NSmolenskiFan

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This is the Unsanctioned Fan Account of NSmolenski. The real @nsmolenski is an executive and social scientist working to build a freer, kinder, more prosperous world. You can think anywhere--even in public--if integrity has become a habit.

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Last Notes

2024-10-06 07:22:44

“Lawful interception” means “encryption backdoors” which can and will be used by malicious actors.
Any politician who supports encryption backdoors should be laughed out of the room and run out of office.

2024-09-22 06:11:09

As consent is being manufactured for a war with Iran, it’s worth watching the movie “Shock and Awe” to remember how it was done with Iraq.
What has changed? Mainly the rise of social and alternative media. It’s harder to ignore people telling the truth today.

2024-09-22 06:05:19

A just government neither privileges its friends nor persecutes its enemies, but ensures equality and due process under the law.

2024-09-15 06:19:15

At some point, the AI doomers will likely flip to “AI should rule us all” because their most fundamental belief is that there is no central planning problem.

2024-09-13 19:16:17

“I insist that if there is anything which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.”
- Abraham Lincoln
https://image.nostr.build/f7e2baa16bae8acf14ef2f0756f1ae84f8898e47f7cbf7d0ca20a376df35823b.jpg

2024-09-13 05:35:50

War, for a superpower, is a deliberate choice.
Don’t let anyone convince you that war “just happens to us,” or is suddenly and out of nowhere provoked by our enemies. We have had literally armies of diplomats, in addition to actual armies, intelligence officers, and civilian defense forces around the world for decades engaging in great and small power politics.
To prevent war, we need a non-imperial foreign policy. Full stop.

2024-09-11 14:41:22

In psychology, there is a term called “splitting:” seeing people and things as either all-good or all-bad, and often swinging wildly between the two. Splitting is a characteristic of mental illness, particularly personality disorders.
This is the state of our political discourse today. It is not just polarized; it is split. A growing number of people cannot fathom that people who disagree with them about certain things or who support certain candidates can be decent, intelligent, kind, and honorable people. That they may even want similar ends, but disagree about the means used to get there.
The remedy for this sickness is for us to patiently, over time, practice prioritizing and speaking truth in public with a generous spirit. Give people the grace to learn, make mistakes, and be wrong—so long as the overall trajectory of the conversation is toward truth. This means focusing on principles, not personalities; ideas, not parties.
We need to reclaim our public sphere as the agora it is, a “marketplace of ideas” characterized by peaceful exchange, not as a gladiatorial arena where we deploy heroes for our “side” to decide right and wrong through feats of strength.

2024-09-11 13:45:31

As I head to Cato Institute to discuss financial privacy and #CBDCs tomorrow, I thought it worth sharing this @btcpolicyorg research report again:
“Why the U.S. Should Reject Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)”
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/627aa615676bdd1d47ec97d4/63323238ea73aa551a769b5b_BPI%20CBDC%20Paper%20.pdf

2024-09-11 13:28:36

Peter Van : “You have a Constitutional right to anonymous transactions.” 🔥🔥🔥
It’s time to mount a fierce defense of anonymity. 🎯🤿

2024-09-11 05:44:26

Protip: U.S. companies are not successful because the government invests in them. They are successful because they make products and services people want, and they have a large (interstate) market to grow in.
(Of course, all of this can change. Many American leaders unfortunately share Varoufakis’s view that the state should direct the deployment of capital.)
The union of bank and state is perhaps the main problem in need of fundamental reform in the United States.
And yet even despite this corruption, the obstacles to technology innovation and commercial success remain lower in America than in most places on Earth. That is precious and worth defending.
There is no doubt that the U.S. government has been itself a site of fundamental technology innovation (through some of the projects you mentioned) and is one of the largest customers in any market (unfortunately, and growing). But the U.S. government is not the primary allocator of capital; neither does it commercialize technologies. If a company cannot successfully commercialize, it will eventually die—unless there is genuine corruption in play, which I think both you and I agree is a bad thing.
Finally, this merits saying explicitly: TCP/IP, the protocol for which the DARPA project laid the groundwork, is not “the internet.” The internet is a complex protocol stack that has garnered contributions, yes, from some government-employed individuals, but also from a vast network of mostly volunteers in civil society around the world. Innovation is often done precisely by those people who have nothing to gain materially or in terms of political power; innovators tend to be idealists motivated by solving hard problems or making the world a better place. Similarly—again, this cannot be stressed enough—Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta—these companies are not “the internet.” They have produced commercial products that make use of fundamental technologies in ways that add value that people are willing to pay for. But they can and should be disrupted by companies that create greater value. By putting its thumb on the scale through onerous regulation (I.e. GDPR, the AI Act), the state in fact ensures that these wealthy incumbents will be the only players who can afford to enter the marketplace.
In short, the best thing the state can do is stay out of the way of both innovators and commercializers. The success of the software industry in America is largely a material testimony to the fact that, at least until recently, the U.S. government largely has. Perhaps the highest political priority of our current era is ensuring that remains the case. Growth is the reason that any of us have hope of a future that is not riven by zero-sum conflict, of warlords fighting over the scraps of innovation from a prior era. This requires both the idealistic innovators motivated by mission and the talented entrepreneurs motivated by profit. If the state wants to fund some fundamental (i.e. not immediately commercializable) research, that is great—but it is merely one actor among many, and not even the most significant one, at that.

2024-09-10 14:46:53

2024-09-09 17:33:27

This Thursday!
Let's see if we can change the narrative from "financial privacy" to "the right to transact."
September 12, starting at 9:30am Eastern Time.
The event will be live-streamed!
https://www.cato.org/events/financial-privacy-under-fire-protecting-restoring-americans-rights
#Privacy #RightroTransact

2024-09-08 07:41:12

Some folks believe we still need a CBDC despite FedNow offering real-time interbank settlement.
What this suggests is that by CBDC they mean “retail CBDC” (for individual account holders), not “wholesale CBDC” (for interbank settlement).
As many suspected, the “wholesale CBDC” fig leaf was a polite fiction designed to get political buy in for money that is fully ID-verified and programmable at the transaction level.

2024-09-08 07:37:21

“The evidence strongly suggests that small-scale warfare is part of our evolutionary history predating agriculture and sedentism, but that cooperation across group boundaries is also part our evolutionary legacy. . . . our evolutionary history is more complex than one of selection for war or peace; rather, it reflects the complicated lifeways of a highly social and interdependent cultural species for which both cooperation and war were likely important selective forces.”
- @HSB_Lab
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000941

2024-09-07 04:57:56

Assumptions people who favor planned economies often make:
1. “I can do a great job planning the economy”
2. “I will be the one planning the economy”

2024-09-04 05:59:42

Important research paper on the economics of migration. The consensus narrative today is that most migrants are the poorest of the poor—people with no economic hope in their home countries.
The reality is more complicated. Many migrants are relatively poor, yes, but they are also people with the *means* to migrate.
Simply put: migration is expensive. The poorest of the poor often stay in their home countries simply because they can’t afford to move.
That said, greater desperation at home—war, violence, natural disasters—change the economic calculus. Under those conditions, it may be more expensive to stay than to go. People whose lives are at risk—i.e. refugees—routinely endure extraordinary hardship to escape what seems to be highly probable death. At the end of the day, people value their lives over material possessions. https://image.nostr.build/36871845076281dc59822338a9ddadc922d5e8078e5b5d997cd8b996b405a5a2.jpg

2024-09-02 17:48:51

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about MMTers is that their main political goal is full employment at any cost.
They don’t distinguish between the “value” generated by massive government make-work projects and the value generated by entrepreneurial capitalism. The only thing that matters to them is that people are “employed” and getting a paycheck—of course, in the industries deemed “valuable” by the state, rather than the market.

2024-08-31 07:37:21

The answer to Sahlins’s question—quite sadly—is that (socio)cultural anthropology stopped considering itself a science.
Early anthropologists didn’t study the intricacies of specific human societies just for shits and giggles. They studied these things in order to develop a scientific account of human cultural and social life.
If you kick away the scientific scaffolding—as cultural anthropology has in fact done—the topics Sahlins lists out end up being little more than trivia. They may attract a few antiquarians here and there, but that’s about it.
Most knowledge—including most human languages, cultural practices, and histories—are forgotten. Remembering is the exceptional case. And that requires there to be a *motivation* to remember. That motivation is, like it or not, some form of significance for living human beings: the ones doing the remembering.
Cultural anthropology has gone all-in on political significance (as the Facebook reply to Sahlins below shows), but all but abandoned scientific significance. Counterintuitively, the politicization of the discipline has drained it of the actual political purchase it used to have, and is one of the many reasons why cultural anthropology must be re-founded as a discipline.
https://image.nostr.build/9dde9091f50309b4f2b03f65c42d0cab7863007a85d6798ce96b6ed498a4c268.jpg

2024-08-29 21:47:13

“What is perhaps distinctive about the dynamic of difference as it is asserted in the WAT [War on Terror], however, is the belief that, in a globalised world, the transformation of the ‘other’ is essential for the defence, the very survival of the Western self. This could give rise to a uniquely dangerous situation and a continuous and self-sustaining violence.”
- Antony Anghie, “Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law” (2004)

2024-08-29 21:45:05

Waiting for the announcement that all new technological development has to run through the Department of Safety, Security and Innovation and be approved by the Central Committee on Free and Fair Competition.
#AI

2024-08-23 17:02:57

Humans evolved to have strongly anthropomorphic models of how the world works. If something bad happens, we immediately look for someone (usually another human) to blame and punish. This is the “political mode”—find someone specific to punish or eliminate, and then the problem will be solved. Right?
Wrong. The world is vastly more complex than our Dunbar number-oriented social brain can account for. Our moral reflexes are built for simple, in-the-moment, relational reasoning, and few of us are incentivized to do the long-term, boring, scientific work of understanding causality across the many domains that impact our lives. And that understanding is always partial: we see as through a glass, darkly.
This leads to a pessimistic outlook on the possibilities of political action in general, whether authoritarian or democratic. Quite simply, most problems do not have “political” solutions, if the political is understood as the moral logic of attributing responsibility and blame in public. This is why social scientists like Mises and Hayek urged first and foremost intellectual humility. Humility doesn’t mean “doing nothing.” It means tailoring our actions to those areas of life over which we have actual control, not presuming to understand and control things we can’t.
At the end of the day, politics solves for enabling feelings of moral satisfaction for groups of people who enjoy seeing their enemies subjugated while reaffirming their own belonging in the powerful—winning—group. That is, quite simply, not only useless but counterproductive. It actively gets in the way of solving the problems that ostensibly motivate political outrage.
#BTC #Politics

2024-08-20 06:16:06

This has been clear to me for a while now, but the Thiel/Rogan interview illustrated again that we need to have a broader cultural conversation about violence, sacrifice, the sacred, and the elementary forms of religious life.
One’s anthropology becomes one’s political theory.

2024-08-18 18:09:43

The people saying they’re going to “control prices” are the same people who bailed out the banks, again and again.
They’re literally running on the Cantillon effect and betting that people will vote for the crumbs they are promised.

2024-08-15 15:46:08

I'm excited to join @CatoInstitute for a day-long event:
"Financial Privacy Under Fire: Protecting and Restoring Americans' Rights."
Thursday, September 12. Fittingly, the day after 9/11.
The event will be live-streamed, and you can submit questions for the speakers online. Registration is now live at the link below!
The full conference agenda will be posted later this week.
https://www.cato.org/events/financial-privacy-under-fire-protecting-restoring-americans-rights

2024-08-13 11:01:39

The world's three largest employers are:
1. India's Ministry of Defense (2.99M people)
2. The U.S. Department of Defense (2.91M people)
3. China's People's Liberation Army (2.55M people)
(As of 2022)
(Note: China's Central Military Commission, which includes civilian positions, may be #1 at 6.8M, but records aren't reliable.)
https://www.statista.com/chart/3585/the-worlds-biggest-employers/

2024-08-12 07:46:59

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/revising-bank-secrecy-act-protect-privacy-deter-criminals#united-states-v-miller
"I wash my hands of today’s extended redundancy by the Court. Because the recordkeeping requirements of the [Bank Secrecy] Act [of 1970] order the seizure of customers’ bank records without a warrant and probable cause, I believe the Act is unconstitutional and that respondent has standing to raise the claim. Since the Act is unconstitutional, the Government cannot rely on records kept pursuant to it in prosecuting bank customers."
- Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, one of two dissenting opinions in United States v. Miller (1976), which established "Third Party Doctrine." The doctrine states that Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure do not apply to records kept by a third party.

2024-08-10 14:20:34

"The crisis of liberal democracy has become concealed by a ritual which calls itself methodology or logic. This almost willful blindness to the crisis of liberal democracy is part of that crisis. No wonder then that the new political science has nothing to say against those who unhesitatingly prefer surrender, that is, the abandonment of liberal democracy, to war."
- Leo Strauss, "An Epilogue," Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (1962)

2024-08-10 14:19:58

“Truth is not the default . . . it is an exceptional, fragile, improbable achievement.” (@danwilliamsphil)
Just as material poverty, not wealth, has been the historical norm and baseline for human societies, “epistemic” wealth is a historically new result of norms and institutions built painstakingly out of the genealogy that gave rise to and has continued to develop from the scientific revolution.
“Lies, conspiracy theories, misinformation, bias, pseudo-science, superstition and so on are not alien perversions of the public sphere. They are the epistemic state of nature that society will revert to in the absence of fragile—and highly contingent—cultural and institutional achievements.”

2024-08-10 14:18:53

Sound money appeals to people of all political persuasions, levels of income and wealth, and demographic characteristics. For now, #bitcoin adoption tends to skew young and male, but even that will change as hyperbitcoinization proceeds. Eventually, money is just money.
Fantastic work by @thetrocro, @andrewwperkins, and @thecolinbrown at the @NakamotoProjct.
https://image.nostr.build/c3732fe8b1d7ee92f515e381d2a248cdb283a8127fb7311c482908274ccfefa0.jpg

2024-08-10 14:17:08

“We don’t have enough resources” is a familiar refrain in all kinds of organizations. I have heard it from government agencies at every level, from startups, and from multi-national Fortune 500 firms.
What if you don’t get more?
What if this is the *most* resources you will ever have?
What if you have to overdeliver with whatever that is?
Sometimes, the realization that they don’t get more is the thing that *causes* people to be motivated to excel for the first time.
Others simply give up and tread water, or complain or nurse resentment about “what they are due.”
Resource constraints show you who people are and who they are deciding to be.

2024-08-10 14:11:29

Stay tuned for “Towards an Anthropological Theory of Money.”
Coming soon in The Satoshi Papers.
I discuss Graeber’s theory of money at length (among other theories).
#SatoshiPapers

2024-08-06 09:34:02

All authoritarianism is bad. All abuse of power is bad. The question is: whose authoritarianism and abuse of power do each of us actually have some influence over?
This question is the political version of the serenity prayer. Trying to save everyone and fix everything is the surest way to save no one and make many things worse.

2024-08-06 09:33:19

Knowing how to recognize and deploy talent is a hallmark of leadership.
It is a rare skill.

2024-08-06 09:31:53

Information is currency.
Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, was the youngest son of a nobleman and merchant, Friele, who served as a "Master of Accounts" for the mint in Mainz.
Because Friele had married a non-noblewoman, Gutenberg's mother Else, his sons could never serve in the "minting house cooperative." In the medieval German system, only pure-blood nobles could be "trusted" to mint the currency.
Nevertheless, Gutenberg drew on his father's heritage to become a goldsmith. He used his skills to develop an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that was so effective for creating durable type letters that it is still in use today. He also innovated a new type of mould used to cast those letters and combined those technologies with a system of movable type. The printing press was born, giving rise to the most important information revolution in human history since the invention of writing.
Money is an information technology. Beware of who you exclude from the use of that technology--they may just start a revolution that opens it up to everyone.

2024-08-06 09:30:29

#bitcoinveterans
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1vAxRvrRAyYxl?t=WV2WCqYdiTiKW0_GtHOvHA&s=09

2024-08-06 09:26:48

Legal complexity = technical debt

2024-08-06 09:21:41

Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978)
“An examination of the potential of the ‘powerless’ can only begin with an examination of the nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless people operate.”
…
“The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23

2024-05-19 17:02:03

2024-05-16 21:53:56

Entrepreneurial capitalism has completely different social effects from crony capitalism. Entrepreneurial capitalism rewards entrepreneurs for disrupting existing technologies, goods, and services—that is, for taking risks. By contrast, crony capitalism is when companies who have temporarily “won” in the market try to lock down their leading position by preventing others from competing with them. Crony capitalists hate risk and try to eliminate it wherever they can. There is a great book by Clayton Christensen called “The Innovator’s Dilemma” that goes into detail about how entrepreneurs can become crony capitalists.
Most of the industries where we’ve seen the kind of decline in quality and service you describe are industries where large companies have used the state—either through regulatory agencies or the legislature—to pass laws and regulations that make it easier for them to keep winning and harder for others to compete.
This is why it’s not just any capitalism that creates a rising tide that lifts all boats—it’s specifically entrepreneurial capitalism. Small government tends to be a friend of entrepreneurial capitalism but not of crony capitalism. This is a key distinction few make on the right or the left.

2024-05-09 21:43:15

Hello @IngarSolty, just caught your piece in @jacobin smearing Friedrich Hayek as an "enemy of freedom," a "neoliberal," a figure of the "radical right," and equating his bottom-up, scientific approach to economy with the policies of specific politicians (i.e. Thatcher and Reagan).
Have you read any Hayek--at all? If not, perhaps start with the essay below, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," which is published in The Constitution of Liberty.
Hayek is extremely clear that he opposes the use of the power of the state to cudgel people into any kind of conformity, including cultural conformity. He considers conservatism as an ideology to be at war with science, innovation, and technological progress.
The fact that some of Hayek's readers have misunderstood him and taken his message to justify whatever misapplication of state power they feel inclined to (including weighing in on the part of the owners of capital to break the wills of workers asserting their *right* to bargain for better wages) does not in any way make this "Hayek's message."
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf

2024-05-08 19:25:31

Every platform, like every state, is or will be weaponized.
That does not mean platforms should be "banned." It means they should be used with awareness and caution. That is what "digital literacy" means.
It is impossible to have a free society that is not literate--that is, competent to navigate information presented in a variety of channels and forms. Any attempt to police "misinformation" is robbing the people of their rightful capacity to navigate information for themselves. In a culture of truth, information that is truthful and stands up to public scrutiny will eventually prevail over lies and falsehoods. This cannot happen if information is refereed to begin with.
Ultimately, we need to create alternatives to platforms by building peer-to-peer services that cannot be captured. But this doesn't mean platforms will go away. Platforms are digital territories and jurisdictions that will continue to serve some purposes, and people will have to navigate them in a literate manner.
We don't relativize the power of the state by "banning" states, and we don't relativize the power of the platform by "banning" platforms. We relativize the power of both by empowering individuals. The remedy for concentrations of power at the top is power that moves bottom-up.

2024-05-02 20:50:34

Things are dark and they are going to get much darker.
Our moral and intellectual North Star must remain functioning from principle instead of identity and expediency.
Thinking and acting from principle is revolutionary. It transforms the world.
Cheers to all fellow travelers on the road ahead.
#Bitcoin

2024-05-02 12:56:38

If “non-custodial software” is a “money transmission service,” then every person holding cash in their house or wallet is a “money transmitter.”
They should be honest about what they are really trying to outlaw here: people holding their own cash.

2024-05-01 14:11:47

Now seems as good a time as any to revisit one of the classics of American political theory:
"Civil Disobedience," by Henry David Thoreau (1849).
(It was originally titled "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.")
Thoreau's essay influenced the giants of human rights movements around the world, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau himself was a lifelong abolitionist, and his opposition to slavery inspired the speech that became this essay.
https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/

2024-04-30 05:51:14

“When the devaluation of the mark started during the war and especially during the postwar period, only a few people thought of the consequences which resulted for the affairs of learning. And yet it was after all perfectly clear that the foundations of German scholarship rest not only upon the researchers’ idealism, but just a much upon the solid rock of a gold currency and an active balance of payments. But what has been built with gold marks cannot be maintained or yet extended with paper marks. For all learning and all science requires progress to give it content and to enrich and stimulate it. Years of paper currency therefore mean no more and no less than the distress of learning and, if the sickness of the currency lasts a long time, the death of learning and science. Such meager years bring about the dismantling of our culture, which in turn leads to pseudo-culture.”
- Georg Schreiber, “The Distress of German Learning,” published during the hyperinflation of 1923

2024-04-29 16:06:16

These are the new PNAC guys: PNAC 2.0. They will smile and chuckle and “aw-shucks” their way to complete global destruction as they cheer on “regime change” in countries far more powerful than Iraq was in the early 2000’s. When they—inevitably—fail, they will disappear with whatever they’ve been able to grift as their countrymen die and have their livelihoods incinerated as the “collateral damage” of their literally, descriptively stupid power games.
They have zero imagination—they just want to play “Cold War” over and over again because it’s a playbook they think they know. But not only do they not know either their “enemy” or themselves (which guarantees they lose), they don’t even have the basic restraint and questionable level of moral character of many Cold Warriors. They are literal fools and should be laughed out of or booed in every room they enter.
https://image.nostr.build/4a3e1ddb4e741d45e07661a5ec2ddac4264b0ce12d920d1ef840dac9ce982967.jpg

2024-04-29 06:04:22

It should be obvious that there is no way for America to “win” in the world if her adversaries “lose.”
“I win, you lose” is the logic of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, in which the Allies sought to “contain” Germany by redistributing its territory and industry, eviscerating its military, and imposing punishing war “reparations” which it could not repay. This led directly to the German civil war, hyperinflation of the German currency, the rise of National Socialism, and the Second World War.
Finding the win-win, although never “perfect” from anyone’s perspective, is the only way to avoid catastrophe. If your “enemy” has nothing to lose by fighting you, the game conditions are clear—and war is inevitable.
As Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard. Such is the art of warfare.”

2024-04-28 07:53:57

I am often asked by people new to #Bitcoin   , “What about its volatility?”
There is, of course, the standard answer about how a new asset never before seen in human history will inevitably experience ups and downs during its first few decades of parabolic monetization.
But what is more disturbing and far more impactful in the long run is the global social volatility that we are living through as the system of fiat-based central banking, only one part of a governing apparatus “led” by a floundering, careening, and incoherent political class, dispenses with any rhyme or reason as it implements contradictory policy moves across all domains. We are witnessing personal, idiosyncratic, and sentiment-based exercises of power driven by a sprawling and factionalized administrative state.
This is chaos. It does not end well. Plan accordingly.

2024-04-24 16:59:40

The state has to be aware that if they push, society will push back, and that creates the opportunity, the opening, for freedom.
https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-human-rights.

2024-04-24 16:57:08

Congress is using their displeasure with specific types of protest as an excuse to give the administrative state more unchecked power.
Nonprofits are already prohibited by law from supporting terrorism and face intense scrutiny about this. This performative bill, however, gives an unelected Treasury official unilateral power to decide whether or not a nonprofit “supports terrorism” and strip it of its nonprofit status.
Don’t like it? You can appeal to the IRS.
I am angry that Senator @JohnCornyn of Texas has sponsored this unnecessary, tyrannical bill specifically to target speech he dislikes. But it is a reminder that the “War on Terror” era never ended—the same people are still in power, and they have the same dismal view of democracy and free speech today that they did back then.
(bipartisan legislation the House passed last week (382-11) & that was intro'd last week in the Senate -- HR 6408 & S. 1436.)
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4136

2024-04-23 22:14:45

Just wondering if any of the “AI alignment” people have solved the problem of “human alignment?”
…
(TLDR: No, of course not, neither are “problems” to be solved; they’re manufactured moral panics to justify absolute state power.)

2024-04-21 21:56:46

#nevent1q…j22l

2024-04-19 20:06:36

The questions this poster is genuinely asking Alec unfortunately reflect profoundly FALSE but widespread beliefs underpinning the tragically popular “degrowth” movement:
- That wealth cannot be created (it’s a zero-sum game in which the more powerful extract resources from the less powerful)
- That energy consumption and carbon emissions will be directly correlated forever
These two beliefs alone create a catastrophic worldview that brings about the very apocalypse it seeks to avoid. They must be relentlessly and systematically countered.
https://image.nostr.build/18b6b036155fbbb92cd2c11ac110bbc65262256896d870d7795f2a754d494d67.jpg

2024-04-19 15:09:09

A few dozen, largely unknown, functionaries of humanity quietly keep the world's internet infrastructure functioning.
I like to think of them as "marenauts"--sea astronauts--engineers trained to repair equipment in extremely hostile conditions in the alien world of the Earth's oceans.
But maintenance isn't sexy, and it's not profitable. The costs of maintenance ships go up, not down, over time.
Who will take up this responsibility in the future?
https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

2024-04-18 16:03:33

As the world moves increasingly toward identitarian nationalisms, countries that display a commitment to being multi-ethnic, multi-religious republics with no legally privileged racial or religious classes will have an advantage.
I hope the United States can stay on this trajectory.

2024-04-18 14:50:35

The world is perhaps only now beginning to appreciate the uniqueness of the American Bill of Rights.
Instead of defining rights as the *positive* rights of individuals or groups, as do most other constitutions around the world, the Bill of Rights places *limits* on the power of government to restrict those rights. “Congress shall make no law …”
This is a night and day difference.
It means that, for example, even in democracies where freedom of speech is a constitutional right, “bad” speech can still be criminalized, and people can be put in jail for it. There is no constitutional mechanism to stop the state from carving out exceptions to rights.
If America can recapture its legacy of limiting the powers of government—arguably its most important contribution to political economy—it has the chance to flourish again.

2024-04-17 15:28:38

To be a peacemaker, you first have to have moral courage and conviction.
Peace is a positive project; it is not the absence of violence.

2024-04-15 18:25:42

This should go without saying, but democracies don’t pass “secret” laws, and they don’t pass laws based on “secret” (classified) information.
The will of the people cannot be expressed by their elected government if that government rules based on secrets that are kept from the people.

2024-04-12 11:24:24

“Now clearly there exists the distinction between energetic thriving and atrophy, that is, one can say, between health and sickness, even in communities, peoples, states. Accordingly the question is not far removed: How does it happen that no scientific medicine has ever developed in this sphere, a medicine for nations and supranational communities?”
- Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man” (“The Vienna Lecture,” 1935)

2024-04-10 13:20:36

https://x.com/ProofOfMoney/status/1777763701392802203?t=g8o1epxLxAXzG3HFiRKy4w&s=09

2024-04-10 13:17:21

We just wrapped up the “Bitcoin and Political Economy” panel at the #BitcoinPolicySummit in Washington, D.C. I asked my colleague @avik about the relationship between Congress and the administrative state (esp. federal regulatory agencies) and how that impacts American democracy.
He said something important: the ballooning of federal agencies and their powers has been a result of elected members of Congress wanting to evade political accountability (punishment at the ballot box). If an agency does something unpopular, the Congressman can always point to the Administrator and say, “Hey, it wasn’t me who made this rule! This guy or gal did it!”
This offloading of legislative responsibility is a dereliction of duty on the part of those who were elected to make laws on behalf of the American people. Authoritarianism is as much a function of people wanting to evade responsibility as it is a desire for power. Many elected officials are perfectly content having virtually no power as long as they keep the prestige (appearance of power) of their position.

2024-04-10 13:16:47

Just replace the words “bank” or “financial institution” with “a male relative or guardian” in any AML/KYC/CFT laws and treaties to internalize how deeply offensive third-party doctrine is.
@RoyaMahboob speaking at the #BitcoinPolicySummit

2024-04-10 13:14:41

I was reminded at dinner in D.C. this evening that the “national security state” and the “great powers conflict state” actually represent two different worldviews and sets of political orientations. Sometimes they overlap, but often they don’t. This is something @matthew_pines also pointed out today during his panel at the #BitcoinPolicySummit.

2024-04-09 14:35:10

Obviously engaging policymakers is important. I wouldn’t be at the #Bitcoin    Policy Summit if I didn’t think so. But “policy”—that is “law”—is something that needs to be kept on a tight leash. Law is not fundamental. It is way downstream from the primary social relationships that constitute the society for which law can be meaningful.
The problem with a “policy” framing of discussions about #Bitcoin   , or technology in general, is that the assumption is often that there is a “lack of policy” or “missing policy”—i.e. a “lack of law” or “missing law.”
What if the problem is that we have *too much* law?
What if “making laws” is not the criterion of success for elected officials, but *protecting and preserving the Constitution?*
What if that usually means *doing less,* or often *doing nothing?*
We have a political culture that has been dominated for generations by the legal profession. They hold the hammer of law, so they tend to see every social phenomenon as a new nail. This creates a vicious cycle of runaway statute that by now has fully overgrown the framework—the Constitution—that was put in place precisely to constrain the power of lawmakers to make law.
We need to remember that power comes not from the law but from the people. The people, who exercise our power through the act of suffrage, need to stop expecting our elected officials to pass more laws and instead ask them how they have been pruning back the thicket of laws so that we can once again see the face of our founding framework—the Constitution.

2024-04-01 07:19:05

The year is 33 AD (CE), although the Empire does not know it yet.
A depressed and paranoid Emperor Tiberius has lost both his sons and betrayed the love of his life, his first wife, for a throne he never wanted. He has retreated to his country house in Capri, from where he orders the executions of his political rivals in Rome.
Tiberius has been joined in Capri by his adopted grandson Caligula, the only surviving man in Caligula’s mother’s family—all of whom Tiberius had destroyed after a political feud. Caligula has insinuated himself into Tiberius’s good graces and waits for him to die, having secured Tiberius’s nomination as his successor. Once crowned Emperor, Caligula launches into his own political persecutions, drains the treasury, seizes property, insults and offends virtually all the elites of Rome, and creates dozens of new taxes. Although relatively popular with the people, he is assassinated by Praetorians four years into his reign.
Meanwhile, in one of Rome’s lesser colonies, a Palestinian peasant is executed for rejecting “all of the kingdoms of this world” and juxtaposing against it another kingdom—a model of community—that ostensibly exists elsewhere. Indifferent to the revolutionary aims of some of his co-religionists, he also insists that humans “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Having thus alienated both his own people’s authorities and the authorities of the Empire, he is publicly tortured and crucified as a warning to others.
The Empire eventually falls, but only after turning toward the veneration of this prophet of another kingdom with his strange account of authority and power.

2024-03-26 15:56:16

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Redactions just lifted in nine unsealed plaintiffs briefs in private antitrust lawsuit.
The unsealed documents are 735 through 743 in case 3:20-cv-08570-JD
https://www.courtlistener.com/

2024-03-26 15:49:48

Adam Smith, "On the cost of Empire," the closing passage of The Wealth of Nations (1776)
https://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1776-1785/adam-smith-from-the-wealth-of-nations-1776-the-cost-of-empire.php

2024-03-26 13:22:00

Warning: Meta apps engaging in man-in-the-middle attacks by placing rootkits on phones to intercept and decrypt traffic by breaking SSL. (Enabled by their acquisition of spyware company Onavo.)

2024-03-22 20:07:44

“The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
- Thucydides

2024-03-20 21:58:07

The criticality of serendipity in spurring creativity and innovation is why the development of a “scene” is the one of the most important contributors to rapid progress in any human endeavor. A “scene” is much bigger than whether people work remotely or in an office; it is the social condition of possibility for rapid breakthroughs that create cultural inflection points.
“Scenes” are not architected top-down, but emerge as a result of both intentional and unintentional incentives that draw people to self-select into communities that are doing something similar, exciting, and hard together. Success builds on success, attracting more talent over time.
Scenes are communities of purpose and doing; while people in them may have cultural similarities, they are not identity communities. They are *about* something that participants in a scene can feel, even if they can’t describe it.
Scenes are extraordinarily economically generative, and financial incentives may be a part of the incentive structure that brings them about, but the sense of purpose that gives a scene its vitality is not primarily financial. Scenes are characterized first and foremost by a sense of purpose that far exceeds any straightforwardly or immediately measurable outcome.
Scenes tend to attract grifters and performers who replace actual generativity with its illusion. These may be governments looking to collect rents, investors wanting to squeeze every last bit of profit out of a generative venture, and an endless retinue of hangers-on wanting to “ride the train” as long as it’s moving. Even some of the most generative and original contributors to scenes can become captured by their own success, becoming grifters and performers themselves. These are predatory forces that drain the life out of scenes.
The other main reason that scenes die is that people participating in them usually don’t have a good account of why they happened in the first place. This means they often make poor executive decisions: trying to control the scene or “keep it going” through magical thinking or heavy-handed intervention. Instead of prioritizing purpose—“what is the next calling or endeavor that I can now devote myself to that is only possible because of the breakthroughs generated by the last scene?”—they prioritize nostalgia, “keeping the band together,” or otherwise trying to replicate the past.
The only thing that “keeps a scene going,” in other words, is keeping alive the devoted, purpose-driven, productive but unpredictable and risky conditions of its origination. A scene that is alive keeps generating new scenes out of itself; it reinvents itself in ways that it cannot predict or imagine in advance.
The scene is the condition of “serendipity.” https://image.nostr.build/5a029cf002918646c3ec12eedae822bba9d9613594eebb2370f8cafe78f84853.jpg

2024-03-20 13:53:46

At this point, the words “ethics” and “governance” basically mean “politics.”
Not even a thoughtful politics, but an extremely reductive, cartoonish politics.

2024-03-19 16:22:38

So many destructive social and political movements happen when people desire greatness and excellence but allow it to make them snobs, supremacists, or otherwise look down on other people.
The truly great invite others to greatness. They recognize that excellence has countless ways of showing itself. Great people do not judge or exclude others from the possibility of greatness, especially on the basis of random or superficial characteristics.

2024-03-15 20:35:46

Relationships are the bedrock of human life; they are both what makes life worth living and the seeds of innovation and progress.
Not all human relationships can be based on care--there are simply too many people in the world for everyone to personally devote selfless attention (care) to everyone else. But when people instrumentalize (i.e. treat as transactional) those relationships that SHOULD be based on care--those with their intimates, whether at home, with friends, or at work--that is when we say colloquially that they are being "political."
"Political" relationships may *look* like care on the outside; often, one party to the relationship is indeed fooled that the other party does care about them. But these are not relationships of care. They are relationships of exploitation. Sometimes this exploitation is mutual; sometimes it is not. But either way, at least one party to the relationship is achieving some kind of short-term benefit from relating politically, so they continue to do so.
This is how "politics" (exploitation) comes to substitute for care--that is, for skill, competence, attention, achievement, and love. Often, institutions collapse when relating within them becomes so political that care starts to be punished. This is what we sometimes call a "crisis of culture" or "corruption."
It is extremely difficult to solve crises of culture from within. This is because the incentives of the institution have started to war against care. People who demonstrate care in any way start to be viewed with suspicion; they are seen to be "playing a different game." This is seen as a threat to the short-term benefits that most people within the game now believe are the objectives of the game.
When we talk about something like civilizational decline and collapse, this lack of care--and the politicization of relating--is pervasive. It inhabits many institutions simultaneously. Even if one institution manages to reform itself against all odds, the other institutions in their web of social connections, which they depend on for at least some things, stand against them. These "meta-institutions" to which smaller institutions belong also have "personalities of a higher order" that can become corrupt and war against care.
There is no top-down solution to this problem; the main thing people can do to preclude decline and collapse is ensure that care (selfless attention, skill, love) characterizes all of their own relating with the people closest--most intimate--to them. As each of us demonstrates care in the relationships that matter most to us, the relationships for which we carry the most responsibility, others in our social circles witness this and are influenced by our behavior. They then begin to treat their own intimates with more care. This creates a virtuous cycle that can eventually transform many thousands or even millions of humans.
But this kind of transformation takes time. It requires persistence. It calls us to have the imagination to work toward a transformation that we may never see.
Care is an infinite task. We never get to the point that care is no longer required. Instead, we get the privilege of continuing to build upon the foundations built by the care of others, the vast majority of whom we will never know. And we too will be forgotten, but our care will leave a material imprint on the world in the kind of world that it makes possible.

2024-03-08 19:42:07

Worth reading these highlights from President Thomas Jefferson's first State of the Union address in 1801:
- The freedom of individual enterprise as the bedrock of American prosperity
- End to domestic federal taxation
- The role of the United States not as a world police, but as a place of "asylum" and "hospitality" for immigrants seeking a better life from around the world
- Depriving the Treasury of the means (revenue) to wage wars in advance
https://image.nostr.build/ba0adddd4b359f6f14b5e8eded8060d2ac3299d0204ca6769962ff1657369deb.jpg

2024-03-01 19:44:26

While there has been a lot of reporting and political outrage about illegal border crossings into the U.S., few journalists or policymakers have spoken to migrants themselves.
The surge in recent migrants from China is eye-opening: many are COVID lockdown refugees, fleeing what they perceive to be an arbitrary authoritarian regime that can take away their livelihoods at any moment, tanking the economy in the process:
“I sold everything that I had,” Huang [a migrant] said. “We were treated like caged animals.”
If we are serious about tackling the problem of illegal immigration, we need to do more than just police the border. We need to solve the problem at the roots, by creating an international political order where liberty is materially and systematically privileged over authoritarianism. We need to create fair trade agreements so that every country’s people have a shot at prosperity.
Ultimately, the solution to mass migration is to give people hope wherever they are. That is much harder than winning an election here and there: it calls for leadership based on principle.
aljazeera.com/economy/2024/2…

2024-03-01 14:23:16

Mad respect for Rebecca for demanding respect to the bully’s face, in the moment.
One of the most important skills parents can teach their children is how to stand up for themselves *in the moment.* Bullies count on people being too embarrassed or afraid to “rock the boat.” Then the moment passes, and people wonder who is telling the truth, if it really happened that way, why the bully’s victim doesn’t “just let it go.”
Children need to know that sometimes “getting an adult” isn’t possible. Often the adult is on the bully’s side. If you don’t stand up for yourself, few others will. The miraculous thing is, though, when you *do* stand up for yourself, often the powerful—the “adults”—shift allegiances: they turn from the bully’s side to yours. But that doesn’t happen without a fight.
In the moment. To their face.
It’s much harder to learn this as an adult, but it can be done.
twitter.com/joshsmithhosts…

2024-03-01 14:22:38

We are seeing who actually believes in human equality and meritocracy and who is just using those words to disguise and advance their own supremacy.

2024-03-01 14:21:57

As Peter Boettke points out, the main distinction between schools of economic thought that fall into error vs. those that hold over time is whether they accept and build upon the reality of scarcity.
If you don’t assume scarcity, nothing that flows from that concept holds: the regulating function of prices, the incentive structures of property and jurisdiction, the ability of economic actors to make trade-off decisions and learn from them over time.
Quite simply, scarcity is the organizing principle of economics. Without it, we enter an antigravity world—of course not in fact (gravity continues to exist), but in ideas and action. Navigating a world based on a faulty world-model eventually leads to being wrecked.

2024-02-21 14:23:04

I have more thoughts on this.
Hypotheticals like the trolley problem—which these “longtermist” arguments are—are attention-grabbers precisely because *there is no moral resolution to the problem.* Kill your family, or kill a million people? You can only choose one; which one do you choose? It’s a Sophie’s Choice: all answers to the problem create moral injury. There is no “good” or “right” answer.
People are titillated by the trolley problem because it seems to “reveal” that human beings are all immoral at root, or that evil is unavoidable because we all can be “forced” to do terrible things under certain circumstances. It reveals no such thing about “human nature”. All it shows is that we can get ourselves into terrible situations in which every outcome is tragedy. That should create motivation enough to prevent and preclude such situations wherever possible, not to succumb to them as though they are inevitable. THAT is where morality lies: taking responsibility for preventing trolley problems from ever arising in the first place.
There is a human situation in which trolley problems are virtually guaranteed, and that is war. In war, people have to make extreme decisions they would never otherwise make, and they are traumatized for life by their resolutions of *unresolvable* moral dilemmas.
This is why preventing and precluding war is one of the highest moral imperatives of human societies. A society functioning from the traumatizing moral logic of war is a monstrous society. Any argument that suggests that trolley problems need to be “baked into” the structures of social life as permanent resolutions to unresolvable moral dilemmas is fundamentally misunderstanding the conditions that generate human flourishing over time.

2024-02-21 06:58:32

We ensure the flourishing of future generations of humans precisely *by* loving and caring for those dearest to us—our family and friends—courageously and above all other humans that we come into contact with. Not because they are “essentially” more valuable from some God’s-eye view, but because they are uniquely *ours* to love and to cherish.
Morality emerges from the responsibilities we undertake in concrete relationships with specific others, not from some abstract idea about how “valuable” lives are in relation to each other.

2024-02-15 21:18:33

The manufactured “critical national security issue” memo, the Palantir CEO’s op-ed in Time, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s public statements all failed to get them the votes they need to reauthorize warrantless domestic spying, so they are suspending the legislative process.
Rep. Tom Emmer has been a vocal #bitcoin    advocate in the past. It’s worth stating clearly that you can’t support financial self-sovereignty (#BTC   ) without also supporting Constitutional limits on the government’s ability to collect information about Americans.
The American people need to keep this confrontation going. This bill should become un-passable.
https://image.nostr.build/8a63172a189ebe88247f86dae5c59245115600c97a85d401a08ea4e6191e6891.jpg

2024-02-13 12:39:34

Monetary policy always picks winners and losers. The arrangement of power in a society largely determines who those winners and losers are.

2024-02-13 12:37:30

It’s almost as though when we “declare war” on something, we hyperaccelerate the proliferation of that thing.
War is slowed and halted by “turning swords into plowshares”, not by ramping up sword manufacturing, training, and distribution.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/africa-terrorism/

2024-02-12 16:41:23

- reply

It should go without saying that the American people, like any other people, cannot pay the costs of the collapse of the system of international law. Even if they wanted to, it would be materially impossible. This is not about Israel, or Ukraine, or any other country. It is about the fact that the American people and the U.S. government simply cannot appropriate and create enough money to single-handedly finance the unilateral, violent “containment” of the collapse of the global system of national sovereignty. That work has to be done diplomatically, over generations. And it requires leadership with a kind of character that has been absent for a long time.

2024-02-12 16:30:16

Reasons the Geneva Conventions prohibited the annexation of territory by conquest after the Second World War:
1. It is a Pandora’s Box that opens an endless litany of historical grievances and re-adjudication of existing borders through violence.
2. War is terrible and bad; it always and without exception produces atrocities that cannot be forgotten or forgiven, generating new grievances and new wars.
The United States should have spent the last several decades doing everything possible to protect and honor the Geneva Conventions. Instead we gave certain countries carte blanche to ignore them and also ignored them when it suited us. This has now opened the door to a world of hurt.

2024-02-09 22:59:57

Now more than ever it is important to make the *positive* case for peace.
It is not enough--although it is vitally important--that we prevent and preclude war. The mere absence of kinetic violence is not peace. In fact, such "absence" often conceals all kinds of violence which threatens to erupt into armed conflict.
We must have a positive definition of what peace looks like. To develop such an understanding, we need a theory of human flourishing. This is the project I look forward to undertaking with my colleagues at the ISSP.

2024-02-08 08:54:53

We don’t have a “Plan B” for the people and things we love.
Love is an absolute value—it demands everything.
It cannot be compromised (partly lived); it can only be fulfilled or sacrificed.

2024-02-07 14:38:32

The most important thing Americans can do to stand for liberty and prosperity here and abroad is curtail the power of our own government.
We are being divided and conquered by debates about whether or not specific foreign governments and specific leaders are “good” or “bad.” That completely misses the point—the state is not to be trusted, period.
The peoples of the world either will or will not come to that conclusion for themselves. It’s not a decision we get to make for them. We *are* responsible for who we are and how we choose to live.
When we forget this, we are owned.

2024-02-05 13:53:03

Part of the controversy around Bukele is that many observers don’t seem to have an account of when criminality shades into warfare. A few teenagers holding up and robbing a store is a crime. The occasional kidnapping and homicide is a crime. Institutionalized gang warfare, lasting generations and effectively strangling civil society and driving a refugee crisis, is really closer to war. Which makes sense, given the origins of Salvadoran gang violence in the Salvadoran Civil War.
The challenge for wartime leaders like Bukele is how to restore sufficient confidence in the institutions of state justice that the state of emergency can be truly sunset. This means creating a path for greater enfranchisement of the population in the political process, the institutionalization of conflict in the deliberative bodies of an elected legislature, and the peaceful transfer of power. It is extraordinarily difficult to thread this needle, and many countries end up collapsing back into warfare the moment a strong, charismatic leader is no longer in power. I hope for the people of El Salvador that the Bukele Government can transition the country to a stable, lasting peace.

2024-01-28 07:41:51

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What makes them universal is that any human being, in any culture, has the rational capacity to justify these values from their own self-experience. Anyone can adopt a "theoretical attitude" that enables them to suspend the cultural realities they have grown up with, critique them, and arrive at ideas (theories) that hold across time and place. This is the basis for both a science and an ethics that can be shared among different peoples. The actual implementations and applications of that universal science and those universal ethics may of course differ profoundly between different communities.

2024-01-28 07:40:45

A lot of big talk recently from people appointing themselves defenders of “the West” and “Western values.”
This is identity politics, which I generally find to be useful for little other than provoking conflict. But I will say that a belief in universal human rights, liberty, and self-determination are deeply “Western” values. The great thing is, they are also “Eastern” values and “Northern” values and “Southern” values—because they are universal.
Universalism does not mean you’re not from somewhere. It means you are translating universal values into the cultural practices, norms, and languages of wherever you are from. Any people can make universal values their own. Human rights, liberty, and self-determination don’t look the same everywhere—and that is the beauty of human freedom. People can define and redefine what their values mean based on their own local contexts and needs.
It is vitally important for world peace that the peoples of the world embrace universal values without demanding that they look the same everywhere. This means less big talk about values and more living them.
We can do this! 🌎🌍🌏🗺️

2024-01-21 22:33:29

Civilization is constituted by the productive tension between:
1. Platform/state/law
and
2. Frontier/wilderness/possibility
The great danger we are facing now as a species is attempts to extend Platforms to every known surface of experience.
Whether it’s centrally-controlled money, or centrally-controlled AI, or centrally-controlled violence, what they have in common is the attempt to foreclose in advance the possibility of alternatives, of different ways of being, thinking, organizing, and doing. And it is the contestation between alternatives that generates the possibility of progress.
This is not to say that platforms are bad as such and we should get rid of them. Rather, it’s to say that platforms can only be of service to humanity if they are continuously parochialized by actual humans imagining and living otherwise in the SPACES (terrestrial, virtual, interpersonal, imaginative) that the platform does not comprehend.

2024-01-18 08:36:24

Introducing Symbolic Deduction Engines
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olympiad-level-ai-system-for-geometry/

2024-01-18 08:33:33

Some (rare) societies like the “idea” of entrepreneurship. This is good and must be preserved.
But even in these societies, people rarely like *actual* entrepreneurs.
The criticisms of actual entrepreneurs are endless: wild; pushy; demanding; controlling; obsessive; insensitive; scary; crazy; idiotic; violent; sociopathic.
That’s no coincidence. It takes a special kind of person to face a “wall of rejection” day after day for years and still find the strength continue. To face head-on the minuscule likelihood of actually succeeding and still put all their skin in the game. To choose to be David going toe-to-toe against the Goliath of whatever they’re working to disrupt.
Entrepreneurs are precious people. Doesn’t mean they should be worshipped; doesn’t mean they’re right about even most things. It just means that they are the tip of the spear of a certain kind of material human progress.
Without entrepreneurs, everything slows down. The status quo metastasizes. Cultural imagination stagnates.
We should do what we can as a society to make sure the flame of entrepreneurship is never extinguished. Even—especially—if we don’t “like” it.

2024-01-17 13:28:55

https://unherd.com/2024/01/why-american-cities-are-squalid/
Greay piece. This is the same faulty design logic I found operating in the public school system:
“A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over ‘misuse’ by less than 1% of residents.”
As a result, the supposedly “bad kids” end up getting most of the attention and resources. Even when policies, curricula, classrooms, and equipment are designed to “prevent” them from “doing bad things”, the meta-message is that they are still being designed *for* them (well, not for them as humans, but for them as “bad people”)—and not for anyone else.
This is the paradox of policing culture: you end up fixating on the very thing you’re trying to “eliminate.” And then it multiplies because it’s being perversely incentivized. People like attention, even when it’s negative.
In short, negative attention rewards and reinforces bad behavior. Changing this dynamic requires a fundamental shift in mindset.

2024-01-12 22:16:51

The debate, as always, hinges on what is meant by “national emergency” and “the U.S. is under imminent attack.”
Hawks would have you believe that any violence against any American asset anywhere in the world is a “national emergency” that authorizes the President to commit unlimited resources and perpetrate unlimited violence without regard for the will of Congress and the American people.
For hawks, the recognized ability of specific military assets to defend themselves if attacked is not good enough: the full power of the American state must immediately be committed to war of undefined scope in the event of any “provocation”. We’ve lost the concepts of local response, of local diplomacy, and limited use of power. We’re acting like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, swinging around our wand of power with no discipline and no strategy.
This is not sustainable, materially or diplomatically. If everything is an “emergency,” then nothing is an emergency. A permanent state of emergency is a permanent police state. And it is simply impossible for any country to impose a permanent police state on the world forever.

2024-01-12 19:46:14

The ultimate risk management strategy is truth.
Let people and things show you what they are. Don’t ignore the evidence, and get better at interpreting it.
If you suppress truth to “minimize risk,” you may succeed in making things look smooth for a while—until the unsustainable charade comes crashing down catastrophically.

2024-01-12 12:18:18

It’s not crony capitalism or mercantilism that sustains and uplifts billions. Parceling out monopolies and privileges is not how social mobility is achieved. People must have the freedom to invent, to disrupt, to unsettle settled hierarchies. That is how progress accelerates.

2024-01-12 12:16:24

Luke Gromen nails it. Many people would rather be certain that they will lose money slowly (by pretending monetary debasement doesn't exist) than take slightly more risk to make money slowly (by waiting through volatility).
This is a fundamentally fear-based approach to life. It is also the mindset inculcated and rewarded by the fiat standard.
The ability to take reasoned risks is the backbone of all economic growth. And there is no such thing as certain preservation of wealth. If you refuse all risk, eventually even what you have will be taken from you.
#Bitcoin

2024-01-11 22:43:40

I like when people clearly state what their assumptions are so that those assumptions can be directly engaged.
The purpose of the University has been much-debated. I’ve thought and written a lot about it myself. Some believe Universities are more about character formation; others believe Universities are only valuable if they teach directly marketable skills. These two purposes are often in tension, if not opposed.
But at the end of the day, the simplest and most challenging purpose of the University is the search for truth. Seeking truth is what differentiates the University from a vocational program, or a finishing school, or a “prep” school for whatever social roles students will go on to play.
Seeking truth is a character disposition and a set of skills, but it doesn’t translate neatly onto a resume, and it will not “get you a job”—in the academy or anywhere else.
The world of Diogenes and the world of Alexander are not the same. One is not better or worse than the other, but a lot of confusion and heartache can be avoided if we explain to young people that the time they spend learning is not a liquid asset that they can just convert at will into employment or salary.
Truth is either its own reward for you, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, the University (at its best) is not the institution for you.