Posts by StJohn Piano

" [Scott] Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special. For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything _except_ for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work. ... Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the world. It's not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. " https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife

New article: https://telablog.com/children-and-a-shared-vision-of-the-future Excerpts: "... This was in accordance with the ancient belief: man did not belong to himself; he belonged to the family. He was one member in a series, and the series must not stop with him..." "... fertility remains far below any desirable level. The reason, I suspect, is that something more fundamental is missing: a shared grand narrative..." "The most interesting question to me is: What story comes next ?"

"Modern politicians and becoming a man" - New article on Tela Blog It contains two quotes that I found striking. Issues: - The effect of a constant audience on a politician - The default state of man absent the cultural imposition of masculinity "... Mature masculinity is artificially induced through culture...." https://telablog.com/modern-politicians-and-becoming-a-man

New podcast episode (~ 4 mins) I'm taking a second crack at the podcast arena. Maximum stripped-down approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diYjLykJHw8

- Great post. Very true. - Where I'm at mentally: Human activity can be so bad that it's preferable to believe in God in order to have a defense against demonic behavior. - To go one level deeper, and to turn the focus away from other people, I understand my own proclivity towards evil / sin, which is quite strong, and the church offers a remedy, which is significantly better than the only two real alternatives: buddhism & nilihism. (I don't consider Nietzche's Ubermensch a viable alternative.) - That said, i still think the faith should be held in balance / tension against instinct / thor / odin / zeus / darwin. Sanity / truth emerges from the tension of opposites. - Incidentally, this is a way to avoid the temptation to try to justify christianity in the terms of scientific proof. I watched a lot of people try to do this. It's pointless. Cedes frame. - The faith is the faith. It needs no further justification. - cf "I am who i am" / ipsum esse

If you rank programming languages by usage outside of devs, the top languages all have a table-ish metaphor (SQL, Excel, R, Matlab). The languages devs use are largely Algol derived. Algol is a language that was used to express algorithms, which were largely abstractions over Turing machines, which are based around an infinite 1D tape of memory. This model of 1D memory was built into early computers, and early operating systems and early languages. We call it "mechanical sympathy". Meanwhile, other languages at the same time were invented that weren't tied so closely to the machine, but were more for the purpose of doing science and math. They didn't care as much about this 1D view of the world. Early languages like Fortran and Matlab had notions of 2D data matrices because math and science had notions of 2D data matrices. Languages like C were happy to support these things by using an array of pointers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052064

The US is a thalassocratic mercantile empire superimposed onto a continental tellurocracy... a Carthage on top of a Rome. ... the two intersect in Washington, more precisely at the money printer. The thalassocratic US empire of the 20th century is locked in a constant struggle to dominate the tellurocratic US empire of the 19th, and its chief weapon in this struggle is control over the money supply. There is little that maps onto the left/right discourse in these United States today as cleanly as the class interests of the American interior, largely white “heritage Americans,” against the class interests of those cosmopolitans who sit by the money printer and experience more alignment with their counterparts in London or Hong Kong, along with their stitched-together coalition of client groups bribed into alliance using the run-off from the printer, than with the bulk of their own countrymen. https://substack.com/home/post/p-179603373

Brains (or brain regions) undergo model collapse just like AI systems. ... Urban people often behave as if they’re retarded. Socially (they’ve never been punched in the face), Geospatially (they have no idea how to navigate by the sun or shadows), Culturally (without some pop-fiction touchstone, culture doesn’t exist), etc. They’re entirely bound to a world of artificial ideas: human-produced data, and unable to accurately model from first principles anything outside their extremely limited sphere of artificial experience. The bugman’s neurological model of reality is divorced from reality. They hallucinate truths that make no sense, and they delude themselves into provably false ideas, and violently attack anyone with a model of reality more accurate than their own. They don’t understand violence, hunger, or (real) social organization because they’ve never encountered those things. https://substack.com/home/post/p-178113467

" Once God is subtracted from life, Man is starved of significance. His life no longer makes sense, and he is stricken by the absurdity of his condition of being born to die between two oblivions. ... man’s appetite for identity and transcendence can be satisified, said the liberals, by the packaging of liberal politics as the higher spiritual purpose of mankind. ... This is the reason these viral cults of feverish zealotry seize the minds of millions in hypnotic cycles of mass hysteria. They are not only partnered with the State - they are the means of the production of belief. ... The liberal system ... is a total system, seeking to reform man within and without, and everything around him. All that was, is and will be is to be recast in the liberal image. It is the attempt to replace reality with a permanent illusion of utopia. ... Under these terms and conditions there is no reality but that of the manufactured consensus. " https://substack.com/home/post/p-177004462

- Man needs a faith. - (Which do you practice ?) - I practice Christianity. - Jesus is the right man to follow. - The worlds that flow from following Marx, Mohammed, Mammon, or Moloch ... are wastelands. Nothing grows there. - The world that we live in grew from Christianity. - Atheists still believe in Christian morality. They do not really want to live in a world without it. They would mostly not survive. - Am I a good Christian ? No. - Do I believe as a Christian should ? No. - Do I try to believe ? Yes. Sometimes. - And sometimes it seems as though it could be real. Sometimes God is sitting on a bench nearby, just outside the frame. - Is it the correct faith to try to believe ? For a European, yes. - But be as wise as a serpent. A man is hated most for his weaknesses. - A man should read the Greeks, Schmitt, the Buddhists, Sun Tzu, etc. Truth emerges from the tension of opposites. - Which rituals should you teach your children ? Correct action, communion, penance, forgiveness.