Articles 14.

14.1

0.1% Ideas: 13 Ways To Spot High Agency People - George Mack

13 ways to spot high agency people: ​
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1. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.
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2. High bias for action - High agency people think problems through carefully, but it’s solution focused with a high bias for action. The low agency person spends years ruminating on a decision that was a reversible door. Rumination is like inverse masterbation — it’s self inflicted pain that never ends.
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3. Golden question - If you're in a 3rd world prison cell and had to call someone to get you out, who would you call? That's the highest agency person you know.
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4. View the present with a historians frame - A common low agency trap throughout history is to think we’re at the end of history. The high agency person gets clarity on the present moment by taking the historians perspective of the present day: What ideas are sound weird today but will be normal 10 years from now? What ideas sound respected today but will be mocked 10 years from now?​
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5. Energy distortion field - If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline. Low agency people do the opposite.
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6. You can never guess their opinions - The boxer that writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don't line up with their stereotypes, they've exercised agency.
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7. Immigrant mentality - If they've moved from their hometown, that's a good sign. If they've moved from their home country, that's an even greater sign. It takes agency to spot you're in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalise a move and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.
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8. They send you niche content - Low agency people look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early.
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9. Mean to your face but nice behind your back - The social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip behind their backs. To do the opposite requires agency because they're swimming against the social tide.
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10. Adults do not exist - A low agency fallacy to fall into is to see your backstage (inner dialogue, emotions, messy life) and contrast it with other adults stage performance (words, social media, job title). The high agency person sees through the facade. Every adult is just a grown up child figuring life out. They started off as a sperm cell, fertilized an egg, came into this world screaming in a hospital bed with no sense of self, downloaded patterns of information from those around them that seemed certain — and now we call them “adults”.
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11. Question assumptions - “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?” - Eric Weinstein.
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If you keep asking why, you realise 95% of people never got past the first why.
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12. Unique language - “The limits of the language are the limits of my world” - Wittgenstein.
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High agency people tend to have their own unique language. They have isms. Musk-isms. Munger-isms. Churchill-isms. In a pursuit of their own worldview, they end up with their own unique vocabulary and aphorisms.
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13. Logic over social proof - Low agency conditioning mechanisms: “Science says” “Experts say” “They say”. High agency people mute the noise of social proof and look for the signal of logic — even if it’s unpopular.

14.2 *

Love Is Worth Believing In - Freya India

“Something often said about my generation is that we’ve lost hope. We’ve lost belief in the future. We’ve lost belief in ourselves. What’s less talked about, though, is that we’ve lost belief in love. We think romance is dead.

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Of course unrealistic expectations exist. Like expecting that first stage of love to stay the same and giving up the second it changes. But romance? Loyalty, kindness, respect? These are not unrealistic. Neither is expecting love to last; we forget that when the explosion ends, it comes back in bursts, and simmers, quietly on, in the small things. It goes from staying up until 3am talking to reaching out your arm in the night and feeling their warmth. From determined to spend every second together to the joy of just knowing they’re downstairs somewhere. It’s feeling that life is flowing a bit smoother, that music sounds better and the walk looks brighter and you’re softer and more gentle with people, more gentle with yourself. And maybe it’s hard to talk about love like that because it’s quiet. It’s not loud or theatrical like these influencers or TikToks or everything else that screams for our attention. But it’s there, it’s there.

It’s also irrational, falling in love. Hard to explain. Which is why all these checklists and calculations about what men and women want online have never made sense to me. Of all the couples I know who are in love, there’s no explaining it. They didn’t decide. There were no calculations about money, height or age; they threw out their checklists. And we know this, we know love is messy, but that’s scary, so we turn to all these dating gurus giving us graphs and statistics, analysing it all, calling it a market. Guide us toward guarantees! Feed our hunger for control that’s gotten so out of hand we’re now trying to predict the most beautifully unpredictable thing in the world. We’ve gotten so used to algorithms and machines optimising our entire lives we think we can hack something like falling in love—if we just follow the right steps life will deliver the right results. Love is so much more unthinking than that.

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And with real love there’s no calculation about what’s in it for you; it’s a sudden, sometimes disorientating urge to give. Not the type of giving we think of. Putting their needs first. That thing we call people-pleasing and a trauma response. That thing we train people to stop doing and send them to therapy for. That beautiful, rare thing. We used to call it love, you know—your needs becoming theirs. Taking care of each other. That’s what love is supposed to be: you fall for someone and it kickstarts some selflessness in you, awakes kindness and generosity you didn’t know you had. Doesn’t matter how resistant or independent you are, it disarms you. Can we even get our heads around that now? We had it hammered in that we are enough, that we have to be strong and self-reliant, that we should never give any of ourselves away. How are we supposed to make sense of becoming one accord?

But I think this kind of love is real, is possible. I think it’s one of the only things left that is. If anything is an illusion, it’s all these other distractions—it’s social media, it’s dating apps, it’s the porn industry pretending it’s healthy and human to sit alone in your room and simulate intimacy with a screen. Honestly is there anything more hopeless? I don’t think the poets are lying to you about love. I do think Tinder is lying to you, and PornHub. I do think our culture is lying to you when it insists self-love is enough, that buying more and chasing fame, followers and freedom is what’s real and reliable. That believing in all that will make you happy but believing in love will get you hurt. I guess I just think if you’re going to fall for anything in modern life it should be another person.

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I’m not denying it’s hard to find love now. But disbelief makes it harder. My advice for girls growing up and becoming disillusioned is basically do the opposite of what we’ve been told. Watch old romantic movies, read classic love stories, play old love songs, listen to your grandparents. Fill your life with reminders of the good in the world. Don’t expect lifelong commitment to be easy, but don’t lose hope in loyalty, in kindness, in lasting love either. Hold those expectations for yourself and others. Conduct yourself as if that kind of love exists, and you’ll come closer to it. Because right now it’s painful—painful trying to keep it together and hold onto hope when this world is hell-bent on killing it. Feel some wonder and get a chemical explanation. Feel some selflessness and get told to put your guard back up. Feel alive for once and get laughed in the face. I suggest you shut all that out. And be brave enough to say no, I don’t want a situationship, I want to know someone; I want to be known. I won’t put up with a love that’s disloyal or unkind or half-hearted, because I believe in something more. I don’t want endless options, the world at my fingertips. I want the world to fall away except for one person.

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All this to say, I think love is real. I think it’s worth believing in. We can’t afford not to. There are a lot of ways we are fooled in the modern world, but falling in love isn’t one of them. Loyal, selfless, lasting love is out there. Remind yourself of that often. Refuse to give up on it. Otherwise our world belongs to the people who don’t believe. Otherwise we hand it over to the truly hopeless. I think we’re already finding out what happens then.

14.3

The Right Kind of Persistence - Paul Graham

“Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.

Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads against a wall and get nowhere.

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I've talked to a lot of determined people, and it seems to me that they're different kinds of behavior. I've often walked away from a conversation thinking either "Wow, that guy is determined" or "Damn, that guy is stubborn," and I don't think I'm just talking about whether they seemed right or not. That's part of it, but not all of it.

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Why are they like this? Why are the obstinate obstinate? One possibility is that they're overwhelmed. They're not very capable. They take on a hard problem. They're immediately in over their head. So they grab onto ideas the way someone on the deck of a rolling ship might grab onto the nearest handhold.

That was my initial theory, but on examination it doesn't hold up. If being obstinate were simply a consequence of being in over one's head, you could make persistent people become obstinate by making them solve harder problems. But that's not what happens. If you handed the Collisons an extremely hard problem to solve, they wouldn't become obstinate. If anything they'd become less obstinate. They'd know they had to be open to anything.

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When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don't give up is completely different. Instead of merely resisting change, you're driven toward a goal by energy and resilience, through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement. You'll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.

Considering what it's made of, it's not surprising that the right kind of stubbornness is so much rarer than the wrong kind, or that it gets so much better results. Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed, kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people have enough of all five of the qualities that produce right kind of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.

14.4

What Does The Gray Tribe Believe? - Erik Torenberg

“Last week we chatted with Balaji for 7 hours about the need for a “gray tribe” in contrast to the red and blue tribes. In this piece I’ll take a stab at some gray tribe positions as well as some context on why there’s a gray tribe in the first place.

We previously talked previously about the techlash — how the left loved tech and then turned on tech. This has left techies politically homeless for some time.

Techies feel they can’t be leftists, because the most extreme leftists are attacking them and destroying their companies from the inside out.

Techies can’t be rightists either because they’re neither working class nor socially conservative.

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So now you have three choices: You can go left and try to stand up to people who hate you. Or you can go to the right and lose because no one wants to be associated with the right (even Garry Tan who is advocating for what seems like right-ist policies on housing, homelessness, crime, etc, swears he’s a leftist). Or you can reach for what seems to be the only alternative, this new form of centrism:

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Of course, centrism is often a losing strategy. It’s a way to seem reasonable, but you can’t build a constituency on that, since it can’t stand up to extremes on both sides. Balaji’s idea of “The Gray Tribe” seems to get at some of the benefits of centrism, while also not being as squishy. The Gray Tribe is a “big tent” for a lot of camps (i.e. people interested in Bitcoin, Ethereum, e/acc, EA even, libertarianism, American dynamism), without being alienating to any individual group the way those groups often are. Gray Tribe acknowledges a class consciousness around centrists in a way that has been hard for centrists to build, which is why you’ve never seen a centrism pride parade.

The opinions/reactions of a Gray Tribe the past few years may have been something like this:

• The left has gone way too far left

• What’s happening in schools on these issues is messed up

• OMG crime WTF

• COVID policies WTF

• Mostly Peaceful WTF

• Tech activists have gone insane WTF

• The right is bananas on abortion

• The right is bananas on Trump / election denial

• Jan 6 WTF

The positions the Gray Tribe/new tech centrists want to have are something like:

* There are elites — there are some people who are just smarter and more competent and more capable than others

* It's OK to be an elite

* It's OK to want to be an elite

* It's OK to want your children to be an elite

* Crime is bad and criminals should be locked up

* We aren't actually racist

* We aren't actually sexist

* We shouldn't be forced to hire people who aren't qualified

* Capitalism is good actually

* Tech is good actually

* And in fact, tech may be the only thing that is actually good, the only area in which actual progress is being made anywhere in our society

* Enemies of tech are bad

* Some taxes are OK, but the government is dysfunctional and we shouldn't keep feeding it more money without fixing the underlying issues first

* Schools should teach math and not indoctrinate kids

* We have the solution to climate change and it's nuclear, if we're ever allowed to build it

* The government bails out other industries but not us, and should stop it

* We need politics out of our companies

* Elon should be a national hero

* Let’s not rewind progress on abortion or gay marriage

* Sure, get the border under control, but let’s not be anti-immigration”

14.5

On Far Left Extremists - Devon Eriksen

“This, and Disney Star Wars, and all of modern Hollywood, and all of Manhattan tradpub, can be explained with one simple idea.

And no, it isn't "Satan". No religious suppositions are required. What's going on here is venial, and even more depraved.

Narcissism.

You see, there are two kinds of artistic creativity. Both are based on egotism, but one is healthy, and the other is destructive.

The first says "Art is about beauty and truth. I will create that which is beautiful and true, that which uplifts those who look upon it. And my ego will be satisfied when my work is acknowledged as good, both by myself and others."

This is based on a healthy version of egotism... pride.

Pride is self-respect, a sense of one's own proper dignity or value, as earned through merit, virtue, and accomplishment.

The second says "Art is about self-expression. I will create art based on whatever is in myself, no matter how ugly, deceptive, and low. I will make myself visible in every aspect of my art, and my ego will satisfied, because I will be the center of attention, with everyone looking at me."

This is based on the sick version of egotism... narcissism. It is the ego that demands to be the center of attention, regardless of what others actually wish to see or would like to pay attention to.

It is the revenge of the neglected child, not on the mother who ignored him, but on the entire universe.

Great art is not about self-expression. It comes from the self, it is shaped by the self, but it the truth it expresses is shared and universal. This is why it speaks to others, not just the artist.

When we look upon a fine sculpture, we see only David, not Michelangelo.

When we read a great story, we do not see Tolkien, and we forget, for a moment, that Frodo and Sam aren't real.

We can say Van Gogh painted one white iris because he was lonely, isolated within a crowd, but if we do say that, we care because we have been lonely, too.

Great art makes the artist invisible. He waits backstage until the art is done, and it is time for him to step out and take a bow, receive his applause and be satisfied in a work well done. He does not stand between the audience and their enjoyment of the work.

But, for this precise reason, great art cannot emerge from narcissism. The narcissist cannot bear to upstaged by anything, even the work of his own hands, the child of his own brain.

The narcissistic artist creates art not to please others, but to force others to look at him. He must stamp his personality on every corner of the work, make it his and his alone, and remind the audience, in every moment, in every place they direct their gaze, that this work is his, and that he is what truly matters, here.

This art, shown here, is not ugly by accident. It is ugly because the artists wish you to look upon their ugliness, both outer and inner.

It is ugly because its message is not "look at this" but "look at me".

This is why the left is obsessed with "representation" in art. This is why they cover themselves in ugly, mismatched tattoos, and dye their hair pink, purple, and blue. This is why they write self-indulgent stories about "identity" and "finding your squad".

They are screaming their identity at the void, never realizing that it's not only possible, but easy, to be unique without being interesting or useful.

Those who fancy themselves to be beautiful unique snowflakes would do well to remember that the slightest touch of heat will turn them into homogeneous, ubiquitous, undifferentiated water.

They can work for Disney all they want, making black lesbian Jedi so that "the character can look just like me", but the character will be boring because they are boring.

In other words, what we are seeing here is not a rebellion against god (if you are religious) or civilization and merit (if you aren't), it's something far worse.

It's the petty, ugly, banalities of an entire subculture of tiresome neurotics who cannot dredge one single beautiful, interesting, or true thing out of their souls that would make you voluntarily pay attention. I blame their mothers. “

14.6

How Close Are We to Creating AI? - David Deutsch

“It is uncontroversial that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of all other known objects in the cosmos. It is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.

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But no brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do in order to achieve any of that functionality. The enterprise of achieving it artificially — the field of ‘artificial general intelligence’ or AGI — has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence.

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Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. The first people to guess this and to grapple with its ramifications were the 19th-century mathematician Charles Babbage and his assistant Ada, Countess of Lovelace. It remained a guess until the 1980s, when I proved it using the quantum theory of computation.

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Despite their best efforts, Babbage and Lovelace failed almost entirely to convey their enthusiasm about the Analytical Engine to others. In one of the great might-have-beens of history, the idea of a universal computer languished on the back burner of human thought. There it remained until the 20th century, when Alan Turing arrived with a spectacular series of intellectual tours de force, laying the foundations of the classical theory of computation, establishing the limits of computability, participating in the building of the first universal classical computer and, by helping to crack the Enigma code, contributing to the Allied victory in the Second World War.

Turing fully understood universality. In his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, he used it to sweep away what he called ‘Lady Lovelace’s objection’, and every other objection both reasonable and unreasonable. He concluded that a computer program whose repertoire included all the distinctive attributes of the human brain — feelings, free will, consciousness and all — could be written.

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I do not highlight all these philosophical issues because I fear that AGIs will be invented before we have developed the philosophical sophistication to understand them and to integrate them into civilisation. It is for almost the opposite reason: I am convinced that the whole problem of developing AGIs is a matter of philosophy, not computer science or neurophysiology, and that the philosophical progress that is essential to their future integration is also a prerequisite for developing them in the first place.

The lack of progress in AGI is due to a severe logjam of misconceptions. Without Popperian epistemology, one cannot even begin to guess what detailed functionality must be achieved to make an AGI. And Popperian epistemology is not widely known, let alone understood well enough to be applied. Thinking of an AGI as a machine for translating experiences, rewards and punishments into ideas (or worse, just into behaviours) is like trying to cure infectious diseases by balancing bodily humours: futile because it is rooted in an archaic and wildly mistaken world view.

Without understanding that the functionality of an AGI is qualitatively different from that of any other kind of computer program, one is working in an entirely different field. If one works towards programs whose ‘thinking’ is constitutionally incapable of violating predetermined constraints, one is trying to engineer away the defining attribute of an intelligent being, of a person: namely creativity.

Clearing this logjam will not, by itself, provide the answer. Yet the answer, conceived in those terms, cannot be all that difficult. For yet another consequence of understanding that the target ability is qualitatively different is that, since humans have it and apes do not, the information for how to achieve it must be encoded in the relatively tiny number of differences between the DNA of humans and that of chimpanzees. So in one respect I can agree with the AGI-is-imminent camp: it is plausible that just a single idea stands between us and the breakthrough. But it will have to be one of the best ideas ever.”