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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
One thing that frustrates me about "my culture is better than yours" discourse, is that the game inherently drives people to come up with post-hoc justifications for why their fixed pre-existing thing is better than the other guy's fixed pre-existing thing. This is not a productive enterprise. It's completely missing the part where if you realize that some aspect your pre-existing thing sucks, you can actually go and change it and make it better. Compete by offering a better product, not by offering a better justification for a product you were randomly assigned by birth lottery. One of the things that attracted me about network states, is that productive cultural competition that leads to innovation in new and better cultures could actually happen there, and in environments "holistic" enough to capture all aspects of culture that are necessary to run a functioning civilization (as opposed to narrow environments, eg. cryptocurrencies and games) I hope we can take that open-minded approach more.
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tldr (tim reilly)
@tldr
A cambrian explosion of new cultures would be very exciting. But also: Couldn’t some of these new cultures find some of their inspiration from the best parts the past? The wisdom of the past thinkers and the experiences of history should be valuable resources for new invention.
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TS
@tsuipen
Learning from the past can turn into nostalgia and historicism real fast. To get best results, it has to be mixed with learning from other cultures too. Learn not just from your own past and present but also from those of other cultures.
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tldr (tim reilly)
@tldr
True, but people don’t think about the fact that everything in the past already *is* a radically different culture. Even when your same nation and language. This is by virtue of having so many less people, who are not connected by telecommunication and high speed travel. To name just a few. (Watching something like The VVitch is a good way to see this)
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TS
@tsuipen
Great artists are good at both. I think of Satyajit Ray whose first film was inspired both by a novel in Bengali and the works of Italian neorealism.
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