some beliefs:
technological progress is the most important and perhaps sole driver of human flourishing
- apparent shifts in social norms, political systems, etc. are ultimately driven by technological change
the world is undergoing enormous change, driven by demographic, technological, and socio-cultural factors
- fundamental historical forces are driving the world toward a period of instability
- 20th century political formulas are running on fumes, nothing has yet emerged to conclusively replace them
- instability creates both risk and opportunity
- some of the main players are already on the board, others are yet to appear
- intra-elite competition sets the direction of change
civilization is not guaranteed
- our current era of economic surplus is predicated on facts which can change
- previous historical eras were horrific beyond imagining for most people who ever lived
- some social structures and cultures are more likely to preserve civilization and are better to live under than others
-
- people confuse fiction and reality all the time; e.g. most people’s understanding of the second world war is from movies
- by presenting historical events in the same medium as popular fiction, the events become fictionalized in people’s minds
- it’s really easy to be delusional, thinking is hard
- people easily delude themselves into believing they’re rational
the ‘low hanging fruit’ hypothesis regarding scientific progress is obviously wrong
- in every era of scientific progress, the ‘low hanging fruit’ are the easy problems that are solved first
- kuhn’s model of puctuated equilibrium fits the historical facts
- science is mainly suffering from managerialization
more opportunity exists for more people than they are aware of
- absent illness or obligation, many people would be much happier doing something completely different than what they’re doing now
- reasonably intelligent people can learn how most things work
- the world is much wilder than you think
elite is better than non-elite is really capable of understanding
- a large fraction of elite performance is the ability to sustain obsessive focus for a very long time
- ‘everyone is winging it’ is cope, but most people will never experience elite performance so don’t believe it exists
human cognition is very weak relative to the complexity of the physical world
- mathematics is far from universal
- we have enormous gaps in our understanding of even basic, classical physical phenomena
somewhat inspired by nat friedman
- people are on the whole insane, individually and collectively
- in the sense that the way they act and what they believe is not reflective of an underlying reality
- people are unable to express their own preferences, and often hold contradictory preferences without noticing
- in economics there is the idea of ‘revealed preferences’ but seldom is the consitency of preferences examined
- both stated and revealed preferences vary wildly depending on context
- because people are insane, the idea that they ‘respond to incentives’ is obviously wrong
- people will ratioanlize their decisions in terms of what incentives they believe led to their decision, but rarely can people describe which factors will influence their decision in advance
- often choices must be made among nearly identical options, and under these circumstances the decision however consequential is made essentially at random
- you have spooks in your brain
update (26.Aug.24): seems pareto came to the same conclusion in ‘general sociology’; people are motivated by ‘residues’ but rationalize through ‘derivations’
the phrase reject modernity, embrace tradition is simultaneously braindead and still-born.
like many movements which exist primarily in terminally online spaces, what the greco-roman statue avatars are demanding when they call to ʀᴇᴛᴠʀɴ is that modernity’s corpse be resuscitated, marionette strings be attached to its worm-eaten limbs so it can be made to dance on late night television like jerry springer meets weekend at bernie’s (some historical references there for you so you know i’m serious).
modernity is dead. man killed it while god’s corpse was still mostly warm. it died in the atomic fire over hiroshima.
There are many and varied textures of the earth, the soil itself, when held or touched by the hand and the fingertips, when rubbed over the skin; it extends beyond the tacticle sensations into visual, olfactory, it digs into memory itself. Sense-memory of place can be tied to the earth.
At the surface the earth is mostly pliant, but hard, solid formations are exposed; they integrate organically with the surrounding soil or else stand out as separate massifs, displaced in a temporally distant era as relics. They are implacable to the ages, they wait for the earth to shape itself around them once more.
The soil in the forest and the sand of the desert speak in different ways. They carry different meanings, and around them different societies form. The earth, soil and sand inform the burial rites of their people, and in doing so their relationship with eternitity.
The soil warms and cools with the seasons and the daytime, the changes are smooth, the earth may freeze and thaw, unevenly and in many layers, in places penetrated by water, by stone and by flora.