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Duncan Idaho: "I don’t understand you, m’Lord." Leto II: "That is the beginning of knowledge—the discovery of something we do not understand."
Leto Atreides II | Dune Wiki | Fandom
Heidegger's thesis that the use of technology trains humans to think like machines. The problem is that machines are deterministic; thus, training people to be machines is self-limiting. Herbert seemed to think that to be human is to be essentially 'open-ended', capable of undiscovered, indeterminate evolution, both personally and as a species.
Butlerian Jihad | Dune Wiki | Fandom
New life is a divine thing, “for conception and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature.”
The Deathless Land - by Simon Sarris
Conversations and debates can be hindered based off of the predispositions from physical and pre-existing intellectual embodiments that limit curiosity and capturing the validity of arguments.
a journey through the terminally online
. That may be true, but the only simulation we need to be concerned with for now is the one we are running in our own minds. We are creating simulations of our perception of reality all the time. We are imputing meaning, motive and intent with every interaction we have whether textual or any other modality.
Full catastrophe living - by torpor - Absolute Beginners
Go for a walk. Get into the World. Other cards may reveal clues as to what patterns need to be released. If you make a choice move on from the old and tired ways of doing things, boundless possibilities will await you.
The Card of the Day: The World (Reversed) — Elliot Oracle - Tarot Card Readings
Procrastination is often fear in disguise. By putting off completing one phase, you still hold onto the past, pretending that you need more time to let it go. Pivotal life-changes are rarely made with one-hundred percent assurance that everything will work out. Often, your best transformations come from having the courage to let go of old tired patterns and commit to a new way of seeing your life.
The Card of the Day: The World (Reversed) — Elliot Oracle - Tarot Card Readings
It’s every individual for himself or herself right now as we try to make sense of our lives.
The Bright (And Cloudy) Dawn Of A New Age | By Steven Forrest | Issue 55 | The Sun Magazine
The relationships that endure, marriages that endure, will be the most dynamic marriages that have ever existed.
The Bright (And Cloudy) Dawn Of A New Age | By Steven Forrest | Issue 55 | The Sun Magazine
We will recognize a couple as a couple even though they live apart. We’ll also find periods of separation in the marriage becoming more acceptable. One person will say, “I love you but I need to go to Europe for the next six months. You’re beginning to get on my nerves. If I don’t leave, we’re going to stop loving each other.” This will be acceptable even to conservative people in 100 years.
The Bright (And Cloudy) Dawn Of A New Age | By Steven Forrest | Issue 55 | The Sun Magazine
Under Aquarius we find still the basic hunger to seek the other half but also much more emphasis upon individuality and the autonomy of each partner.
The Bright (And Cloudy) Dawn Of A New Age | By Steven Forrest | Issue 55 | The Sun Magazine
It is possible to have a technology that would free human consciousness to explore itself, to begin an inward adventure that has never been experienced.
The Bright (And Cloudy) Dawn Of A New Age | By Steven Forrest | Issue 55 | The Sun Magazine
Astrology cannot ever be perfectly accurate any more than science can, as Einstein and Neils Bohr have certainly proven. There are limits to what we can know because ultimately the only thing that can symbolize reality perfectly is reality itself, and then we’re back to square one.
The World As Symbol | By Michael Thurman | Issue 113 | The Sun Magazine
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
Any which way, by pursuing your interest, you will move toward complexity. The simple things do not surprise you anymore. So you turn your attention to more complicated things. This is an amazing algorithm: do interesting things and magically arrive at a complex understanding of the world.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
Some believe that decentralization requires the entire social network to be on a blockchain. This is unnecessary and even undesirable. Social networks generate petabytes of data every year, which can be very expensive to store on-chain. Blockchains also make it difficult to delete data forever, which is a desirable feature for users. A network design that leverages on-chain systems to decentralize ownership while using off-chain systems for a better user experience is a better path to building social networks.
Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks - Varun Srinivasan
A thing I realized recently is that you can pray to your best future self. Your future self knows exactly what you are going through, because they were once you. You don't have to struggle to put your stress and anxiety and anger and frustration into words, and worry that the person you're talking to won't get it, or that the process of putting it into words will have you dwelling on things too much and making it worse. Your future self will just be there. And they will know exactly what you have experienced. And they will be older, stronger, wiser. They will know your pain, and they will know…
Your best future self - LessWrong
Personally, I call depression "the slavery response" and think it used to be an adaptive response to certain kin group dynamics. If you're depressed (and it isn't iodine deficiency or something), find out who you feel enslaved by and powerless against, and obtain social support in changing that relationship.
Methods for treating depression - LessWrong
, Dr. Huq shared his thoughts within the context of Bangladesh. Leaders have identified smaller towns outside of Dhaka with the goal to make them climate resilient migrant-friendly towns. The intent is to build social capital and infrastructure that can absorb migrants who will be forced out of the low-lying rural coasts in the country — and to incentivize people to move to these opportunity- and capital-rich centers instead of the slums of Dhaka.
Key Takeaways from The Growing Role Climate Migration Will Play at COP27 by Atmos and Climate Nexus | by Natalie Leinbach | Oct, 2022 | Medium
Mars in Gemini at its best can bring the brilliance of the mind into concrete action, but slowing to retrograde and square to these intense outer planets, including Neptune, this may look more like slow going, feeling uncertain of which direction to head, and potentially spinning in thoughts of what to do without a clear direction of where energy is best spent. If you do find yourself in such a spin, I encourage a slowing down and settling into the present moment, and direct relationship with Spirit, however that looks for you.
ASTROGRAPH - A New Moon Solar Eclipse of Transformation and Relationship
It is however vital – amidst the echo chambers of the various amplifying social and mainstream media platforms – that we dig deep within ourselves for what we truly stand for, independent of early conditioning or distracting consensus voices.
ASTROGRAPH - A Stunningly Exciting and Contentious Full Moon Eclipse
s?” There are a number of places where it is clearly good for humans, and I realized I was thinking that if we created it, it must be bad—versus not having any bias one way or another.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
When we’re talking about the world, we’re often doing a contradictory thing, which is optimizing for eliminating human impact and at the same time optimizing for advancing human flourishing
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
Your goal should be to advance climate livability. As I mentioned before, priority number one should be to increase your mastery of the climate because that allows you to neutralize negatives, and in fact turn negatives into positives.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
If you care about people, they need energy. They need productive ability that will enable them to deal with storms and to feed themselves and protect themselves from nature and have medical care and education. You need energy for all these things. But you can see they’re making that appeal.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
. Aren’t we being neocolonialists in the West if we try to thrust our anti–fossil fuel mentality on them? People in Africa or India or China might like to have a car or a condo or air-conditioning too!
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
if you think human impact on nature is a bad thing that should be eliminated, you hate the benefits of energy. It’s not just you hate there’s pollution, or there’s CO2 and you think that’s problematic. The very purpose of energy is to do work on the rest of nature. That’s what it is. It’s the capacity to do work. The more energy we use, the more we are going to transform nature to suit our purposes. And “transform” here just means “have an impact on.” So, if you’re against impact, you’re against transformation and you’re against energy, and this is what you get with the most consistent of our …
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
McKibben is telling us what to do about energy, but he doesn’t know the difference between electricity and energy; takes daytime highs and equates them with averages; and equates solar in December with solar in June. It’s important to be precise. The fact that so many of our leading thinkers are imprecise should solidify the idea that our whole establishment doesn’t value energy—and there’s a lot of reasons to think it’s hostile to energy.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
In Georgia, we have unbelievable cost overruns. Construction is becoming uneconomical. This is not something that is poised to be a rapid replacement
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
I told her and the rest of that group that energy is the industry that powers every other industry. The price of energy determines the price of everything, and we’re seeing that right now, with price inflation being substantially driven by energy prices! Everything I say in Fossil Future is coming true: if you ignore the benefits of fossil fuels, and more broadly the importance of cost-effective energy, you are going to hurt so many people, including their ability to feed themselves.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
When you do that in a clinical, prohuman, kind of nondogmatic way, you have a totally different view of the whole situation.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
My claim about the establishment is that they’re not only ignoring the broad benefits of fossil fuels. They are in particular ignoring the climate mastery benefits. Because their implicit goal is to eliminate human impact because it’s evil. They think our impact on the climate is intrinsically immoral and we shouldn’t do it, and they expect us to be punished for it. It has a religious quality to it, where the commandment is “thou shalt not impact the climate” and the climate is going to punish us vengefully if we do.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
. OK, but then let’s look at it from within a human-flourishing framework, where our goal is to advance human flourishing on earth. Then our premise becomes the earth is not this delicate nurturer. It’s wild potential that we need to impact intelligently.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
What you grasp is that our ability to deal with the climate, or what I would call our climate mastery ability, is so much more important than the exact current state of the global climate system.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
The government people behind the funding are very interested in catastrophe scenarios that justify increases in their power. And so, what you find is that even if all the researchers are well intentioned and doing their best, the action conclusions that we’re given can be totally wrong. I’m trying to break this common idea that if we’re told that the experts say we should do X, then that must be right. The point is it can be 180 degrees wrong, and in fact, I show the track record is often that wrong—that is, they’ve recommended policies that would have ended billions of lives prematurely.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
This is the result of what I call “climate mastery,” and you cannot talk intelligently about climate and the threat of climate change if you don’t recognize that we’re far safer from climate. There has been a 98 percent decline in climate-related disaster deaths over the last one hundred years, and the UN doesn’t mention this in any of its reports. That’s like a polio report that doesn’t mention that we have a polio vaccine, a preventative to the disease, and that we’re far better off.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
He doesn’t talk about the fact that the whole world would starve without fossil fuels or their equivalent, and that there’s no reason to believe that their agricultural functions, including as a fertilizer, can be replaced in any reasonable timeframe. This kind of thinking—or nonthinking—is what leads us to an energy crisis or a fertilizer crisis, as we are experiencing today, because people like Michael Mann told us we should make decisions about this while ignoring the benefits.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
I use the term “knowledge system” throughout the book, and this is to capture the fact that when we are told what expert conclusions are, we need to recognize that we don’t just get those conclusions directly from the expert researchers in the field. There’s a process by which what those researchers find is synthesized, disseminated, and then evaluated in terms of what actions they might lead to, and I show that at every stage of this process, there are big distortions just in terms of evaluation.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
I like how you framed it: it’s not so much the experts are wrong in the narrow area of their expertise, but the chain through which knowledge is communicated to the public has lots of links in it. It gets distorted. Just one example: William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of climate change, is arguably the top economist in this area. His own model shows the 1.5°C cap on global warming would be so economically destructive it would be better if governments did nothing. And yet right after he won the Nobel Prize, the same weekend, the UN came out with its special …
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
I reject this framing of “our goal is to eliminate CO2 emissions and fossil fuels,” and as I talk about it in the book, the deeper goal underlying that is to eliminate human impact on the earth. I frame it broadly, but our goal should be to advance human flourishing, and when we’re thinking about global issues, that should be the goal. The –100 is increasing human suffering on earth—and once you frame it that way, then people are very open to the possibility that more fossil fuels are beneficial and we need more of them.
Debunking Fossil Fuel Hysteria: An Interview with Alex Epstein | Mises Institute
Those extolling the virtues of traditional farm life never mention the perpetual manual labor, lack of sanitation, lack of health care, and widespread inclinations toward alcoholism. I have spent my life to date moving increasingly further away from that, and I will resist vigorously the efforts of those who seek to drag our entire civilization back into miserable, decrepit premodernity.
WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity | Mises Institute
Virtually no one today who romanticizes the "good old days" of traditional agriculture recognizes how nasty, brutish, and short life under such conditions had been for millennia. Once the first industrial factories opened — with their long hours, dangerous equipment, and meager pay — people flocked to them in droves, because the factory conditions (including the sanitation provided and wages paid) were greatly preferable to those of toiling virtually all day on the traditional farm.
WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity | Mises Institute
In the real world, there exist immense changes of preferences, widely dispersed information, tremendous uncertainty about the future, and numerous entrepreneurs who alert themselves to possible opportunities for satisfying people's wants in a better way than they are currently being satisfied. That there is not one entrepreneur aboard the Axiom prior to the Captain's paradigm-shifting discovery of information that was easily accessible to everybody for the last seven centuries is testimony to the filmmakers' ignorance of what makes economic change possible and ubiquitous.
WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity | Mises Institute
As Ludwig von Mises showed, people will act so long as they are faced with uncertainty and believe themselves capable of somehow affecting the uncertain future. These conditions will never stop existing — no matter how comfortable and prosperous people become. Thus, humans will always act and will always strive to improve their lives. A wholly static, apathetic, sated, and torpid society is inconceivable in reality.
WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity | Mises Institute
With some kinds of wants met — such as food, shelter, and transportation — people virtually always tend to develop new wants or to focus on existing lower-priority wants not yet addressed
WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity | Mises Institute
WALL-E is egregiously wrong in assuming that technological conveniences such as easily accessible food, transportation, entertainment, and communication render all people lazy, indulgent, and devoid of initiative. Some people, to be sure, respond in this way. In the real world, however, this response tends to be temporary. In the more economically advanced countries, it tends to affect lower-income individuals who have just begun accessing historically luxurious standards of living and have not yet developed cultural habits for managing their newfound wealth and opportunities responsibly. Thes…
WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity | Mises Institute