Recent searches
Search options
“My rule – I don't join a service that I can't leave without switching costs – is my Ulysses Pact, and it's keeping me safe from danger I've sailed into too many times before.” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
// i agree, for a long time held this line + abstained from BlueSky. but recently i’ve created a presence, tempted by people i want to converse with. i’m glad to contribute to an evacuation from x, but i feel ick too. i am taking too much on faith, without guard rails. again.
@interfluidity There's absolutely nothing wrong in ever diversifying your consumption habits -- as long as you don't let addiction kill other options in your habits down the road.
@akkartik i don’t really think of these as consumption choices. i am contributing or refraining to contribute to network effects, playing one small part in a game that shapes important contours of the future. there is a sense in which every consumption choice is “a vote”, but where network effects obtain the analogy is unusually strong. so there’s an ethical component. i feel like i did wrong by contributing (extraordinarily much!) to twitter, and feel i am risking sin on BlueSky
@interfluidity As a thought experiment, I think a parallel universe where everybody used Twitter as it grew popular but also was quick to adopt other networks like Diaspora and spend meaningful time on them -- this would be absolutely fine. What do you think?
I personally find a frame of personal resilience more actionable than ethics. What is good is what is adaptive in the long term. If you can adapt when your environment changes, you're likely behaving ethically.
@interfluidity I think the error was not in adopting Twitter, but in letting it cannibalize blogs and home pages.
@akkartik but time and attention are finite. Google murdering RSS helped, but I don’t think you can disentangle the rise of twitter from the fall of better alternatives.
@akkartik personally, being adaptable and adaptive are great virtues. but socially, politically, i think it’s a mistake to presume people are as adaptable as you think it’d be in their own and our collective interest to be. 1/
@akkartik one of the great errors of the neoliberal experiment is i think was a presumption that people would just retrain or move to opportunity, make whatever changes it takes to maximize earnings. 2/
@akkartik in fact, even when the economic basis for their communities disappear, many people hold fast and try to preserve them. when the skills they have relied upon for decades become worthless, they don’t cheerfully start over to take a nurse’s assistant certificate at the community college. 3/
@akkartik one way to understand a lot of political controversy is as battles over who has to adjust as the world inevitably changes, and who gets to live just in the way they have become accustomed. it’s the latter, not the adapters, who represent the winners in politics. 4/
@akkartik descriptively, thinking about eg social networks, i think you’ll prove more correct predicting that most users are guided by inertia, rather than presuming the sane dynamism you might and should cultivate in yourself. /fin
@interfluidity I think you're right that this is the justifiable prediction to make. But should your actions be justified by predictions or prescriptions? Or what balance rather should we follow. We must use predictions some of the time. But I'd like to be guided by prescriptions as much as possible. Be the change I want to see in the world.
@akkartik i think your prescriptions have to be guided by ones (conditional) prescriptions. i’d not see a doctor who’d prescribe a drug she wouldn’t predict would meet a risk-benefit threshold. 1/
@akkartik being the change you want to see in the world is great, but not immune. lots of time there’s limited harm / cost / risk in it, so even if your predictions are pessimistic, a small chance of contributing to a virtuous network effect is worth it. especially if there’s a community that might make the same calculation. what complicates social choices is social outcomes are very difficult to predict, and small initiatives unpredictably yield avalanches! 2/
@akkartik so i’m definitely kind of with you in practice. i devote much of my time to enterprises i’m predictively pessimistic about that are actually very costly to me. but it’s precisely because i predict the predictiveness of my pessimism is limited that renders the practice quasi-justifiable! (it strikes me as quite analogous to to the famous irrational overconfidence of entrepreneurs.) /fin
@interfluidity Yes, the Angel investor mindset was also on my mind. Investing in businesses even though you know most of them will lose your money. An admirable mindset I can only aspire to.
@interfluidity That's an insane bar.