This may be my new mantra this week. "The intuition of seriousness is simple: if a system can’t bring in enough energy to manage its complexity, the system falls into progressively worse states before collapse." Thanks, Dan! Awesome stuff.
My favorite part is Seriousness as an "earnest, sustained commitment to creating something excellent."
To borrow a line from Ben's review of Breakout, "What it means to be Great is an aesthetic choice. It’s not something you can put a number on, despite the inclination of engineers (and economists)." To me, I like the idea of Seriousness existing in the in the same vein.
This article made me think of the Japanese. We can learn from their seriousness that produces high quality effects across their society, such almost complete lack of crime and the silly movements the west engages in.
The trading card with signifiers for solving the cancers brought about by human invention...that's a serious one among serious ones. What a great dream to envision using the best of AI tools, rooted in the Dartmouth 1956 conference on AI, to undo some of the worst applications of "Better Living Through Chemistry" into the human diet, right in that era.
Sure. We definitely have a seriousness gap. We are governed by unserious people, who are doing unserious things.
OTOH, building two motorcycles per year so that abusive actors get new toys to conspicuously consume is not particularly serious. Neither is giving over the government to Elon Musk for no particular reason other than that his support was essential for winning an election and he is the country's largest rent-seeker.
We already have shifted "the elite student’s dream job" to risk-acceptant industrialists sufficiently well to have built the most valuable companies in the world, the leaders of which openly disdain academia and essentially all civil institutions. Academia and politics are dead zones for ambitious people, and that has been true since 2008 (if not longer), most of today's economic elites are almost shockingly uneducated. "Move fast, break stuff" is definitely not under-supplied in America, it is in fact why everything is broken (it is the source of the ultra-financialization you disdain, which serious academics (and labor leaders) warned about for decades, only to be ignored by progress-oriented tech boosters and the politicians who love them).
And what have those industrialists done with the license they've been given? Fall into the K-hole while impregnating a harem? Rent out the city of Venice for the most plastic wedding in history? Give a Schmittian lecture series calling Greta Thunberg the Antichrist? Erect a surveillance state in service to the most deeply unserious president in history?
No, I'm afraid we don't need more of that. We've had enough. Seriousness comes from *accountability,* a concept (completely unmentioned in this essay) that today's industrialists refuse to even countenance.
So this essay does not make a serious argument, and thus does not serve a serious purpose. As was predictable by simply asking: what would the author's own framework suggest about the seriousness level of Substacking?
"His interpretation of the equation is beautiful and well-structured, and his creativity is apparent."
He has taken a field of serious inquiry -- complexity science -- and attempted to reduce it to a simplified model.
Which is anti-serious.
He voted for Trump because he cares about depolarization, which is grounds to consider extensive remedial education and/or psychotherapy.
But again: the presented avatar of seriousness is building two motorcycles per year for famous people. This is not just elitism, it is "let them eat cake"-style condescension, it's disconnected from our present reality.
Which is where the accountability comes from: the elites being ripped down from their goddamn perches and forced to live with the same rules as the rest of us. Until that happens there will be no progress, only increasing chaos.
Oh so we're grading seriousness on a curve now? We're giving participation trophies to people who spend 6 months writing Substack articles?
I don't care where he's from. The current gov of KY is a Democrat. I've lived throughout that region and spent a lot of time in KY, as well as other red states.
He is not arguing for order, that's my entire point. You don't get order by reducing complex systems into soundbytes and moral lessons. That's how you produce crises.
The "abundance"/"progress" types need to spend some time reading about what happened to the Futurists of a century ago. The Vorticists, the Wellsian "things to come" optimists. You cannot process-engineer the future and everyone who has tried has met with disaster.
Essay is sick, heuristic is useful. Thanks Dan!
This may be my new mantra this week. "The intuition of seriousness is simple: if a system can’t bring in enough energy to manage its complexity, the system falls into progressively worse states before collapse." Thanks, Dan! Awesome stuff.
Awesome :)) stoked you like it Maria!
Amazing how useful microbiology intuitions are huh?
Thanks for the read (and for the provocation)!
My favorite part is Seriousness as an "earnest, sustained commitment to creating something excellent."
To borrow a line from Ben's review of Breakout, "What it means to be Great is an aesthetic choice. It’s not something you can put a number on, despite the inclination of engineers (and economists)." To me, I like the idea of Seriousness existing in the in the same vein.
:) stoked you like it, thanks for the kind words!
I had missed Ben’s review of Breakout but will check it out. Def agreed there is alignment with that quote
This is so Mudd and I love it. Only question left for me after reading this: why on earth wasn't I already subbed to Dan's Substack!?!
I really appreciate the kind words Josh.
And ha you're not missing much on the sub, this one took me ~6 months and I win no awards for consistency ;)
This article made me think of the Japanese. We can learn from their seriousness that produces high quality effects across their society, such almost complete lack of crime and the silly movements the west engages in.
Well said.
The trading card with signifiers for solving the cancers brought about by human invention...that's a serious one among serious ones. What a great dream to envision using the best of AI tools, rooted in the Dartmouth 1956 conference on AI, to undo some of the worst applications of "Better Living Through Chemistry" into the human diet, right in that era.
Sure. We definitely have a seriousness gap. We are governed by unserious people, who are doing unserious things.
OTOH, building two motorcycles per year so that abusive actors get new toys to conspicuously consume is not particularly serious. Neither is giving over the government to Elon Musk for no particular reason other than that his support was essential for winning an election and he is the country's largest rent-seeker.
We already have shifted "the elite student’s dream job" to risk-acceptant industrialists sufficiently well to have built the most valuable companies in the world, the leaders of which openly disdain academia and essentially all civil institutions. Academia and politics are dead zones for ambitious people, and that has been true since 2008 (if not longer), most of today's economic elites are almost shockingly uneducated. "Move fast, break stuff" is definitely not under-supplied in America, it is in fact why everything is broken (it is the source of the ultra-financialization you disdain, which serious academics (and labor leaders) warned about for decades, only to be ignored by progress-oriented tech boosters and the politicians who love them).
And what have those industrialists done with the license they've been given? Fall into the K-hole while impregnating a harem? Rent out the city of Venice for the most plastic wedding in history? Give a Schmittian lecture series calling Greta Thunberg the Antichrist? Erect a surveillance state in service to the most deeply unserious president in history?
No, I'm afraid we don't need more of that. We've had enough. Seriousness comes from *accountability,* a concept (completely unmentioned in this essay) that today's industrialists refuse to even countenance.
So this essay does not make a serious argument, and thus does not serve a serious purpose. As was predictable by simply asking: what would the author's own framework suggest about the seriousness level of Substacking?
"His interpretation of the equation is beautiful and well-structured, and his creativity is apparent."
He has taken a field of serious inquiry -- complexity science -- and attempted to reduce it to a simplified model.
Which is anti-serious.
He voted for Trump because he cares about depolarization, which is grounds to consider extensive remedial education and/or psychotherapy.
But again: the presented avatar of seriousness is building two motorcycles per year for famous people. This is not just elitism, it is "let them eat cake"-style condescension, it's disconnected from our present reality.
Which is where the accountability comes from: the elites being ripped down from their goddamn perches and forced to live with the same rules as the rest of us. Until that happens there will be no progress, only increasing chaos.
Oh so we're grading seriousness on a curve now? We're giving participation trophies to people who spend 6 months writing Substack articles?
I don't care where he's from. The current gov of KY is a Democrat. I've lived throughout that region and spent a lot of time in KY, as well as other red states.
He is not arguing for order, that's my entire point. You don't get order by reducing complex systems into soundbytes and moral lessons. That's how you produce crises.
The "abundance"/"progress" types need to spend some time reading about what happened to the Futurists of a century ago. The Vorticists, the Wellsian "things to come" optimists. You cannot process-engineer the future and everyone who has tried has met with disaster.