internaut

> Leaving cults .... In the latter, the cult is all you've ever known, and it is normality. On the other hand, looking outside of it, you may find specific discrepancies.

That is true. One day I was struggling with something I read. It just didn't gel with my beliefs and I couldn't refute it. It just made too much sense to be false. It had too much power to explain the world. So that's the kind of discrepancy that can happen.

The reasons why most leave the faith are rather more prosaic and I feel they are held back because they didn't have an intellectual reason for leaving. This may be arrogant of me but I feel it's like leaving Enron because management was interfering with your sex life or you had an emotional spat with a coworker. There are better reasons to leave! I myself will never go back but I think the reason why some people feel lost after leaving is that they didn't refute what they had been taught, they are still part trapped and this is distressing to them. I never felt so happy in my life as when I left and it was like everything suddenly made sense. It might seem cheesy but that is a kind of 'enlightenment'.

> The tendency for new adherents and converts to just about anything to become more Catholic than the Pope, as they say, is fairly strong

We see that with ISIS. The most volatile ones are the new ones. Something to do with group dynamics and hierarchy.

> The process of leaving plays into another Dreddit essay I've had in mind for a while, on the concept of Enlightenment, Revelation, and Catastrophe, all three words which have a common base meaning: of a thing having light shone upon it, being revealed, uncloaked, or overturned.

Have you read Rene Girard? His lens is Catholic theology but he has interesting secular ideas.

> There's a modern mystic who's got a brief quote about enlightenment not being pleasant: "Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."

You probably already know this but that is a core belief of the neoreactionary, who believes the truth to be sometimes painful or horrible but always all important e.g. the red pills. Not coincidentally they refer to their belief system as 'The dark enlightenment', and see it as a (partial) critique of the Enlightenment.

> another option is to replace one mythical system with another....

This is a slight tangent but there is this excellent audio drama called 'Our Fair City'. In a recent episode the molepeople begin to rebel against their human masters. In a few short phrases they encapsulated this. The young recruits urge the moleperson leader to take on the role of 'Queen' (very radical change!) but she rejects this out of hand as being little better than being under the thrall of the humans. Then grudgingly she seems to acknowledge it's at least some progress away from enslavement. I laughed, but I also thought to myself that wow, that's kind of how it really happens. We cannot visualize the spectrum of future possibles or the 'golden city' because we're all down here in the mud. It takes an act of some faith just to move to a slightly more elevated plane. I can't say why that is. Supposing our population shrunk to 500 million on earth, I still think we'd have the institutions we have now, I don't think we'd devolve back to a more primitive state unless our population and knowledge base was very seriously damaged. That might seem hopeful but I also do not see us making a grand leap into the future towards some golden city, I really don't know we have that kind of imagination today. The Communists were the last people to hope for such with their scientific socialism. Hopes of utopia appear quite dead in the present and I think that is a problem despite the problems it sometimes caused. Apathy reigns now.

> The Dreddit: I think "philosophical work in process" is truer than I'd care.

If you're independently wealthy it doesn't matter, but if you must work to live then I have to say to you that you'll need to nudge your ideas into paying rent in some way. Books, podcasts, t-shirts, lectures, software, something. If your ideas aren't close to gestation then there's nothing wrong with working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, there are many jobs not particularly joyous but which give the opportunity to think. It is good to have something concrete since this gives a metric to work with and helps gain confidence. It might be difficult but you know there is nothing more exhilarating than something from your mind fleshed out into the physical world. I admire what you're doing because I know it is difficult and intellectuals are unfortunately plagued by self-doubt. This I consider rather unfortunate because while many intellectuals and their ideas stay anonymous, the fields are far less barren than most people think. There really are not that many intellectual explorers out there (and most of them are defenseless since they are dead).

> On the positive side, I've got a sense of the size of the canvas. On the negative side, it's rather large for any one person to work. Explaining to those close to me what it's about and where it's leading is increasingly problematic....

I'd say to you that if you develop your ideas in the right form (a series of explanatory animated youtube videos) or you manage to hit the right chord then you'll automatically obtain a network of helpers.

Peter Thiel has worked his butt off giving countless presentations on the Stagnation Hypothesis. Look at this methods. He uses simple but irrefutable points built into logical chains of reasoning and repeats this to each audience until he has each line perfect and ready to roll off the tongue. If you go this route I recommend you read Cicero's Rhetorica Ad Herennium, it's the go to book for this method.

Curtis Yarvin has managed to spread his ideas by dint of being provocative, but also by using unusual joined up thinking that makes me go 'huh, I didn't see that before' or more likely 'I don't want to believe this but it kind of explains some things.

Eliezer Yudkowsky didn't start with LessWrong, but with an interesting Harry Potter fan fiction. Unlikely but it worked.

Julian Assange got his ideas out there by pissing off the powerful.

You get the idea, signal to your tribe and ye shall find them waiting.

> On the practical side, it's been difficult to hash out a proper working environment for writing complex bits. At the same time, I've been exploring a large scope of literature that illuminates various parts of the puzzle in interesting ways. There has been much enlightenment going on (and frustration with conventional understanding). I'm finding to a very large extent that the ideas I'm having are not novel, merely not widely accepted. Frequently they're widely attacked.

This is what I was saying above. Many of us have similar observations or insights and don't realize they are held in common. You have your tribe, it's out there. It remains to collect them together under a banner. To get there initially you would need a holistic set of statements that are consistent as a sort of axiomatic base.

> Governance: Government is inherently a system for ajudicating differences of opinion, so it's often going to be contradictory. Human society is a complex system, and the needs of any one part are often at conflict with those of another, though the system as a whole should be benefited by some balance of interests. A modern kitchen has spigots, drains, a refrigerator, and a stove. This doesn't mean that sources or sinks or cold or hot are good or bad. It's that each has an appropriate place.

That's an interesting metaphor.

However I am troubled by it because it means the system could and likely does waste energies it could be objectively devote to more effective uses. If every time I lay a building block and tomorrow you remove it, we could play that game forever. I think this is behind the frustration many of us feel about politics. How do you distinguish between balance of interests and plain wastefulness?

I'll reply more tomorrow, it is well past time for sleeping!

Silicon Valley is sometimes overly optimistic but I prefer that to the cynicism I felt in the UK.

Europe in particular really needs some successes. I think I could do something with affordable housing that would scale but we'll have to see. Am confident I wouldn't get venture funding but I have an angle or two. I intend to build a demonstration model as a proof of concept and then hopefully some traction will occur through internet-magic.

Good luck with your projects carapace! We've got this!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-23/bookies-pl...

It's not something that can be both summarized and understood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII

Look this isn't really a temporary interest for me, I'm something of a 'Thiel-logist'. You know how there exist Kremlinlogists? Same thing as that. I watch every video and read every book he writes or reads. This is not some celebrity fetish, but to do with the rich vein of ideas.

This is because I am convinced something very very important is going on and I want to understand more. I think I understand about half of it and I had a holy fuck mind blown moment a few years ago. Remember how Thiel took out Gawker nearly a decade later. This is as nothing in comparison, this is the grand-daddy of all long games.

I hesitate to be explicit about what I think is actually going on but if you've read my posts on the Stagnation Hypothesis or watched Peter Thiel's videos on Youtube (low view counts, so I know you're not watching them!) you'll know there is a rather disturbing big picture which most people are oblivious to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII

More precisely it is the high level implications of the Stagnation Hypothesis. You won't know it from HN or a survey of typical developers but the people who really run Silicon Valley have a set of beliefs about the world which are very different to the people who work for them.

Watch this all the way through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII

Looks like it becomes a bigger problem as buildings become more airtight. Something to do with peak dewpoint in makeup air being all wrong, not sure because I'm not a HVAC expert.

I suspect that political groups send out requests to see the perspective of different factions and this may be what this is.

It's just amazing in general how overwhelmingly two-faced the system is. They say one thing to each other and then the opposite to the public.

If the Americans don't trust their politicians it's probably because they're not insane.

In realtime we're seeing the conservative position on wikileaks melt into friendly affection at "that old rascal", while the liberals are undergoing the reverse metamorphosis.

I can't stop laughing. This is so surreal.

This is the phenomenon of circling the wagons.

I've been going through them and there's all kinds of fascinating stuff. For example if you do a search for 'ocra100' you'll see John Podesta receiving three emails that sound like he's getting intelligence reports from Moldbug. Too many WTFs to explain here. Just go and see.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1637

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/295

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/197

Well done to Glenn Greenwald though.

In it they were talking about how they used to use, and still use, a 100 year old assumption about 'make-up air' in houses which is part of setting up an air conditioning system.

Turns out the original scientific papers were formalized into regulation or ASHRAE standards without double checking whether they were true.

Practically this means every single household in the country has a AC unit which is overpowered by 30% or 50%. For 100 years.

It also meant tens of millions of buildings suffered from dry rot because the systems weren't balanced correctly if I remember right. I'll look it up if anybody's interested.

Ahhhh! But we don't know that. Memetics is not genetics.

It's like assuming that a larger population has a larger number of ideas than a smaller population.

But what if I told you my smaller population sample was from a university and the larger one was from a prison.

I believe Dense networks is what causes a flowering of intellectual diversity. There are heuristics we can use. It is associated with wealthy areas and cities.

I suspect myself that intellectual diversity is orthogonal to the physical phenotype of diversity. However this, like your statement, remains to be shown. There is a lot of contradictory information out there, probably due to confounding factors and gloming unrelated factors together.

In my previous post in a different thread I wrote something related to this subject which is that Facebook (users) has a lot of genetic diversity in its population but it's a sterile wasteland. Facebook and Twitter are tourists on the Internet, but 4chan, reddit and HN are like natives.

4chan, Reddit and HN are Internet natives.

Facebook and Twitter are fucking tourists.

I'm beginning to believe the slightest hint of negativity encourages downvotes irrespective of whether the context is appropriate or not.

> Cults and their own belief systems is a whole 'nother fascinating area. Have you written on your own experiences on this?

A little. Getting out of a cult you're born into is an experience like no other. Many people become zealots of another sort, a different religion or a secular kind. The nearest experience most people will have is finding that somebody they loved has betrayed them.

It's a funny thing you know, I had great anxiety about leaving, but when I left I felt a peculiar joy I cannot adequately describe here.

> I'm looking for a few good questions: https://redd.it/1v052g

I think I was reading your subreddit before last year. How is it going? Have you defined a terminal goal for the question-making or is it a philosophical work in progress?

> I think we're pursuing a lot of the wrong questions, and the answers to the wrong questions are simply meaningless.

I don't think there's a faster way to get diminishing returns than to ask the wrong question. I have suspected for a long time that many things we ask governments to do are mutually contradictory. The effective policy then, is not a government policy of direction and action, but to allow us to join the dots to see that our efforts are in vain.

I envisage a real time system available in each home (optional!) which makes requests and takes requests from householders. Think of a StackExchange, only for the government and citizens to be able to interrelate frictionlessly. A newsfeed of items that actually effect you personally would be terrific by itself.

Simple questions, like "How do I buy land and what regulations do I need to know about" and we already appear to be in the domain of experts. That isn't right. You shouldn't have to wade through a library of content on some obscure website hardly anybody visits.

> Assessing narrative means some way of scoring a narrative. That's an interesting problem in itself.

I think a narrative assessment looking for internal consistency would be an enormous improvement. However; there is a troll/prankster on reddit called vargas who posts these internally consistent but increasingly weird stories. It's the same thing that fools Facebook's trending feature into posting fake stories. That would mean to get somewhere you'd need to store a compare and contrast model of some sort.

> On your "Matrix" example: I'm convinced that one of the key fundamentals of an accurate model of the universe (e.g., a true or useful narrative) is that your different perceptions all tend to correspond. It's when you're getting different messages in different places, or from different sources, that you've got a problem.

That would make a good heuristic for increasing our confidence. You could achieve scaling by invoking human computation such as a kind of capcha that give users little 'stories', and ask them whether they are consistent. I am confident that will work because if your proposition can be shorn of context (events happening to mythical people in mythical lands) people think logically for the most part.

> But there's a huge realm in which a fairly accurate understanding is possible.

Take the Podesta Emails recently. Somebody was asking whether they were real or not. You should be able to verify whether they are real or a work of fiction with such a system. Since lies get harder to cover for the more they multiply, my guess is that this 'verifier' would work.

Why are they motivated to do this though CT? I feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle.

Labour costs are tiny fractions of these company's profits, and code stays 'fresh' for decades. You can easily get leaps in productivity that save a huge quantity of money for the company by just thinking a little harder. And it should be the case that smaller teams are better teams.

Why do programmers even make wages similar to the middle class? Their work isn't remotely comparable to lawyers or dentists. Surely million dollar salaries should be the norm. The practice of acquhires suggest a starting salary ought to be around 1.5 million dollars.

Even if it was one tenth of that...

However that doesn't diminish my original statement because Google is likely to hire the most expensive talent and also their employees in London are paid I think about 30% less than their counterparts in the US. I suspect the American programmers are actually more effective at their jobs for a number of reasons e.g. being at ground zero when new domains open up but there is still likely to be wage gap which I'd explain by the depressed wage market in London. There are many very effective workers who ought to be paid twice or triple what they are currently earning. I know some of the younger programmers in the UK are being paid as little as 12-16k a year.

Also when the economy becomes more centralized and bigger companies swallow up smaller ones, you should expect more cartels. That is just logical.

I didn't say I had evidence but I know the number of competitors for positions in the UK has been going down, not up. The price for labour however has not shifted.

This is indicative of fixed prices, in this case wages.

Does you think the prices for turnips can be fixed but not that of plumbers? It's all the same thing.

The most obvious is you could control wages by being the owner of inelastic goods your workers require to live, such as housing. I think this is how the feudal system worked originally, workers produced cereals but the Land and the worker's cottages were both owned by the Landlord. If the price of bread decreased the Landlord could simply increase rents. So it was only when the factories came along that most workers managed to have any savings.

Another example is where a worker in debt, and must work at an existing job to pay for the debt. Obviously a worker without debt is a worker than could request a higher pay rate because they are able to be more competitive by obtaining a new employer.

Another example is the existence of non-compete agreements.

It should not surprise us that in London there exists widespread use of non-competes and their workers are typically indebted by student loans or mortgages, that the wages are so low. Look at any London software engineer thread if you'd like to be depressed, 300-400 a day and sometimes much less, for people with 10+ years of experience.

Another example is that I suspect that there is a conspiracy to hold down wages that involves both the government and companies price fixing. I further suspect this is a deliberate policy by at least the US and UK governments using a list of occupations they depend on to function. Scientists, engineers, programmers.

This shouldn't come as a surprise because even in Silicon Valley where the wages are the highest in the world for computer programmers, it was found that multiple well known corporations were involved in a wage fixing cartel. That however I suspect is merely amateur hour in comparison to the government and its partners.

I think we made a great mistake by getting rid of them.

Prices should be declining if supply are increasing.

If you're right, which you're not, then prices should be decreasing very quickly.

Food and energy bills for the average person in my country and others I've been to are steadily increasing.

USA 2011 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-increase-most-in-36-...

USA 2014 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-prices-soar-as-incomes-stan...

World graph http://www.worldwatch.org/global-food-prices-continue-rise-0

EX-computation, tell me something good. We can't eat silicon wafers.

The cost of energy alone is exponentially higher than it was in the early 70s.

We're not living in an enchanted forest, formerly progressive trends are going into reverse on most counts outside of computers.

But they took a risk taking on that debt and perhaps they should go bankrupt.

Seems like I've triggered a nerve!

The main problem with it for physical items is that there is always a large upfront lump sum cost. A small hydroelectric system produces energy for practically free but costs a lot to build. It will last until your grandchildren are old though, it is a true investment.

Why not have a shot of deflation?

I hope you're fireproof though, because that would make a lot of people very angry.

Not to disabuse you, because I do think it is a good idea, but many people are simply not interested in asking the right questions. I used to belong to a millennial cult which had formerly been proven wrong about 'The End of the World' half a dozen times in the 20th century, and each time they decide the past prophesies were metaphorical while next time it is literally the 'Big One'.

Each time they do this they do lose a lot of support, so disseminating information about what happened in the past is not completely meaningless. I wouldn't have left the Truman Show without the Net I think, that and books.

> was the underlying narrative correct?

This is the one I want to have done most of all. The others you mentioned are easier to do but this is the crux of it. The cult believers treat every news articles as further evidence of their faith, and every discrepancy as a test from the Devil/oppositional lies.

There is some deep stuff here. I remember reading something from a person who lived under Communism, and like some kind of conspiracy theorist they had every detail about their 'Matrix' wrong but they did know instinctively that something was very wrong because of the mismatch between reports and anecdotal observations.

Are you aware of the cathedral? What about the stagnation?

I suspect this is an excellent heuristic for a media organization to become popular.

However I also don't like it because it would limit the range of thought. Most things that I find interesting are at the peripheral or in the cracks, intersections, oddities, peculiar facts.

Without countervailing narratives you don't have a benchmark for topic variance, and like the OP, become incapable of believing there even exists alternative models of reality.

In a relatively non-partisan example, I find that people who believe in God don't really understand atheists. Surely deep down these people believe in The Creator. I also find that secular oriented types do not really believe that religious people believe. They think they are faking it on some level.

These are serious, even dangerous errors.

So I submit that we need, require, something I'll label The Truman Clause or Exit from the Matrix. I do not know what that looks like in an ethical information aggregation system. I suspect it exists as part of meta-cognition in either our culture or in the human brain, since one of the most important functions of higher learning is to teach you to question your premises.

More so than any elite university I've seen, the kind of culture developed at LessWrong is perfectly suited to tackling these kinds of meta-cognition issues.