Post by @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Any frank assessment of your achievements starts with an equally frank assessment of the world-historic forces attending those achievements. For example, I often tell young people who want to get into tech, "If you don't have the foresight and work ethic to be born in 1971, I can't really help you."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/21/world-historic-forces/#multicore

An old-timey baseball player sliding into base in a great dust-cloud. The background is a high-magnification multicore CPU.

https://pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: Born on technology's third base (21 Aug 2026)

11 Replies

8 Boosts

low-key

@lowkey@tilde.zone 3 hr. ago

@pluralistic “Theory-free inference works well, but it fails badly.”
And the incredible run of perfectly formulated statements that capture the state of things continues

Captain Superlative

@CptSuperlative@toot.cat 5 hr. ago

@pluralistic

I wish more Americans thought about the world in terms of luck rather than merit. I expect we’d have to become an entirely different people. 🤞

MoveFastAndFixThings

@gwilymgj@mastodon.social 3 hr. ago

@CptSuperlative @pluralistic I think the problem is they only think of who wins (and the winning is defined in a very simplistic way)

Captain Superlative

@CptSuperlative@toot.cat 3 hr. ago

@gwilymgj

A lot of poor Americans seem to find it easy to think in terms of luck but Americans who are above poverty and below actual middle class (I.e. the Americans who only think they’re middle class) are terrible at it.

@pluralistic