Varun Vijay

Polymath #LogicalHolism Inspired_by: Yuval Harari, Devdutt Pattanaik, Malcolm Gladwell, Viktor Frankl, Naval Ravikant, Orwell and Eckhart Tolle

[BuffaloRon @BuffaloRon]

Me: I'm going to eat healthy

Lettuce: I'm going to give you explosive diarrhea

Oreos in the pantry: I would never do that to you

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Our thoughts on the importance of AI sovereignty.

1. Your AI sovereignty dictates your institution’s future. Sovereignty is the precondition for choice. Relinquishing sovereignty transfers the future choices of your institution to others, who are likely to exploit it for their gain and your loss.

2. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Your ability to win is dictated by your ability to recognize and use your unique edges, and you keep winning by compounding the underlying data to generate new insights. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones.

3. Tokenmaxxing hijacks your value orientation and decreases your institutional fortitude and intelligence. The pursuit of high token usage incentivizes disposable scripts over robust software — with the addictive feeling of false progress. There is a reason why those selling tokens refuse to charge based on value.

4. Controlling your weights is controlling your fate. Weights are the distilled form of hard-won, accumulated institutional knowledge. If you let others control your weights, you are allowing them to migrate the alpha of your business to theirs.

5. There is no contradiction between sovereignty and alpha. The architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha.

6. Politicizing the technical issues involving sovereignty is what your adversary wants. Techno-politicization is the wellspring of false sovereignty. Techno-politicization drives decisions that seem to reduce dependency, but ultimately limit agency — especially on the battlefield in the West.

7. Real expertise is existential. Allowing politics or favoritism to determine your technical decisions rewards whoever is best at politics, not whoever is right. Listen to those closest to the problems, not those speaking most compellingly about them.

8. Learn from institutions that are winning or that have consistently delivered. Institutions facing existential threats do not have the luxury of making technical decisions based on political preferences.

9. Only listen to institutions, countries, and people who have a proven record of being right. A track record of correctness is the best and only signal for future correctness. Judging something as right or wrong based on who you like is exceedingly misguided.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

So I bought a $2,000 iPhone 17 Pro Max 1TB and it's the buggiest Apple experience I've ever had

First the data transfer failed after 5
minutes, then it had to reset itself, and I had to do everything again

Then after resetting it just would NOT detect the old phone to transfer data from

Then when it did work after trying for ages, it took 6 hours to transfer but kept saying "4 minutes left" (???)

Then when it was done I couldn't go on hotel WiFi because to open the captive WiFi portal to enter the password for the hotel WiFi I needed a browser but I didn't have a browser (cause EU law)

But when I opened Safari, it'd ask me what browser I wanted (cause EU law), but then immediately fail because it didn't have internet to download the browser (catch-22) so I could never login to the hotel wifi to download my browser (???)

Ok then I connected to 5G hotspot of other phone, worked

Then when I got it working none of my apps would download, just all apps say "Waiting..."

Then I went to the App Store to at least install Telegram to chat with my friend, but tapping the download button would then show the rotating loading spinner and then reset to the download button repeatedly

So I gave up and now use my old iPhone

I don't think anyone at Apple actually goes through this process anymore or they just don't give a shit how absolutely user hostile the Apple experience has become

Tim Cook should be ashamed

[alexlindsay @alexlindsay]

If you want to understand American optimism…

We celebrate the date that we declared independence, not the date that we achieved it.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Wisdom @TalebWisdom]

"Unless we manipulate our surroundings, we have as little control over what and whom we think about as we do over the muscles of our hearts." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Bed of Procrustes

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

I must explain that the Skin in the Game idea is not about dermatology.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The problem with @bryan_johnson is attribution: we’ll never know which drug, or combination of drugs, did him in.

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Tucker Carlson:

Many times I said on television, "The problem is Islam. The problem is Muslims. They all want to kill us. They're all crazy. They're all in this lunatic suicide cult created by Muhammad in the 7th century." And I believed that.

I was hysterical. I believed that. No, that's not true. Nothing about that is true, but I believed it.

[Murtaza Hussain @MazMHussain]

Its been lost to history at this point but the former WASP elite of the United States was highly sympathetic to the Arabs and this friendship persisted for many decades even amid the crackup over Israel and the Cold War. With the dissipation of those factors it seems like it returns to prior equilibrium.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The errors in US politics are offset by the most robust legal system.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Happy Birthday, America --the oldest constitutional democracy,* and the most self-correcting of them all.

*To nitpickers: San Marino is older, but pop. is 30K.

[Anthologie de la répartie @Antho_Repartie]

Quelqu'un dit à Paul Verlaine :

- Il faut juger les gens sur leurs fréquentations.

- Judas avait pourtant des amis irréprochables...

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

BS- The U.S. is one of the rare countries --if not the only country --where aggressive & risk taking immigrants can make it big, get rich, & become part of the system without giving up on their identity.

[SynCronus @syncronus]

@joeroganhq Somebody did not hear about China's cloning factory

[Varun Vijay @Varun8Vijay]

@dhume https://t.co/zebR5HiEuc

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just said the one thing about America they made sure you’d never learn.

The one thing that should’ve made you proud, not ashamed.

Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”

One nation held a weapon no civilization had ever possessed.

Total monopoly on destruction. No rival. No consequence. No limit.

Every empire in history that held that kind of power did the only thing empires know how to do.

They took until there was nothing left to take.

America had a greater advantage than all of them combined.

And rebuilt the nations it just defeated.

Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”

Not almost unprecedented.

It had never happened. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded civilization.

The nation with the power to take everything chose to rebuild instead.

Enemies became allies. Rubble became economies. Surrender became partnership.

Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a single generation.

Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.

Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.

Into the capital of the country that just tried to end the free world.

That decision reshaped every economy, every alliance, and every trade route on the planet.

Billions of people lifted out of poverty over the next half century trace back to one moment. One nation choosing restraint over domination.

No other country in history can make that claim. Not one.

Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”

Every nation on earth has blood in its history.

But the measure of a nation was never its worst chapter.

It’s what it does when nobody can stop it.

When nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.

You’re being told every day that this country is something to be ashamed of.

By people who have no idea what the world looks like without it.

Every free market. Every open border for trade. Every democracy that took root outside Europe stands in the shadow of that single decision.

The values that built this country didn’t just shape America.

They shaped the modern world.

AI is about to hand a small number of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look primitive.

1945 was the first test.

AI is the last.

That power is going to exist. The only question left is who holds it.

The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.

It was having the power to take everything and choosing not to.

The people trying hardest to tear that story down have never built a single thing worth defending.

[Thomas Sowell Fan @sowelleconomics]

Thomas Sowell: "It is a lie that problems in the black community are attributed to the legacy of slavery.

Black married couples were more prevalent in the 20's than today. Black unemployment rate was lower in the 1930's than today.

The decline began in the 1960's with the welfare state."

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Why did the media push this lie so hard?

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Diploma Is Dead. Here Is What Replaces It.

It starts in your teens, not your twenties.
Nobody is coming to give you permission – it was already given the day a good AI model became free – the only question now is whether you use it or wait for a stamp that no longer means anything.

1. Start now, not after graduation. Read widely, argue with people smarter than you, learn how three or four different fields actually work, and build something that runs – all of it, at the same time, starting at fifteen or sixteen. Your portfolio is what you built, what you shipped, and it’s the range of what you understand and who you’ve tested your thinking against.

2. Treat knowledge as something you accumulate through work and dialogue, not attendance. Seek out people who disagree with you, who know things you don’t, who come from a different field or a different country. A real education is built in conversation and contested in argument or against reality – a lecture hall gives you neither.

3. Choose mentors who have skin in the game over teachers who don’t. Find the people who ship — engineers, founders, builders — and apprentice yourself to them, formally or not. A professor who has never had a bridge fall or a company fail has nothing to teach you about consequence.

4. Let your work and your understanding, not your transcript, do the talking. When you apply for anything — a job, a fund, a partnership — lead with what you’ve built and what you can discuss with depth. Force the other side to evaluate you on substance. Every time you let a credential speak for you, you strengthen the very gatekeeping you’re trying to escape.

5. For those who train others: pay yourself, and let yourself be paid, on outcomes in the real world – not on publications, not on prestige. A teacher’s worth is what his students go on to build and understand, not how many peers cited him.

6. For institutions: break the monopoly on accreditation. Let any operator — a company, a collective, a platform — issue recognition of competence, and let the market decide which one means something. Prestige that survives only because competition is forbidden was never prestige. It was protection.

7. And this is the point that matters most: a system that protects status instead of rewarding competence and curiosity is not defending Western civilization. It is betraying it. The West did not build cathedrals, ships, and constitutions by asking permission from a mandarin class – it built them by reading, arguing, testing ideas against reality, and letting reality be the final judge of a man’s work. Guilds gave way to markets. Inherited rank gave way to merit. That is the actual inheritance: competition, not credentialism; the depth of what you know and the proof of what you’ve built, not the privilege of the title. An education system that shields its priesthood from the test of the real is not conservative. It is a communist institution left standing in the West – and it will fall the same way the others did: not reformed, but bypassed, until no one is left who needs its permission.

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

To the Americans:

I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States.

And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness:

You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.

This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.

Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.

This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.

But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.

This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.

And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America:

Thank God for the United States.

Thank God for the wisdom of its founders.
Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man.
Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners.

Long may your admirable country dominate the world.

Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.

May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning.

Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill.

Thank God for the USA.

Happy 250th.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson