Curated anonymous discussion for us and our friends
What is meritocracy? Why is it cherished and self-justifying in some contexts, and an object of ridicule in others? I have been reflecting on these questions, and I think I figured it out how to think about it. War is a verifiable domain, and provides dense and low bias feedback. By low bias I mean the platonic ‘true’ objective of the institution aligns well with what you can measure, e.g. how…
After watching The Students episode with Jonathan Wallis about academic apathy I feel compelled to post about Thomas Kuhn’s work as it is very relevant to this conversation. Kuhn is known for popularizing the term “Paradigm Shift”. Many people are familiar with and use this term but have not read his work. I will lay out the basics of his paradigm model of scientific progress. Science begins in…
Radical political organizing today seems to be best carried out through the form of a book club. Just as Bolshevik and Maoist cadres formed radical reading groups to build solidarity amongst partisan cells and nucleate and distribute ideological doctrine, we can do the same with our own ideology today. Book clubs do not attract a great deal of attention from either political authorities or media…
> human vs ai > pro-human > humanity should > human rights > humanitarian > human values > good for humanity We know what we mean by human: genus homo, especially as contrasted to hypothetical AI. But why do we care? Why is that and not something else the axis of our anxiety? Since WW2, the UN conceives of genus homo as equal members of a global community, endowed with rights that entitle them to…
It is fashionable to attack financial capitalism. But I think some of this impulse is misplaced. On a financial capitalist vs. industrial policy axis, I lean centre-financial capitalist. The reason naive financial capitalism is superior to naive industrial policy is because naive financial capitalism has darwinian selection amongst capital allocators / investors. Investors that generate high…
At party some months ago, a bachelor friend remarked how charming and rare it was that my wife and I had a traditional marriage with five kids and such. For me, this is just a normal aspect of a life well lived. But for many, it is as out of reach as a cottage in the Hamptons, as weird as being in a Bay Area sex cult, and as niche a hobby as painting minifigures. Has something gone wrong here? It…
Two macro-trends seem from paradoxically different worlds: the collapse of civilization under ideologically inflected corruption, and rising posthuman civilization via AI computerization of industry. Which matters, and which "wins"? The modernized and civilized part of the world continues to decay as our societies reach a decadent end-stage where all vitality is drained out of the people and all…
Humanism "emphasizes the agency and potential of human beings" in society, morality, philosophy. The human is he who by practical necessity (not moralistic obligation) must be treated as full moral agent with his own wisdom, powers, and agency. He is beyond your full understanding and control, but still a lawful force to deal with in your environment. The fullest human in this sense is a…
My project has been to project what we know as "humanity" into the post-human machine, but in "Make Yourself Human Again" I proposed also the seeds of the opposite idea: that the possibilities of "humanity" seems so different from the possibilities of AI not for any natural fact but because the "concept of “killer AI” [is] just the projection of all the agency we conventionally deny ourselves as…
https://youtu.be/fRfRZKivGwA From our gracious host's latest, we once are left with the question of what the new economic engine may be to save us from the inevitable Quiglian decay. I believe we should be able to make headway here. One key point is that whatever this new engine is, participants must be unable to hedge their bets. If there is a clear new economic engine that is seizing the day,…
What’s the strongest reason(s) not to believe there’s a reasonable chance that some of the seemingly less explicable UAP sightings could be an artifact of alien life? I think the general consensus around here tends to be very skeptical, with Admin taking a dim view on the significance of some new UAP footage recently coming to light (which I admittedly haven’t looked at much myself). On the other…
The term “fedposting,” arose on 4chan’s /pol/ in the late 2010’s. Used to describe anonymous figures advocating violent illegal action, fedposting was an accusation that the original poster was a federal law enforcement agent or “Fed.” The deeper history of fedposting requires looking back at the numerous intelligence operations beginning in the 1950s with COINTELPRO and finishing with the rise…
Perhaps Hanania’s most noteworthy intellectual contribution was to ‘expose’ the legal basis of the proliferation of wokeness: the disparate impact doctrine. This implied a legal/administrative agenda to combat wokeness. I want to propose that a similar dynamic is at play vis-a-vis ‘managerialism’. The separation of ownership and control looks like the inevitable product of corporate scale and…
To piggyback off of this discussion >>5044 I would like to discuss how we might practically apply intelligence. We typically find ourselves in search of a grand vision for the future and how new technology may make use of classical thought to bring these things into being. This is completely backwards. It is the same thought process that management consulting wankers use. “We know the goal. Now…
There are many luddites trying to fight AI and Data Centers, but I don't think the peasants can fight it. I don't think Bernie or Trump can fight it. I think they might not be competent, smart and driven enough. But if Anthropic was going to eat the lightcone and destroy all companies, the dark horse to stop them by force might be Sam Altman and OpenAI employees. The peasants can't do anything…
I've been thinking alot recently about the future of literature and poetry. I've landed on the idea that literature in of itself is not dead as a form despite what anyone says about post-literate society yadah yadah yadah but just the result of no relevant literature being produced for our own era. Every MFA-written acclaimed novel is basically the same stuff written up to the 1960s with just…
I have been reading Chinese and Indian history recently, and naturally I have begun to consider Western civilization in comparison. The most striking and remarkable observation is how strong the historical continuity is over more than 3,000 years among both Chinese and Indian civilizations in a way that is simply not the case in the West. There is truth to the Lindy effect, and thus to be Chinese…
I listened to the most recent 'The Students' episode with an interesting discussion on physis vs nomos. I wanted to write my take on it. I dont think I'm breaking new ground here necessarily but maybe can lead to an interesting discussion. As Samo Burja points out, large social organizations are to humans, what dams are to beavers and a strong distinction between nomos and physis can be…
Anglerfish are a deep-sea animal that uses its bioluminescent lure to capture prey and court mates. Along the way, as the males lack a phallus, they bite onto the larger female Anglerfish, which then fuses the male's tissues into the female's to efficiently enable the flow of sperm to fertilize the female's eggs & produce offspring. Subsequently, the males die out and become lifeless appendages of…
Pablo Peniche and the SF10x boys have blown the whistle on SF's huge SNAP-to-cash fraud problem by which fent addicts get their dope paid for by the government. Basically it works like this: > fent-walk down to the local farmer's market (heart of the city farmer's market) with your EBT card > old chinatown ladies in masks and dark glasses approach > "you sell you sell get in line" > you stand in…