179. INFERRING THE END - Doom-Spiral or Fallacy?

“We had seen the signs that things weren’t going well. That the wheels were falling off a bit. And we had made the inference - this place was going out of business. And the inference was right.“

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120. TALKING ABOUT MY CONSTITUTION - Why Conversation Is More Important Than Codification

“The very act of codifying into a constitution the core principles of how your society is to be run is to commit future generations to values that they may not actually hold. It is a normative act, wherein one generation is imposing a set of values in stone on the basis that they believe future generations ought to hold such values. But while human beings remain autonomous agents capable of choosing many different values such an imposition has no guarantee of sticking unless the values are, in fact, actually held by the citizens for whom they are endorsed. This means constitutions are either attempting the impossible and trying to force people into valuing something they don’t value, or they are redundant, as they simply articulate values already held.“

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106. WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS - On Our Failure To Communicate

“Often we hear people say something that they didn’t think they said at all. They might accuse us of not listening, or being ignorant of certain things, but the fact remains that if you say X and I hear Y, then you did not communicate X to me, you communicated - whether intentionally or not - Y.“

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