Tag: Religion

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Culture Politics

Day 1025 and Petit Aristocracy

A swirling milieu of discourse has brought a renewed focus in my inbox & timeline on what constitutes the pursuit of excellence; that old Socratic dichotomy of the individual human’s personal virtues and his role as citizen in the wider communal project of civilization. The tensions have never felt so taut to me.

Please forgive my focus on revanchist populism, but the good of the many versus the singular hero is a subject of fascination for both fascists and socialists alike. Costin Alamariu has set the warrior master return traditionalists on fire as he’s come out from under his nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert with a complex overview of the tyrannical Athenian philosopher kings and their cultivation (yes he means eugenics) of antiquity’s aristocracy.

The Marxists are just as loud. We’ve got authoritarian leaning proletarian sympathizers assessing a Marxist history of “progressive” American Wilsonian industrial fascism. And yes you will believe its philosophical impact on German National socialist ideology.

Everywhere I look, we are all debating whose rules matter, from Nature to God to man, and how we should use that authority to determine how we organize. It’s a bit surprising to see intelligentsia overcome with fervor for the proletariat and the aristocracy when you’d imagine both classes look back with disdain at the academic class.

It’s a ping ponging back and forth between the individual and his wider group responsibilities to his people from every ideological direction.

I see it in Luke Burgis and Freddie DeBoer’s concern with mimetic collapse and the recursive artistic malaise. If our system produces no truly novel art is it a failure of our elites to pursue excellence? Is it among our elites where genius and high culture produced? Or is it the opposite? Do we seek out frontiers when pushed from the boundaries of those who build and work?

Noah Smith weighed in on the extropian enthusiasm of our technical class for acceleration. The bourgeoise middle class of mercantilism has evolved to engineering and information technology to drive resource allocation.

As a post enlightenment matter, a petit aristocracy of the technical bourgeois is the most balanced of the positions between the masses yearning to be free and recognition of a desire for leadership earned through meritocracy lending a guiding hand.

As a journalist, Noah Smith is coming from a more intelligentsia orientation but the message of progressive futurism is coming from the patrician side as well. A venture capitalist like Marc Andreessen might not see himself as an elite aristocrat, coming as he did from humble beginnings, but he’s the standard barer for the titan class advocating for technological accelerationism.

I’ll fully admit to a personal bias for techno-optimism and effective accelerationism. But it could simply be self serving. Venkatash Rao thinks this mass discourse on individual versus collective responsibility is simply a whole new cope for an entangled world in disequilibrium.

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Travel

Day 1018 & Old Town Tallinn

I was able to enjoy a little bit of sightseeing around Tallinn today. I’ve been having poor health all week so I’ve not had a chance to venture into the beautiful old town section of the city.

A view of old town from the Telegraph Hotel
Cobbled streets of Old Town Tallinn

It’s quite something to go from brand new skyscrapers to medieval ramparts in the space of a couple hundred meters.

I’m staying in the newer, mostly under construction, section of town with brand new luxury apartment buildings and commercial real estate office building. But it’s a short walk to Old Town.

Hopefully I have a chance to visit the museums and do more of a historical tour but it was enough just to walk the streets and enjoy being outside today.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1011 and The Same Timezone

My circadian rhythm has succumbed to the shock of the current crisis. I’m currently on the same time zone as Israel as I’m in Tallinn in Estonia. It’s been a windy weekend with a record breaking wind storm so folks have been advised to stay inside.

That means I’ve been online watching a war breakout with no news delay or influencer filters. There is no defining set of news narratives. Twitter is broken but it’s still largely moved by the enormous traffic of the American dominance on its algorithm. Stories build but American news can whipsaw a single image into our consciousness.

Except there is no one to trust on the platform. The old verification system of the blue check didn’t provide much except that if someone said they worked confidence that the source. It was not a great system. But now there is no system.

It doesn’t seem as if there is a functional trust and safety team at Twitter. So a lot of people have seen horrors that has previously been buffed away by content warnings and nerfings. It’s a good thing and a bad thing.

Keep in mind “trust and safety” is gone might be a fancy way of saying none of the intelligence services have any natural dominance, none of the legacy news institutions are caught up to internet OSINT and you will see things.

And I have. By the time something hits the American audience I’ve had almost an entire work day with the information you are just seeing. And it’s been horrifying. Because it is. And being on the same time zone really lays bare just how much narrative fog permeates war in a crumbling corporate internet.

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Medical

Day 982 and Not Small Men

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.

A tweet from last week

I’ve had my fair share of fucked up fertility experiences and yet I’ve only just in the last few years learned to understand how my follicular phase impacts me so differently from my luteal phase. If you don’t know what that means either well it’s probably time.

The phases a woman’s cycle

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.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 980 and I Am Beff Jezos

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.

The movement itself identifies as e/acc which is a shorthand for effective accelerationism. It encourages people to do more, build more, take charge of their own corner of the world and make the future arrive sooner. The tagline? Accelerate.

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?

e/acc

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.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 957 and Will It Blend?

We are deep in the dog days of summer. I ran a fever and found myself dead asleep till nearly 1pm as my body valiantly struggled to process deluge of stress hormones I’d let pile up. I missed recording a podcast but the fever broke. I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile, on the website formerly known as Twitter, an epic battle of meaning was waged. The group mind egregore known as “this particular corner of Twitter” asked you to take a pill and/or hit a button.

A classic “my child said” poast with a twist on Newcomb’s Problem and Nash Equilibrium

And thousands of jacked in minds, from neu-fascism-IQers-must-speciate-eugenicists & red-rose transhumanist-luxury-space-communists to normie-Dad-banger-poasters, all raced to decide the meaning of the ultimate symbol.

Who lives and who dies when we can no longer coordinate exclusively within our ingroup?

Absolute fucking chaos. The collective of our shared internet went into a frenzy of consensus making.

Would you walk away from Omelas? Or would you save yourself? Would the gods of rationalism betray your soul with the knowledge that the good of the one can and does outweigh the good of the many?

In which selective phrasing has me deciding I shouldn’t jump into a blender but because I am me I also must immediately counter signal

Are you willing to step into a blender to save the normies? No? Yes? Fuck! Roko (of Basilik fame) redefined the problem space.

And then because we all must troll, we all stepped into a blender for the good of our species. Well, I wanted to annoy Roko. So I said I would when I voted that I wouldn’t. Because all serious social question can and should be trolled.

The choice is yours and yours alone

In the space of a day, we all leapt into the proverbial blender to save the naive, the kind, and the fucking stupid. It’s what Spock have done for us. Pro-social is the logical choice. Or is it? Is it better to be red than dead? None of us know.

I personally hope we all continue to create an eternal refinement culture of love and hope across all cycles of time to come.

I found it to be a privilege to be a member of the hive mind. We are all the alignment. Our consensus efforts inside the plutocrats toy is more likely to bring about the singularity than almost any other activity I can imagine.

It is a privilege to be in the egregore. My smol sensemaker syncretic smooth brain being hooked up into the wider hive for “Red vs Blue Walk Away From Omelas Boogaloo” is quite literally divine. To retweet each others bangers is to see the face of God. Just try and remember the truth. There is no blender.

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
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
Emotional Work Politics

Day 910 and The Chessboard

You can feel it. I know you can. The chessboard is being reset. Pieces are being moved. Gambits are unfolding. Absolutely everyone you know is going a little bit nuts.

I would not be surprised if these small informational disruptions will be recognized as part of a global conflict in a hundred years. I hope my heirs recognize that their mother fought as an information resistance fighters in The Great Dislocation Wars. Or World War 3. Just spitballing.

It’s humorous to me to talk in such a grandiose fashion because the reality on the ground is much of life is just a little bit harder and a little bit worse. But we still presume the world is basically still abiding by the same rules as yesterday.

I often forget how much people don’t want to hold power. The current moment shows a strange ambivalence about wielding anything yourself. Anyone with power is bad right? Well, it’s nuanced.

I want to assure you that your instincts in this matter is largely correct. You should distrust anyone that wants power. Be skeptical of the impulse.

Because being in charge sucks. It’s a shitty job. Anyone who has wielded any power from parenting a toddler to being a CEO probably intuitively knows this.

But once you have been given any legitimate form of authority, choosing to ignore that you wield power is a dereliction of duty.

The trouble with all reactionaries is that they assume once they take over, that their experience of power will somehow be different from the current horrors in charge. If they had bothered to crack open their minds while reading Shakespeare (or Thucydides or the Artashastra or literally any Great Book) they would know all men are subjected to the laws of power.

We lie to ourselves about how power functions because it’s very energetically easy to hand over your power to someone else. To be aggrieved is to have power over those you hold in contempt for exercising their power over you. Don’t be tempted by this trap no matter how righteous your cause.

Once you have picked up the mantle of power you must see through. If your people have given you authority you must see it through or hand it off to someone who will.

It’s very hard to own power. You most likely will not enjoy it. And you will be tempted to shunt off your agency. Just remember that you never carry power alone. It is always in concert with those who have consented to give it to you. Good luck on the great chessboard of life.

Categories
Community Emotional Work

Day 899 & Simple

I have led a complicated life. I didn’t really know as a child that being raised by syncretic vaguely nomadic hippies looking for utopias wasn’t really all that relatable. Aside from the general revivalism ethos of America, most folks tend to ride middle of the herd.

There I was not realizing I had a nose for powerful evangelism. I missed that boarding schools and colleges were meant to put you in a certain place in society. Then I didn’t know that spending time inside cultural institutions like fashion was an aspiration. I didn’t really clock that startups, or venture capital, or fucking around online would be a nexus of power either. I just thought all those places looked cool so I showed up.

Maybe I was simple. Maybe I just flowed like water towards the chaos before it became the big show for everyone. I am someone who understands the Thursday Styles problem of timing and I like to get there a little bit ahead of time. Get good seats and sell picks and shovels. From there it’s just a matter of having the stomach for the ride.

But knowing where the boundaries on consensus are is what keeps you from being swept up in the madness, as a movement meant for small mysteries and initiates suddenly sees the harsh glare of vox populi.

And so I am called to remember it is a gift to be simple. It’s a Shaker tune if you recall. Speaking of religious revivalism. The internet’s second brain tells me they were a millenarian restorationistChristian sect with a dualist view of God and equality between the sexes. Quakers and Shakers clearly impressed American’s hippies with this catchy tune. I know I learned it by heart as a child’s.

Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where I ought to be;
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed;
to turn, turn, will be my delight.
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Joseph Bracket

Maybe you also live a complicated life. Or maybe you are working to simplify your life. Whatever you do remember you can have more agency than you think. I’m sending you that message from the valley of love and delight that is Gallatin Valley.