Prowess. 2 tangential thoughts that you might be able to bring back into the fold.
A: that snowclone from Thucydides sounded familiar, but what I really recall was Brasidas’ un-spartan virtues. I cant find my notes, maybe you can XD. Did he out-Athenate the Athenians? Afairc those unspartan virtues didnt travel well in Sparta even after his death-by-victory.
B: Rao’s hackstability, transmuting sprezzatura into samsara, if not erloesung. Morlocks -> Hacker, Eloi -> the Machine (think temple of Moloch in Metropolis; Mittler ~ James Scott’s metis?
What about the trifecta in Russell’s taxonomy? I’d guess PG et al (Type IIIs) bet on it, but having not read Rao’s Gervais Principle, they had to empirically derive the managerial revolutionistas inserting themselves between the Type Is (where matter = customers as well as cash/the lower levels of the infra) and the Type II “system designers” aka “founders”. The new insight (relative to GP) seems to consist of previously repressed kinship bonds between the founder and the infra. (At this junction I tend to revisit my thoughts about p2p child rearing in the kibbutz)
Now.. back to why prowess is deprioritized in uh silo’d hacker “spaces”.. i’m guessing its hard to converge on a shared metric of prowess across hacker subdomains. Other signals, e.g. lieblingshunde can be more reliable. Post coarsegraining we identify Stanley, but in his day the Londoners, what did they think? Why did his brother support Warbeck??? Further riffing on microlocal banks managing the exchange rate (of talent) based on perhacker PPP (“proven prowess parity”) to be called for…
[1,5]Hmm de wiki for Biche says it was an austrian patrol. She was real family! Proof of fortune. The proof-by-lieblingshund would be legal tender on Sand Hill Rd. Not so much proof-by-sansoucci.
[petit nicolas] You do make me miss the locally-sourced, artisanal, post-talk snacks
[EDIT2-3: looking at the DL bookshelf, the accompanying soundtrack (if i riff from superficially collating memories of certain other bookshelves) would be Sprawl II/Tracy Kidder (now with a stake in Jack Dorsey’s Block.io/Tidal)
“Simulation n its discontents” should be paid close attention, with Freud/Oedipus in the background?
[EDIT] easier for me to sympathize with Hacker > book Jeeves > tv Jeeves. The dot product.. might not be real..
Have definitely also run into the “seasonal farmboy-wranglers” in the Appalachian slopes, but uh i think since the crowd was demographically narrower/less touristy/the local culture more laidback not much wrangling took place.. or rather there was a lot more fiddling with the machines rather than people. (Active skiving)