MisterGreubel🍦

Anti-War above everything. Proud father and husband. Love surfing, running, and Javier Milei (so far!)

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

Philosophy, Religion and Politics:
Philosophy is the game of understanding nature and seeking what is real and how humans can best adapt.

Philosophy is truth seeking.

Humans evolved and thrived for thousands of years simply by existing within nature and developing a deep understanding of life and death, survival, fragility, devotion to their tribe, etc.

Fastforward to today, modernity (as organized through governments and states) acts as a bubble insulating humans from nature. Like wearing a cast around your arm, the muscle has atrophied. Humans have all but lost this grasp on reality/nature that fueled our evolution.

Nowadays, philosophy has become the practice of regaining that 'muscle.' But it's a practice that requires curiosity and time. Most people do not have the time or the interest. Thus religion became a way to circumvent this atrophy. Religion became the method by which we could package and spread philosophical ideas in an easily digestible way (stories). It is an economized way of spreading truth, in mass, to a society losing touch with nature. Brett Weinstein aptly describes religion as an extended phenotype or an evolutionary tool - love this concept.

Religion is now losing ground in the age of the internet. Ironically, rejecting the stories in the bible because they aren't true is driving us further from the truth without a good substitute. Thus, our tether to truth is in jeopardy. And politics is taking its place.

Politics is a game of prioritizing perception over reality. It is the enemy of truth and seeks to override nature. It bypasses humans' better judgment by making promises and trying the hide the consequences . . . But the consequences always come and nature wins. Therefore, the success of politicians require an ignorant population. I think the barometer of a healthy species is it's grounding in reality, through religion, philosophy or proximity to nature. Our devotion to perception, false virtue, politics and rejection of religion is the harbinger of a failing species.

Even in the animal world, 'politics' exists in various forms of deception, but a species survival depends on not falling for these pervasive tricks.

We're collectively falling for all the tricks.

[🇦🇺Craig Tindale @ctindale]

I spent 35 years building banking systems for banks worldwide, including central banks. I know how banks decide where their money goes.
When you build systems, you have to make them work, so you have to know how they work.

The Basel Committee de-industrialised the countries that adopted its rules. It's that simple: I explain the whole complicated mechanism in my essay. They simply regulated it away because that was the most profitable thing to do. It was implemented in such a systemic global way, and nobody seemed to notice

Capital is what a bank must hold before it can lend, the way a manufacturer or miner must hold supplies before it can sell. No miner doubles their costs to serve one group of customers. But that's what the banking system does to miners and manufacturers. Since 1988, the Basel rules have required banks to hold twice the capital against a factory loan as against a home loan, and under Basel III the gap reaches five times. So banks lend less to industry and more against houses. It should be stopped tomorrow.

Manufacturing's share of GDP fell in ten of the eleven countries I examined. In Australia it fell from 13.7% to 5.4%. Every other country that followed fell as well. The only truly crafty ones were the Koreans, who did a good job of offsetting it.

Regulators were warned in writing that the rule would steer credit, and they adopted it anyway. No parliament voted for it, and it's simply too dumb to keep doing, but we do . Not today; there is no justification. Yet from India, across Europe, across the US, including Australia, sanctions against industrial capacity. Financialization has gone too far it needs to be reviewed .

The charge is manslaughter by gross negligence. The mechanism is proven.

Same Rules, Different Ruins:https://t.co/n2jflhFw2S

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

@DavidDack He’s probably running the 10K as well and did a 5 mile warm-up and this is all part of a marathon prep workout

[Bret Weinstein @BretWeinstein]

The normalization of casual sex destroyed our comprehension of what sex is, and what it has to do with healthy relationships.

Women have one reproductive strategy: high investment. Men have two strategies: high investment (which is collaborative, and has everything to do with love) and no investment (which is predatory, and is the antithesis of love).

That may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. The ���no investment’ strategy of men attempts to stick a woman with a child to raise alone, or with a cuckolded partner. It has a consensual form, and a non-consensual form. Does any of that sound loving to you? I didn’t think so.

For men, producing a child with a trivial effort is the ultimate evolutionary bargain. It’s something like winning the lottery. For women, being stuck with a baby and no partner is the inverse, like being maimed in car wreck.

So men are predisposed to be on the lookout for fertile women who are gullible enough to go to bed with them without locking down a commitment. And women are predisposed to avoid such encounters at all costs. Or at least they were before birth control + abortion changed the stakes and the culture.

Women, who have always been the gatekeepers of sex, have been lured into embracing men at their worst. And they’ve started behaving and thinking like them too.

There is actually a lot of truth in the idea that “rape culture” has been normalized. Casual sex is not rape by any stretch, but it comes from the same predatory branch of the tree. And before you jump down my throat for saying that, notice just how commonplace “consensual con-consent” has become. That IS normalized rape culture. It comes from the idea that sex is a kind of play. Just like kids playing with toy tanks and soldiers, it’s harmless because the stakes are low and no one actually gets hurt.

But it turns out that’s not true. Casual sex is like playing with fire. Actually, it’s worse. Many who play with fire get away with it. They may even learn how to wield it to great effect. The exact opposite is true with sex. If you play with having sex with people that you don’t love, you are damaging the very architecture you will need to form a healthy romantic partnership. Even worse if they bring the same selfish mindset to the alter and the bedroom.

For young people participating in their generation’s culture, sex now IS antagonistic and predatory. Most of them don’t know there is any other kind. It’s just some story, like Santa Clause.

Not only has this shift in sexual culture obliterated the tools to forge and tend a healthy marriage, but it has also broken the motivational structure that built civilization.
—-
Exhibit A bellow. Please don’t jump on her. She is voicing a false sophistication of her era. And although I believe what she has said is wrong, exactly why it is wrong, and to what degree it is wrong, requires careful thought.

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

@jason61987 This rain can’t come soon enough 🤞

[Adam Butler @GestaltU]

I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back:

We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective.

Look no further than U.S. capital markets.

Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital.

And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it.

But look at what else it's done along the way:

- Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard.
- Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in.
- Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents.
- Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500.
- Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it.

None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about.

And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been.

So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes.

That's the whole problem.

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

@TheOmniLiberal It’s freedom. That’s the difference. Not “conservative” vs “liberal” culture

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

It sounds like @martyrmade should be the one to debate @ComicDaveSmith
He obviously wouldn't be defending socialism but it sounds like he's got some bones to pick with the libertarian perspective.

[Martyr Made @martyrmade]

Can’t speak for leftists, but I’ve spoken to a lot of them, so I’ll try. Dave seems to be making the point that a) our government is big, b) corporations control our big government, therefore c) a big government will necessarily be controlled by corporations. The most reasonable objection is that c does not follow from a & b. Big government is an inevitability in the modern era, if only because small governments are too weak to defend their prerogatives from corporate interests intent on growing the government to serve their ends. The two choices, then, are a small government incapable of defending itself from corporate interests intent on growing it to serve their ends, or a state strong enough to defend its prerogatives from corporate interests. It is not realistic to hope that a small, weak government can sustainably assert authority against the reach and resources brought to bear by the finance, defense, energy, transportation, communications, etc industries. All roads lead to big government, and the relevant question is how to politically organize and mobilize the citizenry to challenge corporations (and other concentrated interests) for control over it. Libertarianism is not a strategy to achieve small government, but is simply an abandonment of the fight for control over the only government that’s possible under current circumstances.

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

Yes! That would be refreshing. I love Dave and his moral reasoning is spot on but frankly tiresome.
Money managers like Brent don't have this luxury. Dave's listeners need a lesson on the economic realities of nation states, mercantilism, and our global interdependence. AKA - how the world actually works.

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

What characteristics do the best performers have?

A few common traits I've noticed:
1. Don't get tired of the boring stuff
2. Masters of compartmentalization
3. Can flip the switch
4. Know how to lose well
5. Cultivate perspective
6. Delayed gratification
7. Drive from within

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

@SecKennedy Awesome 👏

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

Classic AOC:

She proudly tells TMZ on cue that she won't listen to Ed Sheeran's music anymore because of his cowardice on Israel.

But her candidate for House Speaker is Hakeem Jeffries, AIPAC's most loyal soldier who funded, armed and defends Israel's genocide.

Few are better at feeding gullible fans vapid, cheap and meaningless culture war slop, while doing the exact opposite when it actually matters.

[Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith]

Wars of aggression, based on lies, against people who had nothing to do with 9/11, are justified because I’m emotional about 9/11.

Facts don’t care about your feelings!!!

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

You are an example of the latter - which has seemingly been rewarded.
The problem isn’t a lack of nuanced media or a lack of incentives to create it. The problem is the audience, as a whole. It’s a cultural, upbringing issue. Kids raised with proper values will seek uncomfortable truths and rational media over sensational slop. Water seeks its own level.

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

@stevemagness Such a boomer take. Welcome to the era of run clubs and social media. Gear is life - even for the good runners! haha

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

@US_Stormwatch @grok when was the last time Southern California recorded an 80 or above temperature?

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

@SahilBloom Sub 2:50!

[MisterGreubel🍦 @greubel_john]

I'm a big fan of @RyanHoliday - I've read almost all his books and I genuinely can't understand how he maintains lefty politics and simultaneously endorses stoicism.

What part of stoicism endorses confiscating property from citizens at the threat of violence?

What part of stoicism advocates for an ideology that is rooted in entitlement?

What part of stoicism instructs us that we can override the "flaws" of human nature by forcing our will upon others?

Libertarianism / anarcho-capitalism is the only ideology that aligns with stoic philosophy.

[Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith]

The Declaration of Independence is the greatest document ever produced by man. It’s no coincidence that it was the founding document of our nation and we went on to be the most prosperous civilization in human history. Any country founded on that document is worth loving and fighting to save.

It is also, undeniably, a radically libertarian document that clearly states the validity of natural God given rights and that the only legitimate role for government is the protection of liberty.

We have serious problems in our country today and we will be much better off if we follow the spirit of our founding document than the brain dead varying socialisms being promoted by both political parties.

[Dr Sara Pugh PhD @spugh01]

If light is the information, water is the medium, melanin is the transducer, DHA is the receiver and electrical wiring, mitochondria are the processors, and hormones are the messengers.

Perhaps we’ve been looking at biology backwards.

Health may begin not with hormones or supplements, but with the environment that powers and organises them.