Gully Jimson

Hello viewer. I've recently started a blog and hope to use it to probe my thoughts on art and culture. #writer Substack

[Mark Lambert @sitsio]

Does anyone remember this amazing story? On July 2, 1982, a truck driver from California flew 16,000 feet into the sky in a lawn chair. Larry Walters, 33, from San Pedro, had dreamed of flying his whole life. He bought 42 eight-foot helium weather balloons, tied them to a regular Sears lawn chair, strapped on a parachute, packed a BB gun to pop balloons to descend, a CB radio, sandwiches, and a six-pack of beer.
He expected to float a few hundred feet above his backyard. He cut the rope and shot up like a rocket — to 16,000 feet. He drifted directly into the main approach path for LAX. Two airline pilots radioed the tower: they had just passed a man in a lawn chair holding a gun at 16,000 feet. For 45 minutes, he floated over Los Angeles, freezing cold, too scared to shoot balloons because he might fall. Finally, he started popping balloons one by one and slowly descended.
He landed tangled in power lines in Long Beach, California, causing a blackout. When police arrested him, they asked why he did it. He said, "A man can't just sit around." The FAA fined him $4,000. He became a national folk hero — Lawnchair Larry — and inspired the movie Up.

[Gully Jimson @G_Jimson]

@KonstantinKisin Hence, why your trolling is so enjoyable. Really, I never suspected Kisin had a knack for satire, humor, etc.

[Financial Physics @FinancialPhys]

I’ll probably get called a communist for pointing out the 19th Amendment was a mistake and feminism is a disaster that’s distorted our markets entirely… —again🙄

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk reduced the oldest question in human history to basic math.

No one has found a flaw in it.

Musk: “What are the odds that we are in base reality? And that this has not happened before.”

You don’t need a physics degree to follow it.

You need a timeline.

Musk: “If you look at the advancement of video games, it’s gone from Pong, two rectangles and a square batting it back and forth, to photorealistic, real-time games with millions of people playing simultaneously.”

Fifty years.

That is all it took to close the gap between two rectangles on a screen and a world you cannot tell apart from the one outside your window.

Musk: “If that trend continues, video games will be indistinguishable from reality.”

The visuals are not what seals it.

The intelligence is.

Musk: “Think of how sophisticated the conversations are you can have with an AI today, and that’s only going to get more sophisticated.”

We are not scripting characters anymore. We are building minds that reason, adapt, and surprise the people who made them.

We are nowhere near finished.

Musk: “The future, if civilization continues, will be millions, maybe billions of photorealistic, indistinguishable from reality, video games. And with characters in those video games that are very deep, and where the dialogue is not pre-programmed.”

One base reality.

Billions of perfect copies.

Each one running minds that feel exactly as conscious as you do right now.

Each one certain it is the original.

Musk: “So then what are the odds that we are in base reality?”

If even one civilization crosses that threshold, simulated minds outnumber real ones by billions.

The probability you are sitting in the real one is not low.

It is nearly zero.

Not as philosophy. As mathematics.

We are not watching this happen. We are building it. Right now.

Every AI that reasons without a script. Every world rendered one frame closer to indistinguishable.

We are constructing the exact technology that makes our own existence statistically implausible. And we will never stop.

Because the curiosity that questions reality is the same force that builds it.

If the math holds, something built us. Something conscious enough to create consciousness.

They stood where we are standing. Same question. Same inability to stop.

And whatever built them never answered it either.

There is no top floor.

There is no original.

None of that changes what you feel right now.

Consciousness was never about what you are made of.

It was about what you experience.

Musk did not float a theory.

He held up a mirror with no back wall.

And the math does not need you to believe it.

It only needs time.

[Gully Jimson @G_Jimson]

@ChaelSonnen I’m going to pretend this is about that non-fight that influencers were hyping

[Gully Jimson @G_Jimson]

Byw, weird that nobody notices that Connor Mcgregor in the fight last night was literally reenacting what happened the last time in the cage against @DustinPoirier . Food for thought

[Gully Jimson @G_Jimson]

@ericweinstein Right. But I do wonder if you are doing yourself the best service by not running your podcast, as you mentioned on the Morgan show. Not calling you out, btw, I respect you too much.

But:

Isn’t it a bit like the bully who comes to you anyway?

[Gully Jimson @G_Jimson]

@ericweinstein I saw your spot on the Morgan show. Brilliant. You could also tweet articles and reading materials on the revolutionary mind. You turned me on to it, many thanks!

[Derrick Evans @DerrickEvans4WV]

I bet this is an Easter they will never forget.

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

What is one supposed to say? I’m confused.

This is clearly insane, unless it is genius brinksmanship in the service of negotiation.

Seems insane so far. But then again I’m not pretending to be a master negotiator.

—————

Remember what I said about the uncertainty around this presidency before inauguration:

Positive Mean
High Variance
*NEGATIVE* skew
High Kurtosis

This was entirely foreseeable. He told you what he was going to do. And he generally does what he says. He thinks he found a genius move again like a queen sacrifice.

The Whitehouse is courting disaster in the third moment of this uncertain situation as per the skewness above. And it will do so repeatedly as a tool to get others, who are more risk averse, to capitulate. This isn’t a bug. It’s a style that I personally don’t love on a fragile planet. You usually go to movies to watch such climactic scenes.

Some of Trump’s business moves fail. Some succeed. Think of earth now as a Trump Business.

I don’t know if this is like some of Trump’s NY real estate deals or The Apprentice which worked out for him…or Trump University, Steaks and Airlines which were not successful. This looks more like the latter.

I’m not privy to the strategy and nothing like this presidency has ever existed. For a reason. But to a high stakes negotiator, everything looks like a deal.

I’m very concerned. Wish us luck. Given the negative skewness, I’m definitely rooting for a win that I so far see as unlikely. But it’s not impossible.

Bon chance.

[The Atlas Society @TheAtlasSociety]

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

– George Orwell,
1984

[Patrick Bet-David @patrickbetdavid]

A father owes 4 things to his kids:

- Love
- An example
- Accessibility
- Intentional with necessary conversations

Even though Gene Hackman is 78 years old in this video, the question about his father leaving him still gets him emotional.

[Seth Dillon @SethDillon]

Nietzsche on toxic empathy.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Sounds familiar

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

Ah. Why are European-Americans suddenly so inferior at math since like 1998? Why are the people of Newton, Einstein, Dirac, Crick, Feynman, Heisenberg etc suddenly no longer able to do first rate science? Excellent question!

Do you want the brutal answer? Those "white kids" are being forced into trying to figure out how to capture the value created by those brown kids, because STEM careers in actual research have cratered in prestige, freedom, support and compensation. It's awful. But true. Do you want to raise a serf?

I'm torn. Which is why I fight for scientists to capture wealth; science is my life, but I cannot stand the exploitation and abuse.

You actually know this already, you just don't realize it.
How many STEM researchers and research scientists have you seen at Mar-a-Lago in photos and stories? Name them. Try.

When you think modern AI do you think about the 8 authors of the Transformer LLM architecture that changed our entire world with one paper? Can you name them? Any of them? Or do you think Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. like the rest of us (myself included)? Be honest. You think C-Suite or Sand Hill road VCs.

The researchers simply vanish or become businessmen.

We too often erase the people who do the actual STEM research. The PhD most responsible for the GFP revolution in biology (Douglas Prasher) got to drive a shuttle bus in Alabama for his career. Those who exploited his research felt so bad that they flew him to Stokholm to watch *them* get the Nobel prize. It's totally insane. No one knows this because we keep looking to Billionaires...those who capture the most value...to represent STEM.

STEM rests on "SCIENCE COOLIES". That is what a UCSF lab head (PI) called his army of Chinese and Indian biologists in an interview with me around 2000: "My Science Coolies tell me..."

The absence of white kids is because they generally come from native English speaking families before the 1965 immigration act that have been in the US a long time. Thus they get accurate information that grueling STEM research careers are now a terrible investment due to STEM EMPLOYER practices (e.g. H-1B, illegal collusion, lobbying) and the abandonment of STEM by the Federal Government beginning with the Mansfield ammendment 50+ years ago. They will eventually almost all move from the lab bench, the blackboard and the command line to signing pieces of paper in VC shops or Private Equity or some such higher value endeavor. We in STEM are all being pushed from creating the value to capturing the value. It's awful.

"गोरे बच्चे यहाँ क्या कर रहे हैं?" or something like it is what I heard in New Jersey when our family traveled to the science fair. Literally asking "Why are there white kids here?" Can you imagine?? In New Jersey!

Those Tamil and Bengali Brahmins from English speaking households will soon leave research too, to be replaced by Nepalese and Biharis. Then they will all get the message as well and search for non-research jobs.

Before long you will see a push for Vietnamese and Cambodians. The Nigerians, Philipinos and Ethiopeans will be welcomed, but will soon depart in turn as the STEM employers continue to search for servants and 'coolies' anywhere they can find them. All using one bizarre mantra "The Best and the Brightest!"

Because the employers treat researchers like servants. Fungible geeks. That is the culture we have to break.

Those brilliant brown American kids winning our Olympiads will dream of flying Business Class. Maybe even First Class one day. Those equally brilliant white kids who would have loved to do science leaving the olympiads, now dream of not even being on the same airplane as long as they are also avoiding coach.

Sorry "Cornered Hindu". I hate it. But you asked. Don't shoot the messenger.

[🇺🇸Lionel🇺🇸 @LionelMedia]

I'm starting to like Mel Gibson a lot. You? https://t.co/JwDvj5kJ8I

[Dr John Vervaeke @DrJohnVervaeke]

Have you ever had a "gut feeling" that was right? Or just knew something without knowing how you know?

That’s your intuition—and most people either trust it blindly or dismiss it completely—because they don’t know how it works.

But it’s too powerful not to understand it…🧵

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

“The most dangerous institutions today are universities because they teach ideas that will lead to the destruction of the United States.”

Ayn Rand said this in the 1960s… and it feels even more true today.

[Gully Jimson @G_Jimson]

@VivekGRamaswamy As someone planning for our first kid, I’d like to see this topic debated with @ericweinstein . I think it would be fun and informative for everyone.