> Also, the NYT knows what it stands for. Something like the Intellectual Dark Web only expresses opposition to mainstream media but has no coherent agenda of its own.
The IDW stands for classical liberalism. That's a vague term, but less so than whatever concoction the NYT knows it stands for.
I wonder how much Web3 as a vision represents the worldview of Gen X. In the end some key figures, the main ideologues in the movement - although it attracts plenty of young folks - are Balaji or Chris Dixon. Thiel has also become staunchly pro-Bitcoin...
Gen X is perhaps the first generation to experience the decay of the postwar western institutions and to suffer more losses than gains because of it, unlike the boomers who knew how to exploit that decay to their own benefit.
Sounds about right to me. The problem of the age is having no good alternative to being stuck under the control of the bad governance of deeply entrenched institutions which can't be fixed.
Because going directly at those institutions is often hopeless or suicidal, people have been hoping and looking for more peaceful and voluntary ways to 'exit' that control and get around this problem for a long, long time, and in ways that are hard for the incumbents to thwart.
Well, because encryption is hard to break, there is a lot of wishful thinking and ungrounded enthusiasm that the new decentralized crypto tools might do the trick.
But it seems to me these 'Web3 vision' folks are going about things in reverse order to comparable efforts in history. In the past, one started with a vision, then looked for tools or opportunities (like 'going far away') that would solve the problems posed in trying to establish and implement that ideal.
In this case, however, we have the tool first, without a good idea of what can or should be done with it. And the question is, what is the space of visions which, ok, perhaps they are not 'ideal' or even really resembling what anybody really wants, but which nevertheless are new possibilities opened up which might be feasibly accomplished or spontaneously converged upon with the new tool, and which people might still be willing to accept because the status quo alternative is even worse.
If the inevitable hype-marketing tries to spin the narrative to sell those less worse possibilities as if they were genuine 'visions', then it's no wonder they seem neither realistically workable nor particularly compelling.
Re: the university reform debate: one way to approach it would be to change accreditation substantially and to also separate out more professional track schools that can be more easily judged on objective grounds of job placement. A BA program that most students are using as a springboard to business really doesn't make much sense. A technical program with a small number of electives that is judged by publicly reported job placement and salary figures is basically what most parents want and what many if not most students are aiming for. The core mission of the university is good (speaking broadly of its millennium of existence and not of its recent history in the US), but 40%-50%+ of the country doesn't need university; most of those students should be in shorter and cheaper training programs.
The government, for civil servants, should just run its own separate training camps similar to what the military does on a much shorter basis and calibrated to their actual recruiting needs. Graduate students with private school grad debt loads should not be getting 'jobs' as 'interns' in the government.
The universities are moving instead towards a worst-of-both-worlds approach in which they start offering lots of esoteric, specialized, 'technical' master's programs that do not get graduates jobs in the supposed specialization that it confers on them. So you neither get the gauzy cultural elevation / character formation nor the relevant technical training.
The way towards reform would involve some indirect methods and some direct ones. The core of the issue is less Harvard and more the bulk of lower tier schools gaming the way that student loans are originated and resold. Harvard will come out on top on virtually any system change that you engineer. It's a lot more to do with the financial incentives involved than the effects of those financial incentives. We can come up with many reasonable proposals, but the core problem is deeply related to the financial incentives.
> Also, the NYT knows what it stands for. Something like the Intellectual Dark Web only expresses opposition to mainstream media but has no coherent agenda of its own.
The IDW stands for classical liberalism. That's a vague term, but less so than whatever concoction the NYT knows it stands for.
I wonder how much Web3 as a vision represents the worldview of Gen X. In the end some key figures, the main ideologues in the movement - although it attracts plenty of young folks - are Balaji or Chris Dixon. Thiel has also become staunchly pro-Bitcoin...
Gen X is perhaps the first generation to experience the decay of the postwar western institutions and to suffer more losses than gains because of it, unlike the boomers who knew how to exploit that decay to their own benefit.
Sounds about right to me. The problem of the age is having no good alternative to being stuck under the control of the bad governance of deeply entrenched institutions which can't be fixed.
Because going directly at those institutions is often hopeless or suicidal, people have been hoping and looking for more peaceful and voluntary ways to 'exit' that control and get around this problem for a long, long time, and in ways that are hard for the incumbents to thwart.
Well, because encryption is hard to break, there is a lot of wishful thinking and ungrounded enthusiasm that the new decentralized crypto tools might do the trick.
But it seems to me these 'Web3 vision' folks are going about things in reverse order to comparable efforts in history. In the past, one started with a vision, then looked for tools or opportunities (like 'going far away') that would solve the problems posed in trying to establish and implement that ideal.
In this case, however, we have the tool first, without a good idea of what can or should be done with it. And the question is, what is the space of visions which, ok, perhaps they are not 'ideal' or even really resembling what anybody really wants, but which nevertheless are new possibilities opened up which might be feasibly accomplished or spontaneously converged upon with the new tool, and which people might still be willing to accept because the status quo alternative is even worse.
If the inevitable hype-marketing tries to spin the narrative to sell those less worse possibilities as if they were genuine 'visions', then it's no wonder they seem neither realistically workable nor particularly compelling.
Re: the university reform debate: one way to approach it would be to change accreditation substantially and to also separate out more professional track schools that can be more easily judged on objective grounds of job placement. A BA program that most students are using as a springboard to business really doesn't make much sense. A technical program with a small number of electives that is judged by publicly reported job placement and salary figures is basically what most parents want and what many if not most students are aiming for. The core mission of the university is good (speaking broadly of its millennium of existence and not of its recent history in the US), but 40%-50%+ of the country doesn't need university; most of those students should be in shorter and cheaper training programs.
The government, for civil servants, should just run its own separate training camps similar to what the military does on a much shorter basis and calibrated to their actual recruiting needs. Graduate students with private school grad debt loads should not be getting 'jobs' as 'interns' in the government.
The universities are moving instead towards a worst-of-both-worlds approach in which they start offering lots of esoteric, specialized, 'technical' master's programs that do not get graduates jobs in the supposed specialization that it confers on them. So you neither get the gauzy cultural elevation / character formation nor the relevant technical training.
The way towards reform would involve some indirect methods and some direct ones. The core of the issue is less Harvard and more the bulk of lower tier schools gaming the way that student loans are originated and resold. Harvard will come out on top on virtually any system change that you engineer. It's a lot more to do with the financial incentives involved than the effects of those financial incentives. We can come up with many reasonable proposals, but the core problem is deeply related to the financial incentives.