Yesterday I just started working for Postmates, a food and grocery delivery service. It’s like Uber except for food. You can order what you want on demand from restaurants and grocery stores that partner with Postmates.
Continue reading Tired of Working for Unreasonable Bosses? Deliver for Postmates!
I’ve successfully completed another month of Praxis and it’s been a positive learning experience.
To recap, month four is about consuming content and feeding my brain with philosophy, critical thinking, history, economics, and culture. Every week I watched lectures and read articles then uploaded a video about the content I learned.
Week one
The first week I read articles on critical thinking and the work required to have an opinion. Additionally, I learned something new; philosophers make great entrepreneurs and both have similar mindsets.
Week two
During week two, I dived into basic philosophy like how an actual argument is structured and logical fallacies to look out for.
I already knew most of the fallacies but the structure of arguments was new to me. One drawback during this week was the quality of the professor’s teaching in the videos. I would’ve liked to see the professor elaborate more on each concept. Additionally, it would’ve helped if he could give complex examples.
Week three
In week three I started to feel some resistance and impatience. There were a set of ten lectures from the Commerce and Culture podcast by Paul Cantor. Each lecture was and hour and forty minutes which took a long time to get through. Also, Cantor tends to say “um” a lot which makes it difficult to focus and rather annoying.
Overall, it was an excellent podcast packed with a history of Western culture. Cantor builds a case against Marxism by explaining how culture flourished with the free market.
Week four
This final week was a bit more challenging but enlightening. I wasn’t aware of the argument against intellectual property laws from a tech point of view. I read a series of articles called Breaking Smart which was more academic leaning in the way it was written, dense sentences with lots of technical terms and adjectives.
Additionally, I watched a short documentary series on how everything in culture is a remix. It’s a well done documentary that will keep you interested every minute.
Overall, I’d give this module an 7 out of ten with ten being the best rating. It’s especially more valuable for those who have no prior knowledge of philosophy or economics. But it could be better with shorter lectures since it felt like being in a boring, mind-numbing class again. Praxis could also add an Eastern view of philosophy and culture instead of just a Western one.
Intellectual property (IP) laws are becoming obsolete. Blockchain has paved the way for a more voluntary society without the coercion of the government.
Blockchain technology like smart contracts are faster and cheaper ways of executing legal contracts. It’s also more trustworthy and it can prevent situations like a dishonest landlord who claimed you didn’t pay rent on time, and provide proof from thousands of other ledgers who confirmed a transaction.
Basically, if the conditions for a contract aren’t met then the code inside it would not execute the end result. Check out this beginner’s guide on how smart contracts work.
Don’t fear change, instead embrace it.
Nostalgia is a common theme that both the cultural right and left have in common. They wish for simpler times of the old days. For the right, they long for traditional values of the 1950s, and the left wishes to re-experience their childhoods from the 1980s and 1990s. Continue reading Don’t Fear Change
Pastoralism is a common form of elitist thinking. The term refers to nostalgia for the pristine “good old days” coupled with future technology to perpetuate a vision for all of society.
The problem with pastoralism is the one size fits all concept. It ignores each individual’s needs and forces them into a predetermined lifestyle.
The prime example of this is the white picket fence suburbia of the 1950s. It’s highly romanticized with cool futuristic technology like jetpacks and flying cars, merely updated for the ideal nuclear family.
What pastoralists don’t understand is that technology was meant to disrupt traditional lifestyles and usher in a new defining age like the one we live in today. Startups flourish by disrupting traditional office environments and it gave people more freedom to define their lives on their own terms. Compare it to the pastoralist’s view that the only path to success is earning a degree, owning a house, getting married, and having kids.
Pastoralism is elitist thinking because it sets back progress (both technological and moral) and demands everyone to live by their one cultural standard. The pastoralist views of the 1950s still affect us greatly today.
Modernist planners created the suburbs to center around the car and commute to work. The problem was it priced the poor out and separated people from economic centers and places with lots of jobs. Not everyone can afford a car.
You can read a longer explanation of pastoralism by Venkatesh Rao.
Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.
This is one of the most engaging and well-edited documentary series I’ve watched. I highly recommend you to watch all four parts if you have an appreciation for culture.
Everything is a Remix explains how every work of art, music, inventions, or some other idea isn’t so original as one might think. Instead, creating culture begins by borrowing and building upon other people’s ideas over time. Culture is more of an evolution rather than a big bang.
“Copy, Transform, and Combine”
Hunter S. Thompson learned to write novels by copying Hemingway word for word until he figured out a formula and created his unique voice. Likewise, classically trained artists and musicians learn the styles of the old masters first before they could develop their own style.
If you wanted to have credibility in the fine arts world, you needed to demonstrate competency in basic still life, anatomy, figure drawings, and the color wheel. Just take a look at Pablo Picasso’s earlier works. As a musician, you needed to learn composers starting from the Baroque era, instead of learning just pop music.
Let ideas roam free without the restriction of intellectual property laws.
Intellectual property (IP) laws slow down the progress of culture and humanity. Artists learn and gain inspiration by copying the old Masters. They incorporated elements of the old masters’ style and put their twist on it before they can create an original.
It’s the last week of month four of Praxis and time flew by! To recap, this month was about consuming content and feeding my brain with a healthy diet of philosophy, economics, culture, and history.
This final week will focus on how everything in culture is a remix. Additionally, I’m watching a short series about how everything is a remix by Kirby Ferguson. I highly recommend everyone to watch this because he explains why culture has slowed down and how it progresses. Continue reading Week 4 of Module 4: It’s the Last Week of Month 4!
In the last lecture of the Commerce and Culture podcast, Paul Cantor defends each new media of art as the next form of high culture. Continue reading Pop Culture and a Defense of Violent Video Games
The Commerce and Culture podcast provides an Austrian economist’s explanation of how culture would not exist without free trade and advances in technology. Continue reading Culture Exists Because of the Free Market