Something must have acted as a catalyst on a set of wrongly presumed dormant inputs in my mind yesterday.
A catalyst works by lowering the activation energy required for a chemical reaction to occur, making the process more efficient without being consumed itself
I credit the wide availability of accessible artificial intelligence tools for this magical ease in myself. Programs like PerplexityAI (my preference for asking questions where I need precision in my answer) and ChatGPT (my preference for open ended queries) make it effortless to connect ideas and intuition.
Even a vague input like “story about a town that turns rhinoceros as metaphor for authoritarianism” is enough to get me off to the races with Eugène Ionesco and reopen the intuition library of my mind. This era of easy connections is giving my own inference powers a huge level up.
I can bring up “schizophrenia and capitalism” as a mere footnote and my past reading is immediately available and accessible on my phone with simple cross checks. It’s beyond liberating.
Just a few titles on the topic of schizophrenia in radical poststructuralist scholarship I have in my own library
I can see why it would be disconcerting for powerful institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge that someone like me can go down elaborate scholarship tangents without any guidance.
Sharp readers will enjoy that the examples I use here include Deleuze and Eugène Ionesco. Those who are unfamiliar with why this feels salient and ironic please feel free to go down a few rabbit holes of your own. I’m sure you too will connect the dots as swiftly as I did.
“Since you’ve chosen death I must choose another path” It was a shitpost. I posted an acceleration meme. I happily endorse the bumpy progress of material change and the myriad human lives that choose to grow. The responses to my shitpost show that it’s no longer a joke.
Accelerate or die in style of the American Revolution “unite or die” snake representing the thirteen colonies but in the form of a network diagram.
I live in very clear reveled preferences on this front. My husband and I are accelerating the real world in our home in Montana. In two years we’ve planted a fruit orchard, installed solar grid, use the power from that grid to grow hydroponics and mine Bitcoin, we got chickens and advocate for local growth initiatives that allow people in Montana to live and grow together in mutual freedom.
I also believe those rights in the real world rest on a bedrock of natural rights enumerated in the American constitution.
And then suggest you want to engage in earnest debate. I find it hard to believe a good faith reader doesn’t immediately see the cognitive dissonance.
I do have the right to do as I choose as I am an American. We have first amendment rights.
Until you can measurably demonstrate proof that access to compute (which is just mathematics) has specific measurable harms you cannot invoke force on your fellow citizen for your personal paranoias.
The encryption wars had the same logic. So I ask people who worry about the consequences of compute power and artificial intelligence to give us what we’ve asked for in the form of measurably demonstrated specific types of harms where access to compute is a threat.
No “what if” hysterics, show me specifics and we can address those in policy. Armageddon in your head isn’t adequate. Being afraid isn’t enough.
If you can show measurable harms do so. We must hew to empiricism any time we seek to align others to our cause. Show me specific harms & we work to redress those harms. Actual crimes that exist already should be prosecuted as such. Seeking to newly criminalize a basic right because of unprecedented circumstances should be subject to the highest of scrutiny.
However if you show me you want the power for yourself to make these decisions I say no. We all keep our own conscience. We have existing rights.
I have shown through my revealed preferences I also believe this transition to more artificial will be chaotic. An age of higher variance is upon us and this can be a good thing with enough energy and intelligence. And we are about to get more intelligence thanks to the tools we have built.
I hope we can mitigate its harms. I believe we can apply ourselves in individual ways coordinated by the best efforts of those who build new tools. And that because we cannot predict with certainty we must hold firm to our principles doubly so then. We must be brave in approaching these problems as the principles matter.
Marxist Leninist thought has proven resilient
I am not advocating for revolution. I am advocating for keeping our heads and our hearts in times of change and protecting all of our freedoms.
We have historically shown the value of this position and the folly of violent control “for your own good.” Consider those classic socialist musicians the Beatles. Even they understood that revolutionary force was bad.
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all wanna change the world
But when you talk about destruction Don’t you know that you can count me out, in
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We’d all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is, brother, you have to wait
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you’ll change the constitution Well, you know We’d all love to change your head (ah, shu-bi-do, ah) You tell me it’s the institution Well, you know You better free your mind instead (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Revolution 1 – The Beatles
If you want to go around quoting Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. How prescient those British Boy Band Boomers were. If you are so certain a revolution is necessary but you will take my compute from me then it’s you who wishes to be the Vanguard not me.
These calls for safety and caution, lest an apocalypse scenario ensue, appeal emotions to seek a tyranny of the majority for a fantasy of control over something that “may” be dangerous but not in any empirical ways we can address together and in specific ways. They don’t want to be accountable. Accountability is a democracy not this pantomime of concern seeking control.
Appealing to fears is control. All of the issues which have been brought up in artificial intelligence and access to computer models have past analogs and parallels in our existing policy tool set and within the enumerated rights.
Feel free to specify those issues into specifics and not act like this is Patriot Act 2^nth Terminator 2 Boogaloo. We have no need to indulge in Tom Clancy level panic about sum of all fears.
To lighten the mood this is an aligned AI for you.
Embrace the freedoms of affirming your right to choose your own human life. These new tools can we’ve built from mathematics and computation can enrich all our lives.
Lest you not think I take the consequences of this massive change and its potential for dislocation seriously, I live off grid with redundant power and water in Montana. I invest exclusively in solutions to the real problems we face in uncertain times including energy, open source, decentralization & trustless intermediaries. I walk this walk. The choice to make the future is up to all of us. And we should walk it in the most life affirming way we can for each of us.
I hate failing. The sense of doomed futility I have when I interact with the broken bits of the American bureaucracy weighs on me. Every time a crucial piece of the business of government fails I feel helpless. Like I am a loser.
I feel deeply that the machine has ground out some remaining spark of hope in me.
“It’s the hope that kills you”
Phrase Ted Lasso ain’t too crazy about
I spent some time today feel like it was the hope thar kills me. I felt it deeply.
Some time passed and I reminded myself that while I can accept finite disappointment, I can never accept losing the grace of an infinite capacity for hope.
“I think it’s the lack of hope that comes and gets you. … See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief.”
I see cases on socially media daily of award winners, brilliant engineers, academics, and simple good faith aspirants who wish to spend time with the American dream and are denied.
I have hope that we can recognize that tourists, students, entrepreneurs and others that genuinely wish to contribute to our nation deserve an efficient transparent system that lets people come to America.
It should be unacceptable that these systems are unaccountable and impossible to navigate. It shouldn’t feel like we are living within a Kafka novel when getting a visa. This is America not the Soviet eastern block.
I believe that the network state is coming for badly run governments. But it cannot come soon enough. It may sound dramatic but consider that venal, impossible to navigate and expensive government serves none of us and harms the markets, businesses and people. It’s an embarrassment to our national character.
The longer we tolerate these state of affairs the closer we edge to anarcho-tyranny. When the government and help you but it can hurt you. We should be ashamed as Americans that we let this monstrous machine do us so much harm.
I try to collate my thoughts most days but I can’t do it tonight. It’s the eve of the Ides of March and I’ve got something to dread just like Julius. I will be tweeting bangers into the abyss and praying.
I understand Kafka now in a way that I didn’t as a teenager. That is all. Go read some Juvenal instead of seeing Dune 2. Pray the the gods of chaos that my people be spared. Good luck to the Windsors but mostly because we shouldn’t do to Kate what we did to Camilla. Let the stupid aristocracy fans enjoy that anyone cares about Burke’s Peerage. The Nikkei opens in ten minutes.
I’d describe her experience as literal shape rotation with what is a “memory palace” visualization of the world.
I can’t imagine not having inner monologue. I have a bicameral mind and can picture imagery and movement in my head and discuss it with myself.
Her description of her thought process is akin to having filing system and seeing her thoughts in that system rendered in a flexible database. It’s like she’s a computer.
Other reactions to this video have churned through my mind. Is self awareness maladaptive? Would a future intelligence find this bicameral mind inefficient and go back to unicameral. What other forms exist? Can we toggle it up and down? Is it a gradient in humans of types of cognition and the inner voice is just a processing error?
Can’t find it in the thread atm but thanks to the person who made this. “The end point of this thinking is self awareness is maladaptive”
Oh my god, I get it now. The bicameral mind is still in the process of breaking down. Inner monologues are holdovers, doomed to be outcompeted by more efficient mind
Is this “breakdown” a the shift away from perceiving the voice as external to the self? Is it the erasure of the voice wholesale? What will artificial intelligences make of these differences in human minds? Is this special? A tiger isn’t bicameral.
I think this is relevant to our moment in artificial intelligence development. A Finnish mathematician wrote one of the best science fiction novels I read in the last decade on quantum minds and memory palaces. There is a side plots with embodied intelligences on Mar.
The Quantum Thief is a science fiction novel by Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi and the first novel in a trilogy featuring the character of Jean le Flambeur; the sequels are The Fractal Prince and The Causal Ange
Wikipedia
I’ve got a hazy theory about Nordic decentralized engineering culture and mental organization. It’s not a coincidence that fifteen years ago a Silicon Valley Finnish computer scientist wrote some of the best science fiction about a theory of mind that was interior and perfectly organized right?
I may need to go read Julian Jaynes.
An un-cameral mind, as proposed by Julian Jaynes in his theory of bicameral mentality, refers to a state where cognitive functions are divided between two parts without consciousness or meta-reflection. In this non-conscious mental state, individuals lack the ability to reason, articulate mental contents, or have executive ego functions like deliberate mind-wandering. The breakdown of this division led to the emergence of consciousness in humans, characterized by the capacity for introspection and autobiographical memory[1][3].
Jaynes suggests that ancient people in the bicameral state experienced auditory hallucinations as commands from gods, guiding their actions without conscious evaluation. This theory has influenced discussions on consciousness, language, and culture, although it has faced criticisms and debates. Despite differing opinions, Jaynes’s work remains a thought-provoking exploration of the origins of consciousness and continues to inspire research in psychology and consciousness studies[3][5].
Sources [1] Bicameral mentality – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality [2] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Jaynes%20Bicameral%20Mind1.htm [3] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind [4] Retrospective: Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in … – jstor https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerjpsyc.125.2.0237 [5] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072
I saw someone else say meditation is literally teaching people how to run a monocameral emulator. I’ve done these types of exercises as a child. It sounds a bit Bene Geserit but mental exercises around focus was part of the German theosophical tradition that gave us Rudolf Steiner.
I wish I’d be a bit more organized on this but I’ve been fully back on work so this will have to do for today.
Do you want something for nothing? Maybe that’s human nature. I try not to be too cynical.
But then I am occasionally presented with information in which I must confront that some people are in fact fine with getting something for nothing.
“We live in a society!” I scream into the abyss. Maybe I’m the idiot and we haven’t actually agreed to fair dealings. Maybe I’m actually the rube.
I don’t want to give up on my high trust ways. I am not optimizing for the best possible outcome for myself. I care quite a bit about the greater good. Maybe I’m an idiot for doing so.
But I’d rather be an idiot and optimistic than a a brilliant cynic. It makes me unhappy to consider how many people are simply happy to be presented with something for nothing and never have to contend with its costs.
I have a strange gap between my self image and my reality. I don’t think of myself as a “consistent” person. And yet the data on myself I have collected over the years disagrees with this self image.
I don’t know if I’ve always seen myself this way, but certainly since my early adulthood I’ve seen myself as all over the place. I am not sure it’s even an opinion I should hold about myself but it seems well entrenched so has to come from childhood.
I have a self imagine in which I see myself as physically inconsistent with almost no capacity to predict what one day to the next will bring. I take this to a bad place fast. If i I am inconsistent then I am unreliable. I can rationalize that to myself but I don’t think it’s actually true.
There are multiple indicators that suggest I am wrong in my self assessment. I am very consistent across a number of critical areas. This blog is a very public demonstration of consistency. I reliably put something up every single day.
Am I proving something to myself or am I simply refusing to see myself as I am? If I am consistent then I reliable in that it can be predicted with high confidence what I will do.
If I do in fact have high consistency and high reliability then why do not see it? Is it even important that I am predictable? Businesses like predictably. So do markets. Civilization runs on consistency. But do I run on consistency too? And what incentive do I have to see myself in one way and not the other?
I slept a lot last night. Have moved four time zones in as many days with the additional “joy” of daylight savings my body is confused. My mind is not.
My initial impulse today was to push through it with exercise, routines, self care and being present in the real world but after the basics were done I was simply throwing myself into the timelessness of the news cycle. My only clock is the rotation of the planet and even that is arbitrary
Oddly I think this was a good decision in times of adjustment. My body adapts to the sun easily and quickly. My mind however is set on some permanent exterior hive mind that is a 24 cycle. There is no perfect syncing of this to be had nor any shift that seems to make sense to me except “awake” and “asleep”
For most people this strange permanent awareness would be very hard on the nervous system. And indeed it is. And yet the thrum of a global population coming online and offline is soothing and regulating in its own way. Each opening of a new market bouncing me along to a new continent with new people.
I say that this is helpful to me and not harmful only say with any degree of certainty because I regularly dose myself off being “extremely online” into very offline remote living. Being extremely offline has not once improved a single metric for me. This annoys me as much as I was annoyed that removing gluten didn’t improve anything for me.
If anything I seem to self regulate better with maximally online presence. I would have previously assumed something is wrong with me but now perhaps I can explore that it’s an advantage. I come on and off like with whenever I jump back in. The past can be filled in and the future isn’t here yet.
After a quick run through El Segundo I am back in Montana for the moment. Nothing makes you appreciate American more than spending time away from it.
While complaints about travel and its challenges always make you appreciate home, it’s really only upon return to you notice just how good we have it as Americans. Everything is just a little bit easier.
Everything from acquiring groceries to taking a shower is somehow less of a hassle. Getting out of the local airport and getting provisioned was a breeze.
Which is good as I’m tired. It’s good to be back on my own land and in my own country.
A lot of emotional energy has been directed at the “problem” of “women in technology” in the last decade or two. Stupid campaigns get run with degrees of condescension in which it’s insinuated the only way women could see the value in crypto is if we make a perfume. It’s the rankest form of sexism and extremely effective. And I’ve proudly worked in cosmetics. Chemistry is cool.
So today on International Women’s Day I’d like to remind myself that I’ve l been “in tech” since the moment I fell in love with a personal computer as a young teen. I’m on that edge of elder millennial that did things in the real world as children but had access to the virtual early.
Plenty of men mistakenly assume that because I worked in fashion, beauty and ecommerce. I was early before the ease of hosted Shopify accounts or even Heroku instances for an app. It was a lot more roll your own.
And yet some think my experience doesn’t count. Despite it being a clearly sign of capital markets having underpricing occasionally. Ifs a good thing. You go where market rewards you and you learn to learn skills along the way.
I think so much less about my gender now. Almost resent ever having been talked into it. You do it right then you, like an anyone else in the market, can benefit when someone misallocates.
If you are lucky enough to steward your own capital, then get to be part of the investor bases to build the next generation. I do that now. I am still a woman.
I’m proud to use the resources I have to invest in what I believe in based on my experiences and the thesis I invest under. Not as some smoothed over marketing narrative with a gender hook. No I price like an actor you can do business with. I am willing to show my revealed preference.
I learned in previous eras so I may serve the generation that is coming up. And I’m happy to invest in the ares I believe in most. I am happy as a woman to invest in men as I am in women.
The focus I see in founders I have invested in across energy, artificial intelligence and crypto are ones I believe in. I believe in them as people. I believe in them as founders. I believe in them as men.
I am lucky to be seen as an individual with capital and insights that can help them carry a better future forward. I hope all founders are seen as individuals.
Technology innovation has been the driver of improved human life. Material prosperity is good for women. It’s good for men. So I’ll celebrate doing stuff for the boys on international women’s day.
Alex Miller visiting with me at one of our favorite portfolio company Valar Atomics. I believe in Isiah and his team.
