Michael Elling

@molly0xFFF 1/ to quote Herzog, "everyone for themselves and God against all." When will people realize that federation doesn't work without an economic model of incentives and disincentives that promote interoperability, sharing, quality, redistribution of wealth, universal access, etc...

@Marian_L_Tupy If capitalism is so great why are we $40 trillion in debt?

"My students are embracing democratic socialism because they’ve never been taught how capitalism works." wsj.com/opinion/free-e…

@chaykak @NewYorker Born through grift in a winner takes all world. What could possibly go wrong?

new @NewYorker column: the AI industry's catastrophic messaging problems, the paradoxes of commercial hype and real-world danger

@GaryMarcus @Kasparov63 Born through grift in a winner takes all world. What could possibly go wrong?

Generative AI in nutshell: "If the technology is as formidable as the [tech CEO's] claim, then they could be leading us toward existential disaster; if the technology proves less transformative, and thus less valuable than the hype suggests, then they are merely setting us up for global economic disaster." --@chaykak in The New Yorker

@robin_j_brooks @IlvesToomas Due to network effects Germany is still advantaged as the larger actor.

Italy and Spain are free-riding on the rest of Europe in the defense of Ukraine. What permits this is the Euro, which allows them to claim they're solvent, but when a real shock hits they have no cash to spend. This pretense has to end. It weakens Europe. robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/why-germany-…

@alvinfoo Greek philosophers didn't understand network effects, which in turn govern all of humanity's socio-economic and political institutions. Now that we understand better we need to build incentive systems that align with those in nature.

Why Socrates hated Democracy? I got to say I agree with Socrates. Democracy don’t make sense looking at it from his perspective. What do you think?

@brockm Open, permissionless, anonymous, and settlement -free (OPAS). No economic stack adjacent to the protocol stack. No incentives or disincentives. No guardrails. Just 1 grift after another: Internet 1.0, 2.0, Social Media, Crypto, and,now, AI. All grifts.

My critique of the cypherpunks. notesfromthecircus.com/p/show-your-fa…

@craignewmark @samhaselby What we now know to be true is that unchecked global digital networked ecosystems result in monopoly or total destruction of competitive markets. Look at LLM's in their winner takes all fight already causing enormous waste in power consumption and rising energy costs.

Now and then I'll hear someone say that craigslist killed local newspapers, never with any evidence. I try and address it with actual evidence, never with much success. The professionals at Poynter wrote up the facts: poynter.org/business-work/…

@craignewmark @samhaselby The nerds thought they were virtuous, but they were really just grifters without really knowing it.

@craignewmark @samhaselby Craigslist was part of a big grift that began with Internet 1.0 (text, pics), then Internet 2.0 (search, video), then social media (privacy), then crypto (money) and, now, AI (everything). Along the way a lot of good was created, but a lot of harm, seen and unseen, occurred.

@craignewmark @samhaselby The root cause of disruption for many industries was an open, permissionless, anonymous, and settlement-free (OPAS) networked ecosystem. In other words a technology stack without an economic stack providing incentives and disincentives. Another definition is a big grift.

@craignewmark @samhaselby News still has not understood impact of internet, social media, and now AI. They could have federated their own Craigslist. But even today most on both sides don't understand how to do that at scale that is sustainable and generative.

@captgouda24 Our diseases now are virtual, not physical. But there are cures.

Cholera has been known to the world since 1817. When it swept through Europe, it would commonly kill half the people it infected. It didn’t have to be this way, though. We are able to cut mortality by at least an order of magnitude by simply drinking water, salt, and and sugar. Yet, these treatments were not used commonly until the 1970s. Why? Why did it take so long for us to treat it? Cholera, of course, existed before 1817. It is caused by the Vibrio cholerae bacteria, which lives in the water. When it is not transmitted from human to human, it can reproduce in the wild, but it prefers to reproduce wildly in humans, where it is spread by fecal matter getting into drinking water. It resided in the Ganges River, and was kept local by the slow speed of transportation, which kept anyone from traveling far enough to spread it to new areas. Cholera affects the human by binding to the epithelium which line the walls of the intestine, and convincing it to put chloride ions into the lumen, which is just the central tube of the intestine. By osmosis, water follows. People will lose 10 to 20 liters of water a day, and ultimately die from dehydration. Unlike with Shigella or Salmonella, this is not due to inflammation. The person is indeed capable of absorbing water and nutrients, they are simply excreting it so fast that they die anyway. This suggests a pretty simple cure, then – just drink water. And it is indeed the case that you can outdrink it, with the caveat that you also need a small amount of sugar and salts. The standard treatment is oral rehydration therapy, which is just water with salt, sugar, potassium, and some other salts mixed in. The sugar is there for absorption, not for nutrients – skipping over the chemistry, there is a method of transporting things into the body that your body has that the cholera toxin does not touch, bringing one glucose molecule and two sodium ions with. Again by osmosis, you draw water back in. Some early physicians, like Thomas Latta, recognized that dehydration was the proximate cause of the death, and started work on using saline drips administered intravenously to treat patients. However, not getting the salt ratio right, there was not a marked improvement in mortality in the long run (though there were some promising signs). Intravenous treatment was used again in the 1900s, but it was not particularly effective. It was not until 1968 that the discovery that a small amount of glucose (not too much!) was a catalyst of absorption was made. It got its test in Bengal. Recall that the Bangladeshi War of Independence was in this year, and millions of refugees fled the barbaric conduct of the war by the Pakistani military. Dilip Mahalanabis, a physician in Calcutta, ordered that the treatment be given orally instead of by IV when supplies ran out. 3.6% of patients died. 30% of them would have died without treatment. All told, it took 150 years for people to realize that you could cut the risk of death from cholera by a factor of 10 simply with a liter of water, half a teaspoon of salt, and six teaspoons of sugar. It has saved somewhere around 54 million lives. It is for this reason that I am so optimistic about the world. It is possible for the most incredible improvements to be totally overlooked by people, or simply be never tested. We would have profited so much to have had various combinations of household substances tested out on people during past epidemics; perhaps someone would have stumbled across the right solution, without needing to know anything of why it worked. Explicitly testing things gives us meaningful information about the world. We quite simply do not spend enough on research. It is also for this reason that I am so hopeful about the role of development economists. I have argued about this with people before; see, for instance, the point of view espoused by Professor Vincent Geloso in the linked tweets below. The economist can simply be a consultant, a person equipped with a set of tools to diagnose what is not working right and propose implementable solutions. I think that experts – or actually just really smart people trying earnestly to make the world better – do indeed improve things. On the margin, we should be more arrogant, and more imperialistic, and we should not endorse the view that we cannot know better. x.com/VincentGeloso/… x.com/VincentGeloso/…

@JamesLucasIT Unintended (but easily forseen) consequnce of numerous technical advancements: cars, screens, networks, food growing/production/storage/distribution among the chief culprits.

This is a New York City newsstand in the 1930s Genuine question: why no overweight people?

@SenSanders @brockm Internet 1.0 (big grift) begat Internet 2.0 (big grift) begat Social Media (big grift) begat crypto (big grift) begat, you got it, AI (big grift). See a pattern?

I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.

@CNN @IlvesToomas It's just getting our body adapted to confined environments in space as our body becomes uninhabitable.

As humans burn fossil fuels and pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are heating up the planet. New research finds there is another alarming impact of this climate pollution: it may be changing the chemistry of our blood. cnn.it/4bxhCwR

@InfraThesis @aakashgupta Quantity wins over quality. That's not to say quality doesn't exist, but these commenting systems are flawed. In fact, there is no good commenting system or 2-way engagement out there, imo.

@aakashgupta "the model wouldn't be broken. it would be accurately reflecting what 52 million commenters actually believe." this is the cleanest explanation of training data bias i've seen. the model isn't wrong. the dataset is just reddit.

50% of all relationship advice on Reddit is “leave.” 15 years of data, 52 million comments, and the trend line only goes one direction. A researcher filtered r/relationship_advice down to 1,166,592 quality comments and tracked what people actually recommend. In 2010, “End Relationship” sat around 30%. By 2025, it’s approaching 50%. “Communicate” dropped from 22% to 14%. “Compromise” collapsed from 7% to 3%. “Give Space” fell from 25% to 13%. Every category that requires patience lost ground every single year. The one category growing faster than “leave” is “Seek Therapy,” which went from 1% to 6%. The subreddit is slowly learning to say “this is above my pay grade.” Train a model on this dataset and it would absolutely tell people to break up. The training data is 50% “leave” and climbing. The model wouldn’t be broken. It would be accurately reflecting what 52 million commenters actually believe about your relationship. A 50% prior that you should leave, a 14% prior that you should talk about it, and a 6% prior that you need a professional. That’s not LLM psychosis. That’s the median human opinion on your relationship, backed by the largest advice dataset ever assembled.

@samhaselby The internet (narrow and broadband phases) was a grift followed by social media (fueled by 7x24 wireless), followed by crypto (fueled by gaming) all leading to the AI grift. There's the pattern. The latter 2 built by those who grew up in a trustless world of the first 2.

I don't think the dotcom and housing bubbles were also millenarian cults.

@captgouda24 Incentives and disincentives should follow power laws.

This is totally fine. If they pay their tickets, they have bought the right to speed.

@hedgehogreview @TheAnnaGat If we view religions as just another (flawed) institutional framework of humanity (aka network), then violence against and formed from within is better understood.

Out from the paywall: Many secular projects were animated by what historian Eugene McCarraher would call a kind of misenchantment: a sacralization of the political, writes Kyle Edward Williams. hedgehogreview.com/issues/place-a…

@lhfang @samhaselby Thanks to the open, settlement-free, permissionless, and anonymous internet. Maybe we need to rethink things.

The media market dynamics have never been so bad. Online influencers can lie over and over again and get paid millions via views on YouTube, TikTok and X spinning culture war. Responsible journalists carefully reporting the facts and fixing mistakes get laid off. It’s awful.