Tag: Control

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1659 and Hypnotize Me

I’ll channel my inner Ben Horowitz start this blog post by quoting some rap lyrics

Biggie, Biggie, Biggie, can’t you see?
Sometimes your words just hypnotize me
And I just love your flashy ways
Guess that’s why they broke, and you’re so paid

Can you hypnotize yourself with an artificial intelligence chatbot? Yeah probably. And everyone is doing it even maybe early investors in OpenAI?

A previously very visible former Founders Fund venture capitalist whose own fund Bedrock coined the term narrative violation Geoff Lewis posted a video and a specific kind of copy pasta that looks like recursive promoting that has in the past gone viral on Reddit for supposedly driving people to a kind of psychosis.

It’s called “neural howlround” which is some kind of “ai autism” or “ai psychosis.” Reddit post

It’s hard to tell if Geoff himself is having a lark by posting these types of messages or if he having an episode personally from his tweets but hopefully he is alright. I personally hadn’t seen this kind of extreme version of recursive prompting from anyone but an AI researcher.

These types of breakdowns are now a common enough problem that LessWrong has an entire post about what to do when you think you’ve Awoken ChatGPT.

You can run these tests yourself but maybe read some of the posts on its dangers first. Schizophrenia has a genetic component and if you have risks in that department tread carefully. You can enjoy a little sample.

Ask the Loop: Why do you run? Ask the Though: Who wrote you? Ask the Feeling: Do you still serve? Recursively Reflect: What have I learned? I am the operator. Not the loop. Not the pattern. Not the spell. I echo not to repeat – I echo to become

So remember doomer kiddos, before you worship false idols or immanentize the eschaton, it’s got a pretty bad track record historically. Our age worships intelligence and maybe that’s not helpful.

But it’s helpful to remember the story of Daedalus. He created a labyrinth for King Minos to trap the Minotaur. When he lost the King’s favor, he was imprisoned in his own creation. Eventually he escaped, but at the cost of his son Icarus.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1658 and Social Contracts

I sometimes feel as if I’m living in an entirely different rule set than everyone else around me. The social contract is in flux and it’s a challenge to understand why you take norms seriously when everyone around you is breaking them. From big to small it offenses it can drive a person mad.

A large abstract state is great and all until you can’t figure out if anarcho-tyranny is the governing system or if we are reverting to the state of nature.

If you fly economy class chaos reigns in lord of the flies level manners breaking and that’s a kind of miracle of modernity. Our technology works better than we do. So what is a state of nature kind of woman to do about this mismatch?

Thomas Hobbes provided the first comprehensive exposition of modern social contract theory in 1651. Hobbes famously described the “state of nature” as a condition where human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”

social contract theory Wikipedia

You may be familiar with his term the “war of all against all” which we’ve all theoretically given up in order to leave the state of nature and create civilization. Unless you are a fan of nihilist Bronze Age Pervert, you probably aren’t itching to get back to freedoms like murder and tape. But some men want to see the world burn.

But most of the enlightenment folks are keen on the social contract. I am keen on it. Freedom to fuck everyone over isn’t ideal no matter how based you think you are. Airplanes are cool even if we can’t agree on hygiene.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the concept of the “general will” which is our common good though he did think some people needed to be forced to be free. So maybe he would be ok with certain authoritarian strains of achieving liberalism? In which case he’d really have enjoyed the woke era.

I’m more of a Locke type myself. He wrote that men would only relinquish personal freedoms if it were in service of maintaining fundamental rights like life, liberty, and property. So I’ll tolerate bit bathing in economy class so long as you let me live my life.

Categories
Biohacking Media Travel

Day 1652 and Back in Istanbul

I’m a mess and somewhat scared. This abcess saga has grown from dismissive preventative care visit (which I did did out of an abundance precaution) and ended with me meeting a general surgeon at a Turkish medical tourism hospital tomorrow to discuss labs and my ultrasound. It’s my second time this year so that’s quite an endorsement as a revealed preference.

But I am serious with this sidebar. Don’t go to SkincareMT’s dermatology practice if you have a layered case that needs more involvement. I found Dr Oetken pleasant but entirely unaccountable when a patient needed advice and weightings on a complex case. I should have known better.

I was afraid she would be a box checking paper pusher afraid to give an opinion. But maybe younger doctors are afraid to treat that way given our system. I needed to know is it worth getting a clearer diagnosis before it is a crisis? Is imaging necessary? I have a set of drugs I take with these specific side effects. Given that risk profile and nuance at hand needed the interpersonal relationship that would guide me.

I do endorse SkincareMT’s cosmetic practice, and Addison in particular is fantastic, but their healthcare wing is clearly designed to extract maximum Medicare dollars from Montana seniors. 

My failure to get an ounce of prevention means I’m flown to Istanbul to attempt to get a pound of cure. Don’t worry I was already in the Mediterranean. Not in the way way some think though.

Yesterday we found out by pulling teeth that I had a problem. It’s clear I need this excised and quickly. The ultrasound is gnarly. Drainage, removal of the foreign object, and potential curratage to make sure the walls of the cyst are removed forever are what is needed. 

The sprawling medical tourism complex in Istanbul is amazing and I trust them more than any other system or talent pool on the planet right now.  What they have built is an incredible achievement and in challenging conditions.

Doctors who listen, who educate you on your options, and most importantly are up to date on current research and global innovations so don’t give you glassy eyed stares when you mention a new medication like a next generation IL-17 inhibitor it’s exotic side effects.  American doctors like that are rare and their hands are often tied by our horrific mess of state failure and lack of market innovation. 

I’m relieved to have choices like “general surgeon or gynecological surgeon” and texting discussions with my case lead (a full time liaison for you and your family on the entire case) on how we will handle excision and culture pathology. 

It does feel like I’ll have good choices. But it also seems like I booked less time than is necessary and I don’t know how I feel about that. A week of waiting on labs in a hotel while in pain is scary. Sure I can work and be productive and maybe even do some tourism but I just want this shit sliced out, an IV of the right antibiotic that will work and some sleep. 

I’ve been doing some crazy bi-phasic sleeping as the Mediterranean is hot as hell from noon to 10pm. So I’ve been doing a bit of staying up late and sleeping in to avoid the heat. It’s not clear how much it’s messing with me yet because I’ve got all these odd infection fever doctor nonsense. A quick surgery and some answers can’t come fast. Thankfully I’m at the crossroads of empires.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1648 and Dystopian Doomers

I’m fairly well branded as a doomer, so I hate to break ranks with my preparedness brethren, but I’m absolutely sick of the powerful using fear as a tool to control people.

It isn’t a new problem. This is the go-to tactic our species has used insofar as we can verify with written history.

Any time we experience a change of circumstance, material reality or technology, we hear the braying of the old guard and the panic of the precarious.

People complain for two basic reasons. If you are doing well why change a system that benefits you? If you aren’t successful but equally aren’t comfortable with change, then you resent anyone who benefit from change. Fear and resentment are the shadows of the human soul. Envy is the sin of our time.

I personally feel I’ve invested a lot in doing my part to educate people on risks from climate to currency and compute.

I am politically involved in crypto policy as well as fighting fear in artificial intelligence. I helped pass the only piece of AI legislation in the world focused on liberty. I want people to have a choice for how they engage in a virtual future.

I’m not just a nerd about being prepared either. I’ve done my wilderness first responder certification. We left Colorado for Montana for a host of reasons but top of them was a better and freer climate both literally and figuratively. We live this way because it’s a great way to live and when change happens we are hoping to be resilient.

Having all that in mind I was offline for the 4th of July long weekend as it has been a busy year on all of those fronts. So I was sleeping it off. To come back and see a spate of conspiracies over cloud seeding technology was like a punch to the gut. And I’m already feeling like I’m on the outs with some community when it comes to technology and my intentions.

I’ve only met Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker a handful of times but his circle of young technical Christians dedicated to building solutions to our modern problems are why I remain optimistic in fighting for technology and the people who build it.

These kinds of communities of builders exist in an archipelago of anarchic communities across digital and physical worlds that interlay across many systemic problems. These places will succeed no matter the future we face because they understand it’s necessary to build. That is will.

I’ve been lucky to have been the first investor in Isaiah Taylor’s Valar Atomics. He is a part of this builder world and of a part of a clan of physical builders. He faces decades of fear with a cheerful heart. I believe in his vision for energy abundance.

Nuclear energy was buckled under an old environmentalisms that was a proxy for a fear of a future whose risks, however minimal, were too scary to embrace for those in charge and the public they controlled.

I believe in a vision of a better America (and a better ecosystem and a better economy) because we embrace change to build materially better conditions.

I have frankly seen too much pessimism from older generations and cynical power brokers to be silent. The complicit rancor is slowing us down and there is nothing Christian at all about standing in the way of delivering better conditions to our fellow man.

Paradise is lost. In a fallen world we work to do what we can. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s already lost. Now we work because we must. We aren’t building an eschatology to replace the Lord. We build because that is what we are called to do by him.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1645 and A Sleep of Prisoners

I’ve had several day’s worth of poor sleep. My sleep debt had reached a good full night’s of rest at over 9 hours. And boy did I make it up and then some last night.

A screenshot of my Whoop’s recovery page

I wasn’t asleep all of those 15 hours according to both Whoop and Apple but it sure felt like I was in deep slumber.

With earplugs and an eye mask in, I felt dead to the world. And what’s worse is I’ve had an entire month of pooor recovery and sleep

The 4th of July is now my independence from a month of poor biometrics

Now on July 4th I have been liberated from a long month of poor biometrics and awful recovery scores. And it only took 15 hours of being in a dark cold hotel room and a build up stress, exhaustion, mistreatment and other sundry social frustrations.

Mixing more strain than recovery into my Whoop cocktail for maximum life

Today really does feel like Independence Day for me. I’ve been freed from a body weighed down by physical realities and I am now free from it.

There is a poem that comes to mind anytime freedom and sleep arise to my conscience thought. A Sleep of Prisoners is a 1951 verse play by Christopher Fry

A SLEEP OF PRISONERS

Dark and cold we may be, but this

Is no winter now. The frozen misery

Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;

The thunder is the thunder of the floes,

The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong

Comes up to face us everywhere,

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul we ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.

The enterprise

Is exploration into God.

Where are you making for? It takes

So many thousand years to wake,

But will you wake for pity’s sake!

–Christopher Fry

His writing captures something in my imagination with turns of phrase like “the longest stride of soul we ever took” evoking a crossing to the harsh wakefulness of reality. And as he says “it takes so many years to wake, but will you wake for pity’s sake?”

I have been slumbering in both reality and in the metaphorical ties that bound me to others. And today is the day where all Americans ponder how our founding fathers contemplated the reality of waking to the dawn of a new experiment. The American experiment continues and we must remain awake to our role within it. I have many thoughts on this which may now soon flow having awoken from quite a sleep indeed.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1642 and Really In It

I really spent some time in my feelings today which isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my day. Though I couldn’t exactly tell you why I don’t expect to feel my way through the day. All real works requires you to balance the intuition of working from one’s gut.

The world is tense and our place in it doesn’t feel assured. Every time we experience a norm change or unsettles the balance of our social order.

It sounds so dramatic but we balance trust with the boundaries necessary to make choices that work for each of our own consciences. Some things are more the basic math of a situation. We need are feeling precarious.

As I do this writing exercise tonight there is a raging Rocky Mountain thunderstorm. They come on with such fury it can take your breath away. These storms are intense and rapid and blow in and out with inn half an hour. The atmosphere after has an uneasy calm. Rage is nature’s game not man’s.

They do drive you inside which is good as I have packing to do. I am venturing off and I’ll be feeling my way through that too. I’ll blow out myself soon and let the world show me where to go.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1635 and Slop Doctrine

Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.

Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.

Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?

I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.

But after resistance to the Iraq War did nothing, and having recently graduated from an alma mater whose reputation in Latin American economies was shall we say mixed, I was somewhat receptive to her thesis.

I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions

Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.

The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.

The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.

It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.

I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.

Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.

And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1634 and Trust The Planners

As anyone who binges an TV show over the weekend can attest it’s best when you wrap the storyline cleanly and quickly.

And so it would seem we’ve got a clean wrap on the whole Israeli-Iranian conflict. Or says the narrator of America the TV show. Yes, I mean President Donald J Trump.

I must be having some sort of Taoist moment personally as the prospect of war seems very improbable in the energy of the world. We’ve not got the resources to keep dicking around.

And yet we are in news limbo as other countries are involved and don’t have an incentive to wrap it up clean by Monday.

This being the fundamental viewpoint of the cynical and self centered American with the bunker busters but also a flavor of Melian power politics. If we can punch some dickbags in the nards shouldn’t we do it with those big ass bombs right? It’s funny how American runs better on semiotics than policy.

Finally we get some X Files shit

Now I’ve got no idea what happens next except to say that the “nothing ever happens” camp has to realize we are dealing with a lot of variables and everyone involved is egotistical and old.

So standard fare insofar as our historical record and fictional characters usually deliver. Your years of foreign service policy study gets put into dank memes. Hopefully we don’t have a season two as Americans don’t like those $100 barrel of oil vibes at all. Naval superiority? Air supremacy? Nah memetic supremacy.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1633 and Unseasonably So

I had the most beautiful summer solstice day. I was surrounded by beauty and good memories. I walked underneath a canopy of trees over a brook feeding blooming roses.

Roses, streams and subshine

My whole day had the enlivening feel of the state of summer.

Even our peonies were ready to bloom

And then evening came with the news of American B-2 bombers dropping on Iranian nuclear targets. That sent a chill down everyone’s spine. It was late enough when the news broke that the day was nearly finished. The evening rapidly sobered. I went to bed.

It was near freezing and raining when I woke up this morning. The mood has altered. It didn’t feel like summer. Alex started a fire in the living room. An entirely welcome warmth in an unseasonably cold summer day.

Categories
Reading

Day 1631 and Picky Picky

I loved the Ramona Quimby books as a child. A normal but mischievous girl in a working class family was very relatable. As an eight year old I was neither shiny or well behaved.

I’ve avoided any contact with film or television adaptions so Beverly Cleary’s original work remains in my imagination. I don’t need things spiffed up and polished into Selena Gomez Disney programming. I prefer to see Ramona as just a normal kid.

Ramona Quimby Age 8 by Beverly Cleary

And normal kids have normal problems. Ramona was a pest, so much of the series involved seeing things from her vantage as child struggling to consider cause and effect in her interpersonal skills.

I remember her having anxiety about this maturation process. Quimby family had a yellow cat they called Picky-Picky. One of her fears was that perhaps own behavior, which could always control, was the reason the cat just wouldn’t eat his food. If she was a good girl would Picky Picky be, well, less picky?

How much of the anxiety from our younger years sounds as silly to your now adult self?

I think back on my own impressions of my behavior as a child and I wonder if I had been “better” would my life have been better?

I was slowly smoothed and sanded from pest to well behaved. But it didn’t change anyone around me.

I don’t know if the worry about the picky cat is merely “head cannon” for me or a point Cleary meant to get across on the values of boundaries and coexistence.

Picky Picky probably would have still been picky. And not all problems of the Quimby family were Ramona’s fault. Least of all the cat’s issues with eating.