2025-10-13
internal flight
Jasmine Sun interviews Kelsey Piper on how she views and defends liberalism. I feel like reports of liberalism’s demise are greatly exaggerated, in that people are confusing liberalism the ur-system with some set of particular policies that are associated with it. This is one reason I’m increasingly skeptical of Robin Hanson’s theory of cultural drift, because even though global culture is now in the hold of an overarching system, within the system is a great deal of diversity, because the system itself is preserving this capacity for differentiation. For example, it increasingly seems to me that gender relations and the culture war are almost completely different things in different parts of the world1. For example, because various factors limited the effectiveness of martial strategies in Confucian cultures, this resulted in men adopting traditionally female societal strategies; this was paired with oppression of females in order to prevent female competition from overturning male dominance2. Their culture wars are trying to answer the question of what to do, now that systematic oppression of women is no longer considered acceptable. As far as I can tell, ignoring wholesale remaking of society, there are two possibilities: one faction wishes to continue oppressing women in order to maintain male dominance; the other possibility is to let things take their natural course, resulting in a female-run society3 that is increasingly peaceful, orderly, and convenient, but also zero-sum and status-conscious, judgmental and censorious, sex-negative and low-fertility. In WEIRD societies4, there’s a much more complicated question about how to renegotiate the societal contract between what privileges and responsibilities should be assigned to each gender, since after all, men no longer need to go to war. Exactly because they are more liberal, there’s more confusion on exactly what is happening, but also more flexibility in how things could end up going5.
Daniel Muñoz on blaming systems for failures as the easy way to ignore your own agency. It seems to me that, evolutionarily speaking, all institutions which still exist do so because they are best-in-class. Particularly if they seem unsatisfactory, it feels unlikely that they could prolong themselves indefinitely if there were clearly better alternatives.
Maia Mindel and Brian Albrecht provide good explainers for the 2025 Economics Nobel, which was given for a formal model of how creative destruction works. Matt Yglesias has some interesting commentary (Edit: Anton Howe in WIP).
Ava on the Bay Area, which is arguably the place most accepting of weirdos in the entire world: a promise that whoever you are, you can find your people there.
Peter Attia Podcast on the difficulties of nutrition science, which do not produce patentable products to recoup the costs necessarily for high quality research studies. The reason I include this is that their discussion about obesity feels somewhat behind the times, mostly about education and self-control, when there are new advances coming out routinely around GLP-1RAs. I wonder if the fertility crisis might one day be solved similarly.
Synthesized Sunsets podcast interview with Dylan O’Neal on a number of interesting sci-fi and writing topics, including a discussion on how you can predict how good a story is by the shape of the paragraphs, and how short chapters encourage binge-reading. It will be interesting to see if, in twenty years or so, serious literary analysis will emerge of genres we currently consider not worth taking seriously. But SF actually deserves serious treatment, given how much of modern AI research culture is explicitly science-fiction inspired.
Core Memory interviews Summer Norman on the future of brain-computer interfaces. Particularly interesting is Summer’s statement that our ability to interface with the brain is far ahead of our ability to actually understand it, and his hopes for using AI to map the human connectome. I feel like this is a good opportunity to expand my case for how man and AGI belong together: that is, babies should be embedded with an AGI-containing BCI at birth, which is to be regarded as an inseparable part of themselves. What the human provides is a body, a sense of self, and goals; while the AI provides information on demand, memory storage, and as it engages in nondestructive mapping of the connectome, enhanced ability to engage in self-autoregulation6. When the body dies, what’s left will be an “immortal soul”: a fully mapped connectome and an emulation of how it runs7.
David Chapman on being able to see both physical reality and the metaphysical concepts which are overlaying everything.
Apologies for going on about this two days in a row, but the annoyance of missing Slutcon has me in the mood to think about gender relations, and I feel I should take advantage of the fact the gender war is now considered cringe to get my spicy takes out. Anyway, usual caveats apply, and replace feminine and masculine with yin and yang if you prefer to think of things that way.
The Song Dynasty’s response to the An Lushan rebellion was a systematic distrust and suppression of military institutions; I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the Song were also the ones who introduced foot-binding and other restrictions on women.
Note that women-run does not necessarily mean women-led, depending on whether one believes in the greater male variability hypothesis.
These two are the cultures I’m more familiar with, but I suspect the culture wars of other cultures are also asking very different questions. My very uninformed impression of honor cultures like those of the Middle East and (to a lesser extent) India are that their public societies are entirely masculine, with mandated sex segregation for the protection of women. The question here is how to let women enter public life, which will require the suppression of male aggression. On the other hand, both Slavs and Hispanics allow women to be masculine so long as they do so performatively femininely, and men are allowed to engage in feminine behaviors so long as they do it in a masculine manner (my impression is that the Slavs take these personas more seriously, while Hispanics know it is kayfabe); there the issue is that some people don’t particularly like acting or receiving these personas, hence complaints about things like machismo. I feel like the Hispanic solution is a good one, so it’s unclear to me why their fertility rates are also so low and decreasing: possibly these performances are a lot more fun to play as a single than as a husband or wife, so there’s no incentive to actually settle down.
The maximally uncharitable take towards women is that they want the privileges of both men and women, with none of the responsibilities of men, or even the traditional responsibilities of women. Male responses: deny extending male privileges and oppress women back into their original roles (retvrn); to grant male privileges but stop granting female privileges by ignoring traditional male responsibilities (decline of gentlemanly etiquette); to also demand both sets of privileges (one way of viewing the trans debate); or to allow these privileges as the new responsibility of men (the polygyny/hypergamy framing).
In some sense, this is the equivalent for cultural evolution to what genetic engineering is for natural selection.
As to what is done with it, perhaps being given a new body, being put on ice and summoned when useful, or being fed to the ASI as training data, that’s another question. Also, an unfortunate implication of this theory is that it implies all of us who are alive right now are soulless golems, denied eternal life.