dynamic

To be perfect is to be on the cusp of obsolescence.

educated

The difference between those who are schooled and those who are educated, is that those who are educated know the difference between those who are schooled and those who are educated.

aversion

The human mind is actively averse to things it is not prepared to understand.

practical problems of the Wikileaks model

An organization dedicated to exposing other people's secrets must itself be secretive, for at least three reasons:

1) To protect secrecy of the people who provide the organization with secrets. Otherwise people will be reluctant to provide them with leaks.

2) To protect themselves from retribution from aggrieved parties.

3) To protect the methods by which secret information is collected. Otherwise adversary organizations can anticipate and prepare against those methods.

Not only must such an organization be secretive, but it must also be more secretive than the organizations it goes after.

4) The tools it uses to gather secrets could be used to expose its own secrets.

5) To prevent this, it must have even more powerful tools to protect its secrets than it uses to expose the secrets of others.

6) The organization dedicated to exposing secrets must also become dedicated to developing powerful tools to protect secrets, so that it can preserve its own secrets, and continue operating.

It is unlikely they will preserve a monopoly on these powerful tools for protecting secrets. They would soon become generally available, so:

7) To operate, the organization must develop the tools that will make it impossible for it to operate.

Things I have learned

It's hard to predict the future. On the other hand, what else are you going to predict?

those who are ignorant of the future are condemned to precede it

Sometimes history repeats itself, sometimes the future precedes itself, and sometimes stuff just happens.

We focus our awareness on the few things we know explicitly. This solid, explicit knowledge is surrounded by a miasma of semi-awareness, things we vaguely know we don't know well. Beyond the miasma of semi-awareness is an infinite plasma of obliviousness, and it is there that most of the world happens.

unconceited

Any world simple enough to be understood would be too simple to do anything interesting.

how to be stupid

A good bullshit detector is like getting free IQ points.

A defective bullshit detector is like an intelligence offset. A lot of smart people are made functionally stupid by their willingness to believe bullshit.

Others are stupid to begin with, and don't need ideology to help get them there.

self-actualization in action

Having internalized the complete oeuvre of Dale Carnegie, and completed my set of Abraham Maslow action figures, I can now confidently say that my hierarchy of needs has been satisfied top to bottom, leaving me with no higher goal than the creation of my own prescriptive dictionary.

I know it is a bit of a cliche, but I am comfortable with that.

Let your blogging be better than silence

Having a forum does not imply that you have anything to say.