You Bring what you Fear You will bring about the thing you fear. Some opponents of Donald Trump feared he would be an authoritarian dictator, censoring free speech and free press and the like. But some let this fear hold them so tightly they became today’s most extreme censors, and developed tendencies to shut down opposing views with force. Some supporters of white supremacy are so afraid of the gene pool being corrupted, thus barbaric behavior erupting amidst the “lower species” that they resort to barbaric murders in the name of cleansing the “barbaric genes”, becoming the very barbarians they fear. ...

reading list May 2025 Play Anything The Gift The End of certainty Beginning of Infinity Fabric of Reality How Information Grows Debt: The First 1,000 Years The History of Everything (Graeber) The Brothers Karamzov is Alyosha outside the economy? A good exemplar of gift giving? yes, he “has access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty” Non-equilibrium (Prigogine) is also what a gift is. (no expectation of accounting for value such that there can be an equilibrium of exchange) ...

We should all grow up

Real fun is serious business

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/04/14/privacy.html privacy https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-know-what-you-really-want-and-be-free-from-mimetic-desire mimetic desire Facebook banned pseudonymous identities after all. Immediately unbridling the power of mimesis. what is good about transparency scientific progress I think our civilizational flourishing was unlocked when we provided proper incentives for people to share their discoveries of new theories and inventions. Patents, academic publishing of papers. TODO TK: is this true? did our industrial age explosion result from systems providing social credit to shared knowledge? Money is social credit (or can overlap with it at least) by the way. ...

did the credit assigned to new knowledge lead to civilizational abundance? Have a blockchain layer between human and ai so that Anthropic can buy my prompt history. But right now they get it by asking for it as the price of model access. The open source models aren’t learning directly on their users problems…. But they could through blockchain. New ideas must come from humans (a necessary but insufficient source of new knowledge) ...

Why are the fastest-growing industries the worst investments? ...

As the USA is about to turn 250 years old, we face a spate of accelerating changes. Technological, climatic… Will our next age be more of the same, a dark age of subjugation and loss, or an age of miracles taking us to heights unimagined? No one can predict what exactly will happen, but if history rhymes, we can look to another period of rapid change that befell a peaceful, growing society on their 250th birthday. Spoiler alert: their handling of the new period kicked off the fastest period of human enrichment in history. Economists still use the word “miracle” to describe it. ...

crystalline/tight/lean/dense games Virtua Tennis Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Demo Disc I DO say the demo disc is way better than the full game(s) Shadow of the Colossus Tetris Demon’s Souls does having to restart count as filler? or is this a case where the filler becomes the content (and the context) Braid is pretty tight (I mean technically tight; not much slack) Bangai-O Spirits (I hear is tight) Minecraft Fortnite ...

I don’t understand redemption because I don’t understand economics. 等価交換: conservation of energy Economics involves dropping a net down on some aspects of society. That net never encompasses all of reality (that’s why there are externalities). The daimyo-gashi never got their money back from the poor daimyo, but they were “paid” with monopoly privileges for other activities. We make games with rules and we play them. But we can always make more games (the new games may incorporate previous externalities) Even our most fundamental physical theories require a constraint on their scope to convey or even consider (imagine a spherical cow) ...