Philosophical

Over the last few years, I’ve seen several instances of (and reactions against) an intellectual denial of service attack that I’ll call “The Number One Priority”. Maybe you’ve seen it, too.

conversations lately:

“let’s terraform mars!”

“let’s fix earth, first 😒”

“let’s do both!”

”... anyway terraforming venus makes more sense 😒”

“it really doesn’t! [details!]”

“whatever, people are a virus 😒”

“that is a quote from the matrix! the evil guy says it!”

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) March 24, 2019

We cannot do anything until someone’s Number One Priority is satisfied. Exploring Mars? What about the starving Earth children? Developing a decentralized alternative to the current global monetary system? Fix this one first! Building a mobile scooter company to facilitate easy travel in big cities? NOT EVERYONE LIVES IN CITIES!

In my first post on intellectual denial of service attacks , I covered something I dubbed “bad infinitum,” a tendency for non-experts to overwhelm experts with repetitive, costly, and often unproductive demands for evidence or counter-argument to oft-debunked or misleading claims. Here, I’ll cover another of these intellectual attack vectors, which I’ll call “the map to nowhere.” An asymmetry exists in each of these attacks: easy to launch, hard to counter.

We live in an era that devalues conformity, while simultaneously preserving it in many interesting ways. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion. Divergent views produce conflict, however, and disagreement, argument, and debate define our current moment.

If we merely disagreed on matters of taste - our favorite color, music, movies, etc. - we could avoid such conflicts. Increasingly, though, we disagree on more fundamental ideas. Some deny the spherical shape of the Earth and the heliocentric model of the solar system (I highly recommend Behind the Curve , a movie about this movement). Arguments of all shapes and sizes spring up everywhere: capitalism vs. socialism, humanity’s role in climate change, on and on.

The AddToAny Share Buttons  WordPress Plugin was, until recently, vulnerable to a DOM-based cross-site scripting issue. The file in question is hosted on the author’s site, so you’re not vulnerable anymore (you’re welcome). If you just want the vulnerability details, go here . Now for the story of this bug.

This particular journey started with an email from XSSposed , a site intended to allow security researchers to responsibly report cross-site scripting issues in sites that don’t run formal bug bounty programs like those seen here . Having never heard of it before, I was immediately suspicious. I like the concept of bug bounties just fine, but I was a little surprised to learn that I had unknowingly opened one on my site.

Innovation is accelerating and entropy is increasing (as always). Several huge scientific revolutions are peeking at us from the horizon of the future. Looking at how we’ve dealt with the Internet revolution, I’m not sure we’re ready for them.

What 3 revolutions am I talking about? When are they going to happen? It’s impossible to predict which of these revolutions will happen first, or exactly when, but I suspect that it is safe to assume that all of them will come to pass in the next 100 years. I won’t focus on providing every tiny piece of evidence and analysis of these phenomena in this post, but I will examine them in much greater detail in the future.

I first created an account on reddit about 6 years ago, and I think I had been a lurker for a while before that. When I joined, reddit was a place of learning. There was (to me, at least) a sense of community around sharing great philosophical articles, important news stories, and all kinds of learning resources. In essence, it felt like Hacker News before Hacker News. This probably isn’t a coincidence , as Paul Graham had a huge influence on reddit (which wasn’t even the idea Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman originally pitched for YCombinator). And over time, it lost that high quality aspect. I suspect that most people reading this post have heard this argument somewhere before .

The other day I re-discovered this post by Joel Spolsky on Hacker News, entitled " Victory Lap for Ask Patents ." I saw it when he originally posted it a while back, but it didn’t resonate with me at the time.

But re-reading it today, I realized how great an opportunity we, as software developers, have to force patent reform by actively contributing to this project. Ask Patents , if you haven’t heard of it, is a StackExchange site where you can ask questions about patents, or, in my case, respond to requests for prior art that invalidate an overly-broad patent. In my case, I focus on software patents.

“A man’s true wealth is the good he does in the world.”

— Mohammad

When you think of free market economics, undeniably the most championed principle is deregulation. By removing the obstacles that prevent us from economic exchanges, we become wealthier. Letting individuals be in total control of their financial decisions is the path to prosperity, as the thinking goes. Getting the state out of the way increases the number of transactions that will take place.