Popper solved Agrippa’s trilemma, and almost 100 years later, no one seems to have noticed.

It seems linear thinking, aka reductionism, is going out of fashion among serious academics. Indeed, several new (and old) ways of explaining the world are converging on similar avenues of thought. Constructor theory and complexity theory, as well as several less rigourous philosophies that emphasize emergence and levels of explanation. Will a new framework come to dominate? If so, which? I have a nasty suspicion that we’ll get another round of reductionism branded as «complex», but which at the end of the day is nothing more than rebranded PoP-slop that goes nowhere.

I like this quote: «The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy» The edge of chaos means «where the predictable and unpredictable meet», or something like that. Not the predictability of a falling raindrop, and not the jnpredictabllity of the weather, but somewhere in between. From here: https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Waldrop-M.-Mitchell-Complexity-The-Emerging-Science-at-Edge-of-Order-and-Chaos.pdf

I sometimes like to think that in ancient Athens, or in the Vienna circle, or in the Italian Renaissance, there was a guy who isn’t mentioned in any source, but who put all those other people on track to achieve greatness with the right words at the right time.

History is full of clutch technological saves, such as industrial farming preventing global starvation a la Malthus. Thus it is rational to expect clutch technological saves in the future. And it is irrational to expect none. Likewise irrational to expect them in every instance.

New article just dropped. Quality keeps improving. Normies in disbelief. View article →

Lmao

X is currently hosting a competition to see who can make the stupidest argument for UBI.

...and another one (seems these don't show up in people's feeds?) View article →

I wrote an article yesterday. I think some of you would enjoy reading it.

Beware of Fake Humility: What it Means to Respect Complexity

Taking complexity seriously involves a departure from a lot of common sense. In this piece I outline three consequences.

Dostoevsky

To make AI’s way smarter with one sentence, start your query with «From a complexity theory perspective…» It will immediately find most policy and social science incredibly stupid, including public schooling, welfare, central banking and climate stuff.

(Regenerative) farming is a great metaphor and a shortcut into complexity theory. For instance, if farmers thought like schools, they’d head into the field each day to stretch slow growing plants.