Tom Hyde

❤️‍🔥 WONDERISM ❤️‍🔥 — my rough-sketch philosophy of Enlightenment and Romanticism, reason and feeling, science and art.

@saltwatermp3 Bigger, faster, higher

@LakersSpin Why has no one in sports (especially basketball) gone in deep with the Master Chief lore-styling? Has to be 6’10, jersey number 117, nickname “Demon”

Yall throw the word 'demon' around too much. This is what a real demon looks like

That fire shapes light.

people misunderstand the icarus story. the problem was not that he flew too high. it's that the wings were made of beeswax, which offered very little resistance to heating. with modern materials he would have had no problems. we can fly as close to the sun as we want now

I love material reactionaries because they are materially incapable of writing luddite diatribes without writing technology as the coolest fucking thing imaginable. Here is Thomas Carlyle in 1829(!):

The Fall of Icarus by Andrew McCarthy

John Singer Sargent, George Sherwood Hunter, Maxfield Parrish, Thomas Cooper Gotch

Paintings of lanterns

Paul Ehrlich has died. He was 93. He is survived by 8,300,678,394 people (134% increase from 1968), with a daily worldwide average calorie intake of 2,800 kcal (a 22% increase).

From Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_: The Malthusian prophecy of doom has been echoed by many. In 1968, the American biologists Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife Anne Ehrlich, in their book The Population Bomb, argued a familiar sentiment: our numbers are too great to be sustained, and that our destruction by poverty and famine is already determined. They went as far as to begin their book with the words, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That is with the notable exception of staunch population controls, of course, which are the darlings of all resource pessimists. And Paul Ehrlich went one step further than Malthus, suggesting we purposefully starve those nations that are unwilling, or simply unable, to impose such controls. The small nation of India, for example (then home to over 600 million people) would have had their food aid eliminated and be left to ruin. It’s by far the closest we have come to our very own Thanos. But his solution has always been the least serious aspect of his philosophy—not only because of its clear moral insanity but because it makes no sense in his own terms (people would, after all, continue to have children). What has really captured the minds of audiences is his tale of disaster—that we are, despite all efforts, destined for destruction. It almost seems petty to point out that none of these prophecies have come to pass—and that in the time since Malthus and even Ehrlich published their respective arguments, population and quality of life have increased in tandem with one another (see Steven Pinker’s work). But this is to be expected for all predictions that underestimate, or outright reject, our capacity for creativity.

@Marian_L_Tupy One of the most important checks ever written in economics:

RIP. I am thankful that Ehrlich got to live so long in a world where human creativity could continue to feed, house, clothe, and make safe billions of people in unprecedented comfort and that his miserable failure as an academic denotes only our miraculous triumph as a species.

Here’s a letter to the editor that every degrowther should read:

Why wonder? What are the two kinds of wonder? Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_ explains 👇

I can't believe humans were gifted a planet full of famine, disease, and death and invented fusion, vaccines, moon rockets, and so much food that most people die from obesity.

"Henceforce I ask not good-fortune I myself am good-fortune" -- Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Mount El'brus (1894), by Nikolai Yaroshenko

@realtimeai I steal your money I gain money you lose money. Zero-sum. Not profit. Same for all those examples. The only profit I recognise is positive-sum i.e. creates something new. I think this fits with most good theories of capitalism.

@tomhyde_ You are not aware that people profit from lots of destructive things? Crime? Polluting the commons? Rent-seeking?

The profit motive is better labelled as the creation motive. Everyone opposed to profit is opposed to creation.