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Quote of the day – no, the month
From Tim Ferriss’ newsletter
“I will have to remember ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.’”
— From The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander -
The Eight Atlanta SSC Meetup – two is a talkative number
It was just just BJ Campbell and myself, but that allowed for a very enjoyable, extremely wide ranging conversation.
Many things discussed – the notion of evolved causes (see his crowdsourced religion and my “Let’s Kill Hitler”) seems to be what stuck with me the most after the meeting.
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Welcome Bandit
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The Tree
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Ideas to explore
- Ideology as the usable consensus of extreme personality types – see my “Let’s Kill Hitler” book idea. Basically the ideology evolves not as the continuation of first principles, but as a series of compromises on the part of part of the extreme personalities involved – basically the ideology is whatever allows a certain collection of extreme personalities to work together. Cooperation is the important thing – not the consequences. An extreme ideology will be composed of extreme members and so forth. See the the alt-right and modern wokeness. This seems graphable.
- Historical changes and atmospheric pollutants – this idea needs more research, but ideological and religious extremism tracks quite nicely with leaded gas and high tobacco usage. A doubtful relationship – but seemingly possible.
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Herman Wouk was alive until recently
I had no idea – most of the authors I read in my formative years died before I was born, or at least reading, but it seems that Herman Wouk just died at over 100 years old.
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The Genius of HP Lovecraft
I just finished my third book of the Cthulu mythos – The Whisperer in Darkness – and I’m still overwhelmed by Lovecraft’s brilliance. Every question he answers raises two more, in a sly subtle way. The baroque writing style makes it all the more realistic and entrancing
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Quote of the moment – big data edition
From HP Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
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The looming specter of the Murder Ghandi
One of the things that came up at the last SSC Atlanta meetup was the notion of the Murder Ghandi (read the link for an explanation). It’s easy to think of the whole concept as a good example of slippery slopes, i.e. where the same person faces different incentives over time. However, I think the true point is a bit more lasting than that – and much more useful and interesting.
The “make me 1% less pacifistic” pill does not just change the incentives – it is fundamentally a transformative experience for the pill taker. The person who takes the second pill is not the same as the person who took the first pill. The person is different, not the incentives. This should be explained by mathematical formula.
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The Seventh SSC Atlanta Meetup – the Devil Advocates!
I’ve waited a bit too long to write this up, as I’ve forgotten the salient links I was going post – the gist of it
- We did not make technological predictions
- I did my best to play the devils’s advocate position and come up with any defensible restrictions on free speech – it was quite difficult and I did not succeed.
One thing that did occur to me is that that everyone who goes to these sorts of things is all on one side of the “Atomized individual vs member of society” spectrum. I need to explore that a bit. And as promised, for a view from very much the other side of that spectrum, here is the long memory. It’s good to listen to people who don’t agree with you, and indeed are playing an entirely different game.
The turnout was good – five people IIRC.
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Zucked – as summarized from the Sam Harris interview
I listened to the Sam Harris interview with Roger McNamee – author of Zucked – Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. It can be summarized as follows
Facebook takes something we should (in McNamee’s opinion) value, but don’t (in this case, privacy) and converts it into something we actually do value, but shouldn’t (in McNamee’s opinion) (in this case a sense of hyperbolic community), all the while making tons of money in the process.
Not that much deep thought involved – lots of willful ignorance centered around the central dilemma: if person A and person B have a conversation, then that conversation is practically (perhaps not morally, but practically) owned by persons A and B. It is NOT just person’s A data. If they decide to have it via Facebook, then it (for all intents and purposes) belongs to Facebook too.
I’m in the anti-Facebook camp, and I listened to this feeling very unimpressed with my own side.