Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
All these builders telling me I now have the power to do what I want when all I want is to figure out what I should want 🤔 These true believers of builderology vastly overestimate the ability of us non-building users to make choices of any sort, even random ones. Let alone tasteful ones shaped by clear goals and preferences. Even for a decision as simple as what flavor of icecream to get, you can reduce me to terminal robotic indecision stasis by removing chocolate and pistachio from the menu. Most of us are Buridan's asses under a thin veneer of agentic human.
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artlu 🎩
@artlu
h/t @keccers.eth. wait. but more power strictly dominates less power, no? You cite "taseteful" and "clear goals and preferences". That could be in the realm of builder success, sure, or it could be placed in the user's wheelhouse. Less agency shouldn't win, even if vast portions of the population suffer from learned helplessness. Are you really railing against a lack of Smart Defaults? as opposed to the empowering power of autonomous capacity?
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
You're still thinking too deep in product land and instrumental choices. "Why" is not about agency or power. It's about wanting to get up in the morning at all. Considerations like those you lay out are irrelevant if you can't conjure up enough the life energy to get up in the morning, and in smaller ways throughout the day even if you wake up. If you haven't decided where to go on a map, does it matter if there are longer/shorter or faster/slower options to get to various places? IME, half of all humans can't get to activation energy, and the other half flail in random desperation due to the anxiety of stillness and not-doing, but still lack activation energy for any particular thing. This is how you get "early adopter" syndrome and flitting from one shiny new thing to another. They haven't picked a goal so they cycle through tools and capabilities.
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