columnist.bsky.social
‘The view from the column is ever distant’
(Anon, early 21st century)
Befuddling mix of politics, art, literary theory, philosophy, financial markets, international relations, cooking, and…dog photos…
‘Wow just wow what a skeeter’
‘Such a cute dog’
3,940 posts
36,918 followers
1,434 following
Active Commenter
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Ah Tuffy - just this one time - is completely wrong
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It needs to be its own place - it needs to be Bluesky.
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Etc etc
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NOT progressive paradise
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NOT the twitter replacement
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All of that said (!), the correct answer is that absent Elon tripping over his own huh etc, the platform needs to be…
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Oh it’s too progressive.
Oh it’s not progressive enough.
GROUP DMs
(etc)
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So anyway…11/10 theories here are generally self interested b*lls.
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Not for the first nor I’m sure the last time do I ask myself why people are so stupid
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There’s a really interesting great writing / terrible terrible judgement thing here.
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Well! Exactement! cc @katebevan.com
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Yeah. Have a look. It’s a really interesting little case study.
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Did you read his back in the day Boris piece?
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Did you read his back in the day Boris piece?
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Oh. My. God.
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I mean. Fine. Tropes etc. But let’s no pretend to some grand narrative.
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Yeah though for me it’s more - stop trying to grasp at some weird English narrative.
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I’m basically (and very prematurely) turning into the grandfather in Gilmore Girls.
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💯 on that one which I think is proper *sacred trust* territory
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Fair
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Yeah the find my friends is really helpful (and she’s cool with that). So to your MH point if there was ever a problem I can get to her in c 30 minutes.
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Oh we are super liberal
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Yeah she’s a great kid so that’s not the slightest a problem. Arrangements generally fine (taxi apps etc). So yeah my instinct is great kid / transport all fine - go have a nice time.*
* But being contactable is mandatory
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I was thinking about that
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Ah we have our beloved American niece coming to Paris to stay with us for the third year in a row! And I am very curious how you parent types think about huh curfews or whatever for a 17 year old?
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Guys a world renowned investment genius has reliably informed me (in the FT) that not only is the only way up but that we are poised for a huge equity bull market.
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Well. Quite! It’s a really interesting (and crucial) distinction and the current development / debate should cause people to think about it.
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Ha! Not literally. I’ve come at it from a rather different direction but overall not bad at all.
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And I’d love to participate
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Yes please
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And that’s kinda what I’m driving at
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I’m not sure you guys are being ambitious enough. We should simply replace all flowers, trees etc with plastic equivalents.
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My god that’s the paper I wrote
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The jester!
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That’s exactly the right sort of distinction imv
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I’m using very broad brush strokes here…and I’m being careful to say that it will have a major impact on anything information acquisition / collation / production related.
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Yep! It’s information! And - as such - has very little value to anything hmmm knowledge based.
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Oooh very interesting.
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But, imv, and here we go back to the inestimable @jonnelledge.bsky.social , the knowledge economy is not (broadly). I’d even argue the commoditisation of information will actually be v good for people who are good at knowledge because that’s precisely where new world competitive advantage will be.
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So this distinction helps us to think about impacts. In short, the information economy (ie the acquisition, collation and production of information) is going to be massively disrupted.
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And this is before we think about hallucination type flaws etc.
HOWEVER!
That provision of information is very important and valuable.
But this is an information rather than a knowledge revolution.
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The now classic undergrad uses AI to write a paper is a great example. The undergrad has acquired information but *not* knowledge. The obvious truth here is that the notional undergrad cannot apply that AI written paper to anything - hence information rather than knowledge.
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Anyway. The distinction I made was between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. The point being that knowledge is learnt and can (as a result) be somehow applied.
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The interesting thing for me about the historical shallow dive is one gets intriguing little elements of how to think about the overall problem and, very specifically, how one might go about thinking about ‘knowledge’.
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A substantial part of the paper outlines some of the ways in which those dynamics have been previously thought about - Platonism, Francis Bacon (who coined the phrase ‘knowledge is power) and on to structuralism and modern-ish continental philosophy (Foucault obvs and savoir / pouvoir).
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In preparation for that discussion I wrote a short paper on the relationship between information, knowledge and power, and how the AI era might impact those dynamics.