Other Life

Introducing Statistical On-Chain Analysis

Using blockchain network data to predict cryptocurrency price movements—aka “on-chain analysis”—is an exciting new discipline, but the room for improvement is vast. The main technique of leading on-chain analysts is still eyeballing line graphs. With years of professional experience in statistical forecasting, I see a massive opportunity to

strategy

Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy

~hatryx-lastud Urbit is a new kind of networked operating system that turns your computer into a “ship” that can network and exchange data and computation with any other person or group on the network (like the current internet), but without requiring any trusted third parties like Facebook or Google to

Christianity

St. Augustine, the Kernel, and the Long Run

Some real quick housekeeping before we get to 1k words on some scientific overtones in St. Augustine, the first great galaxy brain of Western Christianity… I just announced a new course we’re running at the end of July: The Philosophy of Ivan Illich, taught by my dear friend the

News and Updates

Signs of Life, May 2021: Truth is a Schelling Point

Hey folks! A few thoughts, links, and upcoming events for you. I’m glad I retired the weekly curatorial newsletter. Now when you receive one, you’ll know it’s because I actually have some stuff I want to share, not because I’m trying to hit a weekly quota.

Christianity

Exponential Satanism: Girard and Digital Technology

Christianity invented the concept of defending the victim. In pre-Christian societies, collective violence against innocent scapegoats was commonplace. With the revelation that humans would kill God himself if given the chance, Christianity reveals the dignity of the victim (Girard 2001). Though religious faith is not necessary to grasp the long-term

strategy

Samo Burja and the New Private Intellectual

I just published a new episode of the podcast. Here I collect some of its best insights, in text for your convenience. From Other Life Episode #129, Samo Burja on Intellectual Legitimacy and His Business Model as a Private Researcher, you'll learn about: The dangers of a rebel mentalityGreat Founder

strategy

The time to withdraw

I've built a decent audience across several social media platforms, but I can't shake the feeling that something fundamental is going rotten. For people doing longer-term and more sophisticated work, such as writing serious non-fiction, participating in the "creator economy" is something like settling an unmapped foreign jungle: the irresistible

strategy

Eric Weinstein's Error

Eric Weinstein has released his highly self-aggrandized anticipated research paper on geometric unity. I read the paper. I gave it a solid hour or two. I did read the whole thing. The paper is not really a research paper, it's a collection of briefly formalized mathematical intuitions combined with some

Exit

Technology, Class, and Ideological Realignment

I appreciate Michael Lind's model of the contemporary American class structure. He asks us to visualize two horseshoe structures: a lower horseshoe whose two prongs point up, and an upper horseshoe whose two prongs point down. The lower horseshoe has the underclass at the bottom/midpoint and the hub city

Theory

Barbarians Past the Gate

Legacy institutions are at war with distributed collective intelligence, but the legacy institutions are losing—badly. 2 million full-time “content creators,” outside any professional sanction; the election of Donald Trump against an airtight media consensus certain of its impossibility; mass, hysterical preference falsification due to a normalization of political correctness,

Theory

The Key Ideas of Leo Strauss

Below is the text of an interview I conducted with political theorist Michael Millerman, PhD. Listen to this interview on the Other Life podcast or watch it on Youtube. We cover all the key ideas of Leo Strauss: Nihilism, Persecution and Writing, Reason and Revelation, Classical vs. Modern Philosophy, Education,

Exit

The Meaning of Clubhouse vs. Taylor Lorenz

This is not just another Twitter beef, but a bellwether for the changing structure of intellectual influence. Clubhouse is a “drop-in audio” chat app especially popular in tech circles. People come in and out of ephemeral chat rooms; the rooms split users into speakers and listeners, with users moving between

Why I’m interested in blockchain tech for creators

I’m becoming more bullish on crypto, in particular the long-term value of Bitcoin and the shorter-term value of blockchain infrastructure for content creators. First, the only potential point-of-failure for independent intellectuals is payment processing. Profitable indie thinkers outside of institutions are almost completely cancel-proof; the only exception being if

Productivity

Should you start a Substack?

TLDR: For most of you, no, starting a Substack is not the best way to build a financially sustainable long-term writing project. You should definitely build an email list, but you should do it with a free newsletter you run alongside a website/blog that you own. Especially for people

Theory

Fear and Dissembling

Philosophically, it is impossible to ground claims about the ultimate value or quality of living entities, e.g. genetic quality. Such ways of speaking can make some sense, like when we say “this horse is higher quality than that horse,” because, for all of our practical intents and purposes, a

strategy

It's rational to move somewhere beautiful to write

Having unique and true ideas is, pound for pound, the most valuable human resource in the world. If you are blessed with periodically arriving flashes of insight, in the long-run it is economically worthwhile to organize everything around recording and publishing those insights. The greatest inhibitor of unique ideas is

Will the pandemic have partisan effects on voter turnout?

Election forecasts will probably err systematically in some way, given the unique shock of the pandemic. But in which direction might the forecasts err? I see a few possibilities. Trump voters are likely more passionate voters (many Biden voters see him as a necessary evil). Learning about mail-ins and state

Theory

Decouple intellectualism and intelligence

Speak of the intellectual life and a lot of people will think you’re pretentious; they think you’re calling yourself intelligent. What they don’t understand is that the intellectual is a type of person who can be found across the intelligence distribution. The defining characteristic of the intellectual

Millennials, Migrate to Mountain Mansions

[In less than 30 days my wife and I are packing up our few belongings and driving up into Colorado, Utah, and/or Montana. We haven’t decided where yet, but we’re going to be renting somewhere, exploring places to live longer-term. Below is my vague dream vision motivating

News and Updates

How I made $3,300 on a short niche philosophy book

The Based Deleuze project is now officially complete, so it’s time to do some final accounting. Here I will review the financials, the labor/time costs, and the main lessons learned. Based Deleuze was conceived and executed as a hard test. In research design, a hard test is a

Productivity

How many readers do you need? Kierkegaard only hoped for one

From Copenhagen on his 30th birthday (May 5, 1843), Kierkegaard wrote the following in the Preface for his first book, Two Upbuilding Discourses: Although this little book… only wishes to be what it is, something of a superfluity, and only desires to remain in secret, as it came into existence

Productivity

Lessons from Nietzsche’s Awful Publishing Results

“…the marketbell—The Daily Press—is only run for their own clique and not for the proud and solitary One.” Nietzsche’s publisher Schmeitzner on the complete failure of Thus Spake Zarathustra Independent intellectuals today should study closely one of the most profound and impactful thinkers in all of modern

Theory

Scientific introspection and the analytical advantage of average people

When you have thoughts and feelings and drives, note them and try to understand which variables about yourself cause them. The best way to do this is to compare yourself to others, and the best way to do that is by learning where you fall within empirical distributions. This is

Exit

Intelligence as a political cleavage

Intelligence is increasingly a political cleavage, thanks to the phenomenon of skill-biased technological change. If your income is earned through competition on an open market, intelligence is an unambiguous good. You need it, you want it, possessing it makes you succeed and lacking it makes you fail. The continued development

Theory

You don’t have writer’s block, you’re just being evil

“Boredom is the root of all evil―the despairing refusal to be oneself.” ― Soren Kierkegaard in Either/Or If you are unable to think and express words, something is certainly wrong, but you are not “blocked.” Your brain is a ceaseless machine. It identifies and creates connections. When it gets