The solution to postmodernism and relativism, explained in a series of tweets. See 🧵🧵🧵beginning below.
proved. This is the grave of all positivism.
the world is.
cannot know what that is; all we can know is what we perceive and theorize it to be.
This is what actual science does when developing a hypothesis. Actual scientific method bases its hypotheses upon what has demonstrably WORKED and withstood the test of time in doing so.
And yet ... even chaos has its role to play ...
Working addendum pending continuation:
(A) All religious systems lay claim upon absolute / objective truth. However, as there is no method to remove one's own subjective brain & experience from the equation, there is no way to verify said claim.
More from Twitter
Every single critic of "cancel culture" just thinks the wrong people are getting canceled. pic.twitter.com/DDIVccj8zV
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) February 2, 2021
Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.
It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.
Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.
It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
Inside: Dependency Confusion; Adam Curtis on criti-hype; Catalytic converter theft; Apple puts North Dakota on blast; and more!
Archived at: https://t.co/Osts9lAjPo
#Pluralistic
1/

This weekend, I'll be participating in Boskone 58, Boston's annual sf convention, where I'm doing panels and a reading.
https://t.co/2LfFssVcZQ
2/

Dependency Confusion: A completely wild supply-chain hack.
https://t.co/TDRNHUX0Ug
3/

In "Dependency Confusion," security researcher @alxbrsn describes how he made a fortune in bug bounties by exploiting a new supply-chain attack he calls "dependency confusion," which allowed him to compromise "Apple, Microsoft and dozens of others."https://t.co/hn32EmF5qT
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 10, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/eqFr3GXlyX
Adam Curtis on criti-hype: Big Tech as an epiphenomenon of sociopathic mediocrity, not supergenius.
https://t.co/MYmHOosTk3
4/

Adam Curtis is a brilliant documentarian, and films like Hypernormalization and series like All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace had a profound effect on my thinking about politics, technology and human thriving.
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 11, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/gydJK358BX
Catalytic converter theft: Rhodium at $21,900/oz.
https://t.co/SDMAXrQwdd
5/

Back in the early 2010s, people started falling into open sewer entrances in New York City and other large metros - because a China-driven spike in the price of scrap metal, combined with post-2008 unemployment, gave rise to an army of metal-thieves.https://t.co/gtD72IDCPn
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 11, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/gdgVJoMoY8
Thinking about this tweetstorm, one of the issues I’ve run into as an engineering leader is what to call the software engineering stuff that’s “agile” given that the Agile Community(tm) has killed the brand.
I might do an \u201cagile\u201d tweet storm to the effect that all the attention is to the least leveraged portions of the value stream. Interest?
— Arien Malec (@amalec) October 26, 2019
2/
And by & large, I’ve taken to call it “DevOps”, because the DevOps community have taken up much of the mantle @KentBeck & the XP community started with. & Kent has independently focused on safe small changes deployed to production. Which is DevOps.
3/
Much of the art here is making changes safe enough to deploy to production continuously. And to do that, we need to design incrementally, test obsessively, take architecture seriously so we decompose dependencies. & we need to automate everything & do it all the time.
4/
It turns out that this is what Kent & @RonJeffries @GeePawHill & many other folks have been nattering on about & being broadly misunderstood. @KentBeck has some brilliant essays (scattered across FB & his site alas) & @GeePawHill has amazing twitter threads on the topic
5/
When you look at *what it takes* to get to the DORA measures that @nicolefv & team write about in Accelerate, the input metrics for the DORA outputs, it’s making small changes safe.
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Beautifully read: why bookselfies are all over Instagram https://t.co/pBQA3JY0xm
— Guardian Books (@GuardianBooks) October 30, 2018
THEY DO READ THEM, YOU JUDGY, RACOON-PICKED TRASH BIN

If you come for Bookstagram, i will fight you.
In appreciation, here are some of my favourite bookstagrams of my books: (photos by lit_nerd37, mybookacademy, bookswrotemystory, and scorpio_books)
