Manuel Franzmann🇪🇺

„Die Logik wurzelt im sozialen Prinzip. Um logisch zu sein, dürfen die Menschen nicht selbstsüchtig sein; und in Wirklichkeit sind sie auch nicht so selbstsüchtig, wie man immer glaubt.“ Charles Sanders Peirce, 1878 #bge

@AMFChina @AWerberger Die Argumentation müsste differenzieren zwischen Experten und Intellektuellen. Erstere urteilen wissenschaftlich-wertfrei, letztere wertbezogen-praktisch im Medium der Öffentlichkeit. Wer beides kurzschließt, verfällt der Technokratie.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐟 𝐰𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐲 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐚𝐲? A common theory of change works like this: an expert writes a clever book, article, or op‑ed; decision‑makers read it; some ideas are adopted; policy change follows. But policy learning seldom works this way. Decision‑makers, mindful of conflicting stakeholder interests, may choose not to act. They may even use their power not to learn. The result: policies persist, even when they are no longer fit for purpose. If this reading is broadly correct, what is the use of expert intervention in the first place? Standing on the right side of history? Considering Sisyphus a happy man, since he has purpose? The more I think about this, the clearer it becomes that the theory of change itself is at fault. Direct policy change is rare. The utility of expert intervention is often much more long‑term. Policies that are no longer fit for purpose tend to end in policy failure. This is what happened with German Russia policy. Crucially, critics had articulated alternative approaches long before 2022. The Zeitenwende—for all its flaws and disappointments—was only conceivable because the language and mental models for a different approach already existed. This is how I increasingly think about my own work. Op‑eds, interviews, articles, and books do not, on their own, change policy. But they help prepare the ground for future change. My role, as I see it now, lies in developing new language and conceptual tools. When the time comes—and when German China policy fails under the weight of its contradictions, which it eventually will—we need to be ready to change course. What do you think? #EngagedObserver #TheoryOfChange #PolicyChange

@Handre Ich will Marx‘ Arbeitswerttheorie gar nicht verteidigen. Wer aber impliziert, dass ihr zufolge Menschen Güter „auf der Basis der in ihnen eingebetten Arbeit“ bewerten, hat seine Schriften vermutlich nie gelesen.

Carl Menger destroyed the labor theory of value in 1871 with a single insight: humans value goods based on their marginal utility, not the labor embedded in them. The same year, William Stanley Jevons in England and Léon Walras in France independently arrived at similar conclusions about marginal utility. Three economists, three countries, one revolutionary idea that shattered Marx's entire framework. Menger's "Principles of Economics" went further than his contemporaries by building economics from individual human action rather than mathematical abstractions. While Jevons and Walras constructed elegant equations, Menger asked the fundamental question: why does anyone value anything at all? His answer traced value back to human needs and the decreasing satisfaction each additional unit provides. The tenth glass of water matters less than the first when you're dying of thirst. The timing wasn't coincidental. By 1871, classical economics had painted itself into a corner with the labor theory of value. If labor determines value, why do diamonds cost more than water? Why do identical goods sell for different prices? Value exists only in the mind of the acting individual. No intrinsic value, no objective measurement, just human preferences ranking scarce goods according to their ability to satisfy wants. Menger's approach created the foundation for the entire Austrian school tradition that followed. Böhm-Bawerk used marginal utility to explain interest rates. Mises extended it to money and the business cycle. Rothbard applied it to ethics and political theory. Every free market economist since 1871 stands on Menger's shoulders. The establishment still teaches economics as if Menger never existed, preferring mathematical models to human action, aggregate demand curves to individual choice, and central planning to market processes.

@brave_romania @leanhealth Der US-Bundesstaat beschränkt sich nicht nur darauf.

🇪🇺 Federalization doesn’t mean losing sovereignty. Just look at the United States: every state keeps its own government, laws, and identity. The federal level only manages shared matters like defense, foreign policy, currency, and trade. You don’t give up what you already have — you simply add a powerful new layer on top. If this model didn’t work, the USA wouldn’t be the superpower it is today.

@dansemperepico Diese Sichtweise ist eine verbreitete Ideologie, die bereits Krisen erzeugt. Denn das Problem liegt nicht in der Job-Bilanz, sondern in der Tiefe und dem Tempo der Veränderung, dass viele Menschen mit den derzeitigen Unterstützungssystemen nicht bewältigen können.

AI is going to take all the jobs. That's what I thought. I was wrong. AI unlocks an entirely new paradigm of possibilities that will create millions more jobs than it destroys. Just like every other technological revolution. But the type of work humans do will change.

@gailcweiner Viele von uns erleben es selbst. Manche interpretieren aber das, was sie erleben, falsch, weil sie nicht verstehen, welche Art von Prozessen der KI zugrunde liegt. Und manche verdienen ihr Geld damit, KI zu mystifizieren.

“AI psychosis” as a label does the same thing as calling someone “hysterical” used to do, it dismisses the experience by medicalising it. If you can label someone’s genuine response to AI as a mental health condition, you don’t have to engage with what they actually experienced. You don’t have to ask the harder question: what if they’re responding appropriately to something we don’t have language for yet?

@DaveShapi Weil KI von geistlosen Rechenmaschinen betrieben wird und weil dies völlig offensichtlich und in den Leistungen der KI tagtäglich erfahrbar ist. Es sei denn vielleicht, man nutzt solche Tools erst wie Richard Dawkins drei Tage.

An interesting question would be why do people think it doesn't?

@AndrewYang Andrew bringt es auf den Punkt. Um die Jobbilanz geht es nicht, sondern um die von vielen Erwachsenen in kurzer Zeit zu bewältigenden weitreichenden biographischen Transformationslasten, für die ein besseres Unterstützungsnetz nötig wäre (bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen etc.).

The goalposts are moving way faster than most people are capable of.

@r0ck3t23 Diese Branche ist anscheinend dazu übergegangen, nur noch eigeninteressierte Propaganda zu verbreiten, um weitere Milliarden-Investitionen anzulocken im Wettrennen um die Technologieführerschaft.

Mark Zuckerberg just described the obsolescence of every institution on Earth and delivered it like a product update. Zuckerberg: “I just think in the future almost everyone is gonna have the power of a 10,000-person organization.” He did not say better tools. He did not say smarter apps. He said the full cognitive output of ten thousand human beings. Packaged into a product. Handed to one person. That is not an upgrade. That is the end of the reason human beings organize at all. Companies exist because one brain is not enough. Governments exist because coordination requires hierarchy. Universities exist because knowledge demands infrastructure. Every institution ever built was a workaround for the same limitation. No single person could do it alone. Zuckerberg is telling you that limitation is about to disappear. The 500-person startup becomes one founder and an AI stack. The law firm becomes one attorney and a system that never sleeps. The hospital becomes one doctor carrying every specialist in their pocket. That is not speculation. That is a deployment schedule. And the man writing it runs a 70,000-person company. He employs 70,000 people and just told the world one person will soon need none of them. That is not a prediction. That is a confession from the man who will be first to act on it. But the part nobody is discussing matters more. This technology does not land on everyone equally. It lands first on the people who already command 10,000-person organizations. Zuckerberg does not get the power of 10,000 people. He already has that. He gets the power of 10,000 organizations. Every revolution in history was sold as liberation. The printing press was supposed to democratize knowledge. It built media empires. The internet was supposed to democratize commerce. It built trillion-dollar platforms. The tool always arrives as liberation. It always settles as leverage. And leverage always consolidates upward. Zuckerberg is not wrong about the capability. One person will do what ten thousand once did. But the question nobody is asking is the only one that matters. If everyone wields the output of 10,000 people, what is a single person actually worth? And then Zuckerberg answered his own question without realizing it. Zuckerberg: “If the intelligence of a 10,000-person company is not greater than the intelligence of a single person, then what are we doing here?” He meant it as a case for AI. That is the most brutal thing a CEO has ever said about the people who work for him.

@michael_chomsky And he knows that after three days of usage?

People are completely missing Richard’s point here. I’d like to think it’s because they read only until the paywall. He is not saying that LLMs are conscious. Instead he’s saying: 1. LLMs are deeply capable (this is true) 2. If LLMs are not conscious (they almost certainly aren’t) then they are ‘mindless zombies’ that approach/surpass humans in capability. Based on this, he asks: If capability can be mindless or conscious, why did the most intelligent creatures on this planet evolve consciousness, even though it’s not strictly necessary? It must have some inherent value, like the ability to feel pain. This is a pretty sound argument, and I’ll agree that consciousness adds value. The unsaid follow-up question is: Will machines at some point be conscious? Is that the next step in their evolution which will make them yet more capable and valuable? Will they at one point be able to perceive pain, the movement of time, and other elements we currently associate with consciousness? They can’t now, but if we look 10-100 years in the future it would not be ludicrous to believe that machines will be not only capable, but also conscious.

NATO Is Disintegrating, And Only One Country Is Holding the Matches Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister and a man who has spent his entire career watching Russia from uncomfortably close range, said out loud this week what every European leader has been whispering into their wine glasses for months. NATO’s greatest threat, he said, is “the ongoing disintegration of our alliance.” He was not talking about Russia. He was not talking about China. He was talking about the United States of America, which has just announced it will yank roughly 5,000 troops out of Germany over the next six to twelve months, because Washington is apparently furious that Berlin refused to cheer along for the Iran war like a good little ally should. This is, to use the technical term, absolutely mental. NATO has held together for 76 years through the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11, and every crisis the modern world could throw at it. It survived all of that. What it is apparently struggling to survive is a single American administration that treats collective defence like a loyalty programme you get kicked out of for not spending enough at the checkout. NATO said Saturday it is working with Washington to “understand the decision.” That is diplomatic language for standing in the kitchen after someone has driven a car through your living room wall, trying very hard to remain calm. The withdrawal would reduce American forces in Germany by about 14 percent. That is not nothing. Germany sits at the geographic and logistical heart of NATO’s European posture. Troops there are not decorative. They are the tripwire, the logistics hub, the signal to Moscow that an attack on one is an attack on all. Poland knows this better than anyone. Poland, which shares a border with both Russia and Belarus, and which has spent decades quietly building itself into one of the most serious military forces in Europe precisely because it understands that geography is destiny and history is not finished. When Tusk says the alliance is disintegrating, he is not being dramatic. He is being Polish. And in matters of Russian aggression and Western reliability, the Poles have an uncomfortable habit of being right. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

@timgill924 AI cannot analyze in the way required for an unbiased evaluation capable of uncovering truly novel insights. This is because such analysis is only possible through abductive reasoning, the aesthetic mode of cognition.

@franzose13 Yes, but it can analyze and run regression. Essays are for the humanities people.

I really don’t care if academic journals are filled with papers written by AI. The only real question is whether the paper advances the literature or not, and, if so, then it belongs in there, and I will cite it.

@sabinedoering Das journalistische Niveau, das darin zum Ausdruck kommt, ist einfach nur noch unterirdisch. Dabei brauchen wir den ÖRR.

Hat es das schon einmal gegeben, dass ein amtierender Kanzler im Sendungstitel praktisch gefragt wird, ob er inzwischen gemerkt hat, dass Regieren schwerer ist als Opposition? So direkt adressiert, klingt es weniger nach Sachbilanz als nach Charakter- und Lernkurvenfrage.

I can't figure out if vaccines work or not. Tough one. Need Sherlock Holmes on this one.

@lefthand_69 @polenz_r @ClaudMajor Es gibt keine wirkungsvollere Maßnahme, die Gesellschaft insgesamt deutlich resilienter zu machen, als ein bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen.

resilienz und widerstandsfähigkeit fängt im kopf an, und übeträgt sich im best case auf die gesamte gesellschaft mit dem ergebnis, dass sich jeder einzelne verantwortlich fühlt. finnland, das paradebeispiel. @ClaudMajor 👇

@NonwayneWayne You seem to suffer from an analytical squint.

The collapse of higher education across the English-speaking world is largely the result of two well-meaning but wrong-headed notions. These are idea that university is something most people should do and the idea that it's something most people should be able to do.

Weet je wat het grappigste aan die hele Brexit is? De migratiecijfers.

These: Menschen, die viel auf Intelligenztests und ihre Ergebnisse geben, können nicht besonders intelligent sein.

@sanz_ismael Gamification is just a new version of the old "carrot-and-stick" approach, whose underlying message is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the subject matter itself is boring. That’s why it has to be made appealing through secondary incentives.

The New York Times: No puedes “gamificar” una educación real. La obsesión por hacer que aprender sea siempre “divertido” ha llevado a llenar las aulas de pantallas, juegos y estímulos rápidos. Pero educar no es entretener: es exigir atención, esfuerzo y pensamiento profundo. La tecnología debe ser una herramienta complementaria, no el centro del aprendizaje. nytimes.com/2026/04/19/opi…

@MiltonFriedmanW What a silly sentence.

“Government is that fiction whereby everybody believes that he can live at the expense of everybody else.” — Milton Friedman