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But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.
The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.
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Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget)
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What someone may lack in talent can be more than made up for in self-motivation, self-direction, and follow-through.
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Miles Anthony Smith (Becoming Generation Flux: Why Traditional Career Planning is Dead: How to be Agile, Adapt to Ambiguity, and Develop Resilience)
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He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
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He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative.
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Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics of Ambiguity)
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Is he aware of both—and unaware? Can the mind ride two such separate tracks simultaneously? Concealed ambivalence. Hidden ambiguity. Are we so flawed that we can never truly know our own most secret motives?
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Chaim Potok (The Gift of Asher Lev: A Novel)
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Experience was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.
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Clive Barker (The Damnation Game)
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There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane -- as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout -- there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.
Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it ill be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on the matters of the spirit.
The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end -- wealth, fame, eternal salvation -- but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic's worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.
Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God...
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Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
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Perhaps most stunning thing about the VW emissions debacle is that it's by no means a singular event. The same script – unreachable target goals, a command-and-control hierarchy that motivates by fear, and people afraid to lose their jobs if they fail – has been repeated again and again. In part that's because it's a script that was useful in the past, when goals were reachable, progress directly observable, and tasks largely individually executed. Under those conditions, people could be compelled to reach them simply by fear and intimidation. The problem is that, in today's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, this is no longer a script that's good for business. Rather than success, it's a playbook that invites avoidable, and often painfully public, failure.
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Amy C. Edmondson (The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth)
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But Oppenheimer was still capable of being a critic; he just wanted to stand alone and with far more ambiguity than his fellow scientists. He was consumed with the deep ethical and philosophical dilemmas posed by nuclear weapons, but at times it seemed that, as Thorpe puts it, “Oppenheimer offered to weep for the world, but not help to change it.” In truth, Oppenheimer very much wanted to change the world—but he knew he was barred from pulling on the levers of power in Washington, and he no longer had the spirit for public activism that had motivated him in the 1930s. His excommunication had not freed him to enter the great debates of the day; it had inclined him, rather, to censor himself. Frank Oppenheimer thought his brother felt enormously frustrated that he could not find a way back into official circles. “He wanted to get back into that, I think,” Frank said. “I don’t know why, but I think it’s one of these things where there’s a—when you get the taste of it, it’s hard to not want it.
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Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
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Laundry Sandra’s birthday cake Accounts receivable report Car tires Breakfast with parents Notice how the tasks lack emotional and motivational power. We can fix that by adding verbs to them: Start a load of laundry Buy a cake for Sandra’s birthday Finish the accounts receivable report Check the pressure in my car’s tires Call parents to plan breakfast date Notice how the verbs (start, buy, finish, check, and call) tell us exactly what to do. There’s no ambiguity. You don’t have to guess at the type of activity the task involves.
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Damon Zahariades (To-Do List Formula: A Stress-Free Guide To Creating To-Do Lists That Work!)
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Complex operations, in which agencies assume complementary roles and operate in close proximity-often with similar missions but conflicting mandates-accentuate these tensions. The tensions are evident in the processes of analyzing complex environments, planning for complex interventions, and implementing complex operations. Many reports and analyses forecast that these complex operations are precisely those that will demand our attention most in the indefinite future.
As essayist Barton and O'Connell note, our intelligence and understanding of the root cause of conflict, multiplicity of motivations and grievances, and disposition of actors is often inadequate. Moreover, the problems that complex operations are intended and implemented to address are convoluted, and often inscrutable. They exhibit many if not all the characteristics of "wicked problems," as enumerated by Rittel and Webber in 1973: they defy definitive formulations; any proposed solution or intervention causes the problem to mutate, so there is no second chance at a solution; every situation is unique; each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. As a result, policy objectives are often compound and ambiguous. The requirements of stability, for example, in Afghanistan today, may conflict with the requirements for democratic governance. Efforts to establish an equitable social contract may well exacerbate inter-communal tensions that can lead to violence. The rule of law, as we understand it, may displace indigenous conflict management and stabilization systems. The law of unintended consequences may indeed be the only law of the land. The complexity of the challenges we face in the current global environment would suggest the obvious benefit of joint analysis - bringing to bear on any given problem the analytic tools of military, diplomatic and development analysts. Instead, efforts to analyze jointly are most often an afterthought, initiated long after a problem has escalated to a level of urgency that negates much of the utility of deliberate planning.
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Michael Miklaucic (Commanding Heights: Strategic Lessons from Complex Operations)
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The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end—wealth, fame, eternal salvation—but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.
”
”
Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
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Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that cater to human desires and illusions rather than human reality. These illusions, whether religious or secular, offer a simple and unexamined myth that the human race is advancing morally, spiritually and materially toward paradise. This advance is proclaimed as inevitable. This faith in our advancement makes us passive and complacent.
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Chris Hedges (I Don't Believe in Atheists)
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Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). ... The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.
The literature has two broad themes. One is that rightists are relatively uncomfortable with ambiguity; ... . The other is that leftists, well, think harder, have a greater capacity for what the political scientist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania calls "integrative complexity".
In one study, conservatives and liberals, when asked about the causes of poverty, both tended toward personal attributions (“They’re poor because they’re lazy”). But only if they had to make snap judgments. Give people more time, and liberals shifted toward situational explanations (“Wait, things are stacked against the poor”). In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head. ...
Why? Some have suggested it’s a greater respect for thinking, which readily becomes an unhelpful tautology. Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois emphasizes how the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Ambiguous tasks are a good place to observe how personality traits bubble to the surface. Although few of us are elite soldiers, we’ve all experienced the kind of psychological distress these trainees encounter on their training run: managing unclear expectations, struggling with self-motivation, and balancing the use of social support with private reflection. These issues are endemic not only to the workplace, but also to relationships, health, and every aspect of life in which we seek to thrive and succeed. Not surprisingly, the leading predictor of success in elite military training programs is the same quality that distinguishes those best equipped to resolve marital conflict, to achieve favorable deal terms in business negotiations, and to bestow the gifts of good parenting on their children: the ability to tolerate psychological discomfort.
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Todd Kashdan (The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your "Good" Self--Drives Success and Fulfillment)
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Constantine’s motives were probably confused. He was an exceptionally superstitious man, and he no doubt shared the view, popular among professional soldiers, that all religious cults should be respected, to appease their respective gods. He clearly underwent a strange experience at some time in his military career, in which his Christian troops played a part. He was a slave to signs and omens and had the Christian Chi-Rho sign on his shields and standards long before Milan. Superstition guided his decision to build a new capital, the choice of its site, and many other of his major acts of state. He was not baptized until his last illness. This was by no means unusual, since few Christians then believed in a second forgiveness of sins; sinful or worldly men, especially those with public duties seen as incompatible with Christian virtue, often delayed baptism till they were about to depart. But Eusebius’s account of Constantine’s late baptism is ambiguous; and it may be that the Church refused him the sacrament because of his manner of life. Certainly it was not his piety which made him a Christian.
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Paul Johnson (History of Christianity)
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The story begins with the revelation Alicia murdered her husband. Why do you think the author made this admission at the very start? 2. Alicia’s diary plays a key role in the book. What purpose do you think it serves? And does your perception of Alicia change the more you read? 3. Alicia’s silence is related to the Greek myth of Alcestis. How do you feel about the story of the myth? Why do you think Alicia is silent? 4. Theo’s motives to work with Alicia are complicated. Do you think he wanted to help her? 5. Both Alicia and Theo had difficult childhoods. Early on, Theo says no one is born evil. That who we become depends on the environment into which we are born. By the end of the novel he appears to change his mind, saying that perhaps some of us are born evil, and, despite therapy, we remain that way. Which do you think is true? 6. Weather plays a large role in the book, such as the heat wave during the summer. What purpose do you think the description of the weather serves in the novel? 7. Do you think the world of a psychiatric unit was convincingly portrayed? How do you feel about Diomedes and the other psychiatrists? 8. We never enter Kathy’s mind in the book. Do you have any sympathy for her? 9. What do you think happens at the end of the book? The last line is ambiguous. 10. It’s a psychological thriller with a twist. The author has said he was influenced by Agatha Christie. Did you feel this was simply a detective story or are there any other influences you can spot?
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Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
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Unlike the natural sciences, psychoanalysis was not meant to give us necessary relations of cause and effect but to point to motivational relationships which are in principle simply possible. We should not take Leonardo's fantasy of the vulture, or the
infantile past which it masks, for a force which determined his future. Rather, it is like the words of the oracle, an ambiguous symbol whlch applies in advance to several possible chains of events. To be more precise: in every life, one's birth and one's past define categories or basic dimensions which do not impose any particular act but which can be found in all. Whether Leonardo yielded to his childhood or whether he wished to flee from it, he could never have been other than he was. The very decisions which transform us are always made in reference to
a factual situation; such a situation can of course be accepted or refused, but it cannot fail to give us our impetus nor to be for us, as a situation "to be accepted" or "to be refused," the incarnation for us
of the value we give to it. If it is the aim of psychoanalysis to describe this exchange between future and past and to show how each life muses over riddles whose final meaning is nowhere written down, then we have no right to demand inductive rigor from it. The psychoanalyst's hermeneutic musing, which multiplies the communications
between us and ourselves, which takes sexuality as the symbol of existence and existence as symbol of sexuality, and which looks in the past for the meaning of the future and in the future for the meaning of the past, is better suited than rigorous induction to the circular movement of our lives, where the future rests on the past, the past on
the future, and where everything symbolizes everything else. Psychoanalysis does not make freedom impossible; it teaches us to think of this
freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Sense and Non-Sense)
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All knowledge of man by man, far from being pure contemplation, is the taking up by each, as best he can, of the acts of others, reactivating from ambiguous signs an experience which is not his own, appropriating a structure (e.g., the a priori of the species, the sublinguistic schema or spirit of a civilization) of which he forms no distinct concept but which he puts together as an experienced pianist
deciphers an unknown piece of music: without himself grasping the motives of each gesture or each operation, without being able to bring to the surface of consciousness all the sediment of knowledge which he is using at that moment. Here we no longer have the positing of an object, but rather we have communication with a way of being. The universality of knowledge is no longer guaranteed in each of us by that stronghold of absolute consciousness in which the Kantian "I think"--although linked to a certain spatio-temporal perspective--was assured a priori of being identical to every other possible "I think." The germ of universality or the "natural light" without which there could be no knowledge is to be found ahead of us, in the thing where our perception
places us, in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Sense and Non-Sense)
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Today, any movie that didn’t show Rick and Ilsa sweatily grappling with each other’s naked bodies in Rick’s apartment above the café would be considered old-fashioned. But graphic sex wipes out ambiguity, and the ambiguity in Casablanca, the uncertainty about events and motives, is one of the things that still entices us.
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Aljean Harmetz (Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II)
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In the second year of the Trump presidency, I attended a dinner of American hedge funders in Hong Kong. I was there as a guest speaker, to survey the usual assortment of global hot spots. A thematic question emerged from the group—was the “Pax Americana” over? There was a period of familiar cross-talk about whether Trump was a calamitous force unraveling the international order or merely an impolitic Republican politician advancing a conventional agenda. I kept interjecting that Trump was ushering in a new era—one of rising nationalist competition that could lead to war and unchecked climate change, to the implosion of American democracy and the accelerated rise of a China that would impose its own rules on the world. Finally, one of the men at the table interrupted with some frustration. He demanded a show of hands—how many around the table had voted for Trump, attracted by the promise of tax cuts and deregulation? After some hesitation, hand after hand went up, until I was looking at a majority of raised hands. The tally surprised me. Sure, I understood the allure of tax cuts and deregulation to a group like that. But these were also people who clearly understood the dangers that Trump posed to American democracy and international order. The experience suggested that even that ambiguous term “Pax Americana” was subordinate to the profit motive that informed seemingly every aspect of the American machinery. I’d come to know the term as a shorthand for America’s sprawling global influence, and how—on balance—the Pax Americana offered some stability amid political upheavals, some scaffolding around the private dramas of billions of individual lives. From the vantage point of these bankers, the Pax Americana protected their stake in international capital markets while allowing for enough risk—wars, coups, shifting energy markets, new technologies—so that they could place profitable bets on the direction of events. Trump was a bet. He’d make it easier for them to do their business and allow them to keep more of their winnings, but he was erratic and hired incompetent people—so much so that he might put the whole enterprise at risk. But it was a bet that enough Americans were willing to make, including those who knew better. From the perspective of financial markets, I had just finished eight years in middle management, as a security official doing his small part to keep the profit-generating ocean liner moving. The debates of seemingly enormous consequence—about the conduct of wars, the nature of national identity, and the fates of many millions of human beings—were incidental to the broader enterprise of wealth being created.
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Ben Rhodes (After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made)
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English: "Don't like the world? So change your role in its ambiguity."
Česky: „Nelíbí se ti svět? Tak změň svou roli v jeho mnohoznačnosti.
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Sebastián Wortys
“
The prevailing emphasis of the [Biblical] narratives, in any case, does move away from mythology. What is crucial for the literary understanding of the Bible is that this impulse to shape a different kind of narrative in prose had powerfully constructive consequences in the new medium that the ancient Hebrew writers fashioned for their monotheistic purposes. Prose narration, affording writers a remarkable range and flexibility in the means of presentation, could be utilized to liberate fictional personages from the fixed choreography of timeless events and thus could transform storytelling from ritual rehearsal to the delineation of the wayward paths of human freedom, the quirks and contradictions of men and women seen as moral agents and complex centers of motive and feeling….Because it is a literature that breaks away from the old cosmic hierarchies, the Bible switches from a reliance on metaphor … toward the indeterminacy, the shifting causal concatenations, the ambiguities of fiction made to resemble the uncertainties of life in history. And for that movement, I would add, the suppleness of prose as a narrative medium was indispensable.
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Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative)
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Your mind will discern in the moments of ambiguity. In the chaos and the quagmire that you will encounter. In the darkness and the labyrinth that you will come up against. There lies a direction which if you take will lead you to light and glory. You cannot give up the fight. You were born to win. You are the feared one. You are the bravest one. You are the mightiest one. March on Commander!
~ Call me the Professor, or Poet, or Avijeet, or Musafir.
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Avijeet Das
“
Investment theory claims that the convergence of six elements constitutes creativity. The six elements are intelligence, knowledge, thinking styles, personality, motivation, and environment. It is important that the reader not mistake the word intelligence for an IQ score. On the contrary, Sternberg (1985) suggests a triarchic theory of intelligence that consists of synthetic (ability to generate novel, task appropriate ideas), analytic, and practical abilities. Knowledge is defined as knowing enough about a particular field to move it forward. Thinking styles are defined as a preference for thinking in original ways of one’s choosing, the ability to think globally as well as locally, and the ability to distinguish questions of importance from those that are not important. Personality attributes that foster creative functioning are the willingness to take risks, overcome obstacles, and tolerate ambiguity. Finally, motivation and an environment that is supportive and rewarding are essential elements of creativity (Sternberg, 1985).
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Bharath Sriraman (The Characteristics of Mathematical Creativity)
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book’s central themes: the essential ambiguity of political motivation and political action, the inherent pettiness of the power game, the tendency for political power, once attained, to be redirected toward retaining political power, the ruler’s need to manipulate his public image, the centrality of blame-avoidance and blame-shifting to the exercise of sovereignty, how the possession of great power affects the ends that power wielders pursue, and the way power tends to imprison those who most ardently seek it.
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Moshe Halbertal (The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel)
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homophobia, disrupting a forum with stupid questions, or generally being annoying does not automatically make one a subcultural troll. Trolling in the subcultural sense is something a self-identifying troll sets out to do, as an expression of his or her online identity. In addition to self-identifying as such, trolls are motivated by what they call lulz, a particular kind of unsympathetic, ambiguous laughter.
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Whitney Phillips (This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture)
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Because” is ambiguous. It could mean only a subjective motive (“Because I’m paranoid, I believe that man is going to kill me”), or it could mean an objective reason (“Because he’s pointing a gun at me and squeezing the trigger, I believe that man is going to kill me”). “We believe in angels because we seek security” is only a subjective, psychological motive. “We believe in angels because God has revealed to us in the Bible that they exist” is an objective reason
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Peter Kreeft (Angels and Demons: What Do We Really Know about Them?)
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Ambiguities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and volatilities are the order of the universe and life. Those who dare to solve, resolve, and dissolve them make bold leaps into the future.
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Kuldip K. Rai (Inspire, Perspire, and Go Higher, Volume 1: 111 Ways, Disciplines, Exercises, Short Bios, and Jokes with Lessons to Inspire and Motivate You)
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Leadership is not the absence of doubt but the courage to take risks and embrace ambiguity.
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Felecia Etienne (Overcoming Mediocrity: Limitless Women)
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democracy flourishes when we express our doubts over a policy, over the motives of our leaders. Compare this with those who flee troubling ambiguity by wrapping themselves and their vehicles in flags, drown honest debate with chauvinistic clamor, and encourage a pseudo-patriotism that ill serves its nation by silencing serious dialogue that might lead to more refined judgment.
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James Hollis (Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up)
“
Premillennialists tended to have an even more melancholy view of nonChristians than had prevailed among their predecessors; sometimes this view was applied even to those who professed to be Christians but clearly had a different understanding of the gospel. All reality was, in essentially Manichean categories, divided into neat antitheses: good and evil, the saved and the lost, the true and the false (cf Marsden 1980:211). “In this dichotomized worldview, ambiguity was rare” (:225). Conversion was a crisis experience, a transfer from absolute darkness to absolute light. The millions on their way to perdition should therefore be snatched from the jaws of hell as soon as possible. Missionary motivation shifted gradually from emphasizing the depth of God's love to concentrating on the imminence and horror of divine judgment.
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David J. Bosch (Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission)
“
Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to agree. “It’s really demeaning to think that, in this deep desire to be liked, you’ve compromised giving clear, unambiguous feedback,” he said. He lamented that there were “so many anecdotes” about Jobs’s acerbity: “His intention, and motivation, wasn’t to be hurtful.
”
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Anonymous
“
Creative people generally are self-motivated, independent, delighted by novelty, risk takers, tolerant of ambiguity, deeply involved in their work, avid readers, and world travelers.
”
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Scott McKain (Create Distinction: What to Do When ''Great'' Isn't Good Enough to Grow Your Business)
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Navigating the Market: How to Buy twitter Accounts Safely
Buying a Twitter (X) account sits in a gray area: it’s widely practiced in parts of the market but it also runs counter to X’s Terms of Service and carries real risks. This guide explains why people buy accounts, the platform and legal realities, the risks, and — if you still proceed — the safest possible steps to reduce harm to your brand, money, and future access. Where appropriate, I’ll point to official sources and recent examples so you can judge the tradeoffs for yourself.
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✅Why People Consider Buying Twitter Accounts
People buy established social accounts because they want a fast path to audience, influence, or niche access. The motivations break down into a few common buckets:
✅Speed vs. Sustainability
Starting a fresh account means months (or years) of posting, testing, and building trust. Buying an account shortcuts that timeline by giving you an existing follower base — at least on paper. That speed can be attractive for product launches, political communication, or rebranding campaigns.
✅Niche Targeting & Audience Acquisition
Some buyers target accounts with very specific follower demographics (e.g., crypto traders, foodies, local audiences in a city), because it’s cheaper to buy that attention than to find and persuade that audience from scratch.
✅(Note: while the benefits sound good, always weigh them against policy risk — more on that next.)
✅The Legal & Platform Reality (What Twitter/X Actually Says)
X’s publicly posted Terms of Service and Rules make clear that the platform does not support account transfers or sales. In short, they treat user accounts as a licensed relationship (a right to use) rather than an asset you can freely sell or assign — and they enforce platform-integrity rules around account authenticity and manipulation. This means selling or buying accounts can get the account suspended or permanently removed.
A practical example: when InfoWars’ assets were auctioned, X objected in court asserting that accounts and the platform relationship aren’t freely transferable — showing the company will challenge certain high-profile transfers. That case highlights that the platform may not view transfers as a routine business transaction.
Bottom line: Buying an account can give you reach — but it can also put the account at immediate risk under X’s rules. Proceed only if you understand and accept that risk.
cdn.cms-twdigitalassets.com
✅Risks You Must Be Aware Of Before Buying
Platform enforcement: suspension, bans, and account revocations
If X detects irregularities (unusual credential changes, login geography, bot-like behavior, sudden spikes in activity, or a flagged transfer), it may limit or suspend the account. Enforcement can happen without notice and may be permanent.
✅Reputation & Audience Quality Risk
A large follower number means nothing if followers are inactive, bots, or were gained via engagement farms. Buying a toxic or fake audience can harm your brand — followers may be uninterested, hostile, or used to pushing spammy comments. Tools exist to analyse follower quality, but none are perfect.
✅Scams & Financial Risk
The market contains brokers and sellers who misrepresent metrics, sell accounts they don’t own, or disappear after payment. Without proper escrow and contract safeguards, you can lose money and have no recourse.
✅Legal & Contractual Ambiguity
Beyond platform rules, there’s limited legal precedent that guarantees transferred social accounts are a freely transferable asset. In corporate M&A, social media “assets” are handled via contracts and platform cooperation — not simple username handovers.
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Navigating the twitter Market
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The Curious Digital Bazaar: Unpacking the Phenomenon of Old Gmail Accounts for Sale
In an era defined by digital footprints and online presence, our email addresses serve as fundamental keys to our virtual lives. For most, a Gmail account is a personal identifier, a communication hub, and a gateway to countless online services. Yet, beneath this seemingly straightforward utility lies a niche, often murky, market: the trade of old Gmail accounts. The phrase "old Gmail accounts for sale
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might initially sound peculiar, even nonsensical, but it represents a growing segment of the digital economy driven by specific demands, ethical ambiguities, and inherent risks. This article delves into the motivations behind this unusual trade, explores the avenues through which these accounts enter the market, and illuminates the significant perils associated with both buying and selling what amounts to vintage digital real estate.
The Allure of Vintage Digital Real Estate: Why "old Gmail accounts for sale" are in Demand
The concept of desiring an aged digital asset, particularly an email account, runs counter to our usual inclination for the latest and greatest. However, in the complex world of online marketing, social media management, and SEO, an old Gmail account is often perceived as carrying more weight than a freshly created one.
One primary driver for the demand for old Gmail accounts for sale is the perceived legitimacy and authority associated with age. Search engines and social media platforms often view older accounts with more trust. For instance, an account created a decade ago might be less likely to trigger spam filters or be flagged as suspicious when sending emails or interacting on social media, compared to an account registered yesterday. This 'digital maturity' can be crucial for marketers looking to build audience reach, influence, or simply ensure their communications land in inboxes rather than spam folders.
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The Curious Digital Bazaar: Unpacking the Phenomenon of Old Gmail Accounts for Sale
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emotional, motivational, and ethical characteristics.19 The common strands that seemed to transcend all creative fields was an openness to one’s inner life, a preference for complexity and ambiguity, an unusually high tolerance for disorder and disarray, the ability to extract order from chaos, independence, unconventionality, and a willingness to take risks.
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Scott Barry Kaufman (Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind)