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ratchet-ing

Wednesday,  04/03/24  10:27 AM

As I've noted, one of the joys of having blogged for 21 years (!) is checking old posts.  Maybe nobody else ever clicks my flight link, but I do, all the time. 

Back on April 2, 2017 I posted progress ratchets, one of my favorite posts ever (accompanied by the illustration at right, one of my favorite images), about how "liberalism" tries new ideas and "conservatism" locks-in the best ones, enabling progress.

As a side point, worth noting; all cultures do not do this with equal efficiency, which is why all cultures do not make "progress" at equal rates.

In watching our present society careen between the end stops of wokeness and [what passes today for] conservatism, it occurs to me that this is what happens with a little too much liberalism, a little too much trying new things, and too little lock-in.  Perhaps the very degree of swing is itself a knob society can turn, and we have ours set too far to the left.

Speaking of trying new things; I'm making progress on Twitter/X comments; you are anxiously waiting on this so you can comment on this very post, I know.  Since it is possible to make an RSS feed from an X feed (via rss.app), and since every post I make is relayed to my X feed (via dlvr.it), it follows that there can be an RSS feed of my X feed, a sort of mirror of my blog's RSS feed, but with Tweet URLs instead of blog URLs.  And so these can be matched!  And so one could map blog URLs to Tweet URLs.  All still to be done, but easily (for an engineer, "easy" means "I know how to do it", even if the actual act of doing it is "hard").  Stay tuned.

 

 
 

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