A Theory of Verbal Inflation
The central bankers of knowledge are inflating the word supply.
Theory & Philosophy
A collection of 75 issues
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.”
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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
Rap is not art but it’s cool
Rap is not art, it’s 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,
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 “needs to be heard.” Some do. I don't relinquish at all my conviction that exhaustive, collective, emotional unloading — what the feminist tradition once called "consciousness raising" — is a veritable form of revolutionary politics with
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
Shared roots versus hard forks
I’m 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
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 X’s concept is “built on” Y’s concept — but the only justification for thinking and speaking this way
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
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
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
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
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
Suicide should be slightly stigmatized
For people on the brink of suicide, struggling with excruciating suffering, no good would ever come — and wanton cruelty would certainly result — 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
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
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 — especially among poor whites — fester on top of the educated-progressive party line that heritable IQ differences are bunk. An interesting wrinkle from the study I cited yesterday
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
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
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
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
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 — not in the cool Nietzschean sense, but in the lame way: a day
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
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 — to the degree there persists anything like a unified, macro-social codebase — 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 “rational,” 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
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
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
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 — 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.