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Notes -
Why not use ink and feather then?
It turns out that text has far more uses, even economic uses, than to signal effort.
Because the effort that is being fairly matched is cognitive effort, not incidental physical effort.
I don't deny text has more uses; if the point is to actually obtain information I seek, I don't care for the provenance (that's why I'm happy with a lot of AI-generated documentation, and will ask Gemini to sift through search results). However, the main point of reading and writing on a forum like this, or blog posts on SSC, is not seeking and providing specific information.
Political debate is more akin to technical manuals than it is with literature, in my view. I understand it is not a popular view around these parts, where people think of what they do as philosophy, but it's misplaced in my view.
The internet's conceit has long been to ignore that few things worth reading weren't worth publishing.
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