I. The striver You're a teenager. You don't know what to do with your life, but you're smart and ambitious and so you look around. Who seems successful? Who seems happy? Who is respected? Who is loved? Powerful institutions create attractive ladders: elite universities, venture capital, Silicon Valley, Washington DC. So smart and ambitious high school students spend four years of their lives grinding in hopes of admission to an elite college. They climb hierarchies, run the debate circuit, sp...

Reflections on nationalism, history, and conflict. I. It's July 4th in Virginia, half past noon. It's too hot today to stay outside long, and there's a storm coming tonight — we can hear thunder in the distance, though right now skies look clear. We set off little fireworks on the gravel road last night, anticipating that storm. Dad and I announced the names of the fireworks — Rose Blossom, Wild Side — then set them off, the rest of the family sitting on the porch. They were remarkably beauti...

These are my markdown notes for an in-progress project (see below sections for details). I've found that I learn best by grouping information into small sequential chunks, and writing it as if it's an explainer (except the goal is for me to understand by writing it and the audience is an afterthought, so I might skip some stuff I don't feel like writing out) published directly from my Obsidian vault (hence the [[links]].) I found that, when learning about philosophy, anchoring myself in time and...

Some stuff I might like talking about most important to me: "what's your story" (i.e. like what's your life like, how'd you end up in [x place I met you], what do u think about the future and your place in it) philosophy can you systematize ethics thoughts on analytic philosophy vs. continental philosophy what is the point of philosophy? people i can probably talk about, in sort of descending order of competence: wittgenstein, sartre, de beauvoir, camus, rorty, kant, plato, nietzsche, ma...

i am cringe, this is given deconstruct cringe as a useful social phenomenon, but also as one that inhibits agency becoming cringe-immune makes you more powerful kill not the part of you that is cringe, kill the part of you that cringes ...

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[placeholder post] Human cognition is not formal, it's vibes-based Opinions, heuristics, associations; Even system 1 processing is rarely formal Vibes is a useful proxy for "system 2"/"imperfect reason" but also system 2 being able to learn complex patterns (see thinking fast and slow, Awakening from the Meaning crisis either ep. 2 or ep. 3, mentioning the "can you tell if people are staring at you" experiment) vibe check is a meaningful concept ...

Alt title I'm considering: Social infrastructure and the qualitative filter problem or something Note: considering using gpt-4 to expand this into a post (and add an ai disclaimer of course) but I feel like style is important so idk if the editing required to make it into a style that I actually write with would make gains compared to manually writing it minimal Note: this essay is unrevised. Note: Using the word "intellectual" is usually something I try to avoid because it's pretentious and...

The following was originally a very early draft of a blog post on the topic that you see at the beginning: narrativizing your life because that's potentially useful. Then I just ~~livetweeted~~ directly wrote my thoughts onto the page for about 45 minutes without regards for coherence or deliberate development. Genuinely, I sat on the couch and didn't stop writing for 45 minutes. I won't call this rambling because it's not meant to be coherent or unified; it's a primordial thought-soup that migh...

An experiment in expressing the ineffable -- a post-rationalist statement of principles. I basically want to turn this into a sequence (in the lesswrong sense)/even a book if I ever have enough time. Basically, reject modernist attitudes towards epistemology, and then reject postmodernism too. Reject anti-realism, reject philosophy itself. Reject all of those fundamentally, and then approach them from a new perspective. Another way to phrase the thesis: there are fundamental and absolute lim...

rational “copes” (literally just good arguments) everyone is different; different backgrounds are so different it’s kind of impossible to really compare people to other people holistically very important: this is impossible if you attach your self-worth to being good relative to others I attach my self-worth to… being happy basically — pursuing things that I’m interested in other people are better at it than me, but then it’s exciting rather than making me sad you will feel better an...

On being a fun optimizer with long term attention (e.g. optimizing long term fun by going to college) Useful mental model: When I try to systematically describe why I do things, the closest approximation is that I am a fun optimizer. What is fun? Hard to describe. There’s some sense of pleasure involved, but I feel like it’s a lot deeper, even spiritual? Luckily, my idea of fun has some ethical value, and generally tends to be self-improving. It’s fun to try and build things that make the wo...

das Man, and Breaking the Right Rules A meandering little walk through practical thought, a bit of Heidegger, Sartre, and Descartes, then Sartre again, then some existential doubt, some Richard Rorty, some pretty crazy egotism, and then finally a pleasant piece of advice. Pre-essay note: This appears, in retrospect, a relatively intuitive conclusion, but it's one that I want to make more explicit for myself. It's a principle I want to make a concerted effort to at least pay more attention to i...

How Jordan Peterson's metaphysics could be the future of politics. Author's note: This is more political than I'd like to be -- as they say, politics is the mind-killer -- but... it's hard to write apolitically about politics and a political pundit. I don't usually write about politics in public, so I'm still getting better at it. I. Jordan Peterson, Wielder of Order Jordan Peterson is interesting. From what I can see of him, he's in many ways a regular political pundit -- proseletyzing for...

On Linguistic Inflation Minor Revisions 14-05-2023 I. Introduction When I was in middle school, just beginning to discover the rabbit hole of political ideology, I became convinced that I was cool because I knew the "real" definition of “socialism” — I knew that socialism involved worker ownership of the means of production (a concept I always struggled to describe), and I’d use the word wherever I could find an excuse to. Then I figured out what Libertarianism was, and in early 8th grade I s...

This post is directed at myself but may be useful to you. Most people don't think that hard, most of the time.* 1. Most people won't have based and nuanced takes -- they don't need to. Most of a political base will not have a deep knowledge abbout the issues they vote on. Most people can't defend their positions effectively. Politics is very much based on vibe; thinking hard and dealing with ambiguity is uncomfortable, so most people won't do it, or at least won't do it to the extent that the...

Written originally as a footnote in "On Linguistic Inflation", but then split into a separate post because this is important to my philosophy. You'll see crossover with the topics/examples from that post. Previously titled: "A brief note on language before I continue" When I say words are “wrong” here, I mean they are being used differently from their original, specialized meaning. At the time of writing this, I’m in the “linguistic descriptivist“ camp, in that I believe that language should o...