Michael Millerman

thinking, writing, teaching. plato, heidegger, strauss, schmitt, dugin. twenty video courses. available for tutoring, seminars, etc.

[Pablo Antonio @PabloAntonio]

Frontier tech startups will become indistinguishable from doing philosophy.

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

Only 2 dissertations matter. Mine and BAP's

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

🧵The number of humanities dissertations produced annually has declined by almost half, according to a new analysis.

The same report shows that language related to power and identity surged while treatments of “Western,” “European,” and “American” turned increasingly negative.

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

Things hidden since the beginning of the world (internet passwords, encyption)--all shall be revealed, not even through quantum cryptography, just through garden variety incompetence

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

Php exploit has leaked all straussian esoteric secrets online. Nocturnal council has declared a state of emergency

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

People who follow me for my work on Dugin don't like that I'm pro-Israel, and not all of my Jewish friends like that I work on Dugin (and other thinkers like Schmitt, Evola and Heidegger). Too bad. Read, think, and come to your own conclusions. Don't just ape a worldview.

[Hannes Kerber @HannesKerber]

Well, this is really great news.

https://t.co/6k8hgqEbPC

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets …

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

At talks, I do not love giving prepared remarks but I deeply enjoy the live discussion, Q and A, etc., the conversations that develop spontaneously.

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

@politblogme Avigdor Eskin says this video is an AI-generated fake. These days, who knows...one claim is crazier than the next.

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

The new expanded edition of my Dugin book is now out

https://t.co/vmJ7MelRla

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

Netanyahu named Dugin as a source of anti-Semitism in the West. Dugin has responded on his X accounts. Strange world.

[Maria Dubovikova @politblogme]

Netanyahu has blamed Russia and Dugin for spreading antisemitism in the West.

"Most of the antisemitism in the West, unfortunately, comes from Russian structures and that terrible man Dugin. He is especially poisoning the young American right. That's where the main efforts are directed. They work together, they have alliances."

He also repeated the nonsense that after the strikes on Yandex data centers, Russian-linked online activity "directed against Israel" dropped by 60%. It's a dumb fabrication that concerns nothing but web crawlers, and it has been debunked a million times by pretty much everyone.

But Bibi doesn't care about the truth at all. The truth undermines the very foundations of Israel, let alone the pillars of the current regime, which has completely lost the plot.

The situation in Palestine, whose flags now adorn every protest in Europe, is not only genocide and apartheid. Thanks to European governments' pro-Israel policies, it also gives the migrant community in Europe a powerful destructive drive to mobilize, and it fuels the rise of Nazism in equal measure, as a reaction to migrants' behavior.

It's impossible not to recall a quote from "Mashiah, où es-tu?" ("Messiah, where are you?"), a sermon by David Touitou, a French-speaking ultra-Orthodox rabbi from Ashdod:

"The Jewish Messiah will only appear once Europe and Christianity are totally destroyed. So I ask you: is it good news that Islam is invading Europe? It is excellent news! Islam is the broom of Israel."

But sure, Dugin is to blame for antisemitism worldwide. Obviously. Russians are to blame for everything. Simply for existing.

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

Nashville was fun. My next two stops are Boston and Austin.

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

@Trent_STEMpunk What do you have in mind?

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

Today in private tutoring: Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

Think back to being 18. How much money would have changed your life? How much more risk could you have taken without stressing over rent? These are not large amounts. We all forget, when we get older, how much even a "small" amount changes the game at 18 and 25.

[maja 🔭🍒 @majamediaco]

Just learned the ‘You Can See Everything’ movie happened because Lance Oppenheim sent a cold email to Nathan Fielder. Then Nathan invited Lance to his ‘private magic club’. Long live cold emails

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists.

As is too often the case, we - much like the frog in the well - assume our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making.

Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man").

If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential.

But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point.

Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.

Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think?

Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.”

You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI.

Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)?

There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.”

Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier.

In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn).

“Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others.

And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence.

This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's.

What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for.

A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace?

Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think.

Enjoy the read here: https://t.co/8w34hA97e5

[Michael Millerman @millerman]

"[B]ooks themselves will have no more than minor importance; the events within which such books emerge will be infinitely more eloquent than whatever we write and will establish truths we have difficulty describing and describe poorly, even in simple and banal instances." -Girard

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

The Department of Homeland Security is requiring all civilian federal agencies to remove DeepSeek products and 'any third-party services developed using DeepSeek implementations,' and to stop buying them.