Ah the science of influence : the masterpiece on influence is this book [0]. Came my way by a mention in one of Charlie Munger’s speeches. All the things you mention here and more are there in case you want to broaden your understanding
You’ve gone from corruption (which I agree with) to something about dominant religion thinking of truth and morality as subjective ( which is debatable as you have cited nothing - infact seems like it’s your opinion and nothing else) to low trust ( which I agree with). What’s the logical link to cities being unlivable? The article says that mayors and councillors lack powers which is the major problem.
Not sure about the subjective part though I feel that the OP is right.
My experience growing up in India is that we are extremely tolerant of corruption and self aggrandisement. In fact, people speak of envy and admiration of folks working in govt who even takes bribes even to issue death and birth certificate.
The corruption of the profession of teachers and doctors is something I've witnessed myself. In just the last 20 years, no one in my village shows any respect for both of them. Things were very different when I was a kid.
Personally I do believe that ours is a very cynical, low trust and 'corrupt' society. Though southern India is much better than North (especially the Ganges planes).
I grew up in South India and spent a lot of my adulthood in the North, and I don't think the South is much better. It's different in many ways, which makes some people think it's better, but it's just as corrupt and messed up.
Your politician is as corrupt as any, but people have more trust among each other. It's far easier for women to go out alone, camp outside in the night. It's getter better as you go more south. Not sure about AP/Telangana though!
The culture of selfishness, cheating and corruption IS a major factor in making a city unlivable. I've lived for a long time in a city somewhere in between on such scale, here are my observations:
Trash and graffiti are directly proportional to the levels of selfishness of the population. At the extreme point there are those horror videos of rivers covered in trash and trash mountains near residential buildings.
Grassroots organization of building inhabitants into an org which collect fees and is responsible for the building maintenance and cleaning is impossible below certain level of egoism of the citizens.
Disregard for the neighbors leads to the same disregard by the officials and thus abandonment of investing of the public transit. It then degrades or stays at trash tier and everyone tarts buying cars. Those cars are then parked everywhere, completely destroying all lawns near housing and near offices. Sidewalks are blocked by parked cars too.
In some cities egoistic citizens are burning trash for heating (it's cheap) and pollute air for millions living in the city.
Officials work expecting bribes and nothing is done without greasing someone's pocket.
And the list goes on and on. At a certain point just visiting a city populated by the more empathetic people, or at least governed by such, becomes a revelation. Especially if such city is poorer by the numbers, so makes do with less.
If you believe that what is wrong for others is right for you (subjective morality), you can find ways to do whatever you want to do irrespective of the negative consequences to others.
Combine this with the idea that people are born poor / disadvantaged because of their sins from the previous birth and now you can justify anything you do to them - including making them work in slave-like conditions.
These types of thinking has consequences that you cannot simply wish away.
> have you seen Amazon's "Rufus"? It's hilariously useless.
I'd argue -- for now. Maybe it's an incentive/urgency thing. At the moment, Amazon isn't seeing ChatGPT do the buying of goods bypassing Amazon's own search. I expect Rufus to drastically improve especially given that Amazon has an AWS offering of LLM(s) [0].
I asked ChatGPT to summarize the video and avoid the ad etc.
"The real reason: opportunity.
NZ’s economy offers few paths beyond agriculture and real estate.
Larger, more diversified Australian cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane) offer broader careers and education options
In Summary
New Zealand’s paradox: a high-quality society built atop a narrow economy.
Its openness with Australia, while culturally beneficial, drains the very people it needs to sustain growth.
Until it diversifies beyond real estate and agriculture and offers more opportunity to young professionals, the exodus is likely to continue"
The 20 year old me would have been so excited about something like this. The 39-year old (ok 40 next month) is more reserved. It is not that I don't think this will be adapted but more like : What needs to happen (government, civic groups whatever economic forces) for companies to adapt this? It's going to be a slow burn for sure if this needs to work at a global scale but the impetus should begin with incentives, sadly.
I couldn’t just leave an upvote because rather than read and agree, I immediately had the identical reaction and then saw your post. I may as well still be reading the order section in the back of my comic books or the gadgets in Popular Science.
I’m grateful the work is being done because it’s essential but no longer have faith in these things being solved in 5, 10, or 20 years.
you've realized that the problems are not impossible, and it's just a matter of getting people to think about them in the right way.
that's easy. Humans have been getting other humans to think the ways they want since the written word. Nothing is more practiced as a discipline, except perhaps prostitution.
One aspect of no phone is how to deal with payments. Specifically UPI payments in India. These are QR code based payments and it is getting more difficult to pay by cash at many locations.
Right next to that is OTPs from financial institutions.
On the way towards the same issue in Vietnam. You can still pay with cash everywhere but it's becoming more and more normal to use QR codes. I guess in the next year or two I'll start to see places that only take QR. It's very convenient... unless you don't have a local bank account, or your phone runs out of battery, or, as happened to me 30 minutes ago, your bank's system goes down.
What a beautiful, thought provoking article! When I saw the title , I thought it was a book summary of “My stroke of insight” [0]. This book is by a neuro-anatomist who had a rare stroke resulting in the left hemisphere of her brain being incapacitated. That led her to experiences similar to that of the article’s author. Do check out the book and pair it with the article
FWIW , the blog post doesn't really show any famous games where double bishops helped someone win or anything like that. It's a small fragment of games where players with double bishops improved their position etc.
Went down the rabbit hole which is the overtype.dev website (nice work btw!) and found and even nicer rabbit hole - https://hyperclay.com/ Single HTML apps :). Enjoy!
This is coming close to WWW's original vision because the very first web browser was also an editor. Tim Berners-Lee's application on the NeXT was basically a wrapper for the operating system's built-in rich text editing class named TextView. (It later became NSTextView on Apple's Mac OS X and still powers the TextEdit app on Mac.)
We lost editing for two reasons:
1) The HTTP PUT method didn't exist yet, so edited HTML files could only be saved locally.
2) Mosaic built a cross-platform web browser that defined what the WWW was for 99% of users, and they didn't include editing because that would have been too complex to build from scratch in their multi-platform code base.
This reminds me of some of the better experiments in mid-aughts Web dev, and is exactly the kind of project that helps push standards & user expectations forward.
I would also pair this article with "Stolen Focus" ( a book I am currently reading -- fascinating read ) [0] . I am only 10% in and the book is captivating. Read the book to understand the "whys" of this article .
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence
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