Tag: Lies

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Chronic Disease Politics

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

I went to see a rheumatologist today. I had the baffling experience of them wanting to actually get to know me. Which was surprisingly unhelpful in the moment but really nails vibe we’ve got with healthcare in America.

I kvetched on Twitter that I spent my week defending hot girls and open source software while I deride Big Pharma and public employee unions. That’s more of a humble brag about my priorities. But I felt bad that I picked on pharmaceuticals. I got replies. Why harsh on pharmaceuticals? And actually fair.

Drug companies are the least bad of some very bad actors. For all its faults, drug companies are not just existing to be parasitic like pharmacy benefit managers or generate wealth through regulatory capture like Epic.

If anything pharma is the sad scapegoat in healthcare. We pick one drug a decade to laud & then like clockwork do a hard reversal on it in a decade or two. Patients get hurt and doctors did their best. We saw with statins, SSRIs, opioids, adderall, and I’m sure soon GLP-1s will be next to have Netflix documentaries. Someone is always to blame and it’s usually the drug companies.

Some category is designated a sin eater for the system’s horrors. Which isn’t at all fair as all those drugs serve real needs. Sorry Oxycodone you remain a villain. But why is American in so much pain?

Which gets back to my surprise as having a doctor who wanted to get to know me. We came in with a typed up diagnostics sheet with a timeline of treatments, protocols and medications and the bastard has the audacity to ask me about the quality of my life.

I hesitate to say “well shit” because I am Protestant from Scandinavians stock because we pride ourselves on being “oh just fine”

And of course I’m the asshole who quotes Kierkegaard at my doctor. Sickness unto death right Doctor? Which I guess is a bit of a downer.

The man actually asked me if I’d consider managing my pain more aggressively. I am absolutely mogged by the audacity of the sentiment that I could suffer less.

Apparently no one scans you for drug seeking behavior when you chuckle and kneel before what God has decided for you. So that’s a good trick I guess for the less sincere.

You can really see how public perception of RFK Jr is so different from what elite narratives would like to see. People are with RFK’s righteous indignation. Why are so many suffering?

The cranks and the crazies are here because America is mostly gaslit by a nest of bad incentives. Doctors don’t want any of this. Neither do the drug companies. But someone has to be blamed and it’s usually the guys with the money. But they are trying as hard as anyone to actually come up with solutions.

Maybe no one deserves to have a righteous Kennedy come after them. But everyone feels a little bit crazy with how the system works now.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics Startups

Day 1487 and Gell Mann Amnesia

It’s a busy day for competitive narratives on social media (and in the markets) as normies are belated reacting to news about a new open source artificial intelligence model from a Chinese quantitative hedge fund called DeepSeek.

The new model been available since Wednesday though many of us open source fans have been using prior versions for quite some time.

DeepSeek even powers the skincare bot my friend Kasra and I have been playing with for fun. We used all the open source models We are early days and hyperscalers have different games they play than us tinkerer types.

I have no hot takes for you on what it means geopolitically or otherwise. You can doomscroll for Jevons Paradox, the possibility of a Sputnik moment for the West, and the benefits of constraints for creativity.

What I think is most useful to remember about media narratives is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Coined by Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame it helps remind experts to not expect expertise from normal people.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.


In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Michael Crichton

I am passionate about the right to compute because new technologies should not be in the hands of only giant corporations or controlled by nation states.

Most of the commentary you will see on any given topic of media interest will be a fog of war mismash of competing narratives and ambitions.

Just remember that it’s wise to be wary of any certainty when it comes to what’s going on. What we know changes on what we know and it’s odd how easily we forget that.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1472 and Odds and Ends

I have now done six days of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy (HBOT for short) in a row. I also did a vitamin IV with glutathione so my morning was well occupied with maximizing wellness.

Because I was inside a chamber and tied to a chair for a few hours I was able to enjoy my backlog of reading. If you enjoy essays and e-ink books I personally use a combination of Readwise Reader and Daylight.

News and Essays

Peter Thiel has an op-ed in the financial times about the American ancien regime and the chance for the Internet era to enable us to grabble with the trouble of our elites.

A fan of Leibniz? The New Yorker reviews two books on his life. The polymath wrote quite a bit which endears me to him but our real debt to him goes beyond calculus notation. George Boole’s logic is partially informed by Leibniz.

Leibniz loved the simplicity and the suggestiveness of binary: he titled a draft paper “Wonderful Origin of All Numbers from 1 and 0, Which Serves as a Beautiful Representation of the Mystery of Creation, since Everything Arises from God and Nothing Else.”

Jacobin asks where all the good American Marxist academic work might be given that we perceive universities as hotbeds of socialism. Spoiler alert it’s hard to find.

Is middle age sexy? I went to read the styles piece in the New York Times only to discover that one must be over 50 to count. This elder millennial keeps trying to claim the mantle of middle age but Gen X and Boomers refuse to age.

Tips and Tricks

It’s wise to have a medical plan when traveling. American medications may be unavailable or even banned (Japan does not permit Adderall in the country).

I travel with a box of about 30 core medications to cover everything from allergies to food poisoning to bacterial infections.

Interested in becoming a Normie Man? Go on Joe Rogan. Not notable enough for an appearance. Let me suggest the rousing version of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1464 and Which Information Island?

It would be helpful for most media readers to understand the history of the news business and its relationship to war and finance.

For all the standards and ethics and best practices we expect from professional newsrooms (and they do have conduct standards), the history of media isn’t a clean narrative America went to war thanks to Yellow Journalism in the Spanish American War. If you think the Pulitzer is a badge of merit wait till you learn its history and financing.

You have probably lived through multiple media scandals. Millennials remember the neoconservative “weapons of mass destruction” story thanks to notably terrible editorial decision at the New York Times.

When someone says you are in a media bubble or on an information island, recall that these systems made up of people with varied interests, ambitions and aims.

News

American Surgeon General Calls for Cancer Warning on Alcohol

TechCrunch grudgingly says the AI Bloomers beat the delusional AI Doomers

Essays

An Nvidia researcher Jim Fan tweeted about blog post from the late Felix Hill on 200B weights of responsibility inside the work of building AI. The stress of knowing the billions of weights and bias that make up artificial intelligence that will bend our lives for both good and ill is no small thing. The thread has many beautiful comments.

Vinay the founder of Loom is in the thick of figuring life out after success and it’s brave of him to share.

Applications and Services

AskNews has an interesting set of display options for news types and bias and sentiment I’m considering purchasing and testing.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1449 and Self Deception

Ten years ago when I was struggling in my role as CEO of a startup I’d cofounded, I was introduced to a classic business book called Leadership and Self Deception. I read it in one setting on an airplane. It was that good. Or I was that bad. Probably both.

The research explored how we end up creating and sustaining problems we don’t know we are causing, and how and why people resist helpful solutions. They discovered the clear and surprising way that people begin to evade responsibility without thinking that they are doing so, and therefore end up blaming others or circumstances they, themselves, are helping to create

It’s worth the read even if you are the type who prefers a synopsis. I believe most business books could have been a blog post personally. That’s how strongly I recommend the book.

Self aware leaders enable personal responsibility in themselves and their teams. And yet we all lie to ourselves in our personal and professional lives to evade taking responsibility for who we are and what we want.

It’s easier to evade responsibility. Things happen to us and we let others direct the course of our lives. This is not however a path to effective leadership and it’s a miserable way to become a victim of everyone and everything.

There are many frameworks for overcoming the self deception our ego generates. We are not doomed to self sabotage and evade seeing ourselves clearly.

Leadership and Self Deception is just one option I recommend. The Art of Accomplishment’s VIEW methodology for connected communication is another I found beneficial. Even Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous offer frameworks for overcoming the lies we tell ourselves.

It’s going to be so tempting to bullshit ourselves as the next era of politics unfolds and a whole new generation of technology is adopted with artificial intelligence. Do yourself a favor and tune up on spotting your own bullshit.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1447 and LARPing To Death

Do you know what LARP means? If so, do you remember when you first heard the term? Think back and recall the context of your first exposure to the term. I’ll give you a couple hints for history.

Maybe LARP was used to describe playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps you went to a Renaissance Fair and encountered the melees put on by Society for Creative Anachronism. If you remember Dagohir you are a real OG & also old.

LARP stands for live action role-playing. It originally involved fancy dress, maintaining character and strict but fantastical rule sets. Its not much different from what children call “make believe” except it’s done by adults who presumably understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

It’s likely if you are younger and extremely online, your first encounter with LARPing was less “gamers dressed up with swords” and more “anon pretending to be some type of identity” on a social media platform. Like based and woke, LARP is a term that has had a lot of semantic drift.

Increasingly it feels as if some of us aren’t sure what is shared consensus reality and what is fantasy anymore. We used to call that “crazy” but it’s so prevalent one has to wonder if whole categories of otherwise sane people have gone nuts. People become convinced of fantasy they have made in their identities and are acting out on them.

Even the FBI is concerned about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality in LARPing. In 2023 they discussed the potential threat of violent extremism emerging from LARPing

Violent extremists will extensively engage in confirmation bias prior to the implementation of their plan. However, in this context, it becomes confirmation violence, or the use of targeted violence to impose social and political beliefs onto others and, therefore, change their behavior — in a grandiose sense, perhaps even the course of history

I personally can’t think of a more chilling term than confirmation violence in the wake of the public reaction to the assassination of United Health Care insurance CEO Brian Thompson. We are now LARPing ourselves to death. A bit too “if you die in the Matrix you die in real life” vibes if you ask me.

Think about how we went from digital mobs to physical riots to the dangerous new trend of assassination as cancellation. Vaguely defined members of today’s outgroup are no longer merely targets of online criticism but actually targets of stochastic terrorism. This is leaderless, decentralized violence. No one person held up a hand to start it, and no one person can easily stop it.

Balaji on Decentralized Violence

As centralized authorities are going through significant challenges to their authority we are probably in for a lot more LARPing to death. I’d be prepared to see a lot more violence emerging from LARPers convinced of their own story’s moral superiority.

And I’d be careful about buying into anyone’s story as we adjust. If all the world is a stage but the characters have real weapon’s we are in for a world of hurt.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1444 and Intrasexual Competition

Dating discourse seems to have taken over all forms of social media. Maybe it seems louder than usual because it’s cuffing season and with Netflix becoming a Christmas romance movie juggernaut the urge to find a partner is higher in December.

But you have to be wary of the stories and advice that litter Reddit and Twitter. Not everyone doling out advice actually wants you to succeed. Some of them look like they are actively undermining their peers.

The manosphere seems determined to turn young men into fearful controlling oafs while the radfem/femcel/tradwife axis of influencers is a mess of undermining advice stoking the neuroses of young women.

In the battle of the sexes, a favored tactic is sabotage. Evolutionary psychologists would probably say what we are seeing on social media is intrasexual competition run amok

Giving bad advice undermines your sexual competition. And if you sell advice or attention, keeping people coming back for more bad takes while keeping them miserable (and single) is the whole game. The hot takers build attention and clout.

Attention grifters are here to make you engage while turning you into a neurotic mess. So before taking someone’s advice on the other sex, ask “cui bono” because it’s probably not you.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Medical

Day 1440 and The Pain We Won’t Name

Americans are in pain. Literally and emotionally. How that happened isn’t my focus. We are in the middle of a national conversation about the failures of institutional medicine and its relationship to our government. We are treading in deep water and it’s best not to get swept away.

There are many communities that have emerged on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, GoodReads and elsewhere dedicated to the many paths available to go about fixing the problems in your life. There millions of strong communities of interests, hobbies, courses, and network knowledge that can enable you.

One of those communities is called TPOT. What is TPOT, who is in TPOT, what are its values and what does it believe are all involved and sometimes contentious questions. Being illegible is a big thing.

We mostly agree it stands for “this particular corner of Twitter” which is a loose network of nodes of people interested in applying knowledge they learn across our networked multimedia to their real life.

The experimental “you can just do things” attitude is a big tent. You see DIY projects, tutorials, reading lists, artificial intelligence and coding discussions, fitness and biohacking experiments, nutrition and cooking, meditation and nervous system research, pain management, psychology and emotional wellness and much more. You also see more far out woo woo topics like psychedelics, evolutionary psychology, and many flavors of rationalism and epistemology.

One of the most qualified voices to speak on TPOT might be Brook Bowman of Vibe Camp. In my understanding of her interpretation, TPOT is a memetic virus and once you touch it you are in the topology of TPOT for good.

tpot is this crazy memetic virus where the term itself means so little and is so contagious that you kind of become part of it just by hearing about it

Brooke

This is protective and makes it resilient. The network is bigger than any node and this is a good thing

So TPOT is best understood as a network composed of many interoperable nodes of interests and many layers of engagement. A memetic complex that you become part of on contact. If you read my blog it’s likely have many clear lines to TPOT.

If you like fitness, coding, rationalism, nutrition, or even home improvement well congratulations you are one or two nodes away from “just do things” as a life philosophy yourself and might be a member of TPOT yourself if you talk about it on Twitter.

And this is now some very dangerous semiotic territory as we cope with the gaping wound that is American health and murder. And I am concerned the narratives are going to be heavily fought over territory.

Because it’s easy to dislike a techbro right now. It’s pretty easy to dismiss the group. I can see it now. “Are your friends into this weird sounding acronym TPOT? Have you heard someone say “you can just do things?” If so you need to alert the authorities!”

Of course this sounds funny and histrionic. It’s totally normal to take responsibility for what you can in your life and try out ways of improving your life somewhat.

Everyone is dealing with pain (chronic or otherwise). Being an adult is a set of emotional challenges to manage and most of us do so by making the shocking decision to take action and do something. That doesn’t mean this world is is dangerous. It certainly doesn’t mean murder. It means doing something in your day life like lifting some weights, shipping some code, checking your biometric data, and trying to be a friend to lessen the pain most of us are in.

Categories
Internet Culture Medical

Day 1439 and Landshark’s Prophecy

I don’t like to write too much about developing news especially when it is an emotional topic like murder. The assassination of United Health Care insurance group CEO Brian Thompson last week was horrific. Today’s news that the manhunt found a person of interest Luigi Mangione is exploding into chaotic narratives.

The fog that surrounds violence leads to reactivity and it’s very easy to get things wrong. And the narratives surrounding this young man are both surprising and yet easily spun to cater to a number of simple biases.

One of those biases that I suspect will be warped across the news cycles is so easy to believe it’s making me suspicious.

The young man has easily accessible social media accounts some of which were still up when the news broke. I followed him on Twitter myself to see. What I found made me a little suspicious.

A centrist Penn shredded HuberBro Thiel tweeting TPOT moots futurism policy aesthetic gearporn guy adding maximum anarchy into the system as the UHC murderer does not feel right.

@almostmedia

His GoodReads account shows a man who read a lot of health optimizations literature including quite a bit on back pain and psychedelics. His follows on Twitter were almost uncomfortably midwit thoughtfluencer types but hardly any outside the Overton window.

The Twitter profile of the suspect.

Frankly if I wanted to make make a narrative about disgruntled dangers of TechBro philosophy I’d be trying to steer this conversation into an Uncle Ted speed run to reinforce hostility towards these ideas. It’s easy to see the dark side of the agency discourse & “just do things” set of values if someone kills.

If I found medical system skepticism and Silicon Valley threatening to my interests I’d be latching onto this story as fast as I could to explain why it’s dangerous craziness and the world view should be pitchforked.

There are also very already easy narrative explanations for how an attractive man with an elite institution set of credentials could have snapped. The suspect is so normie in background and so bleak in worldview and he had back surgery and took shrooms. An iconic tweet from Landshark about ayahuasca seems prescient

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1401 and Detox

I’m sure many a doctoral thesis has been written on the obsession with bodily purity and eternal search to rid oneself of toxins.

I’m not an academic but I was on the original Goop team in the far distant past when I worked for legendary adman Peter Arnell. So I’ve had a lot of exposure to particular purity culture that is modern consumer culture detoxing.

While I had hippie experiences with detoxification and also real ones like mercury chelation (which is a fun story), nothing is as intense as rich white women detoxing. From herbals to enemas to fasts you have a lot of choice.

I am all for the woo woo. The aspiration that if one just exercised enough control over oneself that all ailments could be cured is alluring. It’s also fucked up. Bodies are notoriously difficult to control and medicine is littered with mysterious ailments afflicting saints and sinners.

Alas I’m still tempted by this philosophy. I spent four days in Miami and I feel like a bunch of expensive detoxification treatments would be just the ticket. I’ll probably just sleep it off though.