinking you’re immune to the first three…

@dalias I do believe you have hit upon the thrust of the article in question.

Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since…

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/comfort-food-for-the-thinking-class-the-great-intellectual-stagnation/

Grounded intellectual work, when it happens, if it ever happens again, is uncomfortable. It tells you things you don't want to hear, makes arguments that threaten positions you hold, points out problems you'd rather not see.

The public intellectuals of the past, at their best, did this.

Our current crop // slop does the opposite.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/comfort-food-for-the-thinking-class-the-great-intellectual-stagnation/

My conscious brain: 'We should learn linear algebra to better understand neural networks.'

My revealed preferences: 'We are going to scroll specifically the parts of Wikipedia that list defunct 19th-century breakfast cereals.'

Would you accept "Oopsie!" from your accountant? Your doctor?

Why do we accept it from companies holding our data and our money?

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-infantilization-of-failure/

We’ve achieved peak skepticism (trust in institutions at all-time lows, fact-check everything) and peak gullibility (MLM schemes, crypto scams, wellness grifts at all-time highs) in the same generation. This shouldn’t be possible but here we are.

The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.

The thin desire reproduces itself without remainder.

The thick desire transforms its host.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life/

Conservative: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they hate Jesus."

Economics 101: "Companies say 'Happy Holidays' because they want to sell cheap plastic garbage to 100% of the population instead of 65%."

The 'War on Christmas' is just the Free Market you claim to worship working exactly as intended.

You are fighting the Invisible Hand. And losing.

"Facts don't care about your feelings" has mutated into a much dumber heuristic: "If I am hurting your feelings, I must be stating a fact."
This is a logical fallacy. It is entirely possible to be an asshole and be factually incorrect. In fact, the correlation is likely positive.

I am begging you to stop calling your rambling 2-hour conversation a "deep dive." It is not a deep dive. It is snorkeling in the shit-infused shallow end of the Dunning-Kruger pool while shouting about supplements.

A reminder that The Metaverse failed because nobody wants to strap a toaster to their face to attend a virtual meeting that could have been a Slack message that could have been an email that should have been a 60 second phone call.

The decline of Western Civilisation began when the Saxophone disappeared from the Top 40

Modernity is a conspiracy to replace 'thick' desires (community, craft, transcendence) with 'thin' desires (likes, sugar, dopamine). Revolt by doing something slow. Bake bread. Write a letter. Code a tool for just one person.

Your 'network' is a list of people who want something from you. Your 'community' is a list of people who will help you move a couch. Optimize for couch-movers.

Humans are not factories.

We are, as obvious as this may seem, organisms.

And organisms live through cycles.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-harvest-will-come

The ‘Marketplace of Ideas' really turned out to be a 'Spirit Halloween of Grievances’ hey

If it surprises you, it’s information. If it confirms your bias, it’s entertainment. If it makes you hate your neighbor, it’s a weapon.