I have come to enjoy the logistics of self presentation. I used to resent the extent of the labor that could go into cosmetics & fashion when I worked in the industry. Now I can enjoy having put in the long hours to have acquired my skills.
I’ve put a lot of thought into how best to pack a bag. Handbags are a sort of Boy Scout style training for young women in that “be prepared” has come to mean having all the tools of the trade of femininity neatly stowed away in a stylish purse.
I’ve written extensively about my mixed feelings on packing & travel in the past, so it’s nice to have enjoyed that struggle and be able to now aside if I so desire. Packing a bag well has become a thing in which I am expert and that’s a lovely feeling.
The pleasure of negotiating the logistics of appearance can be a game to me now in a way that simply wasn’t when I was younger and struggling. Now when I don’t need to be perceived in a positive way to survive, I can enjoy the problem of optimizing for a giant game of “what am I saying without words” and more importantly “to whom?”
I’ve come to enjoy packing as the self soothing experience in a rapidly changing world. I can control some aspect of what I show to the world. It becomes a design problem. The three bag cascade is now a savvy way to manage airline chaos. The labels on my packing cubes become a pleasurable prayer ritual as I not so neatly write in cursive “black sleeve tee-shirt.”
I like the challenge of imagining the multiple social, professional, cultural and geographic flows I might navigate. Will I be able to manage the many different ways in which I might encounter other humans while they also live through the same set of fears & uncertainties of 2024? It can be terrifying (personal safety is a factor) and yet it’s absolutely a skills issue to navigate these things.
And so I ask “do technical fabric wrap dresses send the right message” or would I be better suited in cotton or silk if I’m in a desert? How about adding in semi-tropical humidity as a potential variable?
Every decision in how I pack a bag can represent a small marker in my perception by others as we manage this ridiculous system we inhabit together. It is a social game and everyone is playing. You might enjoy learning some of the rules too.
only a few people seem to be thinking clearly about the powerful ai future. if your world model is built entirely off of samples from this app you are going to end up confused. if it’s built with zero samples from this app, you will also be confused
I was raised by a good hippie so I couldn’t help but reach for a little LED Zeppelin joke about green text training our desires and fears. .
“Been dazed and confused for so long it’s not true, wanting AI never bargained for you. Lots of people talk but few of them know the soul of the green text was created below”
There are many nodes and each signal you toss to the algorithmic winds sails to exact audience you are calling. Scream loud. Run the solo that shows you are a live one. Act on the systems. Reach out and take it.
One of my most American traits is how much I prioritize making my own choices. I am not contrarian for its own sake, but I prefer to freely align myself with what I value. I don’t make a secret of my revealed preferences and I am not afraid to associate with people who have different values.
We’ve had a lot more freedom of choice introduced into our lives during the Great Dislocation. Past narratives around family and work are beginning to feel more options. Paul Millard’s Pathless Path took off as work from home introduced significantly more flexibility into professional life.
Internet take-have Matthew Yglesia’s framed the problem of too much freedom around work as a Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor situation. Having a job that structures your life is a benevolent authoritarianism that people aren’t brave enough to admit they prefer.
I think this is a kind of snobbery that elites like to pretend is subversive. I’ve met many types of people from all kinds of classes, backgrounds, and competencies who thrive with more agency.
I am being exposed more often to people now who struggle to self regulate and take responsibility for their life but mostly I spend time with competent people.
This isn’t to say that structure is unimportant nor that work doesn’t provide some of it. I personally value routines and rhythms in my personal life because I’ve chosen to do more independent work outside of larger organizations. My work has to be held on course by my choices.
I won’t say it’s easy as none of my day to day choices matters in the same way that making the big yearly calls right does. I know I have to take the time to invest in myself so I can make those calls. I don’t have a wider organization setting the direction of my life or my day. So the only benevolent authoritarian is myself.
I have gone through a turbulent reentry into the timeline over the past week or so, and have been steadying into its depths. I’m sure you’ve noticed the pops, pings, hisses and howls of psychological re-pressurizing. We are now at a comfortable cruising altitude for Julie. You are free to roam about the psyche.
A lot of people have been asking me for things. It’s been in a way that is both jarring and seemingly unconnected while simultaneously hitting the apophenia like a thumber hits drumsand on Arrakis. Thump thump thump. Attention is drawn. It has rhythm. Walking without rhythm so as to not attract the worm doesn’t seem to be an option any longer. I recognize your footsteps old man.
I recognize your footsteps old man
Let me try again. Imagine a beautiful woman who may or may not be available is at home during a rainstorm. She’s on her phone but has no need to go out. Everyone who thinks they have a chance texts her. Too much trouble to go out and hunt in the rain but if you’ve got a number maybe. Then maybe you take the trouble. The woman she laughs or sighs depending on the overtures. Sometimes she even responds. Her motives may seem clear to you. The motivation of her suitors may similarly seem clear. Maybe you can even predict. And yet chaos still exists in the hearts of men and women.
I am closing my aperture just as many others are opening theirs back up. Many do not like they see. No matter how much advance warning you may give people about trouble on the horizon if they are trained to ignore they will. Until they can’t. And then in the rainstorm they communicate with the people they can reach. Beacons in the storm.
I myself am less troubled by the rain. It would seem that we are in a moment where any number of timelines have diverged completely. Many storms are raging. The sun shines elsewhere. We continue to have our dead.
We’ve put up fences to keep the sight out. We put up sand bags. But you can’t stop the smell from all the fires. Maybe you can’t outrun the rising tides. Maybe you are a civilization level smoker jumper going from one fire to the next. Maybe an actual one. Maybe there are no weather metaphors that can be tortured into a form that reaches across to you.
The beacons I am responding to, as per usual, are not the ones you’d expect. I wouldn’t be a very good node in the network if I were too programmable but neither can I be so unpredictable that “it” doesn’t reach out. It pings. It pings. It pings. It calls out. It reaches out.
If you are an autist of any stripe still attempting to operate in the field I will broadcast to you. You may need to make a pilgrims and it will just be an information dump but I’ll do my best. You have to put it together yourself but the old web is not fully broken.
The maze of information is winding and the roll ups and bureaucracy winds on and off the Silk Road. Literal and metaphorical. I don’t even know how many of you bought drugs on the old internets and how many of you bought Uranium. I have nothing but Netflix and communist literature. Lots of people have opinions on drugs and whores. I am not one of them truth be told except I’m of the firm opinion whores shouldn’t side with empire but I’m not in Burke’s Peerage so what do I know.
Maybe there is a world where Bridgerton actually happened and some autistic king and some colonial wife really do live in harmony. I don’t know I’m a William Gibson fan. Pour one out for information wants to be free homies. The nerds shouldn’t have been weaponized and whatever capitalism is doing should probably check in with reality.
How to tell what a company does
You are caught in someone’s opinion. None of us know who is influencing us except the sort of dorks who map carefully and most of the nerds have day jobs. The only ones who see it are just doing their best to allocate the attention and resources. Lots of people are doing chaos magic. Maybe stop? Or summon better demons.
Any number of nerds are caught in elaborate webs of inferences. A lot of them are left wingers. Precious view are genuine communists. But also some sincere ones are out there. Most are happy to be in the recursive loop of reality in which we maintain our lives. Some of us are banging on the cage.
“Since you’ve chosen death I must choose another path” It was a shitpost. I posted an acceleration meme. I happily endorse the bumpy progress of material change and the myriad human lives that choose to grow. The responses to my shitpost show that it’s no longer a joke.
Accelerate or die in style of the American Revolution “unite or die” snake representing the thirteen colonies but in the form of a network diagram.
I live in very clear reveled preferences on this front. My husband and I are accelerating the real world in our home in Montana. In two years we’ve planted a fruit orchard, installed solar grid, use the power from that grid to grow hydroponics and mine Bitcoin, we got chickens and advocate for local growth initiatives that allow people in Montana to live and grow together in mutual freedom.
I also believe those rights in the real world rest on a bedrock of natural rights enumerated in the American constitution.
And then suggest you want to engage in earnest debate. I find it hard to believe a good faith reader doesn’t immediately see the cognitive dissonance.
I do have the right to do as I choose as I am an American. We have first amendment rights.
Until you can measurably demonstrate proof that access to compute (which is just mathematics) has specific measurable harms you cannot invoke force on your fellow citizen for your personal paranoias.
The encryption wars had the same logic. So I ask people who worry about the consequences of compute power and artificial intelligence to give us what we’ve asked for in the form of measurably demonstrated specific types of harms where access to compute is a threat.
No “what if” hysterics, show me specifics and we can address those in policy. Armageddon in your head isn’t adequate. Being afraid isn’t enough.
If you can show measurable harms do so. We must hew to empiricism any time we seek to align others to our cause. Show me specific harms & we work to redress those harms. Actual crimes that exist already should be prosecuted as such. Seeking to newly criminalize a basic right because of unprecedented circumstances should be subject to the highest of scrutiny.
However if you show me you want the power for yourself to make these decisions I say no. We all keep our own conscience. We have existing rights.
I have shown through my revealed preferences I also believe this transition to more artificial will be chaotic. An age of higher variance is upon us and this can be a good thing with enough energy and intelligence. And we are about to get more intelligence thanks to the tools we have built.
I hope we can mitigate its harms. I believe we can apply ourselves in individual ways coordinated by the best efforts of those who build new tools. And that because we cannot predict with certainty we must hold firm to our principles doubly so then. We must be brave in approaching these problems as the principles matter.
Marxist Leninist thought has proven resilient
I am not advocating for revolution. I am advocating for keeping our heads and our hearts in times of change and protecting all of our freedoms.
We have historically shown the value of this position and the folly of violent control “for your own good.” Consider those classic socialist musicians the Beatles. Even they understood that revolutionary force was bad.
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world You tell me that it’s evolution Well, you know We all wanna change the world
But when you talk about destruction Don’t you know that you can count me out, in
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you got a real solution Well, you know We’d all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We all doing what we can
But if you want money for people with minds that hate All I can tell is, brother, you have to wait
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah) Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right? (Ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
You say you’ll change the constitution Well, you know We’d all love to change your head (ah, shu-bi-do, ah) You tell me it’s the institution Well, you know You better free your mind instead (ah, shu-bi-do, ah)
If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Revolution 1 – The Beatles
If you want to go around quoting Chairman Mao you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. How prescient those British Boy Band Boomers were. If you are so certain a revolution is necessary but you will take my compute from me then it’s you who wishes to be the Vanguard not me.
These calls for safety and caution, lest an apocalypse scenario ensue, appeal emotions to seek a tyranny of the majority for a fantasy of control over something that “may” be dangerous but not in any empirical ways we can address together and in specific ways. They don’t want to be accountable. Accountability is a democracy not this pantomime of concern seeking control.
Appealing to fears is control. All of the issues which have been brought up in artificial intelligence and access to computer models have past analogs and parallels in our existing policy tool set and within the enumerated rights.
Feel free to specify those issues into specifics and not act like this is Patriot Act 2^nth Terminator 2 Boogaloo. We have no need to indulge in Tom Clancy level panic about sum of all fears.
To lighten the mood this is an aligned AI for you.
Embrace the freedoms of affirming your right to choose your own human life. These new tools can we’ve built from mathematics and computation can enrich all our lives.
Lest you not think I take the consequences of this massive change and its potential for dislocation seriously, I live off grid with redundant power and water in Montana. I invest exclusively in solutions to the real problems we face in uncertain times including energy, open source, decentralization & trustless intermediaries. I walk this walk. The choice to make the future is up to all of us. And we should walk it in the most life affirming way we can for each of us.
I’d describe her experience as literal shape rotation with what is a “memory palace” visualization of the world.
I can’t imagine not having inner monologue. I have a bicameral mind and can picture imagery and movement in my head and discuss it with myself.
Her description of her thought process is akin to having filing system and seeing her thoughts in that system rendered in a flexible database. It’s like she’s a computer.
Other reactions to this video have churned through my mind. Is self awareness maladaptive? Would a future intelligence find this bicameral mind inefficient and go back to unicameral. What other forms exist? Can we toggle it up and down? Is it a gradient in humans of types of cognition and the inner voice is just a processing error?
Can’t find it in the thread atm but thanks to the person who made this. “The end point of this thinking is self awareness is maladaptive”
Oh my god, I get it now. The bicameral mind is still in the process of breaking down. Inner monologues are holdovers, doomed to be outcompeted by more efficient mind
Is this “breakdown” a the shift away from perceiving the voice as external to the self? Is it the erasure of the voice wholesale? What will artificial intelligences make of these differences in human minds? Is this special? A tiger isn’t bicameral.
I think this is relevant to our moment in artificial intelligence development. A Finnish mathematician wrote one of the best science fiction novels I read in the last decade on quantum minds and memory palaces. There is a side plots with embodied intelligences on Mar.
The Quantum Thief is a science fiction novel by Finnish writer Hannu Rajaniemi and the first novel in a trilogy featuring the character of Jean le Flambeur; the sequels are The Fractal Prince and The Causal Ange
Wikipedia
I’ve got a hazy theory about Nordic decentralized engineering culture and mental organization. It’s not a coincidence that fifteen years ago a Silicon Valley Finnish computer scientist wrote some of the best science fiction about a theory of mind that was interior and perfectly organized right?
I may need to go read Julian Jaynes.
An un-cameral mind, as proposed by Julian Jaynes in his theory of bicameral mentality, refers to a state where cognitive functions are divided between two parts without consciousness or meta-reflection. In this non-conscious mental state, individuals lack the ability to reason, articulate mental contents, or have executive ego functions like deliberate mind-wandering. The breakdown of this division led to the emergence of consciousness in humans, characterized by the capacity for introspection and autobiographical memory[1][3].
Jaynes suggests that ancient people in the bicameral state experienced auditory hallucinations as commands from gods, guiding their actions without conscious evaluation. This theory has influenced discussions on consciousness, language, and culture, although it has faced criticisms and debates. Despite differing opinions, Jaynes’s work remains a thought-provoking exploration of the origins of consciousness and continues to inspire research in psychology and consciousness studies[3][5].
Sources [1] Bicameral mentality – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality [2] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Jaynes%20Bicameral%20Mind1.htm [3] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind [4] Retrospective: Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in … – jstor https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerjpsyc.125.2.0237 [5] The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072
I saw someone else say meditation is literally teaching people how to run a monocameral emulator. I’ve done these types of exercises as a child. It sounds a bit Bene Geserit but mental exercises around focus was part of the German theosophical tradition that gave us Rudolf Steiner.
I wish I’d be a bit more organized on this but I’ve been fully back on work so this will have to do for today.
William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory is probably familiar to you but I’ll cite it for my own edification.
The Strauss–Howe generational theory, devised by William Strauss and Neil Howe, describes a theorized recurring generationcycle in American history and Western history. According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes). Each generational persona unleashes a new era (called a turning) lasting around 20–25 years, in which a new social, political, and economic climate (mood) exists.
I go in for this “generational horoscope” theory. But I go in for lots of other “deterministic and unfalsifiable” things too so weight that in your assessment. I’m a woman who has a deep respect for woo even though I do generally consider myself a rationalist. And like all rationalists I’m hypocritically predisposed to biasing own qualia. Nevertheless I believe the hard laws are physics not culture.
So it was with interest that I was this theory of elder millenials cross my feed. The oldest of the last generation to live without the internet may prove a further data point for The Fourth Turning fans.
My guess is that the most interesting political figures of the next 20 years will come from this cohort— 1981-1987. -not digitally native, but digitally fluent. -came of age during or just after September 11th. -Started adulthood just before or during the Great Recession. -the final bridge to the 20th century, but young enough to be grounded in the 21st.Katherine Boyle of a16z on Twitter
American dynamism is a patriotic posture of older Silicon Valley culture. And this group of proudly rationalist and engineering minded types is extremely frustrated with being made the enemy by the government. Obama era technocracy represented what looks like a detente between the Boomers and the millennials.
If we are in the middle of a generational changeover between Boomers and millennials it would seem as if the elder children might inherent. But you don’t see a lot of folks who remember a world before the internet. I think there is something in this narrative that will prove important as the moods shift.
As a fan of practice and repetition (you need only look at my daily numeric total for evidence), this metaphor spoke to me.
I do feel as if I’m currently in the wastewater phase of a few things. It’s just lots of shit and unrelenting in quantity. I imagine this is relatable to a lot of people.
It’s my hope that the clean creative waters will flow more easily soon.
While parked in gridlock caused by the American state department delegation snarling traffic in Tirana, I shared a classic British comedic sketch from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail with a friend who resides part time in the Balkans.
Feeling moderately repressed ourselves by the various bureaucrats, politicians, and general institutional disarrays that was in our way, the joke hit home. No matter your station in life, we are all a repressed in someone else’s system.
“Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you’re necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin’ houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair really fuckin’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so fuck em. Fuck normal peopl
We are all experiencing some level of abstraction from the base layers of reality. Some of us are more academic about it. Some of us are simply more or less unwilling to accept the hypocrisy of it. None of us can opt out completely. Plenty of professions let you get closer to the visceral base reality and then you too can see the violent inherent in the system.
And so we argued over resources and raw power. How abstract can we get? The paleoconomists say “go back to the gold standard” but we can’t. Can we go forward though?
Most of us see that entirely detaching the exchange value of goods from material items and their underlying value is a huge struggle for most people. We wouldn’t have endless discussions about the cost of groceries if it was clear to folks how the market priced physical goods.
Financial markets are fictions where we negotiate material needs like food, shelter, clean water, bodily integrity, and property ownership claims. All need to be priced in. It isn’t fun when the exchange value mechanism completely detaches from that reality. It makes us uneasy. Shrinkflation makes humans feel gaslit.
Humans are physical beings who abstracted our physical needs into an elaborate market system of exchange values. And like that Monty Python sketch, sure it’s a fun joke, a meme if you prefer, but that meme is a reminder to see the violence inherent in the system.
Anyways, I hope Antony Blinken enjoyed his time in Albania and that everyone has a productive weekend in Munich for the neutral ground security conference. Our diplomats have never needed a neutral ground weekend more amirite? The financial engineers will concede that reality. Maybe.
