"Give a high-agency person better tools, and they become dramatically more powerful. Give a low-agency person the same tools, and they mostly become better at producing polished inertia"
Alex Alexakis@alexalexakis
English
John Raptis
1.7K posts
John Raptis
@JohnRaptisM
Software Engineer | Creator of https://t.co/aslAyEeOBA | Writing on Substack: https://t.co/HNERLPM3eW
Thessaloniki Katılım Temmuz 2016
253 Takip Edilen255 Takipçiler
Failure is poison, but you can turn it into remedy if you learn from it.
Blaming others for your failure, makes it 10x more poisonous and 20x harder to learn from in the long run.
With enough remedy in reserve, you can teach meaningfully.
Life is essentially the endless process of turning poison into remedy.
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I have a similar view.
My requirements for following someone are:
1. intelligent and self reflective
2. competent and incisive
3. high agency and action oriented
As long as you hold these traits, I'd actually prefer you to disagree with me on everything else, as that will help us both to improve our map of reality.
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@signulll Probably why some people feel exhausted with social interaction after a while. They are maxing out their tokens to understand the other person and wait for their usage limit to reset and reprocess the conversation later.
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the reason why emotional intelligence is extremely rare is simply cuz it is expensive.
actually modeling another person’s internal state in real time is computationally brutal.. it requires suppressing your own frame, running a parallel simulation, & updating continuously.
the “inference costs” of eq in humans are likely much higher than the most expensive ai model in existence today.
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The fastest way to undermine a child's thinking is to praise them for the right answer.
When you say Good job, you are training your child to think about your approval. You are training them to perform for you.
A Socratic parent asks: Why do you think that? They do not announce whether the answer is correct. They ask follow-up questions. They present evidence that contradicts the claim. They create the conditions for the child to discover the weakness in their own reasoning.
Getting a child to pause and think is the entire victory.
In a conventional classroom, Good job means compliance with the teacher's version of knowledge. In a Socratic environment, independent judgment is the goal.
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@JohnRaptisM @SwipeWright you think these people were pushed headlong into experimentation by AI-generated muzak?
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FINALLY (!) a new band an old Primus junkie like me can enjoy. Their rapid growth in popularity since debuting a month ago makes me think the kids will be all right!
Angine de Poitrine
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Bands who experimented heavily always existed but they were underground and had limited exposure. The following years AI will generate so much slop—similar to what you hear in supermarkets and airports— that I totally see them going mainstream and people going crazy about it.
John Raptis@JohnRaptisM
One positive aspect of AI generated music is that it pushes creativity and experimentation, and we get things like this. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. Similar to when photography was first introduced. There was no point painting a tree or fruit anymore when you can just take a picture of it in one second. So as a result we got impressionism/cubism/etc
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One positive aspect of AI generated music is that it pushes creativity and experimentation, and we get things like this. Whether you like it or not is beside the point.
Similar to when photography was first introduced. There was no point painting a tree or fruit anymore when you can just take a picture of it in one second. So as a result we got impressionism/cubism/etc
Colin Wright@SwipeWright
FINALLY (!) a new band an old Primus junkie like me can enjoy. Their rapid growth in popularity since debuting a month ago makes me think the kids will be all right! Angine de Poitrine
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@Nikos_17 Some also infer that you become a conservative just because you have something to protect — like having kids, etc. I think this is lazy thinking. Why does one assume you become more stagnant when you have something to protect? It might as well be the fuel for your idealism.
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A usual reply I get when sharing my political journey:
‘If you're not a leftist when you're young, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative when you're old, you have no brain’.
I hate this quote. Every part of it.
Everything wrong with politics is there:
1) why is the Left the only side viewed as idealistic?
Because its opponents have indeed zero idealism
(except some quasi-fascists - not all idealism is good).
Because classical liberalism is seen as ‘compromise’
and boring GDP graphs.
Because no one (minus maybe 10 people)
can make a MORAL and inspiring case for liberty.
2) Why is the alternative to being a leftist being a ‘conservative’?
Screw that. The Left are the real stagnation-seekers.
I want Maglev trains, life expectancy to 500, terraforming Mars.
They want to ban plastic straws.
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John Raptis retweetledi
"If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever."
—Thomas Aquinas
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John Raptis retweetledi
John Raptis@JohnRaptisM
@PeterMcCormack @mattwridley To be honest I've met socialists who are extremely intelligent. Their issue is that they over-moralize everything which clouds their thinking and their understanding of econ. It blocks their reasoning so much that they prefer forced equality even if it means being unfree.
QME
@RockChartrand I genuinely don't understand how someone can be a Marxist after over a century of overwhelming data that it is fails everywhere and always.
It's like someone telling me they're a flat-earther. I assume something is wrong with their brain.
Chandler, AZ 🇺🇸 English
Marxists have this pattern where they love to assert things that they think sound good despite not having the slightest clue of what theyre talking about. That’s why its always asserted and never explained and why their critics are never refuted but simply insulted or called liars without being able to identify the lie.
Midwestern Marx@MidwesternMarx
Marxist economics is the only truly scientific school of political economy in 2026.
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I call this "the blessing of a derangement syndrome". It reveals broken minds at scale, piercing through credentials and intellect. A gift to society to sort out real players.
Max@minordissent
How someone feels about Elon and Trump is the best NPC filter I know of. If they can't acknowledge that Trump is a world class persuader or that Elon is a world class engineer/businessman, they do not have a fully functioning pre frontal cortex.
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@minordissent I call this "the blessing of a derangement syndrome". It reveals broken minds at scale, piercing through credentials and intellect. A gift to society to sort out real players.
English
How someone feels about Elon and Trump is the best NPC filter I know of. If they can't acknowledge that Trump is a world class persuader or that Elon is a world class engineer/businessman, they do not have a fully functioning pre frontal cortex.
Arthur MacWaters@ArthurMacwaters
i genuinely don't understand how anyone hates Elon the night before flight 4, he was vomiting with stomach ulcers from the stress of crashes, with both SpaceX and Tesla on the brink of bankruptcy he launched it anyway, when 99.9999% of people would've quit. that's bravery. and it reached orbit. now, that same company will have the largest IPO in history. absolutely one of the most inspiring stories
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Apparently I'm a billionaire shill,
and an Israeli embassy asset.
But I think my checks are getting lost in the mail.
So, for my handlers & anyone else who actually wants to help, I have a new website: Nikos.org
Pass it to your favorite oligarch, or Mossad agent.
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@signulll Rumination is the infinite loop that you keep refreshing hoping it will get resolved. Introspection is the post mortem you write after an escalation.
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ultimately it’s rumination that will haunt you. introspection doesn’t if you do it right.
i think of introspection as game tape. you watch once, extract the signal, & close the tab. whereas rumination is the same clip on loop w/ no new information being processed. it’s reexperiencing dressed up as reflection.
you should treat the past as a read only database. you query it, get your answer, & then gtfo. i do sometimes wish there was an explicit mechanic in the human mind to effectively hit “archive”. i have personally been on a treadmill here. there is a lot more here to dig w.r.t. to modern therapy culture which is effectively designed to dig deep as far as possible indefinitely & often with a lack of clear purpose.
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John Raptis retweetledi
@stepfanie We can eliminate all unemployment around the world in just one night. After we do this everyone will be guaranteed a job for decades to come. It is so simple.
Ban electricity
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You know someone has no arguments when their main metric is how many jobs are lost. Job loss is a signal that calls for adaptation, not some fixed pie that needs to be preserved.
John Raptis@JohnRaptisM
@stepfanie We can eliminate all unemployment around the world in just one night. After we do this everyone will be guaranteed a job for decades to come. It is so simple. Ban electricity
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