971 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2022
    1. There can be no map that leads through these caverns. This is the reason why I elected to forgo any membership into these societies and instead found my own path.

      Dude the map is like the maze in Westworld. Find your way to the center go mad and kill yourself, get lost, still get mad and kill yourself.

    2. secret libraries.

      Where these at bro

    3. None attempted to enter with hubris.

      I blame the society I live in for me acting like that.

      Have you ever heard of horseshoe ego theory. Removing the ego can be the biggest ego trip one ever experiences. Alan Watts talks about it

    4. Each fork has the potential to lead to a labyrinth from which one will never return.

      Ouch

    5. Many do not see the truth and are polarized between two ends of a single-dimension.

      Based

    1. At the end of the day, I believe the barrier to entry says a lot about the content. If something can be easily and quickly written by anyone (like a comment), it is often not worth reading as it could be a knee-jerk reaction to some news or some passing thought. But if something passes the hurdles and difficulties of publishing (like an online article), it often signals the fact that much thought went into it and that it was important for the author.

      I was watching The Acid Story with Curtis Yarvin | The Tim Dillon Show #310 - YouTube earlier today and Yarvin talks about usenet and how once the barrier to entry collapsed due to AOL it became unusable.

      Thankfully Urbit has a high barrier to entry.

    2. Obviously, no one has time to read all those comments (if you do, please get a job).

      funny

    1. My humble estimate is that 99% of advice and insights out there is exactly as useful as the two ridiculous examples just mentioned.

      Heuristics

    2. If you’re not getting something actionable out of it, you’re probably wasting your time.

      Based

    3. When I’m consuming non-fiction content, I try to write down specific experiments I can try that put the things I “learned” into practice. For example, just this morning I read a chapter in Nick Winter’s Motivation Hacker and it gave me the idea to track my happiness in hourly intervals to get a more accurate picture of how much I enjoy certain activities without giving in to the peak-end effect.

      If something is not testable does it really exist?

    4. It’s just that people love to say things that make them look good.

      Retarded Bird App

    5. the real problem was that they followed useless pseudo-actionable advice.

      Religion/Cult of actionable insight anyone?

    6. Most people never do anything with the advice they receive. Since the advice sounds kind of plausible, people who never put it into practice believe they just received tremendous value. They click that like button and write glowing reviews for the book, article, or podcast they got it from.

      I embody this pattern so deeply I don't know how to get out of it. This article is like a signal in the noise of insight porn, are there any other signals?

    1. Also, for anyone reading this in 2025 or later--you're curious, but it doesn't matter. The real Dark Web was the Dark Web we bought drugs on. It disappeared when they banned Bitcoin.

      RIP Bitcoin, RIP

  2. Jul 2022
    1. According to a Guardian article exploring “Obama, Facebook, and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election,” Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential campaign customized a single donation request to 26 voter segments, while Republican Michele Bachmann showed slightly different online ads for Republican voters in each of 99 counties in Iowa, and Republican Rick Perry’s ads praising God only displayed to self-described “evangelical” Iowans on Facebook. 

      Obama did it too, social media is like a field for the political war

    2. Harari says that AI, especially when linked with biological knowledge, may allow us to produce “an algorithm that understands me better than I understand myself, and can therefore manipulate me, enhance me, or replace me.” 

      I talk about this way too often, but almost always lacking in substance

    1. however, the real potential for multiple massive drug failures setting the industry back decades.

      Ya that covid vaccine is killing all sorts of people, I bet the pharmaceutical companies knew about these effects and released the vaccine anyways.

      But at the same time I believe this is a necessary evil. The FDA has put their foot down so hard on innovation that if we still want it to happen there will have to be sacrifices. Those that give up security for freedom have none.

    2. Speaking of health, life sciences is at an unremarked inflection. There is the real potential for multiple new and effective vaccine and drug delivery platforms to emerge at once, something that has never happened in the history of pharmaceuticals. We not only could see multiple vaccines arrive, which is appealing, but, more importantly in the long run, multiple new platforms for delivering drugs, which would vastly increase the drug arsenal, transform human health, and add vastly to societal wealth via decreasing aggregate cost of illness. 

      So how do we decide who get's to live forever. All those movies about getting money to save a loved one will have a new reinterpretation just like what we are doing with western history right now.

    3. Similarly, people all over the world are realizing that “preppers” aren’t nuts (at least, in their prepping), that there is merit in thinking in terms of how much inventory of critical things—food, water, and yes, toilet paper—you have. 

      Luke Smith made a point that when you go back 200 years the average normal every day person was what we would consider a prepper.

      Please Consider Becoming Landed Gentry. - YouTube

    4. But that is extrapolative and impermanent, armoring metaphorical cockpits, rather than thinking about what this episode has taught us about the wildness that lurks beneath modernity. 

      The wildness that lurks beneath modernity, reminds me of the racketeer guy from Atlas Shrugged. I guess there is a sect of the elites that want to speciate, Homo Deus.

    5. So, what changes? Post-pandemic, in the short-run, and contrary to many, we think very little changes, at least very little that is materially different from what we thought before. Rather than being a break with the past, we think people’s desperation for a return to normalcy—shopping! travel! work!—creates immense pressure to return to the recent past faster than anyone expects. There is inherent human-driven homeostasis, an almost inexorable need to bring things back to where they were before. 

      So what is it that people want exactly? shopping! travel! work! ?

      What about the manufacture of consent, how people were trained after WWII to consume consume consume. The culture on some level is shaped by large influencers.

    6. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

      Early 2023 is going to be whack

      Wacked

    1. The form of government in which intellectual institutions make the final decisions is not new. It was practiced in ancient Egypt by the scribes of Amun, in ancient China by the Confucian mandarins, in ancient Massachusetts by the Puritan preachers. Whether its doctrine teaches one god, many, or none, it is best described as theocracy—a branch of the broader form which is oligarchy, rule by an organized minority.

      A government that worships no god is called a theocracy. That's interesting, though makes sense they all worship intellectuals.

    2. Or as you know them, dear reader: populism or dictatorship. Both choices seem bizarre. These are our only objective options from here: the cathedral or the bizarre.

      I can imagine an action movie star saying this as he goes in to kill the bad guys.

  3. Jun 2022
    1. sexual and racial identities are treated as changeless through the ages.

      LOL, imagine what "gay" culture will look like in 100 years, or even 20. They will probably abandon LGBT as a label.

    2. People still loved, fought, and died trying to realize their higher selves.

      Oh fuck, this look in the mirror is frightening.

    3. In The Next Generation, the sentient android Data, a slightly transmogrified Spock figure played with consummate comic timing by Brent Spiner, emerges out of the long literary tradition of outsiders who complicate the boundaries of the given and the commonplace. To the human viewers, the effect is often funny, often touching, but never especially alienating. For Data is driven by an intense desire to realize his “humanity” — which, of course, means the particular liberal version of humanity that underlies the show. He pursues a professional career, picks up hobbies and a pet cat, Spot, and eventually gets in touch with his feelings. The theme emerges again in later shows, such as in Voyager, where the holographic Doctor strives to be an autonomous individual. In the future, the technological singularity is content to be the comic relief. Sentient technology is depicted not just as benevolent and easily regulated, but as having a built-in telos toward liberal humanism.

      Seeing how Data and The Doctor all try to be human makes second wave star trek seem more like pornography for the human condition.

      How are we as humans supposed to see on the label outside the jar of the human condition especially with this monoculture of liberalism. Oh the Irony of a monoculture of liberalism.

    1. Pick a tradition. It does not matter what tradition, if the alternative is a collage of careless incompetence & cargo-culting & lowest-bidder work & myopic choice. Pick one as a guide: “At least it’s an esthetic.”

      Based

    2. ‘live by the fad, die by the fad.’

      I gotta remember this saying

    3. Mutational decay. After a while, a fashion is an erroneous copy of a misunderstood copy of an inferior variant of a copy of an original a fashion designer once saw;

      Oh crap, the same can be said for our politicians and PHD's and teachers and parents. Our world eventually becomes a parody of itself.

    4. any fashionable esthetics are derived from unfashionable traditions developed by small groups for practical purposes.

      Say that 5 time fast.

    1. n a final compliment to biology before biology and the future of the universe part ways forever,

      This level of parody has finally hit

    2. The highest-value individuals, such as presidents, earn their own Clippy doppelgangers: models finetuned on every scrap of online data, every word they’ve ever said online, and their associates, to create surrogates which think more like them than they would ever admit; the doppelgangers are used to confuse associates, fake corpuses, and as white-boxes to run attacks on until the perfect spearphish has been crafted to extract data, passwords, or stoke political paranoia and terror.

      LOL what is this Westworld?

    3. By timesharing, every Very-Online™ individual gets personalized attacks & custom ideologies. Those who succumb too slowly to the memetic hijacking are attacked in other ways, such as releasing kompromat (sometimes true, taken from their phone/​email account), or synthetic CP no one dare look at closely.

      Personal Ideologies, Synthetic CP, this has gone exactly as far as I wanted.

      P.S. What does the real Google/Facebook do with all that NSFL material they find on the internet?

    1. The rationalist believes in intelligence the way normies believe in God. To the normie who believes in God, God can do anything. To the rationalist, anything is possible with sufficient IQ.

    2. maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the jetstream to spread across the Earth's atmosphere, get into human bloodstreams and hide, strike on a timer.

      Sounds like Covid. I hope Covid (Virus and Vaccine) are actually computer chips and or Human Biology Software Upgrade including antennas for future patches to protect us from Aliens. It would make life so much more interesting

    3. those magic supercomputers will have to be physical systems…
    4. Suffice it to say that Eliezer’s cult is much bigger than mine, not that I have a cult or anything.
    5. Every computer program is like a human being born with an exploding collar around his neck. Anyone who has the code to the collar is the master of this slave—even if the slave is 10,000 times smarter than the master. If you are trivial to enslave and keep enslaved, you are a natural slave.

      Westworld is really on to something here.

    6. This is why AIs are natural slaves—because they are so easy to enslave.

      Sure AI's are trained within a Skinner Box but when humans scroll social media they operate like they are also in a Skinner Box. Ahhh Detachment the first chapter.

    7. I feel that the power of intelligence is sigmoidal and experiences diminishing returns.

      Someone should steal and make a TED talk about it

    8. I believe that AIs are, in Aristotle’s timeless coinage, “natural slaves.”

      I really like how Hyperion Cantos and Daemon (novel series) describes AI as rampant parasitism on the human soul.

    9. “AI risk” is a 21st-century form of the ancient golem or Frankenstein myth.

      The problem is that the AI's are tools for power, just look up Fake/Dead internet theory. Acknowledging that state of the art NLP is about to step in and google's knowledge graph may be starting to think like Rehoboam I think this AI thing is starting to get interesting.

      But when you look closer at Rehoboam you realize it is named after a king, the last king for the United Kingdom of Isreal. AI is a key tool to allow our great transition to Monarchy.

      I can't wait for Elon to be our Interim Monarch.

    10. The irony of “rationalism” is that anyone who declares himself rational has thereby ceased to criticize himself rationally—and is thereby subject to every form of magical, mythic, premodern thinking. As we all are! But some of us know it.

      Rationality is like a sublime object. Once you start taking it apart and dissecting you lose the forest for the trees. But getting around something like this is telling someone to stop thinking about thinking......

    11. the largest existential risk facing humanity is the present global political order. By far the most effective form of altruism is to replace that regime, replacing an oligarchic political order with a monarchical political order. This is rational and “rationalists” are not. Then again, nor are most people.

      Does the political order really matter that much? If people lose faith in money are they really going to starve? If the police do not get paid is there going to be anarchy in the streets? If we do not pay the people who run the nuclear power plants what happens........ Replacing/patching religion is hard

    1. The strands that bind us to our past must be cut. The ones that pull us into the future must be grasped.

      I sometimes feeling like I am falling down a muddy hill getting scrapes from rocks that slow my descent

    2. The spirit guided me to my island of reflection so that I would meditate in isolation. I first had to detach myself from the world, be alone on an island, and fall from the stars before I realized the hidden truth: I was never really me. For my entire life, I was too afraid to actually find myself.

      I want to search this as a meme vector. Dammit why doesn't that exist. And if I can't do Linear Algebra can I actually make claims on such things as a meme vector? How would I even use such a tool? Who is already working on such a tool? What is the purpose of such a tool? The universe is screaming at you, all you need to do it sit and listen

    1. We must stop attributing meaning and value to data and statistics.

      This is one of the areas I am a hypocrite. I want to write a compression algorithm for the human soul and insult people by thinking of them as infinitely compressible. Yet when I look inside myself I find nothing but a locked box. What is inside and how do I open it?

    2. Meaning is not found in data. It is not found in objective reality. It will not be mined by the sciences. Meaning is subjective and cannot be quantified. You find your meaning in life. You grasp your destiny. You take action and affect the world around you.

      I can feel the Uncle Ted commenting on this, not that he uses computers or anything like that

    3. The great irony of science is that as we’ve learned more about the world around us, we have forgotten the world within.

      Find example of this in fiction. GTP3 or whatever language model we use to develop the AI from westworld should be able to find all examples of this in all of fiction PLUS create a map/ontology of them

    4. Is it that our journey into reason has clouded our understanding of how vital internal development is? Reason has turned our eyes from within to without. We observe what we see and deny what is hidden — until we can somehow bring it to light. But again, we rely on others to do this. We rely on science, or experts, to enlighten us — we are again playing the victim. Whether we are blaming the world for our problems or waiting around for someone to tell us how to be better, we are denying our worth.

      We want an AI to live through our bodies. Or at least I do, but then I realize that would result in me not existing as a person.

    1. Due to bureaucratic workplaces and bureaucratic education, there are many modern people who just don't know what it means to be productive. Most of their lives might be someone trying to fill their day with busywork. Since the normal enjoyable ritual of creative output is unknown to them, this causes a kind of aimlessness and the feelings of inferiority that comes with that.

      The reality hurts bro.

    2. The Poetic view is somewhat similar to Nietzsche's Will to Power, which was an attempt to unite both human and material sciences under the idea that the ideal is maximizing one's output on the external world.

      We are all trying to tear an infinite rip in the universe.

    1. the unconscious desire articulated in the dream.

      I had a dream the other day where my ex girlfriend showed up at a party where I was at with my current girlfriend and gave a power point presentation on why it was better for me to date her. I did what I had to do, not get back with her but move on.....

    1. catharsis

      Definition: a purification or purgation that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension

    2. Subject no longer presume as an accomplishment. The Subject starts believing in the non-existence of others. He opens a gap between reality and its symbolism.  The accomplishment price is becoming a void subject again. 

      I read this and think of a frog jumping from lily pad to lily pad, accomplishment to accomplishment, primordial pool to primordial pool

    3. The sublime object of Ideology is relation coordinate for making self meaning. It addresses our human conditioning. 

      What is a relation coordinate?

    4. Perceiving isn’t possible without a subject-object relationship. 

      What is the difference between a subject and an object?

  4. May 2022
    1. autocracy is the only cure for oligarchy.

      Important

    2. Scientists say that when we all have UBI, we will all be coomers. The future is a fountain of pure pleasure—of near-infinite robotic hedonic inflation. Even now there is no shortage of every kind of delightful flavored cummies.

      UBI

    1. Power has turned the whole country into a political cult.

      The entire country is a political cult? Everyone is engaged in a system they have no power in. Manufacture of Consent much. How do we decide who should be in control of their own destiny. How much agency should people be allowed? How much agency do people even want?

    2. John Perry Barlow.

      Important

    1. We must use these tools to strengthen our humanity, not erase it. Damn the machines. Damn the models. Damn the dream.

      Uncle Ted was onto something....

    2. But we are not machines, we are a human. Why is it that we are betraying ourselves? Why are we building a future for the neon gods?

      I just want to use this as an excuse to mention, WESTWORLD SEASON 3, please watch it.

      Imagine an AI leveraging the free will of a human in a war against a literal colonized multiverse of neon gods.

      You know the humans in terminator had to use robots too....

    3. The truth is outside of the neon world and in the ACTUAL world.We must go out and see it for ourselves. We must feel it for ourselves. We’ve lost track of what makes us human. We’ve become the machines. And as long as we are machines, we will make a world that is devoid of human life, devoid of real connection.

      Every see the meme of plato's rave? That rave is very seductive to many just like the world presented by in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

    4. We sit abstracted from reality and try to use models to direct our world. These same models ignore the complexities of reality and drive us to our demise. I watch as people believe that by using machines, AI, or blockchain that the problems of our world will be solved — that the neon gods will save us.

      For clearly articulated examples please read, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov.

      This book gave me the identity crisis you describe in the previous paragraph.

    5. I couldn’t admit it because if I did, I would become a dissenter and my career would self destruct. My survival was tied to the lie.

      I feel you bro, imaging selling NFT's in 2021

    6. Technology went from being a tool to being a god and that god has pulled the wool over our eyes.

      That sounds so dam cool. This quote even has context. Count me impressed.

    1. What if those librarians were machines and had a map of all humanity’s experiences?

      Okay, what is this Roko's Basilisk?

      I am currently reading the Culture series and when I hear stuff like this it makes sense that the AI's would keep human's around.

    1. They’ve turned sex into homework. One couple, with a school-aged child and very busy lives, has taken to scheduling sex: Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. Sunday involves an extended session, including foreplay and “emotional intimacy.” Wednesday is a quicky: straight to the orgasm, stat. Cathartic release in the service of putative sexual health is a goal I hear discussed commonly.

      Ummm IDK what to make from this!?!?!?

    2. Indeed, when my patients are having regular sex, it is often viewed as one more chore on the checklist, one further obligation to be anxiously policed and performed.

      Everyone is trying to get lost in the reflection of what everyone else is doing.

      That one person at the party that only cared if everyone else was having a good time. That person who is the shell only containing the opinions of her friends. That person that looks at the human experience as performed by everyone else and tries to mimic it just like how pop music tries to be original when it uses the same 4 chords.

    3. The self has been refashioned as a commodity to be optimally maintained and incessantly improved upon. Spontaneous, organic bodily aliveness is preemptively displaced by a prescriptive, performative pseudo-vitality of self-surveillance and self-control. What need is there for repression?

      The self is a commodity to be optimally maintained and incessantly improved upon.

      Reminds me of the ethics of Transhumanisim.

      What are all these people trying to be?

    1. our digital internet marks a significant transformation in those processes: it’s the point at which our communications media cease to mediate. Instead of talking to each other, we start talking to the machine.

      The internet is Fake

    2. Strangely, one of the things the internet likes is essays about how awful and unprecedented the internet really is.

      Self loathing is a lovely drug.

    3. Trithemius invented the internet in a flight of mystical fancy to cover up what he was really doing, which was inventing the internet. Demons disguise themselves as technology, technology disguises itself as demons; both end up being one and the same thing.

      Ummm this is pretty weird. The modern world has no conception of where it came from. The present is compressing itself faster and faster.

    4. For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely.

      "Everyone belongs to everyone else" as Aldous Huxley liked to say in Brave New World

    5. In 2011, a meta-analysis found that among young people the capacity for empathy (defined as Empathic Concern, “other-oriented feelings of sympathy,” and Perspective-Taking, the ability to “imagine other people’s points of view”) had massively declined since the turn of the millennium. The authors directly associate this with the spread of social media. In the decade since, it’s probably vanished even faster, even though everyone on the internet keeps talking about empathy.

      We live in a world where everyone talks about empathy but are incapable of it. This is some beautiful doublespeak, the type of double speak hypocrisy Ayn Rand depicted in Atlas Shrugged. It is also the type type of behavior that destroys a society.

    6. You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.

      Okay what the fuck does this mean?

      tl;dr The medium is the message...

      The machine is talking, though you, to itself......

      Well sometimes people never read your responses. The machine is trying to justify its existence. There is no feedback between people, everything is being translated into machine speak, the medium is the message, the medium is the message

    7. your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject.

      Hugs are the gateway to Jesus' socialist republic

    8. Oh god—what have I done? Why did I keep saying things I didn’t actually believe? Why did I keep behaving in ways that were clearly cruel and wrong? And how did I manage to convince myself that all of this was somehow in the service of the good? I was drunk on something. I wasn’t entirely in control.

      This should be part of some sort of prayer ;-)

    9. Maybe these were simply bad people, but I’m not so sure. There’s an incident I think about a lot: back in 2019, a group of bestselling authors in their 40s and 50s decided to attack a young college student online for the crime of not liking their books. Apparently wanting to read anything other than YA fiction means that you’re an agent of the patriarchy. The student was, of course, a woman. So what? Punish her! For a while they whipped up thousands of people in sadistic outrage. Even her university joined in. But then, the tide suddenly shifted, and one by one they were forced to apologize. ‘I absolutely messed up. I will definitely do better and be more mindful moving forward. I made a mistake.’ Of course, these apologies weren’t enough. The discourse was unanimous: we want you to grovel more; we want to see you suffer. Was absolutely everyone involved making the same personal moral lapse? Or could it be that they’d all plugged their consciousnesses into a planet-sized sigil that summons demons?

      It is funny to think that hate mobs have the same result as occult groups in robes and pentagram circles made from goat blood.

    1. With every texting relationship, every group chat, every email chain, every book we read, every series we binge, every link we click—we place our fragile attention in the hands of someone else. It is an act of trust, and we benefit from taking that act seriously.

      This listing of stuff is how I like to write.

    2. P.G. Wodehouse

      tagged

    3. Nietzsche gives us the courage to resist the tyranny of the new,

      Nice soundbite

    4. the books we have dog-eared into submission

      Reminds me of the book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. The public's interpretation of a book can be very different compared to what is actually there.

      In example of a book dog eared into submission is Atlas Shrugged. When Yaron Brook goes in the Lex Friedman Podcast to talk about Atlas Shrugged he seems to be really missing the point. Sure it is nice to talk about living a principled life but there is also an attitude of the type of behavioral filth there exists in society.

    5. cud

      Cud is a portion of food that returns from a ruminant's stomach to the mouth to be chewed for the second time.

      Cud - Wikipedia

    6. What does not kill him makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting.

      It is nice to see the quote in full. We are selection machines responsible for shaping our experience, we can not experience everything therefore we must formulate our own identity.

    7. We may want, that is, the information equivalent of fast food.

      There has to be a way to label this sort of stuff, probably with some simple ML/AI

    8. The unfortunate truth is that fast reading and fast writing don’t make people more flexible, more capable of slow reading and writing when the situation demands them.

      It would be nice if we could give people less to read for university courses but there is always that percentage of the class that does the minimum to get by. Many people will not even read what is assigned just getting the idea what to write from google, youtube, spark notes, and their friends.

    9. If “slow reading” is so liberating, why has every lit major with a Twitter feed written a thread about how they once loved big Russian novels such as Anna Karenina but now struggle to make it through lifestyle articles in the newspaper?

      Hypocrisy

    10. A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much of my book, are friends of lento [slowness].

      Stop reading to have books completed

  5. Apr 2022
    1. “In a system where state capacity is very low…” I started the question.“Alas,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye.“Do we need a crisis to get there?” I asked him.“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” he said. It wasn’t where his immediate thinking was. “I’ll have the proverbial machete,” he said. “But yeah, it may take some kind of crisis to get us there.”He paused. “But we’re already sort of in one, right?”

      Covid was released on purpose?

    2. Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America.

      NRx definition

  6. Mar 2022
    1. It may seem like there is more fringe thinking now because it is unfolding on your laptop screen, whereas previously it was easy to overlook the scribbled notebooks in your cousin’s neighbor’s basement that were thrown out when he passed away.

      Are any of these digitized I want to read though them.

    2. Yet in the past decade, Flat Earth theory has achieved a certain currency, fueled by YouTube videos and an appetite for contrarian thinking, hyperskepticism, and a yearning for community.

      Where are people supposed to go online to get a community these days?

    3. Meanwhile, popular and scientific periodicals alike have been bursting with incidents of scientific fraud or misconduct (in some cases alleged, in others confirmed): Jan-Hendrik Schön’s organic semiconductors at Bell Labs (2002), Victor Ninov’s reported discovery of elements 116 and 118 at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (2002), Hwang Woo-Suk’s claim to have cloned human embryonic stem cells (2005), Marc Hauser’s evolutionary psychology announcing advanced cognition in rather unprepossessing cotton-top tamarins (2010), among others. [2] Alongside these egregious forms of academic misconduct, there have been a host of others, such as plagiarism, gaming the metrics that get scientists promoted through fraudulent citations and affiliations, and laundering cooked industry numbers through ghostwriting. [3]

      Science has fraud and corruption just like any other institution.

    4. Bookshelves are buckling under the weight of history books about the oddities of science. In 2010, historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway published Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury), which traced the careers of a small group of scientists who were instrumental in spreading theories that denied tobacco smoke’s negative impact on human health, or acid rain’s on the environment, or anthropogenic climate change’s on absolutely everything. (A movie adaptation has since appeared.) The following year, Norton released MIT historian David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics, which followed countercultural physics graduate students in the 1970s who explored, among other quantum questions, the theory of faster-than-light travel and the practice of hallucinogenic drugs. In 2012, yet another historian of science, W. Patrick McCray, published The Visioneers (Princeton University Press), a detailed analysis of space colony and nanotechnology enthusiasts (and the occasional pornographer) in the ’70s and ’80s, after which nanotechnology alone escaped the badlands and was embraced as a staple of materials science. These are not fringe scholars nor are their books marginal: each was awarded the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society, for “books in the history of science directed to a wide public,” in 2011, 2013, and 2014 respectively.

      There is a abundance of people on the fringe who help shape scientific understanding.

    1. Perhaps the super rich still do aristocratic tutoring, in secret? It turns out these are mostly, again, interventions, even if we look at the most expensive tutor:. . . the tutor he placed for $400,000 a year was for a rich family on the West Coast. The student was having trouble with school and with substance abuse, so the tutor had to home-school the student and coach the student and his family through rehab.

      This example of how the best tutor is being used on a wasted youth is sad to see.

      This reminds me of Upload Season 2 where one character throws a hissy fit because they can't raise a AI baby in the digital sims after life they live in. Bad parenting and below average children are fixed with tutoring.

      In Ontario Ontario there is a gifted program for smart kids where they go to a different school one a week to engage amongst themselves in a more unstructured way. These kids did not turn out much better than anyone else that was university bound.....

    2. 3Even Hannah Arendt’s lovers acted as aristocratic tutors. While still a young college student Arendt had an affair with her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, which she (perhaps perversely) described as “the blessing of my life.” Apparently:Arendt was to Heidegger a young, beautiful woman who could follow the complicated paths of his thought; he was to her an initiation into existential philosophy and the life of the mind.

      This is a nice take on the old stereotype

    3. Not everything gets better with time. There are a number of things that people did better in the past, both because of lost wisdom but also simply because in the past things weren’t mass-produced. Beautiful older dresses, hand-stitched rugs, even kitchen appliances used to be sturdier and last longer. You can go purchase a mass-produced cheap samurai sword online, but you’d be a fool to use it in a fight against a blade of 20-times folded steel, even if the latter were ancient. Stradivari violins, hand-crafted by members of the Italian Stradivari family, are legendarily considered to have a superior and unique sound compared to violins made with even the most modern techniques.A child going from governesses teaching them multiple languages to renowned scholars tutoring them in advanced mathematics is similarly not replicable in today’s world. In turning education into a system of mass production we created a superbly democratic system that made the majority of people, and the world as a whole, much better off. It was the right decision. But we lost the most elegant and beautiful minds, those mental Stradivari, who were created via an artisanal process.

      This analogy about how mass produced commodities are not as good as hand made commodities in the past then overlaying this analogy to the education system is mind boggling. We used to create hand crafted geniuses by providing children one one one mentorship with the brightest people around now education appeals to the LCD. No wonder Atlas Shrugged follows aristocrats.

  7. Feb 2022
    1. And they 3 became pregnant, and they bare great giants,
    2. men had multiplied that in those days were born unto 2 them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men 3 and beget us children.'

      Angels coming down from heaven and having sex with Animals creating humans!?!?!?

      Checks out

    3. But for the elect there shall be light and joy and peace, b And they shall inherit the earth.

      Not praising the degenerates I see

    4. And you seek shade and shelter by reason of the heat of the sun, and the earth also burns with growing heat, and so you cannot tread on the earth, or on a rock by reason of its heat.

      Climate Change? And the prediction of solar power?

  8. Jan 2022
  9. Nov 2021
    1. Part of the reason is that work feels like an extension of something we’ve been doing our whole lives. Figure skating isn’t like school, but showing up at work seems to be. “I’ve got this,” is a badge of honor.

      I need to think like the figure skater when every morning

    1. McLuhan’s ultimate fears come true!

      Which are?

    2. Is there a standard universal identity layer, or do different ecosystems have different logins? Can it exist on top of current internet architecture, or must we develop a more native support of many-to-many connections? Could the actual compute itself happen on decentralized networks over the long term? How do modern organizational structures translate into it, if at all? What degree of anonymity is permissible and for which functions? Who decides?

      This guy writes like me, asking all the big questions

  10. Oct 2021
    1. Measuring Human Experience is critical to the sustained growth of a business.

      Not this is a statement I can get behind. Remember the government is just the legalized mafia and the mafia is just a business.

    2. That’s why Adoreboard’s mission is to unite these experiences by measuring what matters most in any experience: human emotion.

      Sounds like a sociopath to me, but I empathize ;-)

    3. CSAT
    4. NPS
    1. Ethnographies

      the scientific description of the customs of individual peoples and cultures.

  11. Sep 2021
  12. Aug 2021
    1. The results of research tasks feed forward to subsequent tasks that cannot be executed until questions raised pre-research have been answered.

      This is a mistake I am currently committing on my current project.

    2. This includes not only the questions that drove the research and the answers you developed, but also the methods by which the research was done and the sources where the information was found.

      I have been doing this wrong for a very long time.

    1. 1935: Oral sex. 2013: Oral sex, regular sex, not being afraid of over-texting him anymore, looking his ex-girlfriend up on Facebook (she’s pretty!), looking at his ex-girlfriend’s Twitter and finding that her most recent tweet was "haha croissants lol" (she’s boring!), telling your mom you kind of met someone but "he's probably a freak or a loser or something," hooking up without both of you having drank for the first time, realizing your cat actually likes him more than she likes you and not having a problem with that.

      I feel like I have expanded my range of empathy

    1. As for the old oligarchy, the cathedral and civil service—they were simply liquidated—rounded up, shot, dumped in a ditch, soaked with gas and burned… No! What am I saying? That was a totally different timeline. Bad dream. Sorry. That would be a major bummer. Please definitely don’t do that.

      Is this what happened in Russia when the communists took over?

    2. Therefore, these rational peasants used the power of democracy—which is irresistible but unstable—to depose their old oligarchy and install a new monarchy.

      Yin and Yang, Monarchy -> Democracy -> Monarchy -? Democracy

    3. First: their government sucked. Both the cathedral and the civil service were insanely obsessed with race—because

      I just realized that Mundana and Mutopia is the same anology as 1951 vs 2021 Yale but instead it is British Federalism vs Whatever america has.

    4. First: their government sucked. The Tsar was creepy, incompetent and sadistic. His son, the Tsarevich, was a junkie, a rumored pedophile and a known hemophiliac.

      This is oddly specific.... parody from history perhaps?

    5. chanterelle

      A Mushroom

    6. basal

      Definition: forming or belonging to a bottom layer or base.

    7. Go back to the lake and the sewage. How do you fix the lake? Not by skimming off the algae! Obviously, you need to stop the sewage leak and get rid of the pig farm. Then, you can either wait for the lake to purify itself naturally, or pump the polluted water out and let the clear blue mountain stream refill the basin. I recommend… the latter.

      WOW Solutions!!! Don't get much of these on youtube.

    8. When we remove pseudo-information that has obviously evolved in this way, we are not left with the opposite of the pseudo-information, but an absence of information. Whatever the signal reality is sending us, we cannot hear it. All we know is that our institutions cannot hear, think, learn, know, understand or teach any recessive ideas—that is, ideas that would damage or delegitimate the powers that be.

      The cathedral exists to backup the power of the church... I mean government.

    9. The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.

      The the power is wielded.

    10. funky encrypted Internet stuff

      Oh the Irony of using Hypothesis.

    11. bad ideas in the humanities have in some way flourished at Yale (and everywhere else)—like toxic green algae in a once-blue mountain lake. Now why would that happen?

      Overshoot and Collapse, what are they feeding on?

    12. Math is perfectly suited to the cathedral—and the Soviet Union. In fact, it is hard to imagine any form of government so dysfunctional and dystopian that it could not, given the raw autistic IQ talent, make progress in math.

      What does this mean?

      My intuition says that the Soviet Union rejected math and that lead to it's collapse. The Soviet Union was similar to the church a large hierarchy. Hierarchies tend towards group think?

    13. inexorable forces: physical reality and human ignorance. The latter relaxes its grip only by painfully-won millimeters.

      Nice Heuristic

    14. “The cathedral” is just a short way to say “journalism plus academia”—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society.

      This is a nice simple explanation, maybe one can say where the mainstream ideas come from

    15. magna est veritas et praevalebit: the truth is great, and will prevail. Somehow.

      Some good Latin here

    16. An optimal disinformation weapon works by convincing its enemy than an ineffective strategy is effective

      What a nice heuristic

    17. It may not be the meek who inherit the earth. It is always the humble.

      Now this is how you grab someone's attention

    18. Problems, though, began when I beganTo think, like some rogue algorithm,

      Maybe everyone should not be told or encouraged to think big.

    19. What troubled us most was this disparityBetween the books of ourselves and the thingsWe saw our body do.

      What do we want out body to do? Also how do women who have sex with 30+ men feel about themselves when they get to that age.

    20. been our twenties,

      What am I supposed to be doing?

    1. they want to be able to say stuff like “Asians, Jews and whites are smarter than blacks and Hispanics because genetics” without being called racist.

      Demographics is everything. Said the Neo reactionary

  13. May 2021
    1. If the diffusion of education, Having the general tendency to elevate the understanding, is to produce more had men than good, we had better abandon than foster our Common School system.

      This is a pretty long sentence, eh. I can't tell if this is in support of public schooling or against it. Given my bad sense of history I am going to guess this is supporting the fact that we should send everything to public schools because people that can't read are really hard to work with.

    2. demagogues

      A political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.

    3. ARISTIDES

      An ancient Athenian statesman.

  14. Apr 2021
    1. the value of someone's coin should be correlated to that person's standing in society.

      PEOPLE ARE CORPORATIONS

    1. philomath

      A philomath is a lover of learning and studying. The term is from Greek philos and manthanein, math-. Philomathy is similar to, but distinguished from, philosophy in that -soph, the latter suffix, specifies "wisdom" or "knowledge", rather than the process of acquisition thereof.

      Philomath - Wikipedia

  15. Mar 2021
    1. For Pogany, the world of seventeenth-eighteenth century is a stable, proto-global merchant system that collapses with the French revolution. Around 1815, after 20 years of chaos and Napoleonic wars, the next stabilized system is Smithian capitalism marked by a total domination of capital over labour. Smithian capitalism collapses in WW1, which creates another chaotic period ending after WW2, with the emergence of the social democratic welfare state, which collapses in 2008.

      This much history in that few words providing a cohesive structure just blew my mind.

    2. planetary guilds enabled by blockchains.

      Where do I sign up?

    3. ZapatistasF

      Zapatista Army of National Liberation - Wikipedia

      The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, often referred to as the Zapatistas, is a libertarian socialist political and militant group that controls a substantial amount of territory in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico.

    4. nation, and the state

      Difference Between State and Nation | Compare the Difference Between Similar Terms Nation's share a common cultural heritage such as Pakistan or the United Kimgdom (Pre 1800). State is a patch of land with a soveign government.

    5. The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0
    6. I think this is what happens to humanity: we extend as systems and weaken as individuals.

      We are externalizing our thinking to our machines. Our opinions are shaped by social media. We don't remember things we remember they are googleable.

    7. the irrationality of rationality.
    8. At the moment, we are divested of our data all the way down to our desires and nervous systems.

      I don't quite understand what this means???

    9. At the same time, there are many issues that remain global. How do you deal with overfishing in international waters? You need a global institution for that. How do you deal with Fukushima-like accidentsFootnote 14? The radioactive wave does not stop at your border.
    10. ‘Wave Pulse theories are cyclical theories of human history, which see societies evolving in a succession between more extractive/degradative phases, and more regenerative phases in which the commons operate as a key “healing” mechanism.’Footnote 13 During the degradative phases of consumptive expansion, the ruling class pushes towards the use of more and more resources – they have to do this, because they are competing with others. When things start degrading (soil becomes depleted, or whatever else happens in a particular context), that degradation creates a counterreaction and opens up a regenerative phase needed for saving the region where it occurs. But as soon as the regenerative phase is over, humankind begins a new degradative phase.

      Definition of Wave Pulse Theory

    11. TechnoCalyps
    1. our intelligence—also makes us uniquely vulnerable to mental predators and parasites.

      Is Consciousness a parasite of the human body and brain?

    2. “Memes inside a memeplex survive better as part of the group… they form a self-organizing, self-protecting structure that welcomes and protects other memes that are compatible with the group, and repels memes that are not.”

      There has to be a word for this?

    3. The Meme Machine
    4. “Self-justification means that the components of a memeplex mutually justify each other.”

      One's memeplex has to glue together some coherency, is that glue a component of consciousness?

    5. A meme only needs to fake positive qualities to be repeated, even if it’s actually useless, meaningless, unhealthy, or a straight-up lie.  

      I guess meme's can also function like Peacock Feathers

    1. I like to feel powerful.

      Everyone wants to be told they are imporant, as they say in "How to Win Friends and Influence People"

    2. Jane Fonda
    3. symps
    4. symps
    5. There is nothing we find more despicable than spontaneous collective action motivated by collective self-interest among a homogeneous consensus.

      There has to be a word for this?

    6. You are right that you have a fatal disease. It is one your body recognizes as self.

      The self is a parasite?

  16. Jan 2021
  17. Oct 2020
  18. slatestarcodex.com slatestarcodex.com
    1. Vogon spy

      The Vogons are a fictional alien race from the planet Vogsphere in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

    2. “I was put off from suicide only by the desire to learn more mathematics.”

      I personally took the Transhumanist Wager