tag > Ideas
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Samim’s Law of Diminished Experience:
The quantity of photos one takes (an attempt to save a tiny sliver of the present experience for later replay) is inversely correlated with the quality of the present moment experience.
Example: The more you look at your phone, the less you'll experience the actual sunset.
Discussion around this law can be found in this thread:
https://twitter.com/samim/status/990554137661079553Thanks to Greg Lloyd for naming the law & everyone who made suggestions.
Related links, recommended by the community:
"Take a Picture, You'll Enjoy It More - Photographing experiences usually increases positive feelings about them, study says": http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/06/picture-enjoy.aspx << Notice this study speaks only about "enjoyment", nevertheless fascinating.
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A conundrum of our times: To solve many of the pressing global problems, we ought to do *less*, not *more*.
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When dealing with powerful technologies (ML, Blockchain, Psychedelics, etc.) there tends to be the "Jesus Effect": Newcomers that just discovered the tech think its real magic & start to act like Jesus for a while. This is dangerous & should be avoided.
"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." - Abraham Maslow, The psychology of science
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A strategy how to make computational creativity system outputs much better:
Give bots the ability to spend real-world money.- Generative Music Bot? Let it buy new samples.
- Generative Design Bot? Let it buy new fonts.
- Generative Journalist Bot? Let it hire mechanical turkers.While this strategy might seems like a "hack" from a "pure", academic computational creativity perspective - it is precisely such hacks that will make generative system outputs become "good enough" across many creative disciplines in the near term.
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The older i get, the more i respect people that answer questions with "maybe" or "i don't know".
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You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends. - Robert Anton Wilson
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George Orwell said “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” Yet this Yugoslavian proverb is even more succinct: “Tell the truth, then run.”
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The hardest thing about being honest, is knowing your own truth.
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Self driving cars are only 5% as exciting as the vision of cities with out any cars at all.
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Palo-Alto Syndrome: "feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of abuse or hostage-taking by a user towards a giant corporation".
Inspired by the well documented "Stockholm Syndrome". #Ideas
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ClimateChange is happening precisely *because* of our modus operandi (science > technology > industry > capitalism), not despite it. Think this through deeply, before asking for more of the same.
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"The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people"
- Karl Marx -
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations" - George Orwell
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Thoughts on Botnets and Creativity
Today, Botnets impact almost every aspect of human life. Promoting products, providing support, creating and distributing entertainment, and even winning national elections - all have become unthinkable without Botnets. They are a deeply transformative, yet silent technology.
A realistic solution to the rapidly exploding challenges related to Botnets (fake-news/social engineering/spam/pressures on human economic-systems/etc.) can't be more top-down regulation, censorship and control systems, developed and maintained by giant corporations, post-democratic governments and armies of shadowy contractors - all operating out of reach of effective public controls. As the surface for abuse of such systems is close to infinite, predictably the outcomes will be much worse than the original "evil" they pretend to combat.
Instead, I suggest making the tools and knowledge needed to create Botnets widely available to the creative class - and heavily investing in public education and the establishment of global efficacy standards. The resulting scenario will be equally chaotic and dangerous, but at least more fun, inclusive and transparent. To illustrate this, contemplate the following idea: "Brand celebrity endorsements, powered by generative deepfakes". Clearly, a botnet carrying out such a campaign at scale would be deeply disruptive (or deadly) for the advertising industry.
Beyond fear, there is hope - and so I leave you with the following prediction:
Botnets will be the quintessential art-form of the 2020s.
