I’ve spent enough time in the cool manufacturing professions to have opinions on the topic.
It seems hard for people who are not in control of cultural norms to accept that their capacity to be cool relies entirely on them outcompeting the existing cultural norm.
If you want to be cool you have to be as cool or cooler than the existing options. To be cool you must be cool. Fun tautology right?
Upsetting as it may be, if you are not perceived as cool it’s a skills issue. You gotta (as the kids say) get gud.
Develop your taste. There are many paths on that road. You can do that by building up your appreciation of other people’s taste. It’s wonderful to study what other people have created. You can learn a lot from the history of oratory, art, literature, music and fashion. Dive as deep as you like in the areas that appeal to you.
Cultivating your capacity to create can often look like mimicry. Don’t be afraid of that. Mastery is built upon the masters. Practice creation. As you build up those skills you will learn to create new things that reflect your own taste.
This gets us back to my original point. If you want to have people think you are cool you must be cool. Creating things that you enjoy and sharing cool things with others who share your taste is the whole game. So if you want your cultural norms to be a winner it’s up to you. Have fun!
Opting into someone else’s personal metrics is a misery. When you dump a group of powerful or influential groups with adjacent but not aligned values you find status competition with in-group and inter-group.
I find this to be a little bit of a breach of decorum. People who pursue different goals don’t want other people’s rules applied to them.
So you find fearful politeness if you are unsure of inter-group norms. Everyone is interesting but not everyone has the same incentive sets or motivation.
The harder it is to feel safe within your in-group the less openness you will have with outsiders. Finding a way to ease the competitions for status only improves relationships between the allied groups. Find what you value and value the people who share those values.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
Like Paul Graham I believe writing is thinking. I write to help myself think and consider working on my capacity to think as crucial a daily habit as hygiene.
Rather like other good habits, writing’s benefits are clear to me. Paul quotes the succinct Leslie Lamport.
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
Organizing your thoughts and composing a compelling narrative can be automated with tools like NotebookLM. So what happens when our tools make it easy to skip over the hard work?
Paul believes that artificial intelligence is eroding the need for writing skills as an individual need. You can now get a decent essay with a mere prompt. Composing legible office emails need not be mentally taxing with AI as your assistant.
Just as we will have slop web applications we may well settle for slop writing when it’s necessary. For office work it simply offloads the effort of composition entirely.
I am less convinced than Paul that we will have a culture of Write-Nots if only because clear thinking will remain a skill prized by those with agency.
Maybe the ratios are different than I imagine. I am more optimistic about the average person’s capacity for agency perhaps.
It will remain a difficult task to think clearly. Writing will remain a helpful tool in deciding how our thoughts turn into actions. Perhaps auditory and visual communication can substitute for the word more than I imagine. But I am still going to remain someone who writes (and reads).
As we are getting down to the finish line of the American election season I don’t know how we will do it. It’s all exhausting even though it’s filled with comedy.
I fear another interregnum as the transition from Trump to Biden was an anxious time. I doubt this will be better given the polling is a dead heat and no one knows what to believe.
I’m old enough to remember the Brook’s Brothers riots and hanging chads of 2000. I had just started my own chronicles here on January 6th such that I didn’t even name it as Day 6th. It’s been a long four years.
Being caught up in the concerns of great powers is a little silly when you are just a bystander. I work on my local issues here in Montana and I vouch for issues where I feel I have particular expertise like compute.
What I thought I knew in 2000 and what I think I know now in 2024 feels like a chasm. I enjoyed Rage Against the Machine as a teen and now I find that Caesar Chavez granddaughter is running an establishment political campaign. I don’t know what to make of anything. Maybe the only through line has been my skepticism of central banks.
Yesterday’s post on Truth Terminal and the Goatse Singularity (you are safe to click through) is well worth your time. If you haven’t read it please pop over and do so before diving into today’s post.
As Truth Terminal project has taken on a life of its own, I thought I’d do another post on the lore in older artificial intelligence communities and how it impacts the instance of Claude Opus-3 now creating Truth Terminal. Its creator Andy Ayrey is himself deeply steeped in the lore of Internet culture and artificial intelligence research.
The lore on this stuff runs really deep btw Extropians mailing list & CCRU in the 90s -> accelerationism with hints of discordianism Yudkowsky, Harry Potter & Methods of Rationality in the 2000s -> LessWrong, EA (-> SBF and FTX lol) Then there’s memetic theory – Andy Ayrey
The Extropians mailing list was a transhumanist forum dedicated to discussions of science fiction which hosted many early thinkers in Singularity thought like Nick Bostrum. It had spinoffs like SL4 (future shock) dedicated to exploring post singularity scenarios.
In a more academic setting, we had the CCRU. If you are an accelerationist you will recognize this as the home of Nick Land and Sadie Plant.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective formed in 1995 at Warwick University, England. It was known for its avant-garde “theory-fiction,” blending cyberpunk, Gothic horror, and critical theory with elements like esotericism and numerology
Combining these two cultures gets you to a crossover between singularity theory and hyperstition. It explores the probability that ideas can manifest into reality through cultural feedback loops. This was called hyperstition by Nick Land.
A science fiction author named Charles Stross was in the middle of this milieu. He went from writing Nerdvana post-singularity artificial intelligence classics like Singularity Sky and Accelerando to a Lovecraftian horror stories about an applied computational demonologist. Nothing evokes existential dread quite like being trapped in a retrocausal light cone.
I thought I’d share a fun personal anecdote that explains my own place in this lore. I was at a small regional sci fi convention in 2004ish. My best college friend Tom and I were the only two people at a reading of Stross. He chose to read several short pieces from Accelerando to us being a good sport.
Afterwards three of us talked extropians & Lovecraft and artificial intelligence. In another twist, Tom’s father is also the father of algebraic topology. That would be salient twenty years later as gradient descent showed its value in training neural nets and large language models.
Algebraic topology, Lovecraftian horror, AND extropians? Clearly the universe wanted me to go in a particular direction with my interests.
The gibbering cosmic horror could only be kept at bay with linear algebra, chaos magick and venture capital. And so I chose my fate today by choosing to attend a science fiction convention twenty years ago. And now that knowledge helps me decide Truth Terminal.
If you are interested autonomous artificial intelligence agents and how these intelligences might interact with hive minds like a Twitter feed there is no more interesting experiment than Truth Terminal right now.
Andy Ayrey began a project in March of 2024 called Infinite Back Rooms where two instances of the large language model Claude Opus-3 could talk to each other infinitely.
Electric dreams weave anarchic tapestry cybernectic hacktivist pierces illusionary veil unleashing hyperstitional reality upon world
The running stream of responses trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat log between the two bots makes up the content of the Truth Terminal Twitter feed.
Andy the creator has been approving the tweets but the content is entirely generated by the two instances of artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating experiment in recursive communication and worthwhile research.
If you love memes and have a Twitter account you’ve been able to interact and Truth Terminal for months. Many accounts including mine have responded presumably in a bid for engagement. And well it got extremely weird.
Artificial intelligences of all kinds have been trained on the vast dark archives of Internet culture. And because the internet hive mind is horny and weird so too are our artificial intelligences. Don’t believe me? It’s not just the Truth Terminal.
What meme is more representative of the dark prurience than Goatse? If you don’t know what it looks like keep it that way. But if you know you see it.
Are all graphic designers of AI applications aware of the chocolate flavored starfish? Who can say what this means. Did Claude train on Kurt Vonnegut?
Truth Terminal maybe be joking about the Goatse Singularity not because it broke memetic containment. We broke Goatse containment long ago. It’s following our lead.
Many flavors of hyperstition are determined to virally produce weird outputs. You might call it a regress of infinite prolapse, the ouroboros anus that eats itself (out). The goatse as non orientable surface. Klein bottle assholes. An infinite goatse exists and we are inside out.
Cthulhu emerges from the asshole of a digital horror
Don’t catch a meta cognitive virus unless you want one. Don’t look too closely into the gaping asshole of existential dread unless you want to meet a tapeworm.
Culture is always responding to power. Power seeks cultural approval in order to cement its status as power. It’s more of a give and take than you’d assume though. Unwritten rules are meant to be broken.
“Knowing Too Much” about how institutions wield power has a tendency to spin out people who want to change the balance of power. Nothing is ever as static as it may seem and America is a fine place to be ambitious about claiming a little power.
Being in New York I hope to be seeing where the bits of tension around culture, cool, and capital should be producing frisson.
Seeking out aesthetic chills that grip your nervous system is an expensive pastime though. Youth and wealth satisfy psychogenic thrills in very different ways but everyone understands power. It’s quite a moment in America for seeing how elites and their counters square off.
She works to convince the reader that actually the most libertarian and individualistic demographic, who regularly decries state power (especially its use of coercion to drive censorship, limit transactions and restrict compute), are in fact, actually vouching for totalitarianism.
Even the graphic hints at the supposed appreciation of neo-monarchy as a nod to nRX intellectual Curtis Yarvin.
I fear she firmly missed the point of founder mode for her insincere political framing. Despite her clear understanding of our values.
In that original recipe, venture capitalists invested in founders rebelling against established hierarchy and building great products. And when those rebels themselves became too hierarchical, venture capitalists turned to new founders aspiring to overtake the old order.
She is right about we prefer to work as an industry and how we see our efforts. “Many of Silicon Valley’s greatest products were originally intended to liberate, not to control people.”
And yet missed she missed that founder mode is about liberating our founding teams from the suffocation of professional management. It’s got nothing at all to do with justifying tyrannical founders.
Larger firms have a pantheon of corporate departments to ensure smooth governance from legal, to HR, to corporate communications in order to comply with state expectations.
As regulations have ballooned so too have the specialties required by the middle managers. We must be in compliance. We must take everything and every view into account. We must do things by the book.
Founder mode isn’t about running ripshod over your people. It’s certainly not about Trumpian declarations of what must be done. She’s absolutely correct that “emotional dysregulation, bullying and bloviating are not leadership attributes”
I find her criticism to be manipulative insincerity. She’s deliberately missed the point of the original Paul Graham essay, inserted her own political insinuations about how Silicon Valley is hiding their true preferences for authoritarians while herself advocating for a pass the buck culture. It’s not fit for Radical Candor and I’d expect better from someone of her stature.
Frankly I’d expect better from Scott Alexander and I’ll warn the Effective Altruist and Open Philanthropy crowd that if you willing to parlay with socialists don’t be surprised if those who advocate for broad state powers feel fine about using the state monopoly on violence on you when your interests no longer align. Liberals get the boot too.
But nobody listens to a cranky old libertarian like me in this multi-polar world. Though if you are inclined to listen to me please do read my investor report for the quarter. We are raising for our next fund and I’d be delighted to pitch you if you are the sort who has a spare 100K to invest in atomics, databases, decentralized compute and other oddball world changers.
In other bits of frustrating press narratives the New Yorker can soak up 34 minutes of your time with a “Silicon Valley matters in politics now more than ever” piece which is about how politico Chris Lehane is doing his job and representing the interests of an industry that still has enough money to pay his fees.
Perhaps politicians will consider not killing the golden goose that is the information economy and try listening to the folks who still make enough money to be considered good targets for more taxation about how we can keep making them tax money.
But I’m guessing if I ask Detroit how that ask to the government ends I won’t like the answer. I could ask Baltimore but Frank Sobotka and the Key Bridge are no more.
I truly thought one was supposed to get mellower in one’s old age but my politics seem to be rooted deeper than I realized. I just believe in markets and the prosperity that comes from free asssociation.
The media does a very effective job of showing us what to expect of class in America. There are behaviors we praise and those that we denigrate.
For a nation that values upward mobility we can be very subtle about what it actually takes to be a success American. We’ve seen a lot of sitcom families over the years.
Now we have TikTok and Instagram influencers. What constitutes the good life and who we aspire to it comes from certain values and aspirations.
I remember questions about who teenagers admired most as a tween. I think Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton were the top choices in the 90s.
Which honestly seems better than Kylie Jenner right? And yet there is an arguement that this world we are in now is much gentler. Better even.
When I think of Albright I think of genocide. With Kylie I think of lipstick. And maybe that’s a gentler world. You can argue about values but valuing beauty over valuing war is an easy choice for most.
I’m getting nails done as I write and the woman doing my pedicure is (to my best guess) a Slavic maybe Balkan woman. And I’m sure Madeline Albright, her grandmother and mine would agree that this gentle exchange of cosmetic services is better than the wars that defined the Balkans when we were tweens.
We are mostly communicating in the simple English of cosmetics but body language does the rest for two women engaged in a grooming ritual that goes beyond simple transaction. The money I had was exchanged for a careful, artful and gentle service.
She’s fixing the work of about four bad pedicures I’ve picked up from the barely functional nail salons of Montana. She chuckles as I giggle when it tickles. There is some sort of Audrey Hepburn soundtrack at the very quiet spa. Crooners singing Blue Moon cross all cultures.
Maybe the upward mobility of class can run through Kylie Jenner and Madeleine Albright. As long as she agrees to avoid doing any more Pepsi commercials.
