Hobbes in the 21st Century : openpolitics.com

Hobbes in the 21st Century

The Bush Doctrine reminds me of the political philosophy class I took a few years ago: Wolfowitz (liberally paraphrased):

The challenge of the 21st century is the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, which make it possible for small groups of people to threaten countries. To prevent this, one nation is needed, whose power is beyond contest. The United States of America must be this Leviathan. #

Hobbes:

"Nature has made men so equal in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind that another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest hath strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself." #

- Leviathan Chapter 13

The US's former allies do not support the "US as Leviathan" System and accuse it of violating Law 9:

"If nature therefore have made men equal, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal, yet because men that think themselves equal will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth law of nature, I put this: that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride." #

-Leviathan Chapter 15

2003/03/26 # Permalink

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Links

Youtube: Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space

I don't like his interface but I do very much like the concept. What I find puzzling is that this paradigm could be implemented using current web standards so why did he make this new program with an interface that's entirely foreign to us.

I don't think Xanadu will catch on but everything he demonstrated will eventually make it into browsers and websites, but at a much slower pace than Mr. Nelson is comfortable with.

Ted Nelson on Tim Berners-Lee

First of all, I think the WWW was a brilliant simplification. As I understand it, and maybe I have this wrong, but Tim Berners-Lee came and we had lunch, in, oh I guess it was 1989, 90, something like that, in Sausalito, and I really liked the guy, and he'd done this very simple thing, and it sounded too trivial to me {laughs} but he certainly was a nice fellow and I expected to keep in touch with him, although I am a very bad correspondent, and the next thing I knew suddenly the thing had caught on.

.. What would I recommend to a young visionary today? {laughter} Very straightforward, learn to deal with short term goals and not delegate.

How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit

And although most communities treat their members with gentle regard, Reddit prides itself on winnowing the wheat from the chaff. It relies on the collective judgment of its members, who click on arrows next to contributions, elevating insightful or interesting content, and demoting less worthy contributions. Even Mills says he was impressed by the way in which redditors "marshaled their collective bits of expert knowledge to arrive at a conclusion that was largely correct." It's tough to con Reddit.

What's the Worst That Can Come of the Bachmanns' Swiss Citizenship?

In 1792, French citizenship was bestowed upon George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Thomas Paine served in the French National Convention.

5 Don'ts of Startups

Don’t scale too early. This is the No. 1 cause of startup failure. Startup Compass has found that 70% of startups crash because they scale prematurely.
Don’t work part time. Sleepy? Get used to it. People who work full time on their startups raise an average of 24 times more funding than those who work part time.
Don’t go it alone. Maybe you are the smartest guy in the room. But solo founders raise less than half the money that two to three co-founders raise.
Don’t ignore customers. Yes, they’re annoying. (What do they know?) But startups that track customer metrics have 400% more user growth.
Don’t forget about the technology. Startups without a tech-oriented co-founder are twice as likely to scale prematurely and have three to five times less user growth.