This was not only a result of technology, however, but also of the ideology that grew like cancer during the Industrial Revolution, the so-called Enlightenment, which among other atomizing demands exalted autonomy-granting measurable economically-productive work

The Industrial Revolution, the first widespread application of technology, destroyed this partnership by exalting the market as the talisman of every man and woman’s worth.

“Progress Theology,” the idea that mankind is progressing, through the adoption of principles of emancipation and egalitarianism, to an Omega Point of perfection.

Harrington therefore demands “reactionary feminism,” meaning truly reactionary, reversing the errors introduced in the 1800s. It is not the 1950s we need back, but the 1700s.

Her baby’s breath blew away the final mental cobwebs of feminist fantasy.

Judith Butler’s enormously influential (among the powerful) and enormously corrosive (among all of us) claim, first broadcast in 1990, that both sex and gender are social constructs,

“the equal right to self-realization.”

In pursuit of this goal, reality must and will be bent to our desires.

disordered youth aiming to atomize unchosen bonds

even in this age of liquid modernity

Harrington shows how so-called feminism destroys women, body and soul. Unhinged worship of unfettered autonomy

We are not doing the effective thing with our lives, we are drifting, we are being hoodwinked and bamboozled and misled by those who trade upon the old traditions.

And meanwhile war, which was once a comparative slow bickering upon a front, has become war in three dimensions; it gets at the "non-combatant" almost as searchingly as at the combatant, and has acquired weapons of a stupendous cruelty and destructiveness. At present there exists no solution to this paradoxical situation. We are continually being urged by our training and traditions to antagonisms and conflicts that will impoverish, starve, and destroy both our antagonists and ourselves. We are all trained to distrust and hate foreigners, salute our flag, stiffen up in a wooden obedient way at our national anthem, and prepare to follow the little fellows in spurs and feathers who pose as the heads of our states into the most horrible common destruction. Our political and economic ideas of living are out of date, and we find great difficulty in adjusting them and reconstructing them to meet the huge and strenuous demands of the new times. That is really what our gramophone politicians have in mind—in the vague way in which they have anything in mind—when they put on that well-worn record about moral progress not having kept pace with material inventions.

Everyone was taught a history glorifying his own state, and patriotism was chief among the Virtues.

The young were trained to be loyal, law-regarding, patriotic, and a defined system of crimes and misdemeanours with properly associated pains, penalties, and repressions, kept the social body together.

We are coming to see more and more plainly that certain established traditions which have made up the frame of human relationships for ages are not merely no longer as convenient as they were, but are positively injurious and dangerous.

What does moral mean?

"moral progress has not kept pace with material advance."

There is a sense of profound instability about these achievements of our race. Even those who enjoy, enjoy without security, and for the great multitude of mankind there is neither ease, plenty, nor freedom. Hard tasks, insufficiency, and unending money worries are still the ordinary stuff of life. Over everything human hangs the threat of such war as man has never known before, were armed and reinforced by all the powers and discoveries of modern science.

The biological sciences have undergone a corresponding extension. Medical art has attained a new level of efficiency, so that in all the modernizing societies of the world the average life is prolonged, and there is, in spite of a great fall in the birth rate, a steady, alarming increase in the world's population. The proportion of adults alive is greater than it has ever been before.

They changed a world where there had never been enough into a world of potential plenty, into a world of excessive plenty.

If the "Seven Wonders" had vanished or been multiplied three score it would not have changed the lives of any large proportion of human beings. But these new powers and substances were modifying and transforming—unobtrusively, surely, and relentlessly—very particular of the normal life of mankind.

enormous increase in the substances available for man's purposes

a progressive conquest of force and substance was going on.

The attention of young people was not drawn to them; no attempt was made, or considered necessary, to adapt political and social institutions to this creeping enlargement of scale.

"the abolition of distance"

They are more or less interdependent changes; they overlap and interact.

We are getting our minds so clear about them that soon we shall be able to demonstrate them and explain them to our children in our schools. We do not do so at present. We do not give our children a chance of discovering that they live in a world of universal change.

And now we are beginning to see how these changes are connected together and to get the measure of their consequences.

with no means of measuring the increasing swiftness in the succession of events.

So for instance, if I review a patient’s blood test and see high levels of hemoglobin A1C, then I diagnose them as likely to have the early stages of diabetes. But what if I could keep track of the countless variables about the person’s health and compare them with other people who were similar across all the millions of variables, not just based on their hemoglobin A1C? Perhaps then I could recognize that the other 100,000 patients who looked just like this patient in front of me across that wide range of factors had a great outcome when they started to eat more broccoli.

My experiment illustrated how the vast majority of any medical encounter is figuring out the correct patient narrative. If someone comes into my ER saying their wrist hurts, but not due to any recent accident, it could be a psychosomatic reaction after the patient’s grandson fell down, or it could be due to a sexually transmitted disease, or something else entirely. The art of medicine is extracting all the necessary information required to create the right narrative.

My fear is that countless people are already using ChatGPT to medically diagnose themselves rather than see a physician. If my patient in this case had done that, ChatGPT’s response could have killed her.

about 8% of pregnancies discovered in the ER are of women who report that they’re not sexually active.

“I think we have the embryonic stage of some amazing invention here”

And what do LLMs need again? You, in the front row. Yeah, you.

Put another way, you need a sidecar database. The data moat needs to be fast and queryable. This is a Search Problem!

all the winners in the AI space will have data moats.

In an ideal world, you’d just pass your entire code base in with each query. In fact, Jay Hack just tweeted a graph showing how the latest context window size in GPT-4 compares to some popular code bases:

You talk to LLMs by sending them an action or query, plus some relevant context. So for instance, if you want it to write a unit test for a function, then you need to pass along that whole function, along with any other relevant code (e.g. test-fixture code) so that it gets the test right.

A raw LLM is like a Harvard CS grad who knows a lot about coding and took a magic mushroom about 4 hours ago, so it’s mostly worn off, but not totally.

At this point we’re more limited by imagination than by technology.

Congrats, you’re all caught up on the history of LLMs.

When was the last time you got a 5x productivity boost from anything that didn’t involve some sort of chemicals?

software engineering exists as a discipline because you cannot EVER under any circumstances TRUST CODE.

If you can build something as big as Amazon Web Services with a stack based on a simple service call, or whole social networks and customer service suites based on simple browser-to-browser communication, or a robust way of delivering and managing software based on a little process isolation code, then just imagine how big a thing you could build – bear with me here – if you had the goddamn Singularity as your starting point?

What about Kubernetes? I remember seeing a demo of that early on, on Brendan Burns’ work laptop, when it was called mini-Borg. Entire industries are being built on Kubernetes, and it’s not even very good either. 😉 Or look at Docker! Something as innocuous as linux cgroups, a little process-isolation manager, became the technical foundation for containers, which now utterly pervade our industry.

Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.

the fields of our minds extend far beyond our brains.

provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance.

Before the general acceptance of the Big Bang theory in the 1960s, eternal laws seemed to make sense. The universe itself was thought to be eternal and evolution was confined to the biological realm. But we now live in a radically evolutionary universe.

Social groups are likewise organized by fields, as in schools of fish and flocks of birds. Human societies have memories that are transmitted through the culture of the group, and are most explicitly communicated through the ritual re-enactment of a founding story or myth, as in the Jewish Passover celebration, the Christian Holy Communion and the American thanksgiving dinner, through which the past becomes present through a kind of resonance with those who have performed the same rituals before.

The resonance of a brain with its own past states also helps to explain the memories of individual animals and humans. There is no need for all memories to be "stored" inside the brain.

This means that new patterns of behaviour can spread more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.

I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate patterns of activity. For example they cause microtubules to crystallize in one part of the cell rather than another, even though the subunits from which they are made are present throughout the cell.

But switching on genes such as these cannot in itself determine form, otherwise fruit flies would not look different from us.

if you are an American in the 2030s, is the same as the old reason to move your money to gold in Switzerland, if you are an American in the 1930s.

The unstable dollar economy is always about to collapse. Without informal action, it will collapse—instantly. But only downward. And this will never happen, because no one has any reason to let it happen—as we saw during an exogenous crisis, Covid. Look on the graph above to see how much “value” Covid created.

Inflation is a function of too much spending power “chasing” too little productive power.

Historically, the stablest sovereigns both trade and save in an exogenous currency, such as gold or Beanie Babies. A sovereign company whose people must save in its own sovereign equity is weird; one which buys imports in its sovereign equity is weirder. The former is as if Microsoft made an online game whose currency was MSFT stock. The latter is as if Microsoft bartered MSFT stock for office chairs.

caesaropapist

The whole crypto financial system remains parasitic on the legitimate financial system—there is no end-to-end chain of production in the crypto economy.

As for stablecoins and other asset-backed coins, there are two kinds: legitimate, like USDC/Circle; funky, like Tether. While USDC is more serious about blacklisting, all these coins have circulated freely through the black economy. The regime will seize their assets and use them to allow non-criminal coinholders to be made whole. Any criminal funds will be confiscated and remitted as reparations to Black Lives Matter.

We find that crypto is a vast hive of scum and villainy. To the extent that there are legitimate players, they make all their money from illegitimate players. So, if you have any connection to crypto, don’t be shocked when we shoot you in the head.

Now, due to the failure of FTX, there is now an anti-Bitcoin lobby—a constituency for a lethal strike on crypto as an industry. Of course the press has been trying to gin this up for ages—now they have powder in their guns.

Till now, the main shield of the crypto world has been the image of “blockchain,” a genuinely revolutionary new technology—but one which our political and economic system may be no more ready for, than the Roman Empire for semiconductors.

(The clever way to shut down crypto without deflation or political blowback would be for the Fed to both ban and buy back all crypto. If you have crypto, send it to the feds. They will figure out if you are a criminal. If not, they will pay you for it, in new dollars, at the closing price. Since we do not live in a clever world, nothing like this could possibly happen.)

The kernel module that manages userspace applications is named Gall. Each application is called an agent.

The traditional UNIX command line is a showcase of small components that do exactly one function, and it can be a challenge to discover which one you need and in which way to hold it to get the job done. Piping things into awk '{print $2}' is almost a rite of passage.Another example of the single responsibility principle is git. Although you can use git checkout to do six different things to the repository, they all use similar operations internally. Despite having singular functionality, components can be used in very different ways.

Everything can be broken into smaller parts—the trick is knowing when it’s an advantage to do so.

When it comes to breaking a larger service into smaller pieces, one idea is that each piece should only do one thing within the system—do one thing, and do it well—and the hope is that by following this rule, changes and maintenance become easier.

Gather responsibilities to simplify interactions between them

If you haven’t built something useful with your library yet, it is unlikely anyone else will. Code reuse isn’t a good excuse to avoid duplicating code, and writing reusable code inside your project is often a form of preemptive optimization.

As Sandi Metz put it, “duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction”.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself” turns into “Always Use an Abstraction”.

Never rewrite your code from scratch, ever!.

badrabbit 16 minutes ago | prev [–] From what I tried last year, the old VPS days are over. Anti-fraud has ruined it. Having valid payment and email is not enough, and even with that it will take days to provision one. I tried digitalocean, OVH and several big names and wasted a ton of money for a VPS I needed right away.Just get a gcp,azure or aws compute instance. Hassle is all you'll get with VPS these days.I can't believe it is so hard to pay someone to provision a VM. They need my phone, i have to go through approvals and so much other bs. 4-5 years ago I was able to get a VPS and a domain with some bitcoin within a few hours. Now some places have the audacity to ask for ID verification.

ufw allow OpenSSH ufw allow "Nginx Full" once NGINX is installed. ufw enable

Obsidian sync also comes with 1 year of version history for your files. Yes, the history is also encrypted.

Perkeep’s data model is based primarily on nameless objects. Perkeep can model traditional files with filenames and a POSIX filesystem, but it can just as happily represent a tweet or a “like” with no name. Perkeep is built as something you casually throw data into and don’t worry about organizing too much. It’s all indexed so you can search for it later. Or you can give it a name (or multiple names!) if you prefer, but you can do that whenever you want later. You can even have objects or files with multiple parent containers.

Then the zookeeper asks: how, within the operating constraints of a real-world zoo—which does exist for the animals, but cannot run out of money for them—can she ameliorate this diminution?  This amelioration is her definition of the salus animalium.Her caged lions will always be less than real lions. But what can she do to make the lions as real, as liony, as possible? Certainly, if she had the budget, she would make the lions hunt zebra for their lunch. Certainly, if the lions had to choose, they would prefer buckets of ground chuck. (All cats are lazy; and the lion is the laziest of the cats.)It turns out that a big part of making a lion into a real lion is presenting it with the real challenges of being a lion. These challenges are expensive, often prohibitively so. It is much cheaper for the zookeeper to not challenge the lion—for its so-called life to be ground chuck, catnip and cat videos. This is the happiness that any lion would pursue; any lion would choose this cat prison over the wild, unforgiving veldt. But in the zoo, pleasure is cheap and difficulty is expensive. To exercise the lions and keep them from becoming bored and neurotic, on a budget, without the use of catnip, lion porn, or any other degrading stimulus, is a constant challenge of ingenuity that makes any Gerald Durrell memoir entertaining.

Are You a Bromide?

Ginsberg’s poem famously begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. I am luckier than Ginsberg. I got to see the best minds of my generation identify a problem and get to work.

Bertrand Russell said: “One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.”

To expect God to care about you or your personal values or the values of your civilization, that’s hubris. To expect God to bargain with you, to allow you to survive and prosper as long as you submit to Him, that’s hubris. To expect to wall off a garden where God can’t get to you and hurt you, that’s hubris. To expect to be able to remove God from the picture entirely…well, at least it’s an actionable strategy. I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill God.

The opposite of a trap is a garden. The only way to avoid having all human values gradually ground down by optimization-competition is to install a Gardener over the entire universe who optimizes for human values.

I accuse Hurlock of being stuck behind the veil. When the veil is lifted, Gnon-aka-the-GotCHa-aka-the-Gods-of-Earth turn out to be Moloch-aka-the-Outer-Gods. Submitting to them doesn’t make you “free”, there’s no spontaneous order, any gifts they have given you are an unlikely and contingent output of a blind idiot process whose next iteration will just as happily destroy you.

“nations stumble upon [social] establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”

Capturing or creating God is indeed a classic transhumanist fetish, which is simply another form of the oldest human ambition ever, to rule the universe.

Warg talks about trying to avoid “a future of meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos”. Do you really think your walled garden will be able to ride this out?

Suppose you make your walled garden. You keep out all of the dangerous memes, you subordinate capitalism to human interests, you ban stupid bioweapons research, you definitely don’t research nanotechnology or strong AI.

telos

Suppose that in fact patriarchy is adaptive to societies because it allows women to spend all their time bearing children who can then engage in productive economic activity and fight wars.

The liberal counterargument to that is that evolution is a blind idiot alien god that optimizes for stupid things and has no concern with human value. Thus, the fact that some species of wasps paralyze caterpillars, lay their eggs inside of it, and have its young devour the still-living paralyzed caterpillar from the inside doesn’t set off evolution’s moral sensor, because evolution doesn’t have a moral sensor because evolution doesn’t care.

VI. Warg Franklin analyzes the same situation and does a little better. He names “the Four Horsemen of Gnon” – capitalism, war, evolution, and memetics – the same processes I talked about above. From Capturing Gnon: Each component of Gnon detailed above had and has a strong hand in creating us, our ideas, our wealth, and our dominance, and thus has been good in that respect, but we must remember that [he] can and will turn on us when circumstances change. Evolution becomes dysgenic, features of the memetic landscape promote ever crazier insanity, productivity turns to famine when we can no longer compete to afford our own existence, and order turns to chaos and bloodshed when we neglect martial strength or are overpowered from outside. These processes are not good or evil overall; they are neutral, in the horrorist Lovecraftian sense of the word […] Instead of the destructive free reign of evolution and the sexual market, we would be better off with deliberate and conservative patriarchy and eugenics driven by the judgement of man within the constraints set by Gnon. Instead of a “marketplace of ideas” that more resembles a festering petri-dish breeding superbugs, a rational theocracy. Instead of unhinged techno-commercial exploitation or naive neglect of economics, a careful bottling of the productive economic dynamic and planning for a controlled techno-singularity. Instead of politics and chaos, a strong hierarchical order with martial sovereignty. These things are not to be construed as complete proposals; we don’t really know how to accomplish any of this. They are better understood as goals to be worked towards. This post concerns itself with the “what” and “why”, rather than the “how”.

At some point, somebody has to say “You know, maybe freeing Cthulhu from his watery prison is a bad idea. Maybe we should not do that.”

Land argues that humans should be more Gnon-conformist (pun Gnon-intentional). He says we do all these stupid things like divert useful resources to feed those who could never survive on their own, or supporting the poor in ways that encourage dysgenic reproduction, or allowing cultural degeneration to undermine the state. This means our society is denying natural law, basically listening to Nature say things like “this cause has this effect” and putting our fingers in our ears and saying “NO IT DOESN’T”. Civilizations that do this too much tend to decline and fall, which is Gnon’s fair and dispassionately-applied punishment for violating His laws.

The sacrifice looks even less appealing when we reflect that the superintelligence could realize a nearly-as-great good (in fractional terms) while sacrificing much less of our own potential well-being. Suppose that we agreed to allow almost the entire accessible universe to be converted into hedonium – everything except a small preserve, say the Milky Way, which would be set aside to accommodate our own needs. Then there would still be a hundred billion galaxies dedicated to the maximization of [the superintelligence’s own values]. But we would have one galaxy within which to create wonderful civilizations that could last for billions of years and in which humans and nonhuman animals could survive and thrive, and have the opportunity to develop into beatific posthuman spirits.

It is conceivable that optimal efficiency would be attained by grouping capabilities in aggregates that roughly match the cognitive architecture of a human mind…But in the absence of any compelling reason for being confident that this so, we must countenance the possibility that human-like cognitive architectures are optimal only within the constraints of human neurology (or not at all). When it becomes possible to build architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive post-transition economy or ecosystem. We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

Or it can end in Robin Hanson’s nightmare (he doesn’t call it a nightmare, but I think he’s wrong) of a competition between emulated humans that can copy themselves and edit their own source code as desired. Their total self-control can wipe out even the desire for human values in their all-consuming contest. What happens to art, philosophy, science, and love in such a world?

So I agree with Robin Hanson: This is the dream time. This is a rare confluence of circumstances where the we are unusually safe from multipolar traps, and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish.

A couple people asked me what I meant, and I didn’t have the background then to explain. Well, this post is the background. People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn’t established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products.

But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven’t come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible.

(alternate phrasing for Chomskyites: technology increases the efficiency of manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of manufacturing everything else)

The worst-case scenario is that the ruling party learns to produce infinite charisma on demand. If that doesn’t sound so bad to you, remember what Hitler was able to do with an famously high level of charisma that was still less-than-infinite.

The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.

“Believe this statement and repeat it to everyone you hear or else you will be eternally tortured”.

It looks a lot like even though they are outbreeding us, we are outmeme-ing them, and that gives us a decisive advantage.

Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers – and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money – they have no value as customers either. Capitalism has passed them by. As the segment of humans who can be outcompeted by robots increases, capitalism passes by more and more people until eventually it locks out the human race entirely, once again in the vanishingly unlikely scenario that we are still around.

As always when dealing with high-level transhumanists, “all available hardware” should be taken to include “the atoms that used to be part of your body”.

Human behavior has not yet adapted to contemporary conditions.

Physical limitations are most obviously conquered by increasing technology. The slavemaster’s old conundrum – that slaves need to eat and sleep – succumbs to Soylent and modafinil. The problem of slaves running away succumbs to GPS. The problem of slaves being too stressed to do good work succumbs to Valium. None of these things are very good for the slaves.

how technological changes will affect our tendency to fall into multipolar traps.

Multipolar traps – races to the bottom – threaten to destroy all human values.

This is the much-maligned – I think unfairly – argument in favor of monarchy. A monarch is an unincentivized incentivizer. He actually has the god’s-eye-view and is outside of and above every system. He has permanently won all competitions and is not competing for anything, and therefore he is perfectly free of Moloch and of the incentives that would otherwise channel his incentives into predetermined paths. Aside from a few very theoretical proposals like my Shining Garden, monarchy is the only system that does this.

Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives.

Things are easy to solve from a god’s-eye-view, so if everyone comes together into a superorganism, that superorganism can solve problems with ease and finesse. An intense competition between agents has turned into a garden, with a single gardener dictating where everything should go and removing elements that do not conform to the pattern.

I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.

The company fires all its laborers and throws them onto the street to die.

how do you profit from an enslaved philosopher?

John Moes, a historian of slavery, goes further and writes about how the slavery we are most familiar with – that of the antebellum South – is a historical aberration and probably economically inefficient. In most past forms of slavery – especially those of the ancient world – it was common for slaves to be paid wages, treated well, and often given their freedom.

Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!”

Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia.

Every two-bit author and philosopher has to write their own utopia. Most of them are legitimately pretty nice. In fact, it’s a pretty good bet that two utopias that are polar opposites both sound better than our own world.

but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures.

if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it?

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!

Ennobling

Passages to better places must be found. Places where the true, the good, and the beautiful may be chased with abandon, where the human spirit has not been hobbled. This is not a call to adopt pickup artist buffoonery or the shallow machismo of an Andrew Tate, or any of the myriad pretensions of masculinity that one sees on the right. Such pursuits, even when motivated by a rejection of Longhouse norms, are equally deluded, and diminish one's higher nature.

When Marc Andreessen declares that it is time to build, he must understand that the recognition of merit and the willingness to assume risk that such building depends on cannot be achieved under Longhouse rule.

Male competition and the hierarchies that drive it are unwelcome.

The Longhouse distrusts overt ambition.

Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year.

Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children's education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism.

define Safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”

To claim that a biological man is a man, even in the context of a joke, cannot be tolerated.

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

Spirit is one pattern of being and flesh is another.

As Barfield says, “the full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.”

A history of ideas would refer to “a dialectical or syllogistic process, the thoughts of one age arising discursively out of, challenging, and modifying the thoughts and discoveries of the previous one.”

But the study of the development of language reveals that, in a certain sense, the literal as we typically understand it emerges from the metaphorical. One has only to consult St. Augustine’s Literal Meaning of Genesis to see this. What he thought of as literal was closer to what we might regard as literary. His interpretation of Genesis is wildly and wonderfully poetic. He sees in it far more than what any modern literalist would be capable of seeing. As this makes clear, the range of the literal has shrunk. Arguably, then, the consciousness that believes that unmediated meaning is possible is a shrunken and narrowed consciousness. It is a consciousness that has failed to be attentive to the preceding whole and so attends only to the framing of things that emerges once the whole is forgotten.

Why is decline noticed in the first place?

Just look at the decline of traditions, the dissolution of institutions, the dilution of identities, the decay of faith and reason and national pride, and so many other things.

“lawful intercept”

In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates.

Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T or Comcast.

Some cybersecurity experts have speculated that the Pentagon may be using the newly advertised space to create “honeypots,” machines set up with vulnerabilities to draw hackers. Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity.

That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

There is no biodiversity on this red-dirt farm. There is only one crop. McManus has no choice but to pick it. Imagine him agreeing with me, then trying to have a career. Even with all his fine publications, he will be lucky to make it out of Michigan. Sad! And peace begins with feeling your enemy’s pain.

sharecropper

Chérizier has denied that his nickname “Babekyou” (or “Barbecue”) came from accusations of his setting people on fire. Instead, he says it was from his mother's having been a fried chicken street vendor.

The question of why so many fine Americans of the caviar caste were funding, protecting, and collaborating with this gigantic gang of mass murderers is seldom if ever raised.

The job of a historian is to figure out what really happened, not to beat his political enemies over the head with tendentious, emotional, juvenile propaganda. Again, though—in 2023, it’s easy to see why someone might get that impression.

Speaking as a diplomat’s son, I will say that the global elite are genuinely some of the best people in the world.

Bernie Sanders, everyone’s favorite progressive grandpa, “honeymooned” in the USSR. Imagine if it was Hitler.

Of course Lenin’s party was literally the Social Democratic Labor Party.

And if World War II was not a Marvel movie—how does the present even make sense?

the story of the present has to be told by starting from the past.

In our century the fires of mass slaughter have burned low—perhaps from genuine spiritual advance, but perhaps from a general decline in the passion and energy of humanity. When peace is just apathy, avarice and accidie, peace is not a symptom of health. The peace of decline is the peace of death.

legitimate, press.

If supply of tulpas is limited, then they implicitly have a price.

In an episode of Seinfeld, Elaine’s favorite contraceptive stops being sold, and now for every potential lover she has to weigh in whether he is ‘spongeworthy’. An economics professor at Princeton wrote a paper on this, and it was actually published in Economic Inquiry (Dixit, 2012).

I think it’s bad to hard-code a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘not-real’ into a conceptual system.

xenofeminist

Just as we accept that our bodies are composed of myriad cellular organisms with a high degree of autonomy, egregorics provides a multi-agent view of the self where, moreover, these agents are distributed among members of society. Unlike semiotics where symbols are simply ‘given’, or memetics where memes spread through you like a virus, egregores are feeding on you as we speak. Egregorics must be computational, so machines can tell us what our tulpas don’t want us to know.

The notion of compression adds far more nuance. Suppose a fictional character reminds me of my friend; by watching a movie, I feel like I’m hanging out with my friend, helping me to maintain that tulpa even if I haven’t seen them for years. So large social networks create tulpa externalities which can be positive or negative.

And the mobs that storm the state buildings are not the concerned democratic people in their millions—they are a few thousand gullible malcontents.

By its juvenile mockery of power, the mob demonstrates its incapacity for power. Its attack is truly an attack on democracy—the mob, the essential element which makes democracy a tangible reality, attacks democracy by demonstrating its lack of power. For if the mob has no power, democracy has no power.

Obviously these flexible people cannot be rounded up and put it camps. Instead, they must be employed—probably by the new power. Which they will serve faithfully—so long as it is really in power. And not just a mob vandalizing a government building.

Most people are not logical; most people are emotional.

it will not have any of these ways of feeling good.

Bastille

You resist—why? Not from of these principles, which are not even principles—from your immature, emotional need for power.

The flexible comply and triumph. You resist, and are crushed.

your old principles were just obsolete propaganda.

. So power and those who love power will crush you, and your old principles, like a bug.

Principled people always fall into the propaganda trap. They are educated to believe that the crowd is always right, that people are people regardless of their ancestors. They have no idea that these principles came to them from propaganda. They believe their principles not even because they are useful, but because they were once useful.

Every Bay Area person who has jogged past this plaque with their golden retriever, read it, and thought some happy thought about the Jalquin/Irgin (dollars to donuts that the Jalquin massacreed the Irgin at least more than once, presumably after much wrangling over whose brand sounded more like a birth-control pill), has figured out how to believe in blood-and-soil nationalism.

A crowd rushes and occupies a state building. Is this a joyous expression of popular freedom—the spark that will begin a political revolution? Or is it a criminal assault on democracy itself? And if it is a criminal assault—how can democracy defend itself? Why—only with riot police, mass arrests, investigations, informants, denunciations.

Borgesian

The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare, an infantile nightmare, of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of day thrusts between our eyelids, and the multitudinous sound of morning clamour in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously, "Was there ever such a world?"

Any sort of unification will nor serve the ends we seek. We aim at a particular sort of unification; a world Caesar is hardly better from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must mean a world-wide liberation of thought, experiment and creative effort.

Some method of decision there must certainly be and a definite administrative machinery. But it may turn out to be a much slighter, less elaborate organization than a consideration of existing methods might lead us to imagine. It may never become one single interlocking administrative system. We may have systems of world control rather than a single world state. The practical regulations, enforcements, and officials needed to keep the world in good health, for example, may be only very loosely related to the system of controls that will maintain the communications in a state of efficiency. Enforcement and legal decisions, as we know them now, may be found to be enormously and needlessly cumbrous by our descendants. As the reasonableness of a thing is made plain, the need for its enforcement is diminished, and the necessity for litigation disappears.

Flags, uniforms, national anthems, patriotism sedulously cultivated in church and school, the brag, blare, and bluster of our competing sovereignties, belong to the phase that the Open Conspiracy will supersede. We have to get clear of that clutter.

he new world demand new schools, therefore, to give everyone a sound a through mental training and equip everyone with clear ideas about history, about life, and about political and economic relationships instead of the rubbishy head-content at present prevalent.

Hunting the truth is an art.

Through symbols and especially through words, man has raised himself above the level of the ape and come to a considerable mastery over his universe.

Human thought is still very much confused by the imperfection of the words and other symbols it employs and the consequences of this confused thinking are much more serious and extensive than is commonly realized.

Then they would say, "What are we to do with our lives?"

It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good enough."

The eras of the content on web are starting to look something like this. human, real content < human, fake content < AI, fake content

Maybe it’s that we’re all dopamine junkies at heart and ascending the information chain keeps it pumping more intensely [citation needed].

It’s worth noting, that throughout recorded history (≥4th century BCE), the medium of choice has been the written word (text). It wasn’t until the daguerreotype for images, the phonoautograph for audio, and the Nipkow disk for video, that more complex and information-heavy forms of content began to emerge and become mainstream1. And all this within the past 180 years.

I mentioned that children at my son’s elementary school in Brooklyn are taking coding classes in third grade. “It’s absolutely asinine,” Gelernter scowled. “You could also teach a third grader how to drive, using a miniature car, but why would you? Teach them discrete math, logic, graph theory, not baby coding. They have to work up to the coding. In America these days we don’t like working up to things.”

Young people should be trained to use the web properly: “Push the button only when you’re done; don’t skip to the end. You don’t skip to the end when you read a book.” “The internet has a gigantic flaw,” Gelernter said. “It should be structured like a recursive nest, so that you’re encouraged to return to what you were looking at. Instead, the way it is, if you click you’ll probably never go back.”

“My idea in Mirror Worlds was that the computer screen should be like the still surface of a moving pond,” he explained. That didn’t happen. The internet gives us the news and assists our research, but it is mostly used for low purposes, a glorified fidget spinner, trolling device, and masturbation aid.

“grand unified theory” of all order.

Like the turn against video games, that effort is unthinkable (for now) in the US.

Just this past May, officials swung into action against what one top advisor called a “masculinity crisis” among Chinese boys, many of whom had fallen into danger of becoming “delicate, timid, and effeminate.” Proscribed policies included more gym teachers in the schools and more yang, the masculine spirit, in the curriculum.