Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
1093 Following
63469 Followers
Casting is not that different from doing politics.
Without an audience, your casts have no reach, in the same way that your political agenda won’t be implemented if you lack an electorate. So, you need followers, or else you might as well be casting to your notes app.
In building that followership, you must choose where to place the proverbial cursor between two extremes; you cannot remain undecided.
One extreme is high-integrity: cast only about what you truly care for, regardless of how niche and recondite your interests are, however long or short form that may be, and no matter how alienating your vocabulary is to the average reader.
The other extreme is *not* low-effort kawaii selfies, edgy memes, or LinkedIn platitudes; if those are truly what motivates you (no judgment here), then you can still be a high-integrity caster. What the other extreme is, simply, being inauthentic in return for an audience, engagement farming, and casting only what you think people want to read.
I again pass no moral judgment here — it’s really a personal tradeoff between deontological and utilitarian approaches to using this app.
(Side note: The Venn diagram of low-effort and inauthentic content may overlap greatly, but that’s still orthogonal to the concept of integrity.)
Politicians are no different — you’ll find a few high-integrity folks (on both ends of the ideological spectrum). They may not get elected; but they are consistent, inspiring, and often widely respected in their own ways.
And then you’ll find others who see political expression purely as a mean to an end; the end being to be elected at all cost. And because their electoral discourse is inauthentic, you cannot truly know who they are and what their hidden agenda is until they get to the top, which leads to all sorts of face-eating-leopard, surprised-pikachu regrets, and jadedness toward politics.
I don’t even know anymore if this cast is about Farcaster dynamics or politics. I guess it’s both 15 replies
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Crypto markets are nonlinear systems and TA is astrology for grown adults.
“Why do investors insist on the existence of cycles in gold and silver prices? Because periodicity is the most complicated orderly behavior they can imagine. When they see a complicated pattern of prices, they look for some periodicity wrapped in a little random noise” (James Gleick in Chaos, 1987).
Markets are nonlinear because small news (e.g., a Musk tweet) create large swings, when large news (e.g., a regulatory approval) may cause small swings. Nonlinear systems are not only sensitive to small influences (the butterfly effect), they can also be resilient to large influences (the raging bull effect).
They’re also nonlinear because shallow market depth, liquidity fragmentation, and feedback loops cause nonlinear amplification, as is the case when shorts get liquidated in cascades.
Crypto markets are also aperiodic, even after accounting for BTC’s four-year halving cycles. Their volatility is also highly autocorrelated. Any chart repetition is coincidental and transient at best.
There’s even evidence for strange attractors and fractal geometry in price trajectories.
That’s not to say that crypto markets are random — they are deterministic yet largely unpredictable, as all chaotic systems are.
Bullish on fundamentals, unfazed by transient noise 4 replies
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This latest Veritasium video is about a widget that shrinks when you pull on it. The script makes whimsical detours into springs physics, road congestion, and Braess' paradox, however the key insight about this little counterintuitive oddity felt unremarkable at first.
But then I realized that it is a rare example of antifragility in action (yes, the Taleb kind), although the video makes no mention of that. As a refresher on antifragility: a few systems benefit from randomness over time, while most don't.
An object threatened by randomness over time is said to be fragile. Such is the case of a vase because so many random events (a baseball, a cat, moving houses) can irreversibly destroy it.
An object is considered to be robust (neither fragile nor antifragile) if it is mostly impervious to randomness over time. Mountains are a good example — only erosion over geological time scales can affect them (and love, if we get lyrical about moving them).
But an object is said to be antifragile if it strengthens as a result of stressors and volatility. If you skip to the 20-minute mark, you'll see that with just the right amount of stress applied to it in the form of vibrations, the widget can oscillate between vulnerable (resonant) and stable states.
That's a fascinating property — imagine that applied to a building in an earthquake-prone zone, to a computer network, or to an immune system.
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