2024-12-03
pride
Celine Ngyuen reading list. I’m also currently in a sort of reading lull where I switch between three different books and two different shows without making much progress through them. Anyways, the one recommendation I did check out, the Substack novella Money Matters is actually very good. It captures something of my own experience which is rarely directly articulated, because those who know typically just can’t be bothered to do so. There’s basically only two key components to being talented at anything, unlearnable because speed is of the essence, such that if you have to think you’ve already lost: the ability to instantly get to the core of any situation, and the immediate awareness of new options as they appear. If you see the paths and know how to traverse them, and can take them before anyone else, then anything that is possible is attainable. That’s sort of how I feel about systems, and that’s how it is for Jack with people. And this novella captures the pride that can come with this golden gift, this expectation that you should be talented at everything else as well, which means you just cannot bring yourself to muddle along with anything you are bad at, no matter how important it is. It’s the Catcher in the Rye feeling which I thought only angry young male novelists were capable of writing, where you feel simultaneously like a loser and a god, entitled with both privilege and discontent. There’s probably a lot of overlap here with the phenomena of people who just do not want to work. I’m not referring to those that have daddy’s money and/or poor impulse control, but the cases where this trait is combined with high conscientiousness and a long-term outlook: people who somehow have the ability to make it work without working, and along the way develop a fixation that anything else is failure, a surrender to something like capitalism or society or entropy (depending on their politics). These people are usually very interesting! It’s one of the few cases where I wish I had more money, which might open my options for arrangements with women who are in this category (the other is if it turns out that radical life extension is possible, but is prohibitively expensive). Unfortunately I can only support myself, without the leverage of Jack’s gifts in persuasion to reach for more (or I suppose even to make it work if I could). Also, the plot of this novella is also happens to be an argument for the housing theory of everything being the cause of the fertility crisis.
Joseph Politano with charts showing the impact of Ozempic on Danish GDP. I wonder to what extent this is actually being felt throughout the entire economy though.
Here’s an article in Reboot Mag about someone trying to organize a union in a tech startup, which seems terribly misguided to me. According to the company, if it succeeded they would no longer get funding and lose their runway, having failed, it resulted in firings and attrition. And they did it entirely for ideological reasons, rather than aiming for any expected benefits for anyone involved.
Stella Tsantekidou interviews a self-proclaimed Nazi. As entertaining as her personal style is to read (which turns emotion into primal forces in a Greek tragedy) it seems pretty unsurprising to me that a random young man would develop feeling for an attractive classy woman who paid attention to him. Regarding the Nazis, this is another case of the SSC idea of tolerating witches, and central to crypto values is being permissionlessness.
Asimov Press on the misunderstandings of the central dogma. Even if it is actually correct, I think there’s a certain point where a scientific or mathematical concept just has so much baggage that you should just start over with a new term.
Wyclif's Dust on family culture in the Philippines. It’s interesting, because it’s my understanding that the Philippines have eclipsed everywhere else (like Thailand) as the preferred destination of Passport Bros. Phenomena like this, their remittance economy tied to nanny and nursing roles abroad, their mixed cultural heritage, Duterte and the nationalism of “Pinoy Pride”, this country is inextricably tied in all the culture war hot-button issues. But strangely, discussion of these topics rarely mentions them.
Casey Handmer on the case for DOGE.
Zvi pronatalist roundup.
