yep. What gjm said.

Elo is a mod and keeps banning Eugine-sockpuppets, and is therefore The Enemy.

Other mods before my mod-time imposed a ban on Eugine for sock-puppet voting behaviour and then proceeded to let him post when he made new accounts/ the period of identifying a new Eugine takes time so his posts would stay up for weeks at a time. Also if you ban an account without deleting the posts then his mark stays. I stepped in and won't let any of his posts stand more than a day because he is banned, he also has a habit of posting in identifiable ways, repeatedly - up to 10 times, trying to post literally the same thing. Him Posting is just him trying to break the ban. Which STILL STANDS FOR REASONS OF ONGOING SOCK PUPPET VOTING.

If he came back, didn't sockpuppet, and picked a new alias - we probably wouldn't know. But idiots with a vengence... It's relatively easy to work out who he is when he posts, or sockpuppet downvotes. We are working on a reverse-downvote solution. I don't have any interest in pressuring Dev volunteers so it will happen when it happens. Feel free to PM me if you want to join the development of a solution. I think python is the language it will be happening in.

A simple justification of a slightly less extreme position is easy enough: there were many sane people who did not predict the value of the internet, indicating that being sane and smart are not sufficient to predict such things.

There are plenty of quotes from people who were supposed to be experts (or at least well-educated) saything that heavier than air flight was impossible, computers would always be room-sized monstrosities of limited use, etc. I assume that this quote is pretty much the same idea (that future technology is unpredictable), but using a technology that is 1. more recent, and thus more relatable, and 2. not simply a matter of technology, but of adapted use; that is, most smart people might have guessed that the early internet could be made faster, webpages better, and the network more comprehensive. They simply didn't see the value that this would produce, and so assumed that technology would not move in that direction.

They didn't anticipate what the Internet would become--because they weren't fucking insane...

Robert Evans, Cracked

Related: Stranger Than History.

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Update: I've received feedback, and I won't be posting links to TFP in this thread, or others, on LW.

Would it be below the bar for no-politics to post one or more links in this thread from The Future Primaeval (TFP)? Some of their posts are more overtly political or controversial than others, and the only ones posts from the site I'd link here are ones which make more direct reference to, e.g., the rationality community, metacognition, strategic thinking, etc., rather than having something to do with sociopolitics. Note: I'd prefer if those hostile to TFP links of LW would reply to this comment rather than downvoting it, but, that stated, downvotes without clarification will be treated as a negative response to my above question.

Ben Hoffman, Solve your problems by fantasizing

The problem with most goal-driven plans is that most goals are fake, and so are most plans. One way to fix this is to fantasize.

Meta thread

"it's a fast-paced, complicated world - either understand something, or have an opinion on it. there's no time for both"

The Unpleasantness of Pain For Humans and Other Animals

Why Blocking Roads Can Speed Up Traffic

Why I Think I Win My Bets

The onward march of the new young fogey

Ben Hoffman, Exploding the sociability binary

A lot of the discussion about introversion and extraversion seems to collapse a whole bunch of things into a single binary. When people point out that they’re not well-described by either term, they tend to come up with patches like “ambivert,” but this is a missed opportunity to develop a more granular understanding of sociability. There are enough tensions in the underlying definitions that I want to blow up those terms and replace them with more precisely defined axes along which people vary:

Sarah Constantin, Nootropics

There are a lot of drugs and supplements reputed to improve cognitive function. I was sick of relying on hearsay and anecdote, so I did my best attempt at a systematic overview of what works and what doesn’t.

Meta thread