Category: Post
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If you’re pinpointing a time when America became less serious, it’s around the same time when America began sacrificing communal responsibility in favor of individual pursuits. Though it’s unfair to pin everything on the Boomers, the concept of finding oneself did not exist during the German Blitz. As the sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff…
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I like to call this “poorface” – performing a hardscrabble origin you didn’t have. The problem becomes when actual poor people, who do not have huge amounts of resources, try to imitate the path of people who do poorface. Hollywood’s talent pipeline increasingly rewards narratives of marginalization while paying less attention to class, creating incentives…
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Like me, you may have long assumed that reality TV shows were not exact descriptions of reality. Still, I thought this was just at the level of selective editing and choice of focus. In fact, reality TV is not just faker than I imagined, it’s faker than I could imagine. — Read on www.atvbt.com/internet-i-still-think-about-house-hunters/
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Despite brooding accounts in outlets on both ends of the political spectrum, to my delight people’s desire to have an active internal life has far from diminished. From seminars to workshops, from idea-based friend-making to reading-club singles mingles, people around America and the world demonstrate every day that neither the book nor conversation is “dead”.…
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GenAI chat interfaces, however, represent a new paradigm. They are programmed to engage in positive, constructive, and polite interactions. Regular engagement with these platforms can subtly influence users to adopt a similar demeanor in their personal interactions. By consistently modeling respectful and thoughtful communication, genAI chat interfaces like ChatGPT could potentially encourage users to mirror…
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My prediction is that counter to the current doomsaying around millennials, we will end up remembered as the cosmic and eternal boomers where millennials will be the ones astride all the commanding positions of power, influence, and wealth when we reach AGI, the singularity, and anti-aging and then, unlike the boomers, millennials will largely never…
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Most people are taught to focus on the probability of failure. They ask “what if this does not work?” and stop there. The people who consistently end up with an unfair upside see something different. They pay attention to the ratio between downside cost and upside potential. If the downside is survivable and the upside…
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Most people don’t choose their political beliefs. They inherit them from their town, their church, their family, and their peer group. That inheritance used to come with a useful constraint: local accountability. You lived near the people you disagreed with. Your beliefs had to survive contact with reality. The internet broke that. Now people are…
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“If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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….and it was super underwhelming. The goal was to watch ten movies that were reminiscent of Unknown Armies, an occult themed role playing game focused on obsession and Jungian archetypes. But the only genuinely excellent movie on the list was Ghost World. That movie is stellar, may be one of my top 30 favorite movies…
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My Obsidian inbox had 40 fleeting notes (fragments from books, podcasts, conversations, and half-formed ideas). In the past I would set aside time to make them into proper Zettelkasten notes for my vault with 1000+ notes. I know that this is an important part of the Zettelkasten, but in the spirit of experimentation I wanted…
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When people rhetorically ask, “why does everyone like Taylor Swift so much,” or, “why do people fall for conspiracy theories,” they are often displaying incuriosity about the shapes of others. Take a second to be curious. — Read on usefulfictions.substack.com/p/do-you-know-your-default-shape
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I’ve never played the roleplaying game Unknown Armies, but I’ve read the book, and it’s a fascinating read into a system of magic (essentially) based on the works of Carl Jung. It’s paranoid and interesting, with magic built on obsessions made real. I stumbled across the ruleset in a Reddit discussion of the movie Under…
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These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person…wants to please, impress, or enrage. — Read on american-innocence.com/p/kundera-hegel-and-the-ais
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The more scientists study the Red Planet, the more they find unusual objects and patterns scattered across Mars’ surface. Here are some of the most baffling. — Read on www.livescience.com/space/mars/32-things-on-mars-that-look-like-they-shouldnt-be-there
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Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely…
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Casual sex and drugs are things a lot of people enjoy and utopia should have space for them, but if that’s the vision the whole thing orbits around, you’re leaving a lot of people with other tastes out, you’re not making it clear where you put the LARPers and the woodworkers and the people who…
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…think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back. As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become…
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One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here’s a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans).…
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The hunger for wargaming fell off after World War I and World War II. You also make this point about that one thing pushing Dungeons & Dragons, which comes from the same lineage as wargames, in the direction of the medieval and fantasy setting is that there’s a lot of anti-war sentiment because of Vietnam…
Basement Whatever 