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.

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.

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. 

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.” 

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

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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

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.

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.

sexual and racial identities are treated as changeless through the ages.

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

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.

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.”

‘live by the fad, die by the fad.’

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;

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

those magic supercomputers will have to be physical systems…

Suffice it to say that Eliezer’s cult is much bigger than mine, not that I have a cult or anything.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

the unconscious desire articulated in the dream.

catharsis

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. 

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

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

autocracy is the only cure for oligarchy.

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.

Power has turned the whole country into a political cult.

John Perry Barlow.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

P.G. Wodehouse

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

the books we have dog-eared into submission

cud

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.

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

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.

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?

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].

“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?”

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

And they 3 became pregnant, and they bare great giants,

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.'

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

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.

KYC registration

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.

McLuhan’s ultimate fears come true!

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?

Measuring Human Experience is critical to the sustained growth of a business.

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

CSAT

NPS

We build relationships that matter.

Ethnographies

Diverting the most capable women away from reproduction is dysgenic

He is your natural slave.

The results of research tasks feed forward to subsequent tasks that cannot be executed until questions raised pre-research have been answered.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

chanterelle

basal

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.

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 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.

funky encrypted Internet stuff

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?

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.

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

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

been our twenties,

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.

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.

demagogues

ARISTIDES

regicides

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

philomath

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.

planetary guilds enabled by blockchains.

ZapatistasF

nation, and the state

The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0

I think this is what happens to humanity: we extend as systems and weaken as individuals.

the irrationality of rationality.

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

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.

‘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.

TechnoCalyps

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

“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.”

The Meme Machine

“Self-justification means that the components of a memeplex mutually justify each other.”

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 like to feel powerful.

Jane Fonda

symps

symps

There is nothing we find more despicable than spontaneous collective action motivated by collective self-interest among a homogeneous consensus.

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

Video et taceo

Vogon spy

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