Moravec’s paradox is an observation based on the history of AI: the problems thought to be hard turned out to be easy, and the problems thought to be easy turned out to be hard.

But so far, they’re not doing it quite as well as we do. Computers have learned to be mediocre, but haven’t yet learned to compete at mediocrity out in the open world.

There are instances of programs respecting the rules of the game while blatantly violating its spirit.

For instance, there are instances of programs figuring out how to use tiny rounding errors in simulated game environments to violate the simulated law of conservation of energy, and milking the simulation itself for a winning strategy. Like the characters in The Matrix bend the laws of physics when inside.

Every principal-agent game is of this sort. Every sort of moral hazard is marked by the ability of one side to pursue mediocrity rather than excellence. In each case, there is an information asymmetry powering the mediocrity.

This kind of indifference-driven mediocrity is the hallmark of games where one side is playing a finite game and the other side is playing an infinite game that isn’t necessarily evil in the Carse sense of wanting to end the game for the other, but isn’t striving for excellence either.

like honest, by-the-book bureaucrats.

Mediocrity is not about what will satisfy performance requirements, but about what you can get away with. This brings us to agency.

Humans have a rich vocabulary around mediocrity that suggests we are not talking satisficing: dragging your feet, sandbagging, pulling your punches, holding back, phoning it in, cutting corners.

You could say mediocrity seeks to satisfice the laws of the territory rather than the laws of the map.

This is just a different way of playing a finite game. Instead of optimizing (playing to win), you minimize effort to stay in the specific finite game. If you can perform consistently without disqualifying errors, you are satisficing. Most automation and quality control is devoted to raising the floor of this kind of performance.

I like to think of laziness — manifested as mediocrity in any active performance domain — as resistance to optimization.

The inner ear bones for instance, evolved from the optionality of extra-thick jaw bones.

The universe is deeply lazy. The universe is mediocre. The universe is functionally unfixed self-perpetuation, always in optionality-driven perpetual beta, Always Already Player 0.1.

Mediocrity is the functionally embodied and situated form of what Sarah Perry called deep laziness. To be mediocre at something is to be less than excellent at it in order to conserve energy for the indefinitely long haul. Mediocrity is the ethos of perpetual beta at work in a domain you’re not sure what the “product” is even for. Functionally unfixed self-perpetuation.

So middling performance itself is not the essence of mediocrity. What defines mediocrity is the driving negative intention: to resist the lure of excellence.

That being said, the most important problem in digital immortality may not be technical, but economical. It may not be about how to scan a brain, but about why to scan a brain and run it, despite the lack of any economic incentive.

Fidelity will be among the most important problems in neuropreservation for a long time to come.

An adult human brain takes up around 1.2 liters of volume. There are 1 million mm³ in a liter. If we could scale up the process from Google researchers 1 million times, we could scan a human brain at nanometer resolution, yielding more than 1 zettabyte (i.e., 1 billion terabytes) of data with the same rate.

But then, why not just create a new AI from scratch, with the same knowledge and skills, and without the baggage of your personality, memories, and emotions?

For one second, let’s assume that they could. Let’s assume that they could inject your scan with 1000 years of knowledge, skills, language, ontology, history, culture and so on.

On the other hand, it would be a pity if a civilization which can emulate brain scans is unable to imbue them with relevant knowledge and skills, unable to update them.

1000 years into the future, you could be as helpless as a child. You could need somebody to adopt you, send you to school, and teach you how to live in the future. You—mentally an adult—could once again need a parent, a teacher.

To give an example, I am a software developer who takes pride in his craft. But a lot of the skills I have today will most likely be obsolete by the 31st century. Try to imagine what an 11th century stonemason would need to learn to be able to survive in today’s society.

Given that running a brain scan still costs money in 1000 years, why should anyone bring *you* back from the dead? Why should anyone boot *you* up?

I have no idea how to solve 2. If addresses are random it is very hard to be able to route to any random address from anywhere else.

The first 3 could be mitigated by reducing the number of hops. Individual ISPs could act as one large hop, rather than multiple routers. This could reduce the number of hops for each connection and total number of logical routers that clients need to know about. Instead of having a layer for every hop the packet can be wrapped only until large networks. For example major ISPs. At this point they can absorb any attacks and your traffic is well mixed with other sources.

The client needs to know about various routers along the path. On the public internet this is a lot of data that is frequently changing.

No Leak of Incoming Connection Server Address If I receive a connection a local observer must not be able to identify which address was used to create it. (If the address is publicly known they can likely probe this by making connections and comparing traffic, but I’ll consider that out of scope of this feature.)

Non-sensitive Client Addresses If I make two connections, the remote end should not be able to tell if I am the same person. This property should hold whether I connect to the same host twice, or two hosts that coordinate.

The most obvious sign of this is the many non-technical people know what an IP address is. I don’t think the average user should need to care how their networking works, but due to issues with the protocol many people are aware that their IP is sensitive information and that they need to protect it.

desktop picture phones

It may seem insurmountable, but the alternative is a single dominate political vision where only one form of data management exists: large data centers filled with coarse data points and countless assumptions about what that data says about who we are. This is indeed a bad idea.

Any real political response will require more than introducing new tech. For example, consider all the institutional support needed to manage a currency in your country. And then remember that a person’s identity is infinitely more complex than any financial abstraction.

Data must have some sense of authenticity to be useful, it must have some contextual meaning to be shared, and it must leave room for error if it is to be alive.

These tags can lose their meaning in different cultural contexts or on different platforms - the #meta tag might imply something different on Flicker versus its use on Facebook. But machine learning has flattened these differences. Algorithms can now identify similar data across the internet with or without tags or vocabularies.

Widely-adopted semantic vocabularies are usually refined by a small group of experts until a rough consensus is reached. This approach can be seen in contra-distinction to tags. Tags also provide meaning to data, but they are formed organically by a large group of people generating a large number of tags; tagging trends then emerge over time and provide context for information.

Solid does not work with immutable data, but folks are working on similar guarantees through a Solid non-repudiation service.

Errors propagate a lot faster than they can be repaired. […] If something is screwy, can we trace the calculation back and figure out which input it depends on? Philip Agre

There is also a way to discover the name of a VC even if you don’t know it through the .well-known convention. Solid doesn’t offer the same benefits, but changes to linked data can theoretically propagate. And Solid folks are working on a Webhook (v 0.2.0) standard to serve updates to linked data over REST.

link rot a

Domain Name System (DNS)

All data in the flow must also have a name so it can be found. And resilient software would need a contingency plan in the event that data changes its name or goes missing. These requirements are difficult to deliver on a networked system.

Making credential checks easy ensures that we will have more of them. Which means more bureaucrats. It’s a road we must build cautiously.

I’ll instead circle back to Verifiable Credentials because they provide a “triangle of trust” to ensure accuracy over open protocols. Do I really trust that he earned a degree at that university? Don’t take his word for it, check the claim with the university.

Solid or local-first software principles would change the power dynamic between large software vendors and individual people. Solid even offers a specific open standard for application interoperabilitySolid supports RDF, which offers an open way to link data. The web-wide aspirations for linked data have fallen short, but RDF is used successfully in many important projects. while a person’s data remains on their personal filestore.

A website’s non-negotiable Terms of Service is also a set of permissions. They dictate what a website is allowed to do with a person’s data and they also dictate what a person is allowed to do with the data once it’s in the system. This power imbalance stems from the fact that 1. the website holds both the means of computation and the data to compute and 2. a person using a website often has neither.

For example, we have “ownership” over the organs in our body, but we thankfully don’t have conscious control over their management. If we did, we would need to outsource the burden of “personal organ management” to an outside entity to get anything else done.

Many futurists, especially those in Web3, want to apply property rights to aspects of our identity. Any attempts to commodify self-hood is an egregious misapplication of technology. Not only is it ethically dubious, it’s technologically incoherent. As health technologist Adrian Gropper points out, “control doesn’t scale.” Individuals simply do not have the time or expertise to manage a portfolio of online personas or a single persona that discloses only essential information to a portfolio of clients.

Philip Agre enumerated five characteristics of data that will help us achieve this repositioning. Agre argued that “living data” must be able to express 1. a sense of ownership, 2. error bars, 3. sensitivity, 4. dependency, and 5. semantics. Although he originally wrote this in the early 1990s,Phil Agre. “Living Data.” Wired, November 1, 1994. it took some time for technology and policy to catch up. I’m going to break down each point using more contemporary context and terminology: Provenance and Agency: what is the origin of the data and what can I do with it (ownership)? Accuracy: has the data been validated? If not, what is the confidence of its correctness (error bars)? Data Flow: how is data discovered, updated, and shared (sensitivity to changes)? Auditability: what data and processes were used to generate this data (dependencies)? Semantics: what does this data represent?

Identity is a natural place to start when talking about people. The following discussion is based on two observations: 1) data naturally reduces complex conceptions of identity into coarse representations and 2) data about identity is generally held in systems far away from the people they identify.

It lead him to propose an abstract concept of ambassadorsAlan Kay was originally thinking about objects interacting on a network. Currently, all network interactions follow explicit protocols. Objects of the future, Kay believes, must be able to negotiate the exchange of data even if they come from completely unknown sources. As Kay noted in the conversation with Hickey, “For important negotiations we don’t send telegrams, we send ambassadors.” in computer science. Ambassadors might like to follow a protocol, but it isn’t required. They act on behalf of a larger autonomous entity. And when two ambassadors meet, both entities they represent retain their autonomy.

Consent is the latest fashion.

Data processing is the lifeblood of large bureaucracies.

The problems become apparent when we start talking about people. Data cannot express a meaningful distinction between intelligent actors and the things they act upon; a database that tracks widget production can also store information about the people who buy those widgets. Databases then turn intelligent actors - who are often human beings - into things to be acted upon. This is where data can quickly become a “bad idea.”

Data is inherently objectifying. This property is an asset when describing inert phenomenon such as the composition of soil or the properties of various metals. Data enables the applied work of engineers and there are no direct ethical considerations.

I have often described imag­i­na­tion as a muscle — one that, like any other muscle, can be developed.

It’s easier to write the defeat than the victory, isn’t it? Easier to write the failure than the success. For some reason, the success seems like it might be … boring.

I very strongly believe new readers ought to start with Player of Games. It is a capti­vating novel in its own right, and its intro­duc­tion to the Culture is smooth, almost stealthy. It’s also the book I started with, and obviously It Worked for Me, so I can’t help but recommend the same on-ramp.

Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.

The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently artic­u­late and defend their values. (Their enthu­siasm for their own politics is consid­ered annoying by most other civilizations.)

When I peer into the far reaches of science fictional imag­i­na­tion, way out beyond the easy extrap­o­la­tions and consensus futures, beyond the Blade Runners and the Star Treks, the name that looms largest is Iain M. Banks.

Indeed, I think it’s often better to pick narrowly scoped questions, especially for junior researchers, because they tend to be more tractable.

Example of strategic relevance: if TAI is soon, then slowly growing a large field of experts seems less promising; if TAI is very far, then longtermist AI governance should probably be relatively deprioritised.

AI safety research

international AI standards

For example, a planner may find that his beautiful plans fail because he does not follow through on them.

within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years,

German theologian and picked up quite independently, some 150 years later, by John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola, each of who incorporated it into the practice of his followers. In fact, the steadfast focus on performance and results that this habit produces explains why the institutions these two men founded, the Calvinist church and the Jesuit order, came to dominate Europe within 30 years.

abstract theorizing, always the worst possible way to think;

the purpose of economic life is the satisfaction of desire?

Watching this debate, we begin to wonder if it is possible for liberals and libertarians to both be right, and both be wrong. This might be possible if neither side was rooted in reality—if their conversation was not the sky, but a fragment of the sky in a puddle.

As Dr. Phil always says: how’s that working out for you?

But in your mind, “autocracy” just means “monarchy.” This may seem like a semantic nitpick. It is a semantic security hole. It is how democracy died without you noticing.

Next to his 18th-century beast, 21st-century democracy is a sea-cucumber. Once a wild animal, it has since evolved into a sessile quasi-vegetable without will or capacity. Any vegetable has a farmer. To empower it is to empower its farmer. Its voice is the voice of that farmer. This hollow and passive ventriloquism is the last stage of many a regime.

For some people the day comeswhen they have to declare the great Yesor the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yesready within him; and saying it,he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—drags him down all his life.

the people are always right, if rightly educated.

(C) luxus populi, suprema lex.

salus populi, suprema lex;

ox populi, vox dei;

If you think this, you are or want to be an aristocrat. This is fine. It is good to be, or become, an aristocrat. But this desire, like all desires, can bend your logic; and bent logic is a very dangerous toy.

A broad justification is like: Soviet physics is valid. A narrow one is like: this Soviet psych paper is valid. Either demands an argument. Soviet physics cannot be accepted in verbum—either because of the prestige of the USSR, or the prestige of physics—and nor can any Soviet paper, just because it appeared in some prestigious Soviet journal.

like many esoteric philosophies cynically crafted to entice the young

and we do not dream its Dream

dignitaries

We project the player as far as possible into the game, bringing the human power of the DM as close to sovereignty as we can. In the end our thought-experiment, which is certainly not a proposal, will arguably even reach true sovereignty.

But there is no such thing as a virtual gulag.

The first form is lame, and appeals principally to perverts and journalists.

A country is a role-playing game.

Fortunately, she is a good zookeeper. She is here to govern for these humans. The humans should thrive; they should flourish; most of all, they must be as human as possible.

But there is already a word for a sealed human buffer: a prison. How can we build a prison that human beings want to live in? Or at least—that they would rather live in than their current Hobbesian slum?

None of the governance geniuses of the 20th century ever showed us how to turn a slum into a non-slum—though cases of the converse abound—except by clearing it to the ground. But if we clear it with the people inside, or even just force them out with guns and dogs, our heads are really back in the 20th century.

As anyone reading this will agree, the tragedy of Earth today and for the foreseeable future is that most human beings do not and cannot live in a way that we would recognize as fully human. They certainly do not live in guilds and fight dragons.

In both cases we see a regime no longer capable of managing its country.

So those powers must and will be taken from them. In a monarchy where the king is weak, the king will be managed. In a democracy where the voters are weak, the voters will be managed. In no such country can vox populi be vox dei. God is not managed.

We see that early in a democratic period, the real power of democracy (the power of the mob) greatly exceeds its formal power. Late in the cycle, this disparity inverts: the formal power of democracy exceeds its real power. Its peaceful, apathetic voters are not only a not mob—they are not even a crowd. These “last men” are too soft to even lift the swords of the primitive and violent ancestors who created their powers.

We can generalize this by saying that no regime can rule unless that regime is strong. The historical birth of democracy—both in the Greek world, and the English world—was not a consequence of democratic philosophy, but rather of popular strength—if that word can bear the marriage of determination and ability.

a sacred conch, which is the prey of every party with any motive to speak through it.

no power has an incentive to coerce or seduce public opinion. No power has any reason to compel the public mind; so the public mind is effortlessly independent; it is the only cause of its own opinions. It has to be ruled by boneheads, though.

the persuasive institutions that manage public opinion.

When we grant sovereignty to public opinion, we grant sovereignty to the teachers

if they are less speaking, than spoken through

The fundamental assumption of democracy is that public opinion is an ultimate cause. Once public opinion is a consequence of some other cause—once it must be led and educated—vox populi, vox dei is “not even wrong.” No voice can be the voice of God, yet also the voice of the man behind the curtain.

If all the teachers must be licensed by the Enlightenment Ministry of Dr. Goebbels, public opinion will be Nazi opinion. If all the teachers must be Catholics, the Virgin Mary will rise steadily in the polls.

If you cannot accept Pope’s rule, it means that your view of government and power is mystical rather than instrumental. You believe that certain human beings have certain inherent rights to political power, regardless of the good or evil this power does. You believe that even a small amount of evil is a price worth paying, since political power is essential to the human soul.

One way to sell absolutism to Americans, which is almost as hard as selling BLTs to ISIS, is to derive our next political doctrine not from rational first principles, like a total sperg, but from some long-hallowed American mantra which we all adore.

Isn’t the Western world experiencing an embarrassing shortage of real work to occupy its overeducated, overpopulated clerks?

The day Science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.-Nikola Tesla

If we look at what we are told in comparison to what actually exists then we can begin to see the complete and utter lack of consistency. For example; Construction dates stop making sense when we really compare the time it would take to construct such buildings, railways and tunnels, with the technology and man power of the era. We even see physical evidence of previous, now underground, cities and civilizations.

Thiel’s law: a startup messed up from the start will fail.

What secrets are people not telling you?

What secrets is nature not telling you?

In universities, students are advised to accumulate as many micro accomplishments as possible and stick them on their CV. That way, they’re increasing their options. This is shortsighted since the safest way to stand out and make a difference is to focus on one thing for a long time.

People stopped dreaming of a future they can design.

The solution to man’s instinct to evil is unlikely to be found in the colonization of new planets, but rather in the reform of civilizations.

But Bloom makes a major error, he has used biological imperatives to justify human violence and stops there. Interestingly, Bloom is Jewish and naturally, an outspoken critic of the horrors of the Nazi regime. But like Hitler, Bloom looks at biology as a scapegoat for human violence. Long ago, David Hume warned us about the dangers of the naturalistic fallacy. It is the conflation of what is with what ought to be.

The only glimmer of hope for mankind is to expand into the cosmos, to colonize new planets and to increase the amount of resources it has access to.

The ecological damage that results from man’s ambitions cannot be prevented by guilt

And when nations have opted out, when they have burned their scientific texts, and have opted out of the struggle, they are dominated by other nations. This happened to China – Japan was the country that attempted to dominate it.

When a superorganism is winning, it secretes more testosterone, and becomes more ambitious, more risk taking.

Every nation is a superorganism, a cluster of billions of cells, that attempts to gain power, whenever an opportunity presents itself. And each superorganism has its neural net, or its collective consciousness. What forms this collective consciousness? Memes.

Bloom emphasizes that these battles are not so much fought between individuals as they are by national or cultural groups.

The Lucifer Principle describes the evil we see in the world as an inevitable consequence of the biological urge to power.

If only they were given more hugs.

The DID document does not express revoked keys using a verification relationship. If a referenced verification method is not in the latest DID Document used to dereference it, then that verification method is considered invalid or revoked. Each DID method specification is expected to detail how revocation is performed and tracked.

DeSo is an example of a purpose built blockchain that is storage oriented and specially equipped to handle a lot of post-sized content.

“decentralizing the social graph”

A strategy, on the other hand, is a guideline for decisions you make. It defines how an objective will be achieved. For example, if you run a retail store, your goal might be to increase sales. This goal may sound obvious, but how do you achieve it? You can attract new customers, encourage existing customers to buy more, broaden your selection, or advertise more. Each of these options is a different strategy. You could have a promotion strategy, a pricing strategy, a distribution strategy, and more.

Strategic planning is the process you go through to create a vision, a mission, goals, and a plan for your organization for the next three to five years. It includes a review of opportunities and articulation of the elements discussed here, using a structured process that works through them one step at a time.

Researchers at TopNonprofits.com calculated the average length of vision statements among a group of 30 nonprofits to be just 14.6 words.

“Our strategic imperative is to be world-class, best-in-class purveyors of superior, strategic alternative, custom solution platforms catering to exceptional output optimization. With a touch of class.” This is what the phrase “mumbo-jumbo”

proto-danksharding

Your focused attention is not only causing the flow of energy into a new form from the formless, it is simultaneous rearranging all the existing form to shift to accommodate what it desires to create.

Here the concept of a staring point is meaningless unless we wish to look at what happens in the process. Then, of course, we enter the creative cycle and no longer stand outside of it.

In the end, in both these examples, the essence of both the water vapor and the water in the river never changes only its expression changes because of the environment in which it finds itself is different.

The river in flow cannot comprehend itself without the form of the river.

In one case, the river will give a form (the river) to the flow path and there will be different types and kinds of experiences as the river traverses the landscape flowing back to the sea. When the flow dissipates into the sea, the form of the river no longer exists and there the death of the river. The vehicle that was uses to return to the sea, the river, no longer exists.

The third is to view the cycle from the perspective of the water finding its way back to the ocean. It is to being at birth were the rain falls to the ground and flows back to the sea where the river “dies.” Here again, the time between death and birth, the evaporation of the water into a cloud to form rain lies in the unseen realm of Creation.

In this case the time between death and birth, where the water flows back to the sea lies in the unseen realm of Creation.

In the awareness of now, there is no death. There is just events that eventually repeat themselves to one degree or another.

We only need to become aware and remember when we begin to repeat the process.

As soon as a consciousness awakens, there is a flow into and out of a creation. We need to remember for consciousness to awaken within energy consciousness means to be in the flow so an awaken consciousness will viewing from within the flow and it can view the process in one of three primary ways.

What needs to be understood is that the experience of time and space only exists when you are in the process and compare one part of the process with another.

It has been said time and space do not exist outside the creative/creation process and that there is an instantaneous communication with the process and all of Creation.

How RouterQueryEngine works in a DevSecOps chatbot

As we learned from our previous article Experimenting LlamaIndex RouterQueryEngine with Document Management, different indexes serve different purposes. For example:List index is better suited for summarization.Vector store index is more fitting for question-answering.

Let’s put LLM to work and have it auto generate a pool of questions based on our documents, we then randomly pick a subset of those questions and use them as our base evaluation questions. We are encouraged to manually add/modify questions for our “golden” set so we can use the same set of questions to evaluate how our RAG pipelines function and perform with changes we introduce into our pipelines.

It appears that a certain electrostatic field brings a certain order to nature. Or rather, it induces a brief anabasis toward the cosmic egg, from which all order permeates. A kind of reshuffling of the deck. Henri Bergson, the 19th century vitalist, conceived of a current of life, flowing through the generations, which was the result of a primeval vital impetus, the élan vital. "This impetus, sustained right along the lines of evolution among which it gets divided, is the fundamental cause of variations, at least of those that are regularly passed on, that accumulate and create new species." It might be that an accumulation of this vital impetus is restored or redirected by experiments in the elektrofeld.

Unless we know why someone made a decision, we can’t safely change it or conclude that they were wrong.

Bad habits generally evolve to serve an unfulfilled need: connection, comfort, distraction, take your pick.

Without a formal hierarchy, people often form an invisible one, which is far more complex to navigate and can lead to the most charismatic or domineering individual taking control, rather than the most qualified.

Someone needs to make decisions and be held responsible for their consequences.

Take the case of supposedly hierarchy-free companies. Someone came along and figured that having management and an overall hierarchy is an imperfect system. It places additional stress on those at the bottom and can even be damaging to their health. It leaves room for abuse of power and manipulative company politics. It makes it unlikely that good ideas from those at the bottom will get listened to.

Chesterton describes the classic case of the reformer who notices something, such as a fence, and fails to see the reason for its existence. However, before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. In its most concise version, Chesterton’s Fence states the following:

Chesterton’s Fence, described by G. K. Chesterton himself as follows: There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Second-order thinking is the practice of not just considering the consequences of our decisions but also the consequences of those consequences.

If you are reading this in the 21st century it is safe to assume you’ve survived countless “Wow, Science!” sermons, each one ministered from atop a teetering tower of model-based speculations, every word presented as absolute, objective reality.

The key takeaways from playing with this tool should be that: yes, you can store infinite amounts of data, scalably, in a merkle tree; and yes, you can parameterize that in many ways to tune for your desired outcomes.

Neofascist accelerationism’s ideology is characterized by a belief that the destruction of modern civilization will usher in a new age of rejuvenation and glory, premised on a social structure of caste-like hierarchy and traditional values. To return society to a structure of tradition and hierarchy, neofascist accelerationists endorse the tactic of seemingly random acts of terrorism to attempt to spark chain reactions of social upheaval and violence.

In European classical antiquity, democracy was recognized as a familiar phase of cyclical political development, fundamentally decadent in nature, and preliminary to a slide into tyranny. Today this classical understanding is thoroughly lost, and replaced by a global democratic ideology, entirely lacking in critical self-reflection, that is asserted not as a credible social-scientific thesis, or even as a spontaneous popular aspiration, but rather as a religious creed, of a specific, historically identifiable kind:

They are weak only in political freedom, and political freedom is unimportant by definition when government is stable and effective.

The formalization of political powers, thirdly, allows for the possibility of effective government. Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp. the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer any need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities. If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice, free exit.

If the state cannot be eliminated, Moldbug argues, at least it can be cured of democracy (or systematic and degenerative bad government), and the way to do that is to formalize it. This is an approach he calls ‘neo-cameralism’.

… libertarians cannot present a realistic picture of a world in which their battle gets won and stays won. They wind up looking for ways to push a world in which the State’s natural downhill path is to grow, back up the hill.

As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future).

How can the sovereign power be prevented – or at least dissuaded — from devouring society? It consistently finds democratic ‘solutions’ to this problem risible, at best.

The left, at its root, is all about destruction.

It models the state as a representation of popular will, and making oneself heard means more politics.

Democracy and ‘progressive democracy’ are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Whig history

Just as the normal sexual complex excites and stirs the individual out of his egotism to serve the ends of the race, so the normal religious process takes the individual out of his egotism for the service of the community.

They demanded devotion and gave reasons for that demand.

"YES," objects a reader, "but does not our religion tell us what we are to do with our lives?"

Archbishop of Canterbury

The Ten Memes of the Witchcraft Construct

ontology is mutated

mythopoesis

Throughout milleniums it has been observed that a minority of human beings has been blessed or cursed with supernormal powers, meaning those developed beyond the recognised range of our faculties…. Such singular talents range through healing, prevision, supersensory cognition, inspirational and trance writing and speech, projection of apparitions, materialisation, fire immunity, action at a distance by invisible means (telekinesis), levitation, and, most remarkable of all, the power of transmitting matter through matter. Illustrations of the working of such perplexing mysteries have become familiar through the agency of sacred history, which is replete with relations of psychic acts…. Subject to various vicissitudes exploitation of divers of these accomplishments has continued from primaeval days to the present time in the practices of healers, dowsers, diviners, and spirit ‘‘mediums’’, … If, as often observed, an hereditary tendency to active psychic powers exists…the tremendous slaughter of young witches will explain in considerable measure why ‘‘psychical mediums” are scarce at the present day.

underworld deities like Diana or Hecate.

Throughout the Middle Ages, there was an increasing perception that women were naturally susceptible to the allure of sorcery. By the end of the 7th century, “the witch was … more often a woman than a man”

Siena

that of the unassimilated folk magician and the bureaucratic egregore.

From antiquity until the mid-twentieth century, women have interacted with the sacred through the medium of the household and childbirth. There is the brick and beam that constitutes a house, then there is the metaphysical overlay which conjures a home. There is the bare broodnest, and then there is a blanket of gossamer moss— myths, songs, and spells that provide raiment for oneiromantic rituals and bind souls to human hearts. This is man’s covenant with Pandora. When this vessel of domestic sorcery is broken, due to widowhood, divorce, or abandonment, she spills her curse out into the world in the form of witchcraft.

It has happened before, and it will happen again, the miller’s wheel must turn.

Cataclysmic droughts accompanied this “Little Ice Age” of the Spörer and Maunder minima, bringing starvation and pestilence. In 1540, a multi-season megadrought in Europe brought on massive fires destroying whole towns and forests, sparking an “arsonist panic” in Germany where vagabonds supposedly formed secret societies, had a secret language and used secret signs, “and many of these fire-raisers, men and women, were seized and killed, but no one could learn the proper truth,” recounted Nicolaus Thoman in his Chronik von Weissenhorn.

In his 1787 “Essay on the Mechanism of Glaciers”, the naturalist and statesman Bemhard Friedrich Kuhn (1762-1825) concluded that towards the end of the sixteenth century “an extraordinary revolution in nature” must have taken place, promoting "alpine glaciers to grow beyond their usual limitations and to extend into cultivated areas.”

Schumann

accompanied by significant calendar reforms [Knorozov, 1971].

In 1996, Russian cosmophysicist S. Ertel's research [Ertel, 1996; 1998] uncovered a remarkable pattern: between 1400 and 1800, there was a synchronous surge in creative productivity across two separate cultural areas, Europe and China. These periods of heightened creativity coincided with significant and extended low points in solar activity, known as the Spörer and Maunder minima. This led to the suggestion that variations in space climate might influence human creativity on a global scale.

In the 1920s, Russian astronomer A.L. Tchijevsky released a study that compared the Schwabe Cycle, or the approximately 11-year cycle of solar activity, with global historical events from the 5th century B.C. to the 19th century A.D. He found that periods of societal unrest, such as revolutions, tended to align with the peaks of the Schwabe Cycle, while eras of peace and flourishing in science and the arts coincided with the cycle's minima.

Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS)

A lesser-known aim of Stanford Research Institute’s CIA-funded STARGATE research was to discover “correlations between AC [anomalous cognition] and geomagnetic activity,” and they found “higher-scoring laboratory AC trials, tend to occur at times of relatively low GMF activity.” (May et al 1993)

Changing Images of Man (1982)

In 1967, physiologist Rütger Wever at the Max Planck Institute in Germany conducted experiments in two specially constructed underground isolation chambers, one shielded from electromagnetic fields. Over two decades, hundreds of participants' sleep cycles and internal rhythms were monitored in these rooms. Wever observed that in the presence of Earth's natural electromagnetic fields, bodily rhythms maintained a close-to-24-hour cycle. However, in the shielded room, these rhythms became longer, erratic, and desynchronized. Body temperature, potassium excretion, mental process speed, and other bodily rhythms diverged in their own distinct patterns, becoming completely unmoored from the sleep-wake cycle. Introducing a 10 Hz signal, similar to Earth's Schumann resonance, in the shielded room resynchronized the body's rhythms to a 24-hour period.

He discovered that frequencies above 8 Hz increased reaction times,