Why are socialism, marijuana, and original blockbusters ascendant? Where do "Western values" come from? Why do modern people torture ourselves with comparison and guilt?
Regarding: "The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Ancient Greek culture used to value brute strength for its own sake, while it was Judeo-Christianity that inverted the relationship between strength and goodness and encouraged the strong to feel guilt and pity for the weak."
I have often thought that narcissism and psychopathy exist in the human population because natural selection favored them at low rates in the population. If your tribe is competing with a neighboring tribe, having one psychopathic person on your team, happy to do terrible violence to the other tribe, is better than if you are all squeamish normies.
By extension, just as many of our leaders today are disordered narcissists (or worse), I think that many leaders of the past and deep past likely were as well.
So no surprise, when the idea of God came along, he/she looked like the leaders of yore. The God of the Torah and the Greek gods certainly read as capricious at best and disordered at worst.
Christianity flipped this, and imagined a God that was NOT disordered! And promised the normies (i.e. the 'meek') that they too could get ahead, and even inherit the earth.
Love this, and have also been unable to stop thinking about the uni-context. It feels true.
Wonder though, Derek et al, what you think it implies about our behaviour?
A couple thoughts:
- The uni-context seems like it explains why organisations have become battlefields for society's ills. Why are local councils announcing their position on Israel/Gaza? Why are UK book festivals being forced to take positions on fossil fuels? The uni-context!
- It also might explain why change is difficult. Harms are easy to describe because they're uni-contextual. Gains often apply within a narrower context, so are harder for a universal audience to see or value. (Actually, maybe this is why AI and GLP-1s are sources of excitement! They're much more uni-contextual than a targeted heart drug, for instance.)
It's easy to understand that the HS2 rail project in the UK might kill some bats. It's a concrete harm anyone can recognise. The benefits, however, are much more conditional and require understanding the transport corridor, its counterfactual and wider network effects. The uni-context cludges things up!
Maybe we need to work harder to establish the relevant context before introducing change or debating an issue. What's the aspiration? What would success look like? Which constraints are relevant? Which universal safeguards should remain ? If we narrow the context up front, maybe that describes fairer battlegrounds.
"Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did—all it does is ruin your day. Doesn't hurt them at all, and there's zero upside to it. If you're going to pick a sin, go with something like lust or gluttony. That way at least you'll have something to remember the weekend for.”- Warren Buffett
Obesity is a huge problem, renders 100m Americans alone disabled. I wouldn't be surprised if globally the number was more than a billion.
Even though we're not there yet, glp1s will ultimately diffuse out and give decades of physical agency / play time with children / romantic desire / literal years of life back to _hundreds of millions_
Not suggesting you specifically, but the commentariat doesn't seem to comprehend just how enormously this class of drug will change the world. Yes llms will change work and possibly bump material abundance, but material abundance sort of doesn't matter if you're immobile. You still live in a physical "prison"
Kinda kitchy, but it's as if llms are tech for the physical world and glps are maybe the first truly profound liverative tech for the inner world. And our cultural weighting of the two reflects sth.
On the question of guilt and Western values, there's a case to be made about the impact, for better or worse, the Enlightenment has has had on a grand scale long term, shifting our focus more towards the individual rather than the collective. A can of worms but something I think about myself often.
On Question # 6. I'm a 58M who is bald, and have been taking Finasteride for 2 years and counting for prostate cancer prophylaxis. After reading a compelling peer reviewed study. It helps with hair loss too, but the hair was mostly gone before I started.
I explained it to my partner as 'if there was a pill that cut breast cancer 25%, most women would be on it.'
Add the hair factor, and it is a no brainer.
The rub is that some men report a severe and permanent loss of libido from taking the drug. My own deep dive suggests that that is a nocebo effect. ANY treatment of men that involves hormones or the reproductive system... has a small subset reporting that. Including vasectomy. I think there are just a lot of suggestible 'fragile' men out there...
What if the unicontext ALSO helps explain the Dem factional war in terms of why both moderates and leftists have valid arguments for their positions AND valid examples to point to?
As usual Derek you blow my mind with your insights and analysis. I think the most surprising thing for me was that you get high to watch movies :) My only other thought is that after seeing The Odyssey, it struck me as a metaphor and critique of Trump's presidency. I may have TDS and be overly simple, but the breaking of Zeus's Law and the norms of society eventually ruin life and how we interact.
“…sui generis (movie) hits are rare”. I believe this is generational. A steady stream of character-based dramas from the 70s are worth watching—or rewatching.
On #8: It may well be Christian values introduced more guilt a couple millennia ago, but I'd like to think my many generations of Catholic ancestors felt as much guilt (about everything) as I do. Can't believe that's gotten worse for us in the last 100 years.
A weekend’s worth of questions to think about now 👍
Regarding: "The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Ancient Greek culture used to value brute strength for its own sake, while it was Judeo-Christianity that inverted the relationship between strength and goodness and encouraged the strong to feel guilt and pity for the weak."
I have often thought that narcissism and psychopathy exist in the human population because natural selection favored them at low rates in the population. If your tribe is competing with a neighboring tribe, having one psychopathic person on your team, happy to do terrible violence to the other tribe, is better than if you are all squeamish normies.
By extension, just as many of our leaders today are disordered narcissists (or worse), I think that many leaders of the past and deep past likely were as well.
So no surprise, when the idea of God came along, he/she looked like the leaders of yore. The God of the Torah and the Greek gods certainly read as capricious at best and disordered at worst.
Christianity flipped this, and imagined a God that was NOT disordered! And promised the normies (i.e. the 'meek') that they too could get ahead, and even inherit the earth.
Love this, and have also been unable to stop thinking about the uni-context. It feels true.
Wonder though, Derek et al, what you think it implies about our behaviour?
A couple thoughts:
- The uni-context seems like it explains why organisations have become battlefields for society's ills. Why are local councils announcing their position on Israel/Gaza? Why are UK book festivals being forced to take positions on fossil fuels? The uni-context!
- It also might explain why change is difficult. Harms are easy to describe because they're uni-contextual. Gains often apply within a narrower context, so are harder for a universal audience to see or value. (Actually, maybe this is why AI and GLP-1s are sources of excitement! They're much more uni-contextual than a targeted heart drug, for instance.)
It's easy to understand that the HS2 rail project in the UK might kill some bats. It's a concrete harm anyone can recognise. The benefits, however, are much more conditional and require understanding the transport corridor, its counterfactual and wider network effects. The uni-context cludges things up!
Maybe we need to work harder to establish the relevant context before introducing change or debating an issue. What's the aspiration? What would success look like? Which constraints are relevant? Which universal safeguards should remain ? If we narrow the context up front, maybe that describes fairer battlegrounds.
What does the uni-context imply for our approach?
"Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did—all it does is ruin your day. Doesn't hurt them at all, and there's zero upside to it. If you're going to pick a sin, go with something like lust or gluttony. That way at least you'll have something to remember the weekend for.”- Warren Buffett
Obesity is a huge problem, renders 100m Americans alone disabled. I wouldn't be surprised if globally the number was more than a billion.
Even though we're not there yet, glp1s will ultimately diffuse out and give decades of physical agency / play time with children / romantic desire / literal years of life back to _hundreds of millions_
Not suggesting you specifically, but the commentariat doesn't seem to comprehend just how enormously this class of drug will change the world. Yes llms will change work and possibly bump material abundance, but material abundance sort of doesn't matter if you're immobile. You still live in a physical "prison"
Kinda kitchy, but it's as if llms are tech for the physical world and glps are maybe the first truly profound liverative tech for the inner world. And our cultural weighting of the two reflects sth.
You’re doing it again: confusing sales with profits. This is Econ 101 and is a major mistake that for me harms your overall credibility.
On the question of guilt and Western values, there's a case to be made about the impact, for better or worse, the Enlightenment has has had on a grand scale long term, shifting our focus more towards the individual rather than the collective. A can of worms but something I think about myself often.
Roald Dahl published an eerily prophetic short story about machine writing in 1953: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator
On Question # 6. I'm a 58M who is bald, and have been taking Finasteride for 2 years and counting for prostate cancer prophylaxis. After reading a compelling peer reviewed study. It helps with hair loss too, but the hair was mostly gone before I started.
I explained it to my partner as 'if there was a pill that cut breast cancer 25%, most women would be on it.'
Add the hair factor, and it is a no brainer.
The rub is that some men report a severe and permanent loss of libido from taking the drug. My own deep dive suggests that that is a nocebo effect. ANY treatment of men that involves hormones or the reproductive system... has a small subset reporting that. Including vasectomy. I think there are just a lot of suggestible 'fragile' men out there...
@Derek here’s some food for thought:
What if the unicontext ALSO helps explain the Dem factional war in terms of why both moderates and leftists have valid arguments for their positions AND valid examples to point to?
As usual Derek you blow my mind with your insights and analysis. I think the most surprising thing for me was that you get high to watch movies :) My only other thought is that after seeing The Odyssey, it struck me as a metaphor and critique of Trump's presidency. I may have TDS and be overly simple, but the breaking of Zeus's Law and the norms of society eventually ruin life and how we interact.
“…sui generis (movie) hits are rare”. I believe this is generational. A steady stream of character-based dramas from the 70s are worth watching—or rewatching.
Excellent, thank you.
10: Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping?
On #8: It may well be Christian values introduced more guilt a couple millennia ago, but I'd like to think my many generations of Catholic ancestors felt as much guilt (about everything) as I do. Can't believe that's gotten worse for us in the last 100 years.