Nostr Web Client

I like the key pair idea you’re talking about and I think it’s mostly right but Marcus Aurelius was a stoic that did not care to share his thoughts with the world. I highly doubt he’d have a nostr if alive today, and even if he did have a nostr, he wouldn’t post his personal thoughts on nostr. His book, meditations, was not intended to be shared with the world. They were personal writings discovered after his death.

Jor 1y ago

Fair points here.

But it’s a tough comparison to make. It was a much different society when he was writing.

It’s like trying to compare Wayne Gretzky and Connor McDavid - on a much longer timeframe.

Did he even have the option to share his thoughts with the world?

Why would he write them down if he didn’t want people to find them?

Also, this was just a name that most are familiar with. You could replace him with Twain, Hemingway, Poe, Wilde.

It was less about the person and more about this new ability to properly credit writers over the VERY long-term. And remove the middlemen from profiting instead of the families of these writers.

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Discussion

MAHDOOD 1y ago

I agree with you on how powerful nostr can be but I’m just saying that Marcus Aurelius specifically is unlikely to ever use nostr in this way haha. He definitely could have gotten his ideas published, he was the emperor of Rome after all. His writings were for him. If you read meditations, it’s clear that he’s reinforcing his stoic beliefs to himself. The book was published long after his death when they found his personal writings.

I agree that the other figures you mentioned would use nostr.

liminal 🦠 1y ago

Now the incentive structure for knowledge creation is reversed.

we historically wrote to keep knowledge stable. I send you a letter that you will read a month from now and the ideas should still be true. I write a book and this is my framing it at this point in times.

but knowledge is always updating, we just assume some stability because it was published (book, paper, letter).

now we have this phenomena of live tweeting events. Where the stream of information is unstable, and it tied to the context of the current moment. After the event has passed will blogs and articles be written to be stable. Live tweeting and knowledge creation are disconnected even though knowledge progresses like that.

Alexandria will have the capacity to update not just an article, not just a fragment, but you can comment and fork individual fragments to full articles and add in new existing fragments from other authors. Zap splits allow for monetary attribution to knowledge.

This enables a live tweeting of knowledge creation and a live tweeting of science itself. Instead of saying "i've discovered this with my group. It is truth until proven otherwise." what becomes possible now is "we are breaking new ground, we don't know if this is the whole story, but it is true given what we know and will be updated as we know. You are also welcome to also join in this discovery journey."

Every article or fragment becomes its own big bang. Lots of unstability in the beginning because it is new ground, but as time goes with edits forks and reattribution knowledge earns more stability.