Post

oh i like this one a lot, especially @3blue1brown.com 's commentary on credit and ownership and, approximately, meaning-making it resonates with a central conflict i have with society; y'all way too into 'status' and 'credit' and it's a wonder anything useful ever gets done in that context

idk i think it’s pretty load-bearing that a portion of the population is motivated to work insanely hard for something as cheap as “credit”/“status”

it probably is! i still think it's bad. i also don't think those are cheap, at scale. it's cheap for the university exploiting i mean assisting the individual researcher, but said researcher will often turn it into...idk if this is a word, but, soft-capital, post-haste

like how many dinners do we think erdos paid for, yknow?

i do wonder what the next world looks like, and don't want to guess at it, but i have high hopes that low-credit personas turn out to be similarly productive to high-credit personas, but more diffusely as is our nature

like, arguably if math lacked names-on-papers, we don't get erdos (he'd verbally disagree iirc, but we'll pretend for the point). i'd like to think that over a relatively similar timeline a lot of the same discoveries happen but for different purposes; just love of the game type-shit

the big breakthrough of “capitalism” is that it channels human greed towards the project of delivering goods and services at scale at the lowest-possible price. another way of spinning straw into gold