Tag: Forced Metaphor

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Culture Medical Politics

Day 948 and Assigning Value

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.

But deciding on value isn’t the same thing as a thing driving a profit and we have to remember that truth. Between the gaps in the models of what we value is the epsilon of what cannot be calculated.

If you’d like to read a horror story on how assigning fungible value in a database can end up assigning a value to something we humans generally don’t consider interchangeable at all, then I’d go read this piece on how public hospice care’s incentives have been perverted by private equity profit motive.

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.

Categories
Biohacking Politics

Day 946 and Compounding Our Incentives

I don’t want to brag (that’s a lie for rhetorical flourish I am bragging), but I woke up with excellent biometrics today. My first instinct was that I should rush into a long “to do” list for the various priorities I have remaining in the month.

And I do have some priorities I’m very excited about this month. If you are in Montana I’m hosting a get together to celebrate the “Montana Miracle” of the housing reform we successfully passed. Would love to have anyone near enough to Gallatin to pop by and meet me, my husband and our friends in person.

If you aren’t based here, you might be interested in our successful campaign cut out California style regulations so we can build more housing.

We think we can be a model for other western states looking to reclaim rights for their citizens from the government. I believe in individuals pursuing their own freedom as a long term incentive for growth.

The focus on long term incentives is key to understanding both my stance on individual freedoms and how I spend my own time.

Because I’ve got to turn this blog post around to why I was tempted to run into my immediate to do list but held myself to my routine.

I was reminded that my biometrics are good because I’ve been focused on core activities and processes that make my own “system” of incentives tick for my physiology.

I have to sleep, eat, exercise and otherwise take care of my body. If I simply responded to every dopamine hit and desire I had I’d be sick as a dog. I can promise you this is true as I live with a chronic condition I manage with good habits and some better living through chemistry.

I’d prefer we manage as many problems through good compounding longer term incentives. From building for a future that’s arriving to quickly to keeping our bodies from imploding. So get enough fiber, lift heavy things and build more housing.

Categories
Culture Medical Politics

Day 945 and Secrets and Safetyism

Keeping secrets used to be a lot easier. Noble philosopher kings with priestly knowledge kept that shit under under lock and key so some uppity courtesan or eunuch didn’t get too clever.

Not that it was all that necessary. Nobody was accidentally misinterpreting the layers of mystical knowledge because illuminated manuscripts were expensive as fuck. And that was cheaper than the previous method which was memorizing oral histories. The expense of sharing information has acted as a control mechanism for centuries.

If you’ve got the money, you can store your sex toys and drugs in layered secret drawers behind a hidden bust of Socrates. But some asshole will post a primer online and your benzodiazepines and vibrator will be long gone.

The metaphor I’m working with on this silly desk is that humans love to horde secrets. We’ve got a lot of incentives to keep knowledge locked away. Drugs and sex in my joke mere proxies for ways we access altered states. Eve’s apple was a metaphor for forbidden knowledge so I’m not reinventing the wheel here.

So where are we today on secrets? Well, I think we are trying desperately to put the genie back in the bottle.

We think we’ve got an open internet but ten years ago Instagram stopped including the metadata tags to allow Twitter to display rich content embedded directly in a Tweet. Now Twitter and Reddit are taking the same approach as Instagram did as data ownership becomes a hot issue.

Closed gardens are meant to keep thieves out and Eve in. And depending on who you are it’s likely you will experience the fall from grace of Eve and the persecution of the thief. God clearly knew something as his conclusion was that once you’ve tasted the bitter fruit there is no point in protecting paradise.

Every time there is more access to information we have the same debate. Fundamentally you either believe people should have access to information and how they apply it to their lives (side effects included) or you don’t.

I’m happy for you to argue the nuances of it. Want a recent example that looks complex and might actually be deadly simply?

The clown meme format asks if it’s
a joke to conclude confident that “LLMs should not be used to give medical advice.”

I know it’s tempting to side with the well credentialed researcher over the convicted felon when faced with a debate over access to medical advice. But I don’t think it’s as simple as all that.

From Guttenberg to the current crop of centralized large language models, it’s just more complexity and friction on the same old story. It is dangerous to let the savages have access to the priestly secrets. I for one remain on team Reformation. Rest in power Aaron Schwartz.

To quote myself in my own investor letter last month.

Most builders remain deeply skeptical of Noble Lies, “for your own good” safetyism, regulatory capture, oligopoly control, and the centralized nation state control as the most effective methodology of innovation for a dynamic pluralistic human future. We are having cultural and financial reformations at a frightening speed. It’s beyond future shock now.

So if I have a gun to my head (and that day may come) I’d like to have it on record that I don’t think secrets have any inherent nobility. It’s just a control mechanism. Keeping people safe sounds noble. But you’d be wise to consider how you’d feel if your life depended on having access to medical data. How would you feel if the paternalism of a noble lie to keep you from it? It’s not great Bob.

Categories
Culture Politics Preparedness

Day 943 and Glimmers

I find myself filled with optimism today, even as I’m quite sure we are ramping quickly into the era of chaos I’ve been prattling on about for nearly a thousand days. Everything feels a bit “hold on to your hats” as we collectively experience the fear and joy of an illegible moment without any dominant narratives.

And yet today inside this chaos without clarity, the internet is filled with enthusiasm as a small niche of enthusiasts try to replicate the results of a chemistry paper that claims to have made a superconducting at room temperature material LK-99 produced with common materials like lead and red phosphorus.

Add that on top of fervor over Congressional investigations “aliens” program whistleblowers while we all collectively wonder at the potential for artificial general intelligence to be accelerated and the zeitgeist is a fever pitch of vibe shifts from doom to foom.

All of these glimmers of joyful uncertainty and hopeful chaos are emerging from a youth culture that is quite sure it has been abandoned by its own past as it is bombarded by a dystopian future by its own geriatric elite. Is it any wonder it feels like the social contract is hanging on by a thread?

Historian Peter Turchin is taking a victory lap with the accuracy of his theory of cliodynamics

When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved.

Peter Turchin “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

The broader popular rediscovery of historians Neil Howe and William Strauss is no coincidence. They wrote the The Forth Turning twenty five years ago.

Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous.

The Fourth Turning Is Here

Clever Simon and Schuster realized it was an opportune moment to point out that the fourth turning had arrived with a new book from Howe.

So perhaps these glimmers are here to show us that the churn is here, the fourth turning is now, and Turchin’s race to become an elite to outrun the effects of dislocation may already have its winners.

Amidst all of that there are those of us seeking to believe that we might find a way forward. I’d rather be looking for the glimmers of hope. I’ve already done what I can to warn about the need to prepare for hard times. If you haven’t yet come to terms with the doom then I certainly won’t convince you of the need for optimism either.

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 941 and Unreasonable

Today marks our one year anniversary of moving to Montana. I noted yesterday just how much we achieved in just 365 days.

I’ve tended to think in terms of time in terms of days over the past three years because no other metric seemed sensible. Too much changes every day even as too little seems to be different.

I do believe that what gets measured gets managed. So it makes sense that someone like me who writes every single day thinks that days are the manageable metric. Not that being manageable means anything is under control. Merely that I have some metric to measure back into to make life seem more reasonable.

I am however all too human. We are feeling animals with the capacity to reason. It’s important that it’s not the other way around. Much as I like to reason my way through life I’ve learned to remember feelings matter. This has made me both much more open and also much more careful about how I treat myself.

I suppose this makes me unreasonable simply by definition. Humans are unreasonable because we do not operate through reason entirely I’d encourage even my most autistic friends to remember that this means you are unreasonable too.

Narratives are the comfort we seek as our apophenia runs rampant. Spotting the one thing that is not like the others is how we survive. We seek sense in the chaos. It’s an unreasonable thing to do when we know we’ve not yet managed to measure even a fraction of our reality. One day I hope I come to terms with that.

Categories
Community Politics Preparedness

Day 939 and Culture Wins Not Culture Wars

You could be forgiven for losing faith in the American Dream. We’ve had a rough couple of years with bad vibes and culture wars. The Great Weirdening era was not easy.

I’ve been encouraging people to consider preparedness in the face of unrelenting uncertainty for a decade now. It’s time for us to move on from the “what if” of our current geopolitical, economic & climate dislocations to the “what now?”

I’m pleased and saddened to say the future is here. My revealed preferences tell you most of what you need to know. I live in an off grid capable homestead with well water and solar in Montana. I own Bitcoin. I think we are in for a bumpy decade or two.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not hopeful. I am optimistic about what a very different future will look like. I invest in technologies as varied as open source vector database software, multi sig wallets for DAO governance & network states, and psychedelic clinics for mental health. I clearly believe we can do future in the future. Orders of magnitude better. If you believe in the same you future you can become an LP in my fund chaotic.capital

Change is the only inevitable thing in life. I’m proud to have been raised in the Rocky Mountains because our history has been so crucial in the formation of the American mythos of a better future. We are the frontier. The future is a frontier just as surely as Star Trek was about space cowboys.

And on the frontier you have the freedom to make choices of your own. How things used to be done doesn’t matter as much here because “how things used to be” is barely more than century or two for most of us.

We take what works from our heritage and we use it to inform a better future. Because a frontier represents a better future for your family. That the next generation will have it better. It’s a commitment to our heirs.

We’ve seen what happens when people don’t believe the future will be better. The pandemic years were bleak. I’ve seen the despair in people’s eyes when I discuss the problems we have in front of us. I’ve happily worn the doomer mantle as I do not wish to convey that success is assured nor that the problems all have solutions. As without clear eyes we will remain in denial forever. But after accepting that we have problems we cannot remain frozen, we must act.

I’d like us all to wake up to our reality and resolve on the good we can achieve by believing the future can be improved by what we do in the now.

We need culture wins not culture wars.

The desire for clean and livable environment, a functional state, and the dignity of our life’s pursuits remain common cause for all humans. Resilience and adaptability remain our tools.

If you are one of my neighbors in Montana, I am hosting a get together on August 16th. I believe that America has a “dissident” middle who are tired of culture wars. We want the freedom to pursue the American dream without government interference. A dynamic future with growth and choice for everyone is the best path forward. And I like to walk that path with you. If you’d like that please come on by my place.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 936 and Take The Beating

I got my ass kicked yesterday. I made a decision that I knew would be disliked. I knew how unpopular the decision would make and that I would have to suffer the consequences. I did not bend on my decision despite knowing how much I would suffer for it. It was right for me. But damn it always sucks to take a beating.

I have taken my college cafeteria’s name as a law of the universe. TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. I know it’s a bit unfashionable to be a Hayek libertarian these days but I do think we have to accommodate some basic physics in life. Actions have reactions.

I had to take my beating. I made people hurt. And it’s entirely possible that we have different expectations and realities. As soon as I give my firm position on my reality and energy I can expect a response.

I think it’s genuinely healthy to feel like you have the capacity to endure criticism. Sometimes you can’t make people happy. Sometimes you’ve done something wrong. Sometimes it’s just that you couldn’t find an accommodation between what you gave the situation and what it gave you.

Life has a budget. There is a balance to the energy of the world. I suppose sometimes you just have to take your licks.

Categories
Media

Day 929 and Right Speak

My day has been a little off as I’m nursing my husband through some surgery. Through frankly he’s recovering so well it’s mostly just keeping him company while I do my regular workday. But I have consumed some good content in the process of keeping him company and making sure ice packs are rotated & medicine is taken.

I watched John Mulaney standup special Baby J which was surprisingly good. My main takeaway was “being liked is a cage” but also you’ve got to watch out for how selfish everyone is in the process of managing their own traumas and addictions.

Mulaney is a fascinating example of someone going from beloved to fuck up as soon as it was clear he was a human and capable of sinning and hurting himself and others.

He got a good dose of being condemned while being shitheel as an addict. Who he really hurt other than himself I can’t say. But he was problematic says many inches of gossip writing and critical reviews. Wrong speak and shame and condemnation is so interesting as a social engagement issue for culture. It’s never really about them. We can all be assholes and unlikable in the process of being hurt and healing our hurts.

I suppose this is why I believe it’s better to never take anything personally and be sure you take care of yourself if you find yourself reacting strongly to a person’s frailty. The ones who love you will forgive you if you need to reorient yourself into doing what’s right for you so long as you don’t hurt anyone in the process. And oftentimes even if you do.

The follow up movie we watched was also about wrong think. But instead of it being about the addiction and selfishness of a celebrity it was about the selfishness of trying to decide what’s right for an entire nation. We watched the Tetris movie.

Which is quite a dramatization of how totalizing even the most glorious of ambitions can be in the hands of hands of normal frail humans. Yes I think wrong think comedians and communists are related and I swear I still think Bari Weiss is kind of an asshole. Most of the comedians asking for forgiveness for wrong think aren’t actually that funny to begin with. Back to Tetris

I found myself inspired by the frustrations that come from human nature & self dealing while glorifying ambitious end goals for social good. The collective good can often be patently false if someone ambitious enough gets perverted. Maybe I’m just being that asshole capitalist but I think nepotism and corruption come in many forms. And it’s easier to spot it in British billionaires and communists bureaucracies. But we’ve got plenty of right speak and “for your own good” pleas right here in America.

It’s inspired me to look harder into how we are perversely seeking control and benefits for large corporations and political parties in our current race to regulate new technologies like crypto and artificial intelligence. If you want a hint as to where I’m worried look no further than Gary Gensler and reinforcement learning for artificial intelligence alignment. And yes I’m making bets to that effect.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 920 and Faster Pussy Cat, Kill Kill!

A regular theme of my writing here is the pace of accelerating change. There is rarely a break from “life happens” for any of us because that is the human condition. But I must say it’s really taking a lot to manage for some Americans who have had enormous systemic advantages for several decades now and are reacting poorly to even the potential of loss.

I believe the best way to overcome the loss of these advantages is by banding together in teams and collaborating to solve bigger problems together. Everyone brings a unique viewpoint.

If you are like me, teams are necessary for survival. I can survive on my own but it’s a much smaller more circumscribed life.

I have accepted that whatever character sheet got built before my arrival (genetics & chance) requires some min-maxing as on my own I’m not particularly independent or self sufficient. Yes, libertarians recognize our interdependency. It’s called division of labor.

Min-maxing is the character-building strategy of maximizing a specific desirable ability, skill, or other power of a character and minimizing everything else, seen as undesirable. The result is a character who is excessively powerful in one particular way, but exceedingly weak in others.

Min-Max Gaming Strategy

And so whatever I am left with in this character sheet feels a bit like I got stuck with a lot of weaknesses. But why not simply lean into it. Faster pussycat, kill kill.

A classic exploitation film poster
Categories
Culture Politics

Day 914 and Unsucked Dick

If you have spent time on this blog, you likely have some familiarity with my usage of crude language to get across a wider point. Sometimes being rude or lewd is simply the most effective manner of communicating a difficult truth.

While I have an overused forced metaphor tag given for my tendency to write in overwrought imagery, I’ve only just realized that I have written a trilogy of crude metaphors in service of explaining power as simply as possible. Those crude metaphors include shitposting, dickriding and now unsucked dick.

Without attention-grabbing taboo cursing, these topics can otherwise might seem too complex or academic. If you have read critical theory texts you know what I mean.

Overly formal language is alienating and tends to entrench us in our priors. With that context out of the way, I shall now get into today’s crude metaphor.

An unsucked dick is someone who is willfully giving up their own power to victimhood through refusing to act for what they want. And everyone wants their dick sucked. Metaphorically, at least a little. Those that don’t want power are usually loathe to admit it.

This turn of phrase is NOT intended to be gendered. Unlicked cunt doesn’t work as well for a host of sociopolitical reasons on sexual status and power. Don’t get too worked up about it. See the bigger truth.

You will find unsucked dick when the hard work of getting what someone wants is either is too much effort on their own, or otherwise requiring collective action & leadership on behalf of a group that is in disfavor from those currently in power.

Let me illustrate with a shitpost. Perhaps you too have had to organize a group of activists who would rather squabble and in-fight than win power.

My ambitions are bigger than running the internal politics of dozens of tiny activist groups that can’t see beyond their own unsucked dicks but this isn’t very polite to say.

A dick that is unsucked is the inversion of the dick that is ridden. You may recall that dickriding occurs when a group surrounds it’s most powerful member with praise and flattery. The leader has the sucked dick.

The one whose dick is ridden sucks up (pun intended) a lot of the energy of collective often at the detriment of their followers. The example I used in my previous post is Elon Musk.

You can use tactics like shitposting to attract some of a groups’ energy away from the ridden dick. Shitposting is deliberate act of soliciting a response online. It’s traditionally used as a lower energy way to shape engagement and conversation away from the traditional or current power holders, particularly when you know no other method will break through the noise and narrative.

The collective action problem in the many disenfranchised groups in modern society can often be boiled down to unsucked dicks desperately shitposting as dickriders. They want power but either cannot or will not find ways to gain it.

I don’t strive to organize unsucked dick into powerful constituencies and I’d bet you don’t either. It’s exhausting to control others. Politicians and celebrities have their simps but it’s often a complicated and unstable relationship. Audience capture by your simps tends to turn you into the New York Times or Andrew Tate.

Everyone needs to be responsible for their own dicks (gender neutral I swear) and get on with achieving their bigger goals. If you are not actively getting beyond purity politics and activist in-group fighting you are not serious about winning the thing you claim to want.

If having is evidence of wanting a lot of you simply do not want power. And that’s OK, if that’s actually what you want. Just be damn sure your actions are true to want you want. And if you want something go fucking get it. I’m happy to help.