I’ve been working on getting a deeper understanding of my hormone profile and where I can better support my cycle.
I’ve been surprised by just how little we seem to know about women’s health and the baselines that are considered ideal. Between the battles over health education in school (abstinence only) and the eagerness with which we put my millennial generation on birth control as teenagers, we’ve got both an under-informed and potentially over medicated population. Which wasn’t the case for our mother’s generation who went on birth control much later in life if at all.
I generally feel most energetic, pain free, and happy during my follicular phase. Despite knowing this I couldn’t tell you what an ideal FSH hormone level would be. I don’t know what balance of estrogen I should have at any given phase. I have no clue what my LH should be during my luteal stage either.
It strikes me that these levels should be taught along with implications for what it means and how to work with them just as we know our ideal blood pressure rage and resting heart rates. It’s some of the most crucial and basic self knowledge about our bodies.
When I think of how many other crucial biometrics I’ve got memorized (I track my SED rate and CRP quarterly for inflammation) it seems odd that something so crucial as one’s hormones wouldn’t be known, tracked and improved. I watch my heart rate variability like my recovery depends on it because it does. So do most serious biohackers.
Knowing more about own health is part of being a responsible adult. And I’m sad that we do so little to educate women on basic rhythms. I can’t tell if it’s a lack of interest from women or a dismissal from the medical profession. Women aren’t just small men.
Humans are horny for hierarchy. We are eager to give our power away as a species. Please will someone else just be responsible for making our decisions for us? Can someone point me to the person in charge? “Take me to your leader!”
If someone seems smarter, richer, more capable, more aggressive, heck even if they have better taste than us, they become an instant candidate for us delegating our authority over to them. My most popular blog post ever was about dickriding. Yes it was about Elon Musk’s fans.
I’ll be the first to say that people who court you to gain power should be viewed as suspect. But someone who has power is not themselves always suspect by default. I know it’s a fine distinction. But people fall into positions of authority simply by going out and being competent. Competence is a fast route to power.
Sure being competent has a lot of downsides. Suddenly you’ve got power you maybe didn’t want. We have an incentive shunt power off to someone else as it generally sucks to be in charge. It’s energetically expensive to be responsible. Just ask one of your friends with a toddler.
Sometimes we have to wield power because it’s our job to take care of our corner of the universe. Again ask someone with a toddler. We are in charge of sustaining some portion of the grand experiment called life. Even if it’s just our own families. Even if it’s just yourself.
So why am I titling this post “I am Beff Jezos?” Right now online there is a movement gaining recognition for encouraging people to have agency and build for the future. It’s a movement that wants you to own your own power. And to help others get more power of their own.
One of the anonymous posters associated with it calls himself Based Beff Jezos as a play on Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon and the meme “based” as in Lil B’s “based means being yourself.” It’s a silly joke.
It’s principles are simple. The future will arrive and we should build like it’s coming. Slowing things down, or even worse, going backwards, is not a solution to our problems. We can only go forward. If you’d prefer a driving metaphor, we should accelerate into the curve. Slowing down just spins out the car. Civilization is the car.
So what, you want to just uplift humanity, build AI and populate the universe with the maximum diversity and quantity of life?
The movement is more of a meme space than anything else. It is decentralized. I’ve not met anyone that runs it though I’ve spoken to many vocal supporters. And I’ve chatted with folks that are at the nexus of of its online presence. Everyone is positive and friendly. Most of them are anonymous. I’m not even of sure if some of the accounts are singular or plural. Which is pretty cool. It doesn’t have a president or a CEO or even a founder who owns anything with any amount of authority. It could be one dude or multiple dudes gender non specific.
It’s just a bunch of people who make stuff. It’s popular amongst engineers but it’s an ethos that to anyone who can make something. Even this blog post counts. I am e/acc as much as anyone.
Naturally if no one is in charge it’s a bit threatening. If there is no hierarchy how do we control it? If no one is in charge then what will we do if someone under their banner does something bad?
Such is the beauty of an idea. A meme can’t really be owned. A decentralized group of goofballs on the internet can’t really be snuffed out for bad think. Maybe a few nodes go down. They literally cannot kill all of us.
I Am Spartacus
The messages does seem to be resonating. I know being hopeful has improved my mood. A decent number of people who make shit want the future to come a little faster. They want more people with more ownership of the building process.
More complexity and more abundance is appealing even if it seems impossible to achieve. Don’t worry, just build for your corner of the world. Put power and responsibility in as many hands as possible. We can build it together.
You too can have a toddler and own the joy of being responsible for your corner of the universe. It’s dangerous for sure. Folks will tell you for your own good you need to have a hierarchy and someone responsible for the power.
But guess what? It can be you. And sure heads will get bonked. Crying will ensue. Remember I said ask someone with a toddler? What if you are the competent and in charge parent? Shit right?
We’ve got to go forward. I am Beff Jezos. You too are Beff Jezos. And they can’t stop us all from arriving at the future. Go ahead and accelerate into the curve.
A toxic morass of content has been circling on Twitter and corners of the chattering classes on TikTok, Substack, and podcasts that I’ve taken to calling gender bait.
The insecurity is palpable. The lust for control is high. How many people you’ve had sex with and how it affects marriage and family formation has been a contentious topic in culture wars in America for sometime. For a private matter between partners, it’s shocking how much it’s become fodder for social media grist.
Presenting scorn to women for being without significant others and children strike me as callus. Fertility is one of the most sensitive possible areas for anyone. I know it has been for me. You never know why someone is childless.
I wouldn’t recommend diving into gender bait topics if you aren’t already aware of the discourse and it’s champions. This variant appears to have gained momentum with a YouTube celebrity boxer feud.
It’s now percolated out to every engagement farmer looking to grow their outrage crops. And it looks like business is booming. Sadly, lonely people are desperately searching for control and reassurance and gender bait gives it to them.
If you are looking for ways to judge, shame and coerce others into behaving in a way that provides you comfort without their consent please consider that the problem might be you. It’s your insecurities speaking when you apply sweeping generalization to an individual you may not even know.
Once you are secure in your value and worth it’s a lot easier to get what you want from others simply by having boundaries and standards. There is no need to rain judgement on others. You wouldn’t want them doing it to you. Apply the golden rule and nurture empathy. The security you will find will last longer than any temporary control you may find through shame or judgement.
I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about who gets to decide the boundaries of society.
Automation of civic and cultural life has been happening at the speed of capitalism. It’s about to happen at the speed of artificial intelligence’s processing power.
At least during most of techno-capitalism, corporations and governments were still run by humans. You could blame an executive or elected official. What happens when more decisions are snapped into reality by a numerical boundary?
High frequency traders have found many an arbitrage they whittled into nothingness. Who will get whittled away when the machines decide how society should run?
We got a taste of the horrors of treating people like statistics instead of humans during the first Biden era crime bill with mandatory minimum sentencing. And here we are rushing to find new ways to nudge consensus back to hard lines and institutionalization.
I don’t know how we handle virtue in a world without grace. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue seems prescient. Forgiveness in the face of horrific reality has been the hallmark of humanity’s most enduring religions. But then again so has swift punishment and inscrutable cruelty. Humans are quite a species.
I am, like manyothers, concerned about reinforcement learning in machine learning and artificial intelligence. How and where we set the boundaries of the machines that determine the course of daily life has been a pressing question since the invention of the spreadsheet.
Marx certainly went on about alienation from our contributions to work. But division of labor keeps dividing. And algorithms seem to only increase the pace of the process.
I’m starting to feel like summer is losing its grip on me. I cannot even begin to express my relief that September is almost here. I loathe summer and this one has been particularly hot and horrifying.
Being in Montana for the summer has given me the nicest possible version of summer still possible on a warming planet. You wouldn’t imagine being a mile higher than sea level and in the Rocky Mountains would make for hot summers. But you’d be surprised. Thankfully it’s not a persistent condition like Houston.
I love being home. But I love winters in Montana about hundreds times more than summers. Ironic then that I usually find myself traveling for work during the times I most prefer to be at home. I struggle to remember the allure that travel once held before the Great Weirdening collided with the Pandemic Years. I remember yearning for Hong Kong and Dubai. Now I’m avidly negotiating Airbnb so I can stay put in a relatively centralized European city.
Can you imagine thinking that going abroad to do business was a sane use of time before say 2016? 2019 and onwards has given us closed borders to the lawful and state capacity collapse and immigration and visa panics. Hard to imagine that doesn’t feel like some kind of change to American idealism.
I truly pray if my writings are ever preserved for any kind of historical usage in some artificial intelligence that you will remember there was a time when New York and San Francisco were the gravity wells of an era. It’s been a long fifteen years since the Great Recession.
Whatever that time was it’s not the current moment. Maybe it comes back. I was a post 9/11 New Yorker who came from the country to do patriotic things like build businesses. Let’s not get into the war that happened in the process.
I’m glad I’ve gone home to the west. But I know you’ve got to journey from home to appreciate it too. I’ll keep my corner in the edge of the empire as renewal comes from the edges. Fall may turn into winter but you know in all seasons things turn.
Greetings, citizens We are living In the age In which the pursuit of all values Other than Money success fame glamour Has either been discredited Or destroyed Money success fame glamour For we are living in the age of the thing
I wasn’t a club kid in the Iraq War era. I had not yet rebelled. Like all class jumpers I was safely ensconced at a private university where I studied great books. I was however a club kid in the era of indie sleeze which arrived at an even more bleak sociopolitical nadir.
The Global Financial Crisis imploded expectations for how middle class millennials might pay off loans for expensive educations while we redeployed our working class to Afghanistan. But we’d elected Obama so like our politics were a little weird. Yes, we can’t? It’s was a dissonant age.
The remnant aesthetics from that era are somewhat shameful (as is all true youth culture) and yet here we are repeating them as the twenty year cycles of cultural remixing arrive to demand their due from my youth. 2003 is reappearing in 2023.
Logan Paul cannot marry a slut just as Britney Spears should never have given it up to Justin Timberlake. Elite social mores are not for the Bourgeoisie to emulate.
I encourage you to revisit an artifact from the 2003 called Party Monster to explore this aesthetics original form. It stars Chloe Sevigny, Seth Green (remember him) and McCauley Caulkin. The music video for the big hit from the soundtrack is titled “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour”. I quoted it at the top.
With lyrics that rooted so deeply in modernist materialism I’m tempted to yell “Eat your heart out Walter Benjamin!” The Marxist continental philosopher was a sexy club kid. Consider the engraving on tombstone in Portugal where he died fleeing the Nazis.
There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Benjamin was a great historian of German romanticism and it’s impact on fascist political aestheticism. So consider that history and ponder it’s relationship to the 2003 era counter cultural artifact.
The “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour” lyrics are materialism distilled and reflective of the nihilism of the Bush era. Forever wars and inflationary spending on empire was harder to smooth over with propaganda as the internet fought back. But in the aughts we still hadn’t quite realized we’d never be rid of our elites after the shocks of reactionary terrorism.
Maybe in our twenties we thought eventually we might take over and do things differently. I’m turning forty this year, and well, Joe Biden is president.
So here we are revisiting the past that won’t leave. RuPaul has a remix challenge of Party Monster soundtrack’s hits released this year and it’s worth seeing how ugly the refinements are compared to the original.
The most you can hope for now is that some millennial will turn your influencer work into a Netflix comedy in which you show off your cultural savvy by going to a queer club party themed 2003 in Bushwick. No the Kim Cattrall vehicle Glamorous is not very good.
It’s clearly the deep dog days of summer as I’m in a bit of a mood. I’ve got all kinds of things on my mind and yet it’s slow going executing on anything. The doldrums has certainly gripped me. And yet I take hope.
This corner of Twitter is going through a paroxysmal fit of whether it’s rational to be embracing pro-social behavior. Without having to cite all my sources we had Jane Goodall being packaged into a deceleration meme about removing a billion or so people.
So I think my entire mood when staring down the barrel of the future is “what’s it going to cost me in my soul?”
At this stage of the simulation I have to ask What color are the pills, and how many people are dying?
The cost of knowing it’s not just about us is slamming into the hard reality that you can’t do a damn thing about other people. And so we have to ask if we preserve what we have or do we leap into the great unknown. I don’t know anyone who is in the mood for much safety at the moment. There doesn’t seem like much to be had.
It’s a war of all against all on the internet. And I don’t recall being conscripted into any kind of war but here I am up to my neck in ontological shock and crisis of meanings as I read the news.
It’s our autonomy of mind that is threatened by this unholy troika of smartphones, social media and linguistic weaponization, and there is no more important struggle today than to defend ourselves against that threat.
Humans have nervous systems that are easily hijacked. You give us something to imitate and within a few weeks we’ve learned a new way to get a social advantage. And so we have massive social cataclysms as the rules change. And the rules are changing fast.
It’s not as if America gives a shit about maternal health or women but hey here is a podcast about a porn star who specializes in anime’s less savory fetishes. Is your teenage boy an Andrew Tate fan? It’s time to enjoy a reactionary period.
Obviously this has anyone older than forty asking if the western world under attack. Is questioning liberalism actually the psy-op? Are we fighting amongst ourselves? Do you even know what memetic agents you are infected by?
I sure don’t what brain works in carrying but I don’t think animated porn is for me. But I also got taken in by lots of questionable narratives on modern medicine, fertility and children too. Untangling yourself from the desires you were given is exhausting. Good luck unpacking who jacked your frame!
What does assigning value mean to you? How do you begin to investigate what is valuable? If someone asked you to value “object X” do you know what tools you would use first to make a measurement?
If I tell you determining value is a cultural problem, you may investigate the problem of value through religious or philosophical frameworks. If I tell you value is an artistic problem, you may use taste in finding value.
If I tell you that assigning value is primarily a computing problem, you may search for weightings, databases and referents to determine value.
So what happens when determining value has to account for multiple or even contradictory frameworks? Which framework assigns the ultimate value? And how do we align them?
Congratulations, you’ve known become an artificial intelligence alignment researcher. I bet you thought that required a doctorate but it doesn’t.
It’s not an entirely intractable problem. The Industrial Revolution found ways to align competing frameworks. We assigned labor value and made currencies to facilitate the exchange of different goods.
Markets can, and do, spring up for all kinds of previously impossible to value things. Capitalism done its best to make cultural value fungible and legible to an agreed upon value. Sure, artisans and artists complain we conclude incorrect values regularly. But we don’t always agree on value.
Generally we’ve found that what can pay for itself survives and what can profit for others thrives.
Not all people are motivated by profit, but we all are motivated to survive. And so we contribute what we believe has value to each other and hope the frameworks of value that others have will align with ours. The balance between the two has held together humanity for sometime.
I don’t always agree with the author of the piece Cory Doctorow. But I think he’s raising a powerful point on how we are assigning value when we overlay competing frameworks.
This is the true “AI Safety” risk. It’s not that a chatbot will become sentient and take over the world – it’s that the original artificial lifeform, the limited liability company, will use “AI” to accelerate its murderous shell-game until we can’t spot the trick
If you aren’t familiar with Doctorow, he’s a powerful voice in right to repair circles, a classical hacker opposed to corporate oligopoly, and a bit of a anarcho-syndicaticalist in his preferred solutions.
I like markets more than governments for most things. More of us can contribute to markets than we can contribute to specialist bureaucracies
But we have assigned value to end of life care inside the convoluted system of profit motives and medical ethics and it’s not the value most of us share on life.
And that’s going to happen a lot more as we get further and further abstracted away from the existing models of value that govern our lives. So remain skeptical when someone tells you that they know what you value. How they assign value might be different than you.
I slept quite a bit last night. I slept more this afternoon. I can’t say why I needed so much rest. But what I can say is that I dreamed a lot. Odd, florid, turbulent dreams too demanding to be ignored.
It’s unclear to me what my unconscious was tidying up. Was it the detritus of ego death or the toxins being flushed by my glymphatic system? As my favorite meme suggests, “porque no los dos?”
I’ve not been much inclined to engage in the day’s online dramas as I’ve been too distracted by my own dream roads. My own life has too much of a hold on me today.
I gather there has been arguments about pagan vitalism and post-Christian morality. The persistent agony of feeling like life is no longer about living has scrambled the brains of our young. Extremist communities have infiltrated our meme spaces. White nationalists and Nietzschean fanbois insist on their own righteousness.
And who can blame the lost boys from looking at these scandals? Ontological shocks are coming at a fast and furious pace, all while the depths of the abyss are staring back.
Nothing is sacred and all is permitted. Everything is sacred and nothing is permitted. Keep at the permutation until you’ve reached enlightenment. Or until you’ve died.
I’ve not felt the need to swim in the deep end of offense. I require no taboo or reactionary behaviors to feel as if I’m alive. My dreams even at their most intense remain mere reflections of the enormity of my own life. I have lived large and with more agency than I ever dreamed possible.
