Sjors Provoost @sjors@m.sprovoost.nl

@kekcoin @FreePietje @Sosthene @harding the mechanics of a system matter. Put 100.000 people in a stadium with no food for a month, you get get very different results than if you put in a nice city. But I'm not ready to make predictions about how Mastodon will be different from Twitter. At least we have a bit more control here.

@jronkain @stephanlivera the alternative is a free rider problem. Use the medical and educational resources of a country based on solidarity, stay there if you fail, leave if you succeed, come back when you get ill. Either way, you can't force your preferences on another country, including your preference against an exit tax. Provided it's not used to imprison people in the country.

@stephanlivera Taleb has a very nice, but draft, essay / pamphlet on this stuff.

One of the rules he advocates is that people should be free to leave an area if they don't like the system. Another rule is that they can't be forced to change their political system.

This implies you can move to a citadel - if you pay an appropriate but not prohibitive exit tax, but you can't force a country to switch over to a citadel system.
https://www.academia.edu/38433249/Principia_Politica

@stephanlivera experiments at the city level are totally fine with me. If they fail, the damage is limited. If they succeed, others can copy. I'll be sure to visit them.

But I don't expect useful results in the near future for those who are fighting discrimination and police brutality.

Competition between nations is more promising in the short run: perhaps European countries could offer asylum to Americans. But I think most Americans would prefer to fix their own country rather than leave.

@stephanlivera Plato was the grandfather of Utopia. He believed that a complete overhaul of society, ruled by a Philosopher King, would be perfect, thought police included.

It's wise to not expect perfection, but there still remains a dangerous pattern of completely overhauling society expecting great results, at the expense of more incremental changes. Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies describes the pattern (I'm only 1/3rd though) and strongly recommends an incremental approach.

@stephanlivera I'm all for providing an alternative to fiat, and it may indeed come with positive side-effects in other areas. But beware of utopianism.

It's tempting to ignore current suffering because the end times are near and God will save the righteous. But non-violent protests are not futile, and it's not fair to associate them with looting in a single sentence.

Maybe Bitcoiners have to pick their battle, but it's not the only worthy battle out there.

@stephanlivera @michaelfolkson great timing, the maestro provided stats today 🙂

It's a bit of humble brag I guess? Ten thousand blocks, but he has over half a million followers, and probably more drive-by commenters if he's in the news.

@stephanlivera @harding keep in mind that the spam problem was around back in the day when all the cool kids had a public WordPress blog with open comments. Akismet came out of that.

@waxwing @stephanlivera @michaelfolkson I read most his books in a weird order and liked Anti-Fragile and The Black Swan the most.

"laughable pompous idiot" - he's certainly gotten more assertive in his tone. But if he really got sloppy, why has nobody really caught him in a lie or meaningly flawed analysis?

I've only seen very weak attempts at fighting his arguments, where his detractors show a clear lack of grounding in statistics, focus too much on tone and use straw-mans themselves.

@Sosthene @kekcoin indeed, Twitter is more addictive. You can compensate a little bit by decreasing addictive factors in Twitter (only use web version, no push notifications, logout every time) and increasing addictive factors in Mastodon (turn on notifications, use a mobile app).

But the bid site also has a bigger audience. Even if Bitcoin reaches critical mass here, non-Bitcoin stuff won't anytime soon. But one step at a time.

@michaelfolkson @stephanlivera for your reading pleasure 🙂

@FreePietje @kekcoin most podcasts I follow have a different guest in each episode, so that makes it a bit easier to - to put it nicely - focus on the most promising episodes.

@birdsite the original tweet said: "By the way, I was told multiple times that I'm censoring [Dutch conspiracy theorists] by fact checking them. It's convenient when calling out falsehoods is 'censorship'"

To which I replied: "Well, in a roundabout way you could argue something like that, but it says more about the absurdity of social media. In a world where 'fake news' is deleted rather than merely criticised, that criticism is used as an argument for deletion. But what do you do then?"

@birdsite @ayushsharma22 the bird site bot is interpreting my retweets as my own. That's not good...

@stephanlivera @michaelfolkson I think the exact opposite. Time will tell.

@FreePietje @kekcoin maybe it helps that I was happiliy going to Twitter meetups when that was still a good way to meeting interesting people (late 2018, I lived in Melbourne Australia at the time).

I also used their API in hackathons

Then the Dick Bar came. And they starting closing the API. And we learned from Hatching Twitter that Jack lost control of that company a long time ago and they've agreed to pretend otherwise since. Twitter's open source nature died a decade ago and won't return.

@stephanlivera @michaelfolkson his new technical book, should fill in a lot of those gaps. It contains many of the more controversial papers he wrote recently. That's a good opportunity to hunt for bullshit claims, and learn a lot in the process.

https://www.amazon.com/Statistical-Consequences-Fat-Tails-Preasymptotics/dp/1544508050 (there's also a free pre-print PDF out there)

@stephanlivera @michaelfolkson "never meet your heroes" is a good rule of thumb. From the examples I've studied in more detail, I think he _is_ great at applying the ideas. But he's not so good at explaining all the mental steps he takes.

So far I have not found evidence of bullshit, which isn't evidence of absence of course 🙂

His material is dense, but mostly falsifiable. If there is bullshit in it, it can be called out. But I've only seem poor attempts at that.