ČČǤĆČ 63: Reality Splitters
âAttachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.â âSimone Weil
Justin Murphy
Housewives on LSD and other secrets about the psychedelic revolution
Psychedelics are about to go mainstream, but the field is riddled with myths and misconceptions. For instance, did you know that one of the primary target markets will be senior citizens and housewives? The best psychedelics haven't even been invented yet, and microdosing might be overrated. Below are some highlights
The Non-Fungible Aristocracy
On the distributive consequences of NFTs and Georges Bataille's economic anthropology.
A Theory of Verbal Inflation
The central bankers of knowledge are inflating the word supply.
I think I built a Liberal Arts college on the internet
But it's harder than I thought, and it's killing me. So here's the plan...
How to Dominate Substack with Genetic Blackpills
How to genotype your unborn baby, increase your intelligence and testosterone with CRISPR, and crush it on Substack.
All men by nature desire to know
"I have gained this by philosophy⌠I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.â
Introducing Statistical On-Chain Analysis
Using blockchain network data to predict cryptocurrency price movementsâaka âon-chain analysisââis 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
Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy
Urbit is a new kind of networked operating system that turns your computer into a âshipâ 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 mediate
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 weâre running at the end of July: The Philosophy of Ivan Illich, taught by my dear friend the
Signs of Life, May 2021: Truth is a Schelling Point
Hey folks! A few thoughts, links, and upcoming events for you. Iâm glad I retired the weekly curatorial newsletter. Now when you receive one, youâll know itâs because I actually have some stuff I want to share, not because Iâm trying to hit a weekly quota.
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
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
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
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
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
Barbarians Past the Gate
Legacy institutions are at war with distributed collective intelligence, but the legacy institutions are losingâbadly. 2 million full-time âcontent creators,â 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,
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,
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 âdrop-in audioâ 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 Iâm interested in blockchain tech for creators
Iâm 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
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
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 âthis horse is higher quality than that horse,â because, for all of our practical intents and purposes, a
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
Decouple intellectualism and intelligence
Speak of the intellectual life and a lot of people will think youâre pretentious; they think youâre calling yourself intelligent. What they donât 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 havenât decided where yet, but weâre going to be renting somewhere, exploring places to live longer-term. Below is my vague dream vision motivating
How I made $3,300 on a short niche philosophy book
The Based Deleuze project is now officially complete, so itâs 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
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
Lessons from Nietzscheâs Awful Publishing Results
ââŚthe marketbellâThe Daily Pressâis only run for their own clique and not for the proud and solitary One.â Nietzscheâs 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
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
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
You donât have writerâs block, youâre just being evil
âBoredom is the root of all evilâthe despairing refusal to be oneself.â â Soren Kierkegaard in Either/Or If you are unable to think and express words, something is certainly wrong, but you are not âblocked.â Your brain is a ceaseless machine. It identifies and creates connections. When it gets
Review of Based Mansion LA: Observations, Finances, and Bibliography
On the weekend of February 28, I rented a mansion in Los Angeles for two nights and stayed there with about 15 people from the internet. I facilitated a mini-conference; everyone there presented some ideas. After that, we partied. In this post I'd like to share: a few lessons learned,
Beware, rationalism!
A fatal flaw of rationalism is that the spread of rational thinking often causes a net-decrease of rationality across the population. For every type of logical fallacy, for instance, there is a fallacy fallacy in which the name of the legitimate fallacy is invoked in a fallacious way. Occurrences of
Reasons why the IHME model might be under-predicting coronavirus deaths in the USA
Most political elites in the United States right now seem to be invoking one epidemiological model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Deborah Birx, leader of the White House coronavirus team, referring to the IHME forecasts. Apparently there is a more complicated
There are no humans on the internet
The best way to build community and make friends on the internet is to treat all internet interlocutors as if they are real humans in a real-life, local village. If you do this, over time many people will like you and want to form an alliance with you. Because most
The Second Golden Age of Blogging
Many people say that âblogging is dead,â but dead for whom? Blogging remains powerful, just not for the same type of person who found it powerful in the âgolden age of bloggingâ (roughly 2003-2009). In that period, blog-based intellectual freedom coincided with professional career tracks. Tyler Cowen, Crooked Timber, Instapundit,
Rap is not art but itâs cool
Rap is not art, itâs stylized abjection. Same with punk. Indeed, this is one reason why it has been possible for rap and punk to merge today, musically and sociologically. Who ever would have predicted this from first musical principles? In rap and punk, sounds primarily have social effects,
The Optimal Podcasting Process for Indie Thinkers: Automate and Proliferate
Here is the podcasting process Iâve developed over nearly 2 years of iteration. Itâs not perfect, and itâs not for everyone, but for many indie thinkers I think this is the best system. Certainly better than any other piece of âhow to run a podcastâ content Iâ
Reasons not to start an online magazine
TLDR: The magazine model is not the best choice for indie intellectuals trying to start something. Two reasons: (1) Accelerating digital culture requires you to move fast and group projects move slower than solo projects, and (2) accelerating media segmentation rewards increasingly unique, hyper-niche content, so smaller, in-house production teams
Fully automated personal brands
Right now, itâs still seen as bad taste to overly automate your personal social media â and for good reason. But taste changes, and it always follows the money. As machine learning gets better, we will soon cross the threshold where some minority fraction of the dumbest people will be
Truth = Joy = Power: Spinoza's Galaxy Brain
We live in a bourgeois culture where people hate intellectuals, the truth is. So, yes, of course there are stupid people on the internet who are really pretentious and think they're really smart. However, there are also really smart people on the internet who are very interesting and independent, and
Not everyone needs to be heard
One of the worst mistakes I made as a younger man was believing that everyone just âneeds to be heard.â Some do. I don't relinquish at all my conviction that exhaustive, collective, emotional unloading â what the feminist tradition once called "consciousness raising" â is a veritable form of revolutionary politics with
An Effort Allocator for Content Creators
Get the spreadsheet If you're trying to build a long-term intellectual life on the internet, one of the biggest problems you'll face is figuring out how to allocate your effort. There is no template for doing this successfully â yet â and it's a doozy of an optimization problem. If you don't
WASP Microaggressions (MY #METOO MOMENT)
I've noticed I strongly favor words beginning with intense, brash sounds. Words which invite you to say them quickly and loudly. The paradigmatic example might be the greeting: "WHAaat's up, DUuude?" Only after returning from 6 years in England do I realize the quality-of-life cost of misalignment between natural diction
What is an "image of thought" for Deleuze?
From Lecture #3 in my video course for Based Deleuze: What's really at stake here, I think, is the attack on representational thought... That's one of the core components of the Deleuzian project. Deleuze argued that any philosophy presents an image of thought and that this image of thought, it's
How to know if youâre talking to a wokescold: A scientific method for preventing IRL flame wars
[FYI: If youâre interested in data-blogging like this, Iâm offering a little free course on it.] Weâve all been there: Youâve had a couple drinks, youâre having fun talking with someone, then you blurt out a controversial opinion and everything goes belly up. Maybe your
The Univocity Debate in a Nutshell
From Lecture #3 in my video course for Based Deleuze: Aquinas wanted to say that â he did say, famously, in the Summa Theologica â if we say God is wise, and then we say that Socrates is wise, we're not really saying the same thing. We're saying what is a kind
If you're a content creator, you're a tiny startup (you just donât know it yet)
All of the following terms from Silicon Valley startup culture have direct analogues in the content-creation game. In the examples below, Iâll discuss a blogger or video producer who earns income via Patreon, but the principles generalize much more widely. Product-Market Fit Product-market fit is when it becomes clear
You canât be smarter than you are
This might sound obvious, but itâs not: You are only as smart as you are. People get stuck because they aspire to be smarter than they are. People refuse to produce until they are as smart as they want to be, but the only way to become as smart
Calling all indie thinkers (literally)
Over the past week, Iâve conducted more than ten private Skype interviews with a diverse group of internet intellectuals, âcontent creatorsâ of the higher-brow variety, cancellation-vulnerable professionals, and lesser-known upstarts aspiring to be one of these⌠The reason I organized these Skype calls is that I spent the past
The worst that can happen is nothing
If youâre genuinely seeking the truth and you put something crappy into the world, nothing happens. There is no punishment for crappy content. Itâs one of the simplest and most profound facts of conducting creative intellectual work on the internet. If you make something good or important, thereâ
Shared roots versus hard forks
Iâm reading with interest the recent comeback post by Curtis Yarvin. I might have some longer thoughts later, but for the moment I just wanted to quibble with part of his empirical model. Referring to the dominant axis of partisan polarization, he writes: Any point on which both poles
What Would I Do Without This World
What Would I Do Without This WorldBy Samuel Beckett what would I do without this world faceless incuriouswhere to be lasts but an instant where every instantspills in the void the ignorance of having beenwithout this wave where in the endbody and shadow together are engulfedwhat would I do without
Abjection
If you would like to become a philosopher or any type of serious intellectual you must acquaint yourself with the concept of abjection. To be a philosopher one must be abject, and the reason a lot of people don't understand anything about this concept is because most contemporary philosophers want
Post-Structuralism and False Authority
A major epistemological foul in Continental Philosophy is that it often treats concepts as if they were tested and validated empirical models, when they are not. People routinely speak as if Xâs concept is âbuilt onâ Yâs concept â but the only justification for thinking and speaking this way
Hyperstition Americana
I like Lana Del Rey. Sheâs not super hot, and she's not a great singer â but sheâs become an entity that is âsuper hotâ and âgreat singer.â Thatâs true art. She succeeded in the political game of occupying both of those categories, all the more impressively because
Depressive capitalist realism
I recently received an email challenging some of my past comments on depression and public political theorizing. Here is the main gist of the email and beneath it is my response. I'm a pretty recent listener of Other Life and I was interested to hear your most recent release about
Introducing Deleuze vs. Heidegger on Technology, Enslavement,⨠and Escape
Thatâs the title of an online course Iâm developing with Johannes Niederhauser. You may remember Johannes from his widely admired appearance on Other Life: âHeidegger, Ecstatic Time, and the Community of Mortalsâ (livestream, podcast). Our plan is to produce about 8 hours of content, mostly traditional lectures and
Quick note on a site change
For those of you who've subscribed to receive my blog posts via email, you'll notice my posts are now coming from a different email address. This is just a quick note to let you know, in case you're confused. Email replies still come directly to my inbox, so feel free.
Advancing to Level 2
Iâve now been on Patreon for one year. It's been good, but I think I need to level up. Would you like to help? If so, I have a new flashy object with your name on it. Read on. Review and Projections First, a little review of my Level
The Two Meanings of Reaction (Excerpt from Based Deleuze)
The following is an excerpt from my short book Based Deleuze, which will be published on September 20th. Pre-order here and youâll receive it by email as soon as itâs released. Discussing the ideological valence of great thinkers is difficult because they have little use for the crutches
The Cybernetic Trinity
The Trinity is one of the more vexing doctrines in all of the Catholic tradition. God is one, and yet God is three: the father, the son Christ who walked on earth, and the Holy Spirit. To make matters worse, God even has a mother, to whom one prays quite
Virtues of the Desert
Here is Joseph Ratzinger, formerly Pope Benedict, on St. John the Baptist. He was not ordered to deny Jesus Christ, but was ordered to keep silent about the truthâ (cf. Homily 23: CCL 122, 354). And he did not keep silent about the truth and thus died for Christ who
Not making progress or losing motivation?
As I wrote a few weeks ago, I was recently hired on a monthly retainer to do some intellectual consulting. Basically, a very smart person just needed to some help getting a project off the ground â what they needed was a combination of substantive feedback, informal support, tactical guidance, and
Deleuzeâs Troublesome Inheritance (Excerpt from Based Deleuze)
Now that the book is a little more than 75% done, I figure I should start posting some excerpts. Did you know Deleuzeâs parents were both fascists? Good son that he was, though, he never disavowed them. Very naughty, todayâs Antifa would say, but very based. Not because
Hallow be thy name
To say that one believes in God is to be stupid and wrong by the definition of these words in modern secular culture. And yet I believe that I believe, so how? The word âGodâ does not mean what modern people mean when they deploy it. The word is ambiguous
Progress report for first book project
I launched a pre-order form for Based Deleuze a little more than a month ago (June 20, 2019). I committed to publishing a short book of about 20k words by September 20 at the latest. I currently have 15.9k words, so the writing itself has been proceeding smoothly. Thatâ
Religion, guilt, and creativity
One feature of religion a lot of secular people do not understand is that, although religion can make one feel guilty at times, it also prevents one from feeling guilty about trivial matters. Secular people think that by avoiding religion they avoid feeling guilt, but often they end up overwhelmed
Is Facebook the Largest Corporate Fraud Ever?
Jaw-dropping new post up today on Naked Capitalism, âFacebook: Mark Zuckerbergâs Fake Accounts Ponzi Scheme,â by Aaron Greenspan. Best quotes: Old money goes out, and new money comes in to replace it. Thatâs how a traditional Ponzi scheme works. Madoff kept his going for decades, managing to attain
Can you do a PhD if you have ADHD?
I received this question recently from a reader. Here is how I replied. I also made this video if youâd prefer to hear my thoughts that way. This post and the video are not exactly the same. First of all, I'm only slightly âon the spectrum,â if thatâs
An automated system for delivering high volumes of exclusive content to patrons
This took a lot of tinkering, but I think I've finally figured out the best currently available way to manage and deliver a wide variety of exclusive items to patrons. Optimizing and automating the links between research, production, and dissemination will probably be one of the main edges that internet
Why no depiction of Hitler is evil enough
Robin Hanson thinks it the result of a signaling spiral, "wherein people strive to show how moral they are by thinking... even more lowly of standard exemplars of bad..." Certainly possible, and plausible. But there is an alternative explanation: Hitler is the Devil â for Protestant atheists (secular progressives, in the
Democrats wanted strongman rule way more than Republicans â until Trump arrived
That graph is from the new book by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2019), Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Just finishing the book now. I'd call it a rigorous validation of the conventional wisdom of the moment. Certainly required reading for anyone with weirder theories about
How I'm Successfully Digitizing Another Professorial Function: Consulting
[Update: Much of this turned out to be prescient, in fact so prescient that a lot below has been transcended by the creation of IndieThinkers.org. So I'm not really helping many people personally and directly anymore, but rather building scalable systems for doing so.] As loyal readers will know,
Life update from the Sunshine State
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The Second Problem of Being Perceptible Is Motivational Highjacking (Becoming Imperceptible III)
Another problem with being perceptible is easy to understand in our current digital context. It is a problem we might summarize as the motivational problem. Being perceived triggers dopamine, and dopamine hits train you to do more of whatever got you the dopamine. The more your motivation relies on dopamine
Tour stop in Raleigh, North Carolina this Thursday May 16
Currently in the mountains of western North Carolina, Iâm looking to buy an old broken down house somewhere for like $50k but I need to test Wifi quality first... On Thursday weâll be passing through Raleigh on a gracious invitation from @nicholatian and @resonanceknight. This will now be
We Are All Conspiracy Theorists Now
The collapse of trust in mainstream authorities is discussed as if it is only one of many troubling data points. It's not. People are still underestimating the gravity of the interlocking trends that get summarized in this way. For instance, when trust in mainstream authorities is sufficiently low, one implication
The Patchwork Intellectual
Patchwork intellectuals do not protest or endorse technological acceleration; they ride the waves of destruction wrought by disintermediation. They fall forward, sacrificing the twin pillars of security and prestige (which are now only shells) for advanced experiences of the socio-technical frontier. The comparative advantage of their new knowledge is its
Communism Is Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Nothing Else
Money is a trap, but how? For many years I believed that radical intellectuals and political revolutionaries (interchangeable terms, I thought) should simply eschew instrumental calculations altogether. As my understanding of intelligence developed, I eventually realized that â though there is a crucial intuition there â this position makes no sense. For
On Those Who Worship the Big Other
Nina Power just lost her gig at The Wire because of her appearance on my measly haphazard experimental one-man Youtube channel with no particular identity and a whopping ~2k followers. (Feel free to give our talk a listen, alternatively). The Wire is a small British music magazine you've probably never
Getting High on Easter Sunday
I got high in the morning, for the first time since I can remember. There exists a defensible Christian opposition to drugs, no doubt, but it's poorly calibrated to the Information Age. This is not to say it is incorrect for the Information Age, as a popular relativist interpretation would
Technocommunist Vectors: Radar Edition
When I first laid out my idea for a neo-feudal technocommunist patch, I only waved my hand at the coming technological pathways to my proposed polity. In that first talk, I just hypothesized that Rousseau's concept of the General Will could be engineered by Internet of Things + Smart Contracts. But
What I'm reading: Ernst JĂźnger
I've been exploring the work of Ernst JĂźnger, which I've never really read until now. The most cursory searching confirms a high likelihood of this man entering the Other Life pantheon. Consider the following from Eumeswil: When society involves the anarch in a conflict which in which he does not
Hateful Silence
What's great about modern tolerance is that we're rarely confronted with negative judgments about our personal choices (notwithstanding the resultingly elevated sensitivity to negative judgments, which makes some people perceive a growth of "hate"). However, one of the unfortunate consequences of tolerance is that people don't give advice like they
The First Problem of Being Perceptible Is Being Manipulated (Becoming Imperceptible 2)
This is the second post in a series, on the concept of "becoming imperceptible" in Deleuze and Guattari. The first one is here. For obvious reasons, we have strong inclinations to be understood by others. There is a problem here because, to the degree we wish to be perceptible to
AcademiaLeaks, University of Chicago Edition
I was just sent this by an anonymous reader. It's not private but it's not in the news. The reader says "Haha imminent collapse. For real though, mostly suggestions for more committees..." They went on, "It all started when grad students voted to form a union in 2017. Admin didnâ
Becoming Imperceptible (1)
Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly stress the importance of becoming imperceptible, but the idea remains poorly understood. When this phrase gets tossed around today, especially on the internet, it's often to glorify obscurity. Deleuze and Guattari are used to justify a certain kind of hiding. Consider, for instance, the number of
Open Letter Concerning Luke Turner
To all who oppose fascism: In a paranoiac and libelous screed written recently against Nina Power, yours truly is mentioned several times. The so-called "open letter" calls me a neo-reactionary, among other things I am not. Someone somewhere posted that it was probably an artist named Luke Turner, so I
Terre Thaemlitz on why you should just stop
Woker Nexus in my Discord server recently introduced me to the work of Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles. (If Woker Nexus sounds familiar, Woker is one of the more active participants in my Youtube livestreams). After a few minutes of browsing, I immediately understood the recommendation. Thaemlitz is a militantly
Some news and updates resettling
I'm now back in the United States, for the foreseeable future. My last two weeks in the UK were possibly my favorite two weeks in my 5.5 years there. On February 28, we went up to London with only what we could carry, for me to give a talk
Modern Liberalism Is Not Peace, It's Pacification
Readers of my work over the past few years will know that I have long been interested in how natural human rebelliousness gets pacified (1, 2, 3). I recently had the pleasure of working on this question with a group of co-authors, from very different methodological backgrounds. The final result
How to Deal With Punishment According to Nietzsche and Spinoza
I was just reviewing my copy of Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, before I send it off to someone through Version 2 of my book recommendation experiment. The person said they wanted something I consider âfundamental reading.â As often happens reviewing Nietzsche, I came across a passage surprisingly applicable to
Unfair Competition (How Academia Got Pwned 13)
This is the thirteenth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. It's going to become a book, so for updates be sure to subscribe. You are probably reading the first and only blog that a university has
Planning a tour, would you like me to visit you?
I have received just enough speaking invitations to announce that I'm pretty much embarking on a DIY book tour. Basically how punk bands do it: no agents, no rules, no frills. Would you like my wife and I to visit your town, for me to give a talk? For normal
Explaining Who Gets to Speak at Universities
I recently received the following question from a journalist (paraphrased): "Universities host many Islamist extremists as speakers, but they order comedians performing on campus to not offend transgender sensibilities. Could you comment on this double standard in light of your own experience?" Here is what I wrote in response. I
Deleuze, Cybernetics, Evolution, Academics
Alexander Galloway thinks that Deleuze sees cybernetics as an enemy, or even the enemy: Such a strange little text, this 'Postscript on Control Societies.'... The complaint is articulated in terms of control, communication, and the 'harshest confinement' wrought by 'the new monster' of information society... So why not call
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, and Intellectual Strategy
In 1836, when his Twitter profile still showed nothing but some obscure username and the face of a Roman statue, Ralph Waldo Emerson published a badass blog post called Nature. The day before he clicked "post," he setup a private chat forum called the Transcendentalist, which he hosted on a
On Not Being Fired (How Academia Got Pwned 12)
This is the twelfth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. In fact, now that I'm living
Evaluating Exit Modes: Resign or Be Fired? (How Academia Got Pwned 11)
This is the eleventh post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. I am considering the benefits and drawbacks of simply resigning, compared to being fired in my hearing tomorrow. One of the reasons Iâm finding it
Disrobed Academics, Crimethinc Anarchism, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
Thanks to some good questions in last night's livestream, I managed to give a relatively concentrated hour of talking, with a surprisingly high signal/noise ratio (relative to my average, which isn't saying much). With more than one machine-learning tool and a couple hours of editing, it's now searchable for
Other Life News and Links (February 6, 2019)
Other Life started as a âside project,â but it seems now to have escaped its cage, destroying my normal life, and growing itself into the project, which is now my life itself (at least until I go broke and have to find a salary, or get a phone call from
Respectability Is Not Worth It (Reply to SlateStarCodex)
I've had some vague notion of trying to contribute more to other intellectual communities, but whenever I start to write a quick reply, I end up hunched over in a room gone dark from nightfall with a word count that seems self-indulgent for a reply on someone else's blog. This
Early Days of Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned 10)
This is the tenth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. For such an extraordinary idea, with
Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned 9)
This is the ninth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. "Interesting points," you might be thinking,
Remodeling the Units and Flows of Intellectual Production (How Academia Got Pwned 8)
This is the eighth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. [This post dives deeper into some
Rethinking intellectual production models (How Academia Got Pwned 7)
This is the seventh post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. Youâll recall from my last
I Have a Dream (How Academia Got Pwned 6)
This is the sixth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. At some point, I will very likely edit and compose this story into a nice little book. My hearing for âgross misconductâ was supposed to take
Reputation (How Academia Got Pwned 5)
This is the fifth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. At some point, I will very likely edit and compose this story into a nice little book. To hear about that, make sure you've subscribed. If
The Highest Ranking Non-Player Characters (How Academia Got Pwned 4)
This is the fourth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. I'm curious: Would you like to read the whole story, edited, in a beautiful paperback? I may have an announcement soon, so be sure to subscribe.
Paid Vacation Begins (How Academia Got Pwned 3)
This is the third post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. My first day of teaching in Fall 2018 would have been October 3rd, so of course â normally â I would have spent the day and night of
Mushrooms, Modafinil, and Mass Shooters (How Academia Got Pwned 2)
This is the second post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. Tell me: Would you like to read the whole story, edited, in a beautiful paperback? I may have an announcement soon, so be sure to subscribe.
How Academia Got Pwned (1)
This is the first post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This blog will now commence a strange and winding tale. If it requires many installments, and many detours, it is because I am still living this
Student debt is worse than a bubble
I've often thought about higher education today as a kind of economic bubble, though I've always wondered if that's quite right. It seems to have the traits of a bubble: It seems overpriced, herd behavior and social conformity appear operative, and there's good data suggesting it doesn't do what it
Suicide should be slightly stigmatized
For people on the brink of suicide, struggling with excruciating suffering, no good would ever come â and wanton cruelty would certainly result â from stigmatizing their difficult situation. I wish for all such people to be treated with nothing but compassion. For instance, compassion makes me hope that no such person
Two kinds of hustle
To get the kind of life I want, or anywhere close to it, I realize I'm going to have to hustle like crazy. But one thing that's become immediately clear to me is that working hard has profoundly variable effects on well-being, conditional on what the work means to the
Introducing monthly seminars
For the past two months, I've been hosting private online seminars for patrons supporting me at $25/month or more. The first one was good, but the second session really took off. Participants became comfortable sharing their projects, raising questions and constructive criticisms with each other, and the whole thing
When not to go with the flow
The task of identifying the line between good and evil is like infinitesimal calculus. Mere intuitions are insufficient, which is why "going with the flow" so easily ends in evil. Many marriages fail this way, as sincerely innocent intentions to "make friends" or enjoy "a rich private lifeâ all of
Algorithms and prayers
The mild-mannered socialist humanist says it's evil to use algorithms to exploit humans for profit, but the articulation of this objection is an algorithm to exploit humans for profit. Self-awareness of this algorithm may vary, but cultivated ignorance of one's own optimizing functions does not make them any less algorithmic
When does blogging become worth it?
A misconception about blogging is that one needs X number of readers before it's worthwhile, where X is some dauntingly high number. But actually, you only need Y readers, such that when you write something good, there is a non-trivial probability that it will get shared to X number of
Audience structure on the Left and Right of new indy media
It looks to me like the audience structure of public intellectuals and/or "content creators" differs across the Right and Left. Right-leaning writers/creators in contemporary culture seem to enjoy a larger variety of wide pyramids (anti-establishment populism), whereas left-leaning writers/creators produce for a smaller number of taller pyramids
Wang Yi's Other Life
A listener of the podcast writes me about a Christian pastor in China who was recently detained. The pastor Wang Yi has released a personal and theoretical statement that followers of my work (and readers of late Foucault) may find compelling. My listener summarizes the background: In your podcasts I've
If education is signaling, does moral signaling become a viable major?
In a recent post, I encountered an interesting empirical fact about the college wage premium accruing to low-ability college grads over the period 1979-1994. Looking at a 2003 article by Tobias, I wrote: "There is a lot of temporal volatility for the class of low-ability individuals. In fact, for low-ability
The non-linear effect of ability on earnings in the computer age
A reader/watcher/listener has brought to my attention another paper, which shows that, for college-educated individuals, earnings are a non-linear function of cognitive ability or g â at least in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979-1994. The paper is a 2003 article by Justin Tobias in
Genetic research disrupts racist views of welfare
Following on my post from yesterday, I've been thinking about how the widespread and often racist views of "welfare" in the United States â especially among poor whites â fester on top of the educated-progressive party line that heritable IQ differences are bunk. An interesting wrinkle from the study I cited yesterday
Study finds the relationship between genes and earnings increased after 1980
Someone sent me a recent NBER working paper by Nicholas W. Papageorge and Kevin Thom on polygenic scores and educational attainment/earnings. Most pertinent to my theoretical interests is that the link between genes and income appears to increase over recent decades. In my lectures on the politics of media
Against the Epistemic Status
I've been considering the idea of assigning an "epistemic status" to each of my blog posts, in the fashion of Scott Alexander. Basically: adding an addendum at the top of each blog post indicating the degree to which I really believe what is said in the blog post. Perhaps I
Are Politically Correct Students Better or Worse Students?
In my current book project, one of my goals is to provide the fullest possible empirical accounting of the strange new persona sometimes derisively called the "social justice warrior." Although the main contours of my argument are pretty well developed, there are various sub-hypotheses that I've had for a while
The Psychology of Supporting Open Borders
Angela Nagle makes the case that open borders are not consistent with leftist politics. The wonderful thing about the intensity of the culture wars right now is that, with a little bit of courage, you can make quite a splash with ideas that were conventional wisdom for hundreds of years.
You can be neutral on a moving train
There's a popular idea that one can't avoid taking some political position because having no position is to support the status quo. In the words of Howard Zinn, "You can't be neutral on a moving train." For a while, I agreed with this, but I don't think I believe it
Segmentation and personalization for philosophers and scientists
The techniques used by today's marketing professionals, such as "customer segmentation" and "web-page personalization," would appear to be emblems of instrumental, exploitative communication. Today, we are so saturated with instrumental communication that Orwell's 1984 sounds benign in retrospect ("doublethink" feels quaint compared to the "multithink" we have now). At the
On Intellectual Twitter Beefs
Smart and capable people spend vast amounts of time engaged in useless, circular debates on a platform that is arguably designed to thwart intellectual illumination. Why? No sane person would ever consciously choose or agree to participate in these monstrous wastes of effort, and yet even smart people do it
Radical Europeans of the Twentieth Century â In Color
Machine-learning techniques for automated colorization are increasingly effective and accessible. I came across a Python library by Algorithmia that makes colorization very easy. If you have a working installation of Python, all you need to do is install the package and get an API key. Then just a few a
The rich are more communist than they're allowed to be
When I talk about aristocratic communism â the idea that a functional communism might be achieved by organizing and enforcing respect for the rich, on condition they distribute wealth â many people scoff and say "that's already the hell of neoliberal capitalism!" But in fact, today, it's increasingly difficult for the wealthy
Fascism over yourself is called autonomy
When I recently sketched out a system for bootstrapping a libertarian communist society from a combination of AI and blockchain, I was genuinely surprised to receive so many indignant accusations to the effect that I'm an authoritarian. I was called a Duginist, a neoliberal, and even a fascist, etc.
Now, wars start themselves
Major wars have become less frequent, but a curious feature of the wars we still observe is that almost nobody starts them. When wars occur today, they appear to start themselves, or are started by some unknown entity. I learned this from a new article by Hathaway et
Educated Errors? On Perceptions of Trump's Ideology
More educated individuals generally know more than less educated individuals. If you test what they know about any random political issue, for instance, uneducated individuals are more likely to give an incorrect answer, or say "I don't know," relative to more educated individuals. At first this sounds obvious, but what
Durkheim Meltdown
The French sociologist Ămile Durkheim believed that one defining feature of a profession is that the attitudes and behaviors that count as "professional" within it are of no interest to the general public. My recent experiences suggest that whatever Durkheim was referring to has changed a lot since the time
The Catholic Coordination Game
[Disclosure: I don't actually know that much about European feudalism. Most of my posts contain a fair bit of speculative guesswork and imagination, but after finishing this I felt compelled to make clear it's almost all conjecture. Rather than make every sentence wishy-washy with too many qualifiers, I've kept many
Free Hierarchy
Libertatem hierarchia. What we call European feudalism was the becomingâpatchwork of the Roman Empire. As the control structures of the Roman Empire atrophied, and the de facto liberty of its subjects increased, those subjects sorted themselves according to their objective levels of political power. Slaves sorted into Serfdom, mid-tier
Is parental social status a mixed blessing? On toleration for occupational drudgery
Many people assume that coming from parents with high social status is an advantage, because it would appear to increase the probability of gaining high social status for oneself. But what if parental social status is more like a weight on one's shoulders, an obligation heavy enough that, in some
What am I doing?
Many different people are asking me what's going on with me. In different languages, sometimes gleefully and sometimes worriedly, I have been asked some variant of "what are you doing?" so many times in the past couple of weeks that I figure I should just write one thing that I
Reality Patchwork and Neo-Feudal Techno-Communism (Transcript)
[This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Diffractions/Sbds event, "Wyrd Patchwork," in Prague on September 22, 2018. The video can be found here. My talk begins at around the 2-hour and 6-minute mark. I've added some links and an image.] I want to talk about
Eichmann in Oxford
I have recently been assigned to an Ethics Reviewer position, and I just had my first training. One of the lecture slides for this training was quite audacious: It placed the UK's current academic ethics initiatives in a glorious history, beginning with the Nuremberg Code of 1947. The Nuremberg code
Does a country's separation of powers affect its status culture?
I was recently wondering whether countries with more centralized executive and legislative powers (less checks and balances) might have more status-intensive cultures â or in some way a qualitatively different type of status culture. My hypothesis is inchoate but here it goes. When a government has few checks and balances (e.
Is it racist to use the Kekistani flag?
I was recently queried by a reporter in Arizona covering a story about some conservative university students who caused a scandal by displaying a Kekistani flag. It turns out that I am now the academic expert on this topic. His specific question was the degree to which Kekistan is rooted
The Devil Is in the Denial
The religious, who possess only tacit knowledge of the pragmatic truths inhering in religion, should be forgiven their occasional intellectual backwardness, for the same reason we forgive the idiocy of someone who recently suffered brain damage in a car accident. The religious today are still in a state of cognitive
WYRD PATCHWORKSHOP
I was recently approached by Diffractions Collective in Prague, who are working with a group called Sdbs, about hosting a discussion event on my livestream. The topic is patchwork. I don't know exactly what to expect, but naturally I said sure. They will be hosting a semi-public IRL event in
Why Do Muslim Immigrants and Western Leftists Like Each Other?
It's fairly well known that Muslim immigrants in Europe tend to support left-wing political parties, but it's not obvious why, given that Muslims tend to oppose key planks of Western social liberalism. It's even more puzzling why Western leftists so actively support the in-migration of Muslims, given that Western leftists
Make Communism Elite Again (Corralling Desperate Hordes Is Not a Blueprint)
Any serious theory of communism needs to have not only an account of how and why communism has always failed, but also an account of how and why it could work differently now. Ideally, a parsimonious theory would solve both of these puzzles at once: the specification of some key
Why Write One Book When You Can Speak 18 Volumes?
Have you ever wondered how and why The Life of Samuel Johnson is so damn long (and influential), even though he's just rambling like a livestreamer on adderall? Some thoughts on the current frontiers of idea production. Organic conversation is one of the most effective ways to generate thoughts; and
The Human Cartel, Part 1: The Working-Ruling Class
Why do so many people in large bureaucratic organizations spend so much time doing meaningless paperwork that has no effect on anything? One possible answer, suggested by David Graeber, is that the ruling class needs to keep the masses busy. I would not reduce Graeber's book to any one of
Fully Automated Luxury Communism as Rousseauean Techno-Commercial Cyber-Manorialism
My take on Fully Automated Luxury Communism is that â if it is anything â it should probably look something like a Rousseauean techno-commercial cyber-manorialism. In short, think The Four Hour Work Week with ~150 people enjoying guaranteed material comfort and deep belonging supported by a cryptographically formalized nobless
Some personal reflections on Jordan Peterson
If you've been following me for some time, you'll know that current affairs commentary is not exactly my strong suit. I don't really keep up on the news and my own thoughts and ideas are quite untimely â not in the cool Nietzschean sense, but in the lame way: a day
Occupations and Their Ideologies
Occupations are strongly sorted by ideology. Political scientist Adam Bonica has produced reliable and consistent estimates of ideological placement for a huge number of individuals, politicians, and organizations. As he writes here, he was especially struck by how extreme are the mean ideology scores for various occupations: Although the ideological
Sell Outs and Sell Ins
It's interesting to note that, since I've shifted a lot of my intellectual energy to autonomous work on the internet, I've received a fair number of accusations about "selling out" or "pandering." It's very strange because academia pays me to constrain my intellectual ability into a highly ideological and politically
Bear Traps
It is very clever how Moldbug chooses extra-provocative phrases and examplesâfor instance, extended reflections on the successful infrastructure projects of the Third Reich. He likes to purposefully trip social justice trip-wires, as if he's a literal Nazi naĂŻvely unaware that certain rhetorical choices are way beyond problematic. He's playing
Stream Theory
As a livestreamer, you ignore the entire world to focus your attention on a subset of people who are genuinely interested in you. Entrance into the practice of livestreaming immediately leads you to ask yourself questions such as: Why should I pay any attention, or have any interactions physical or
Aristocracy and Communism
Communism remains the best conceivable form of human organization, and it can work, but the major catch is that it requires something that smells intolerably fishy to those who are most likely to want communism (left-wing activists). I will try to show that a workable and highly desirable communism is
Catholicism as Nomad War Machine (Deleuze and Chesterton)
Chesterton: Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians
Theology and experimental method
I think tomorrow morning I will take the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession). It will be the first time for more than 15 years. Why not? I will do it with absolute sincerity, but also reflect on it afterward as an experiment I am conducting on my being. High-IQ rationalists often
Hard Forking Reality (Part 3): Apocalypse, Evil, and Intelligence
This post is the third in a three-part series. You can also read Part 1 and Part 2. To the degree we can refer to one objective reality recognized intersubjectively by most people â to the degree there persists anything like a unified, macro-social codebase â it is most widely known as
Hard Forking Reality (Part 2): Communication and Complexity
This post is the second in a three-part series. You can also read Part 1 and Part 3. There was once a time, even within living memory, in which interpersonal conflicts among strangers in liberal societies were sometimes solved by rational communication. By ârational,â I only mean deliberate attempts to
Hard Forking Reality (Part 1)
TLDR: Environmental complexity increases the cost of adjudicating interpersonal disagreements about the true model of reality, while information-processing power increases the payoffs (and decreases the costs) of organizing communities around one's preferred model of reality. Given that the Information Revolution has triggered globally and secularly increasing environmental complexity and information-processing
The interaction of education and race on Trump approval
The correlation between education and support for Trump is very different across the black-white divide. The graphs below I have taken from Civiqs. For white people with no college degree, a small majority approves of Trump: For white postgraduates, a small majority disapproves of Trump. Interestingly, this is more Trump
How to kill the grump in your head (Deleuzean #NiceRx?)
I can sometimes sense inside of myself, already, the early stirrings of elderly grumpiness. Needless to say, I do not like this, and so at this relatively early stage in my life, I must do everything possible to avert this sad fate. A few nights ago, I went to my
So what if Iâm afraid of death
I must admit to feeling afraid of death. I am drawn to religious belief, in part, because I think I do want help with my fear of death. I donât see why it would be an intellectual violation to want such help, and to experiment with solutions coming from
Religion is an extra-rational condition for the possibility of rationality
G.K. Chesterton happily understood in advance what the Frankfurt School theorists only observed with great horror after the fact. Namely, that without an authority such as the Catholic Church, placed above the orbit of merely rational calculation and willing to enforce ethical standards over its head, human reason will
Are the greatest beneficiaries of Effective Altruism its proponents?
[I’m not sure how much I believe this, this just barely passed my threshold of post-worthiness.] It seems to me that the greatest beneficiaries of Effective Altruism might very well be its proponents, who help others in a linear fashion but help themselves in a non-linear fashion. This
The net-negative utility of Utilitarianism in the long term
Utilitarianism, taken as a world-historical arrival at the level of civilization itself, might very well have a net-negative utility. It is perfectly plausible that an overly refined awareness of, and sensitivity to, utility would have unintended consequences tending toward catastrophically negative outcomes. Deontological ethical systems have often issued from this
Utilitarianism incentivizes suffering, or victim culture as a child of rationalism
Insofar as people live according to its suggestions, Utilitarianism strangely incentivizes suffering. In a society where utilitarianism operates as the governing philosophy, the accommodation you receive from others will be a function of your propensity to suffer. If a society is maximizing its net utility, then it will effectively care
On British Reservedness and American Boisterousness
The British are known be to reserved, and Americans boisterous, but I don’t think Americans communicate more in their higher volume of noises and gesticulations. If one could somehow measure the information content of interpersonal micro-gestures â all the nods, grunts, spoken comments people use to lubricate interactions with
Multiple heuristic equilibria (cognitive patchwork)
If we are living through a “semantic apocalypse,” a likely implication is that the signal-to-noise ratio in most explicit political debates is not only lower than it might seem, but asymptotically approaching zero. The differential value or accuracy of true news vs. fake news, or smart opinions vs.
A machine superintelligence might never display itself
This seems to me a crucial point not often discussed by the AI Risk folks such as Bostrom and Yudkowsky. Whether it’s a bug or a feature of the AI Risk industry is harder to know, a thorn in the side of their project, or beneficial for (potentially
Left Singularity
…modern political history has a characteristic shape, which combines a duration of escalating âprogressâ with a terminal, quasi-punctual interruption, or catastrophe â a restoration or ârebootâ. Like mould in a Petri dish, progressive polities âdevelopâ explosively until all available resources have been consumed, but unlike slime colonies they exhibit a