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There's a bunch of different black pills that members of my tribe and adjacent tribes are tempted to take.

One is "the game is all over, the commies won."

Friend, censoring dissident voices, building walls, and lying about everything is not what winning looks like.

2/

That's what terminal rot looks like.

When the Soviet Union was rolling out rural electrification and sending the barefoot sons of farmers to study math and engineering, they didn't HAVE to lie about change and growth

The lies started later, when growth dropped to or below 0

3/

Compare the Soviet Union in 1955 to 1975 or 85. In 55 there were lots of true believers.

The Berlin Wall didn't go up the day WWII ended.

It went up 16 years later.

For 16 years, the story that "Communism is better" was plausible enough that they didn't NEED a wall.

4/

The American Cathedral didn't NEED to censor people say "the election was stolen" in 1976, because no one was credibly saying such a thing, and everyone believed in the basic morality of the Other Party.

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The urge to censor, to crush, to humiliate, to silence ... that's not an urge that a strong, stable, self-evidently successful government needs to indulge in.

One evolution in my thinking over the last ~5 years is that I now hate High Theory

I find a few other people using the phrase, but no crisp definitions so I'm going to attempt one.

It will necessarily be wrong

...if I claimed it was simple AND correct IT WOULD BE A HIGH THEORY

2/

A "high theory" is an explanation of multiple phenomena using a simple (low Kolmogorov complexity) explanation, often coupled with an appeal to essentialism.

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A trailer park example of High Theory is "Jews pull all the strings" or "whites are better than blacks in every way".

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A mid brow example of High Theory is "Christianity caused the dark ages and delayed Real Civilization by 1,000 years".

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High brow examples of High Theory are whatever most philosophers are nattering on about, and anything 1 or 2 steps removed from a TED talk.

It's a bitter pill to give up your childhood faith in the Myth of 1776. Moldbug warned us that the pill slits open and the sodium core burns as it goes down.

...but it makes perfect sense that an elite will always be in power

I remember reading a brief article 20 or 30 yrs ago

2/

asking "why do planets and moons spin?"

and the answer was an appeal to statistics - there are a ton more items in a random distribution of momentums that equate to "spinning" than equate to "not spinning".

3/

Planets and moons are formed by the coallescence, under gravitation, of various small bits.

Things falling in from infinity, basically.

Depending on the random assortment of starting locations of those infalling bits, you get torque applied to the accumulating mass core.

4/

In order to end up with a planet with absolutely no spin, you need a PERFECT balance of starting locations of all of the constituent bits before they start their fall in.

This is possible, but is an insanely small subset of all possible starting configurations.

5/

Governments and societies form from the coalescence of individuals.

We could imagine a society where Everyone Was Perfectly Equal ... but that would require a starting universe where all people were born with equal talents.

1/

time for a little bit of a bragging thread

2/

in hunter gatherer societies, male speed, strength and dexterity peaks in the mid 20s, but hunting success peaks closer to 40

the difference is decades of acquired wisdom about all sorts of tiny things

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In infoworker economies I think something similar happens. Fluid intelligence peaks in the 20s or so, but graybeards have seen all manner of complicated Charlie Foxtrots and can start to predict where they're going to happen.

4/

I build this complicated app that communicates with Vast Third Party via three different APIs, a mix of XML, JSON, etc.

Two of these APIs are outgoing / push (from my PoV), one is inbound.

Three weeks ago Third Party pinged us and placed an order. We responded "ok".

5/

Then, apparently, Third Party pinged us again and placed a second order... and is now upset because second order didn't ship.

We have no record of a second order in our system, and we don't have enough inventory to fulfill it.