Jamie

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

@NYCMayor Your mask has come off and what is beneath it is a soul nourished on hatred. Hamas in a suit and tie is still Hamas. You will fail as they did.

[Aaron Stupple @astupple]

Compare it to ancient times, when guessing novel theories was taboo, punishable by death. There was zero conspiratorial or woo-woo thinking, and stagnation was the rule.

Today, we've had an explosion in our ability to pontificate and bloviate, hurray!

Sure, lots of woo-woo nonsense and conspiracy theories, but would you really expect otherwise? And do you really prefer to go back to the good old days of conformity and a single "shared reality"? And if you do, how do you want to get back there? You really want to mete out the authoritarianism that this would require? I don't think scolding is going to cut it.

How about we turn over a new leaf, abandon the authoritarian impulse to clamp down on new ideas, and instead create norms and institutions that can criticize and evaluate the froth, rapidly and effectively?

Surely, we're seeing an explosion in the ability to do this as well.

[Tom Hyde @tomhyde_]

> “Meaning does not require subordination to something ‘greater than oneself’.”

Yes. This can also be rendered as a theory of the sublime. Enlightenment figures (Kant, Godwin, Turgot) met eternity face to face, not merely in the abstract, but in material reality, and measured themselves equal to the endless excession.

Romanticists, by contrast, were even more obsessed with the sublime but ever more eager to lower themselves to it. Thomas Carlyle said:

“To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon’s Eclipses; by all which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time to time (unmiraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence through AEons of AEons.”

The pessimism of Romanticism was its belief in the inability of the infinity of the soul to manifest in the finiteness of the body.

This led Romantic individualism to idealism, and then to solipsism, and then to lonesomeness, and then—as a revolution—to collectivism.

But Enlightenment individualism, steady in its connection to The Universal Everything, remained the more hopeful, nourishing, and meaningful.

In truth, meaning does not require subordination to something greater than oneself; it only requires *elevation* to oneself greater than before.

Because nothing is greater than the potential of a person.

Infinity divided by infinity equals one.

[Jamie @beigege]

@realzoestrimpel congrats! how are the ghouls finding these so fast 🤣

[Jamie @beigege]

800k views fucking good work! 🙌

[Anders K. Hvelplund @Falliblemusings]

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time.

But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay.

That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions.

Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design.
After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples:

On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion."

On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings."

On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over."

On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us."

On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed."

On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two."

This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty?

And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it.

Now compare Deutsch:
"Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature."

"Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow."

"Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved."

"We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be."

Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence.

The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children?

Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct.

Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going.

Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

[Jamie @beigege]

@RagingKuJo1222 🔥

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

https://t.co/k1AfuiT61t

[Jamie @beigege]

@astupple amazing he, and "a bunch of those guys" read it💪

[Jamie @beigege]

@PaulRRobichaud Picked up Logicomix. loving it, thank you!

[Jamie @beigege]

@DavidDeutschOxf @_prashan7h @CosmicSkeptic @bigthink Thank you both this is very interesting to think through!

[Russ Roberts @EconTalker]

TWOE: I spoke with @DavidDeutschOxf on what he calls The Pattern--the willingness of people to legitimize the harming of Jews. Deeply troubling. Deeply thought-provoking. https://t.co/AmPjfbvNc1

[Jamie @beigege]

@poemsbyalexis @Lovandfear beautiful. thank you

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

@TheHalcyonSavan @PSTaylor13 Absolutely anything can inspire new ideas. New data, old data, fake data, learning a theory, misunderstanding it, being taught, being lied to…

None of that is what theories are 'built on', 'derived from', 'justified by', etc. Theories are conjectures—not to be judged by origin.

[Sam @Sam_kuyp]

TIL that twin studies are highly misleading.

‘The study of “twins reared apart” is widely regarded as a scientific dead-end and behavioral geneticists have entirely moved on to new strategies.’

https://t.co/G04o6H77Hx

[Jamie @beigege]

@astupple Shingrix ! My father has had 6 months of postherpetic neuralgia while dealing with heart failure. Nightmare.

[Jamie @beigege]

@m2jr great thread and great institute. Thank you! 🙌

[Jamie @beigege]

@diegoarey @ConjectureInst hear hear! 🙏

[Jamie @beigege]

@ToKTeacher Excellent! Looking forward to it.

[Jamie @beigege]

What an amazing book the end of the affair is.

[Jamie @beigege]

@mjgoldwater Thank you