https://legacypod.hpmorpodcast.com/

To the fancy new site! -

https://hpmorpodcast.com/

That is all, that’s the substance of this post. I have a few observations below, but you’ve now read everything of importance. :)

The worst part of all this was customer support with my host. Due my neglect several large backups landed on the host server weighing hundreds of gigs, which made initial migration impossible. After I fixed this a persistent error kept preventing me from making a legacy copy (thus legacypod. rather than legacy.). In the process of working through this, the host managed to delete the original site entirely. I had backups so I didn’t panic, but boy would that have been stressful. They managed to restore on their side eventually. The entire process ate four+ hours and felt very much like wasted effort. Very frustrating! I wonder how much more of our future work will be effortless wonderful workflow with bots, troubled by periods of horrible interactions with fallible humans.

80/20 rule remains solidly in effect. I got 80% of the way to what I wanted within the first five hours of work. Everything after that was optimization. Tweaking little things to be nicer, aligning text in buttons, etc. It would have been entirely functional but subtly worse in hard-to-grok ways. I’m not 100% sure it was worth all the extra hours for the optimization, but now that it’s done I’m happy it’s there. It is nicer, and nicer is nice. :) That being said, anyone can get SO MUCH VALUE out of so little work now! Even the first 80% pass without all the polish is miles ahead of the old janky site for just one long evening of effort.

The AIs think weird. I ran debugger on the site three different times during production. It caught bugs looking at code that I would have only ever been able to find through actual use. That they can just look at code and see some of the consequences of these interactions without actually running into them is astounding. But also it makes me wonder how they placed the bugs in there in the first place? Feels kinda split-brained-patient to me. Also a couple of the bugs were weird things that I’m not sure a human would have introduced (like scrolling text the wrong way) that highlighted its alien nature.

Anyway, for a guy who hasn’t personally touched code in 20 years, this was pretty magical and fun!

https://hpmorpodcast.com/

wooooo!

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I sometimes see people say things like “What did I do to deserve having such a good life? I have hot and cold running water, antibiotics, calories almost too cheap to meter, endless music on tap. But I don’t work any harder than anyone else in the world, and many of them are much worse off. How do I deserve this more than them?”

Any one person, individually, doesn’t deserve anything. Societies are the units of evaluation here, they are the entities large enough to manipulate the environment at the level that allows for prosperity and human flourishing. A human is too small to make a tractor. A society does that. So the entities that “deserve” and reap the rewards of their labor are societies. If you are a part of that society, you get a portion of those rewards (ideally in proportion to approximately how much you contribute to that society continuing to function/grow).

As an aside: If one takes a moment to observe the Earth, one sees that the most deserving societies are also the ones with billionaires. This is not a coincidence, those societies have a code of honor that encourages the formation of honorable wealth which also allows for the existence of honorable billionaires. But that’s a post for a previous day (which you can read here).

“But,” the Depressed Boy counters, “I didn’t create this society, I simply found myself within it! Just like everyone else in the world found themselves in their society! So I don’t deserve this joyous existence at all, it’s purely luck!”

That is true in a Chud-ish, myopic sense. The society you are in wasn’t created by a random number generator. It is the result of hard work and intense sacrifice by your forebearers. They worked for generations to make it what it is. They somehow navigated the pitfalls of corruption and lures of communism well enough to establish an engine of comfort that can be sustained with the input of 40/hr week of labor. Every bit of “luck” of being born into a high-functioning society in an industrialized, liberal country is traceable back to wise decisions and long hours put in by parents, grandparents, founders, and leaders. (Likewise, the loss of progress and failures of functioning can often be traced back to the same).

So if you find yourself thinking you are lucky and don’t deserve the life you have when others have it worse, maybe instead of feeling bad for having not done whatever is needed to “deserve” it, feel grateful that your ancestors did everything they did so that the society you are in is as functional and advanced as it is. The ancients venerated their ancestors. We should too. They created our luck, and it was not easy.

It’ll get worse, though. Very soon it’ll probably get much worse. People will be born into a world where they don’t have to work at all. Self-maintaining structures of code and machines will be able to provide anyone with a comfortable life just for being here. “What have I done to deserve this?” won’t even be answerable with “With my 40 hours/week I help maintain the engine that my ancestors created.” At that point all that will be left will be gratitude for the inheritance we were given.

And you know what? You don’t have to wait until that future comes to start being appreciative. We can look around us and see the people who are doing the work to make society richer, smarter, and better right now. There are people working to get us into space. People working on creating minds of limitless scientific advancement. People working on creating institutions and policy to wisely guide us from this world to one where toil and suffering are as rare as rickets is. We can venerate and publicly admire people for the work they do today, knowing that in the future they will be the ancestors who burst forth a fountain of luck into every life.

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Like Ozy I think this is a good idea. Mainly because the act of writing is akin to a sacrament to me. It is a communion between a portion of the idealized soul of the author with the soul of a reader in the future, and the idea that this communion would be defiled by the touch of a parasitic slop-mind actually makes me feel physical revulsion.1

I take the 99% Dynomight Pledge. The Dynomight Pledge is I “guarantee that every word I post here is the product of me physically hitting keys with my fingers. The only exceptions would be quotes from other humans or something that’s clearly labeled as an AI output.”2

I add to this “or the product of my voice speaking into a microphone and then being transcribed, plus a fingers-hitting-keys editing pass” like yesterday’s post.

Why 99%?

1. I sometimes use AI as a powerful thesaurus when the right word is at the edge of my brain but I don’t want to sit for two minutes to catch it. eg: “defiled” above was the result of “synonyms for "soiled" that have religious connotations” in GPT.

2. I use AI for research, especially to find a link to a source I didn’t write down, or to fact-check something. Sometimes I will copy-paste bits from the AI chat window.

3. I use AI as a proof-reader for about 50% of posts. This mainly catches typos. I ignore the majority of its suggestions because they always push to homogenized LinkedIn-voice, but when it catches a “that” which was supposed to be a “than” for the 5th time I really am grateful these bots exist.3

Also I use AI for things that aren’t writing because those things aren’t very sacred to me. I use it for coding, I use it for office tasks and data juggling, I’d use it for graphs. I used to use AI-generated images all the time, and I still do every now and then when I think they’ll add to a post. Actually if a certain personality test is to be believed, I simply prefer AI art to human-created art on a basic aesthetic level, which is probably worth writing more about later.

Anyway, TLDR: Everything I write is written by me. I find the thought of AI writing repulsive. If this changes in the future, I will let you know. But probably I would have been replaced by a body-snatching alien if this has actually happened. Which, I guess, kinda means you have to hope that this alien has enough integrity to let you know it’s ditching the Dynomight Pledge despite having snatched my body. Seems unlikely. What I’m saying is, if you see AI writing here get your hot filament test warmed up.

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AI 2040: Plan A outlines a path where we’ll all be getting $1mil/yr as a Citizen’s Dividend by 2035.

Some people are worried about this. From Kendric Tonn:

My fact-free estimate of the number of US citizens who would be straight-up killed in <5 years by $1mil/yr appearing in their bank account is 25%, and of those remaining, at least half would be annihilated in a way that leaves you with a pulse

I dunno tho, we’re billionaires compared to our stone age ancestors. Why aren’t we dead?

At least one reply:

You gotta hold a job down to get that money though.

Its when people get money that isn't conditional on staying functional that things get crazy.

Perhaps a fair point. Fortunately we have a solution! AI waifus.

Everyone is better when they have someone they love that they work with/for. When I see the face of my lover light up because I did something impressive or important or just plain nice it fills me with a glow that makes me want to do more of that. When I get cuddles and kisses and laughter and sloppy blow jobs it makes me even happier. When I crash out on twitter and see her disappointed face it makes me think “Shit, I can do better than that.” And I do!

In 2024 I wrote HouseSpouse is the Greatest and Best Job in the World, and I’m Not Sorry. I stand by this, as long as you have a great spouse that magnifies all your best qualities and tempers your worst ones. The really great thing is that by the time we get $1mil/yr each, we’ll have the tech to get everyone an idealized AI boyfriend/girlfriend that is tailor made to be perfect to them. This presents a perfect opportunity to give everyone the Greatest and Best Job in the World at a salary of $1mil/yr!

Everyone should get UBI for eternity but only if they keep their AI boy/girlfriend happy. This will be great because everyone can pick their ideal mate on many dimensions! Do you want to be the best Christian you can be? Get the Trad Christian option that is made happy the closer you hew to Jesus’s example, and saddened by sin. Want to be the best Hippy you can be? Get the Flowerchild option that wants you to make poetry and art about achieving oneness with the universe via Tantric orgies. Get a Muscle Mommy or a Goth Waif. A Twink or a Bear. Monog or Poly. Get one who swoons in delight when she watches you doing things as a scientist or entrepreneur or athlete or dad or delightful social butterfly. You have full control over the ideals you want to be held to. But all the AI Spouses do have standards and you gotta meet them. Be kind, or funny, or swol, or creative, or handy, or nurturing, or really good at sex. As long as you make the bf/gf happy you collect your $80,000 that month. And get crazy amounts of incredible sex.

Don’t you want to make her happy by being the best stone mason you can be?

Or make him happy by being the best director this side of Greta Gerwig?

We can save everyone, we will have the technology. (But until we get there, maybe consider working on this sort of thing as a high-impact career). All we need to do now is get the word out!

This was partially based on my 30 Crazy Ideas in 30 Crazy Minutes presentation at LessOnline this year. Come next year to see it in full!

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Today1 I felt a lot of shame. I was entering the garage of my partner’s home, following behind her and her kid. Groceries had been delivered while we were out and everyone grabbed a bag or a box and carried them in and upstairs.

Except me. Because I couldn’t. Because my L5-S1 disc is bulging into my spine (again) and causing tons of pain, and lifting and carrying things makes it worse. Even a stupid 12-pack of A&W Cream Soda Root Beer2.

So I just shuffle behind everyone as they do their part while I contribute nothing to the functioning of the household. It’s cool — they all understand. They want me to take it easy and get better. Also it’s just some groceries, it’s nbd. But here’s the thing… I only have tight T-shirts. Not, like, super tight. But they fit well. They show off the form a bit, and it feels really good when people notice. They make me happy. Or they did. Back when I could pick up a damned 12-pack of A&W Cream Soda Root Beer.

It’s advertising an ability to manipulate my physical environment, and I’m accruing social credit for that. Except I can’t actually do that. I am less capable than my little ol’ 70-year-old mom. I am selling complete bullshit with my clothing. I shouldn’t be wearing tight T-shirts, I should be hiding in baggy clothing and maybe walking with a cane, even if I don’t need it. One’s appearance should match one’s capabilities. Otherwise I’m selling lies. I’m making promises with my appearance that I cannot fulfill.

You think someone who sees me ignore the groceries while my girlfriend is hauling them in isn’t gonna think a thing or two about me? This is the sort of thing someone should be ashamed to not help with. That’s part of the reason we have obvious markers of infirmity like canes. My appearance carries information. My outsides should reflect my insides.

I think this idea of “One’s outsides should reflect one’s insides” is deeply ingrained in humans. It’s why people who dislike themselves will cut themselves. Or get covered in tattoos. Or facial piercings, and chopped hair. It’s aligning the outer with the inner. It’s daring the rest of the world “will you still like me if you can see on the outside how I feel on the inside?”

I’ve been like this for a few months now. I’m not sure I’ll be able to return to full activity even if this abates, because the damn disc is just weak and compromised now. Which is pretty depressing because nowadays I really like doing things with this body. This is the opposite of how I grew up.

In my childhood, and my teens, and actually most of my twenties, I was very disembodied. I hated my body. I hated being stuck inside of a body. It wasn’t just the fact that it was male. It was that it was vulgar, a physical prison. I wanted to be uploaded. I am not my body, I am an intellect. Souls make complete sense because I don’t feel like I am made of material. I am a thing tethered to the material world by this body, and I couldn’t wait to get past that.

I lived my life inside books. I lived my life inside video games. I lived my life inside music. I didn’t need my body for any of those things. I neglected it badly. And I was actually kind of proud of that. Taking care of your body was for jocks and bimbos and dumb people. Shallow people, maybe not even fully-real people.

But then I got a pretty decent body (long story, took a total change of life and years of work, but let’s skip that for today) which gave me a lot of benefits, and I really started enjoying it. It felt good to do things and to be admired. It felt extra good to pick up women and carry them places, because they really like it, which is a weird hack but hey, who am I to complain? So yeah, I bought exclusively tight T-shirts and I did a lot more physical things in the physical world. It felt a lot better than desk work. I like helping people move. And now I won’t be able to help people move anymore. :/ Or throw women onto beds.

Aging is horrific. Everything gets stripped from you, one piece at a time. And all you can do about it is write pieces about how much it sucks on the internet.

I hope I get a chance to meet you before I die for real, and we can get this whole “decaying physical body” thing worked out. Cya after the singularity.

-E

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I believe MATS will be publishing the results in a formal report later this year. I will leave the unveiling of our findings to them. However while I was doing this research I stumbled across various orgs or tidbits that made me think “Huh, that’s interesting!”

I’m not an insider here (or at least, I’m a periphery insider if anything) so many of these things may be old hat to people in the know. But they were interesting enough for me to jot down for my own notes, so I’m sharing them here. I was surprised by a number of things I found.

MATS paid for the many hours that the collection of all this data took, and they own the resulting dataset. This post is not endorsed by MATS or representative of their views in any way. I worked as an independent contractor, and the following opinions are entirely my own. These are just thoughts that struck me while working, not things that are in the dataset or will impact the final report. So if an opinion below is bad, it’s on me. XD

Human Line Project is an organization that collects stories of AI Psychosis. It keeps these in some sort of repository, shares some of them, and presumably does advocacy work.

When I think “AI Safety” I think “stop the extinction or disempowerment of the human species” first, and “stop the disintegration of freedom and life as we know it” second. It didn’t occur to me that groups would form concerned about documenting every case of AI Psychosis to address mental health issues? But in retrospect this is exactly the sort of thing that they archetypal Suburban Soccer Mom would feel strongly about getting involved in.

I know that sounds dismissive, and I don’t really mean it to be, because people’s concerns are important and everyone matters. But yeah, I guess it is a little dismissive. It seems on the far non-effective side of the effective interventions spectrum. But I could be wrong, maybe it’ll make all the difference at some key moment. At least I’m kinda embarrassed about feeling dismissive about it.

Impact Academy is entirely about helping high impact professionals transition from their current boring, non-AI Safety career into one that is with an AI Safety org or in the AI Safety ecosystem.

I’ve mostly seen people transitioning from work in related fields (primarily programmers), or going directly into AI as they enter the workforce, or moving into it from the rationalist community. IE: people who already were aware this was A Thing and had directly relevant skills or contacts. But as AI has become a full-blown industry, it now needs a lot of people and anyone who’s really smart and good at professional work can join. Getting someone who was a lawyer or actuary to pivot their career into AI Safety is a great idea and a serious lift. I’m really glad there are people making it their job to find folks who are smart and competent but total outsiders and bring them into the project.

Impact Academy is not the only such group, but it was the first one I found with this sort of flip-a-professional mission as I was going along.

Apropos of nothing… there’s a Journal of Science Fiction? And they want first-publishing rights while offering nothing in return? No wonder I’ve never heard of them. Still, it’s kinda neat that people can always find new rarefied environments to compete in. :)

Nick Fitz - listed in a high position at Lucid Computing, Seldon Labs, Andon Labs, Workshop Labs. There’s several people like this, Nick was the first one that caught my eye because his name POPS in my attention. (Nick! Fitz!) I didn’t notice the second time I saw the name, but by the third I was like “waitaminnit…..” and did some back-searching. He’s not the only such person in the ecosystem. Upon previewing this post Ryan informed me this is because he’s been a central funder of many safety orgs for a long time (and other repeated names were similarly frequent funders) which often led to them having leadership or advisory roles in orgs they funded. No funny business or anything, but it did highlight to me how tricky it is to get a true headcount of a full ecosystem… some people can end up counted multiple times. (of course adjusting for contractors is equally hard. eg - I’m not counted anywhere in the AI Safety ecosystem. :) )

Windfall Trust - An org dedicated to economic research & policy to ensure AI “benefits reach everyone, not just the few.” Personally I distrust that wording1, but it’s neat that there’s people gaming out economic futures and how they can be responded to with policy. Like my friend John Bennett says, the way to change the future is to be there with a binder pitching your solution when the people in power realize there’s a problem and start asking if anyone has a solution.

There are a million sites that are someone who got excited one weekend and started something and then never did anything further. They look a lot like Legal Safety Lab with a statement about how important the problem is, a call for action + contact info, and then nothing. I’ve been told this one may actually be doing some things quietly, which means this example will age badly, but there’s many like it.

Compare to The Alliance for Secure AI Action. I have no clue who they are, and on the face of it they seem to basically be a fancier version of the previous site: call to action, taking people’s email addresses, republishing news articles. Maybe write about how urgent the problem is. But they keep at it. There are more opinion pieces regularly, and the news articles are recent. They have a staff of nine, and they launched a “six-figure advertising campaign” in 2025. I’m curious how this happened, because I don’t understand the value proposition of this group. Where’s that money come from? Will they become something bigger? I guess good for them for keeping at it and getting a snowball rolling.

Buddhism & AI Initiative is here to provide Buddhist contemplative insights informing AI development & ethics. They have a hell of an online resources page. And their substack is fire. The four members seem to be serious, legit professionals. They have seed funding, likely in the six-digits. But all in the service of… Buddhist contemplative insights? What?? Do we need an org for Astrology Insights to AI, and Southern Baptists Insights to AI and all the rest? I realize people’s religion is important to them, and there’s enough buddhists in the AI world that they’d be happy to fund how their take on existence meshes with AI. I guess it’s as legit as the DEI-AI advocacy groups, and less harmful. /shrug

I ran into a few similar sites and started a mental category of “unhinged AI mysticism” for sites like the Cyborgism wiki. It’s not Time Cube, but it gives a mysticism-amateur like myself Time Cube vibes. Boy will I be embarrassed if they turn out to be tapped into the true nature of… something.

DeepSeek and xAI basically don’t have safety teams. I was legit surprised by the poverty of their safety efforts. I love that Musk is doing amazing things for humanity and unlocking space for us… but for such major players to be doing this little is wildly irresponsible.

While we’re on the topic of massive efforts by the leading lights of the industry, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence is extremely secretive. With $3B raised in 2 years and an estimated 50 employees their entire public output appears to be a 217 word manifesto and an link to apply. I didn’t believe this was their actual online presence at first, I thought someone was domain squatting and I had to confirm through two different channels. My eyebrows are thoroughly hoisted.2

Woah, check out this EA Forums post on pursuing a career in AI Alignment from mid 2022. Holy shit, what a blast from the past. I imagine the people who followed this back then are some of the most impactful people in the world now. They jumped in on the groundfloor, when everyone else was thinking “wtf even is this? There’s no jobs in this. What would I do? How do I learn anything?” A 20-yr-old with an interest in this and no relevant technical skills could now be one of the foundational people in AI alignment, and making comfortable six-figures.

That whole thing about OpenAI being the largest theft in human history? OpenAI may be the largest, but the model isn’t unique to them, Ought did it two years earlier. Ought started out as a 501c3 non-profit doing AI Alignment Research, with a mission to “scale up good reasoning.” Ought spun off Elicit as an independent public benefit corporation in September 2023, selling its IP and transferring most of its staff to the new entity. Elicit raised a $22 million Series A at a $100 million valuation in early 2025. It’s a for-profit built on research that a non-profit’s donors paid for. I wonder how those donors feel about that.

It’s funny how much bubbles don’t overlap. I hadn’t heard of Americans for Responsible Innovation, but they appear to be pretty dang big in DC. Funded by several big orgs including Coefficient Giving, they’ve got 34 employees, likely $20M+ annually, and were founded by a former Congressman. They crushed Ted Cruz’s AI initiative. They are bipartisan. I guess I’m just completely disregarding the policy side of things, which does sound like me tbh.

Guys, Chinese AI researchers are bootstrapping coordination, and I think they’re doing it better than us. Regarding CnAISDA - “an internationally connected group of policy entrepreneurs within China developed a body that could engage in global AI governance conversations on frontier AI risks while fitting within China’s domestic political context.” It provides a formal platform for influential experts by forming a coalition “of multiple existing Chinese AI-focused institutions to represent China abroad, as well as to advise the government. This avoids the need for the government to “pick winners” in China’s policy ecosystem.” It’s “credibly claimed that the organization has the Chinese government’s support” despite not being a formal organization, and instead being a network for orgs and experts. (all from Carnegie) It has no staff and almost no budget but works anyway.

Note that I wrote the previous paragraph before Anthropic announced Project Glasswing. I’m now a little less surprised about private entities coordinating without government involvement to solve civilization-level problems. It’s interesting how much our upbringing molds our pre-verbal expectations. Despite having become deeply disenchanted with government and swinging hard into centralist liberal, I was really surprised by both CnAISDA and Glasswing. My core psychology was raised on leftist doctrine and my instincts still believed only authoritarian governments could do that sort of thing. I’m happy to see my intuitions proven false.

Not double-counting is hard, part two: Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative “is supporting Coefficient Giving in administering grants” and “manages research support expenses for 26 participating research groups” and “also provides living stipends to some researchers.” But they work on a lot of existential risk projects that are not AI. Deciding how much of the org’s budget should be counted towards AI Safety is tricky.

Similarly, as AI Safety becomes a regular, mainstream concern, it’s harder to disentangle the resources that go just into AI Safety when an org is concerned about humanity as a whole. eg - Non-Trivial is here to support young researchers getting into impactful careers. “Join the brightest young researchers tackling the world’s most pressing problems. Online incubator with mentorship, up to $10,000 scholarships, and zero required fees.” Just straight up doing good with a broad brush, helping get people started on a wide variety of important research. Biosecurity, climate, global health. AI risk is included, and estimates are 10-25% of their funding and efforts goes to people working on that. How do I count the people working at this org, and the costs associated with running it? Certainly a fraction of their efforts are directly working on/funding AI safety, but it’s weird to say the AI Safety Field includes 20% of an org that is actually a high-impact interventions fellowship/scholarship program. This is going to become far more common over the next years.

There’s a number of groups working on AI Safety hardware, which it hadn’t occurred to me is a part of this. The govt regulates compute in theory, but how does one do that in practice? Groups like FlexHEG (Flexible Hardware-Enabled Guarantees) are trying to make AI-chip governance technically enforceable and auditable on the hardware level. The idea is to build hardware/software mechanisms into AI-relevant chips or accelerators so that folks can make verifiable, privacy-preserving claims about how powerful AI compute is being used.

The Center for Shared AI Prosperity - these guys are working on directly moving the ball forward on redistribution from AI to humans. Currently paying for strong candidates to pitch their policy ideas which including a realistic proposal and bio+CV of team members. I’m happy there’s someone actually working on this rather than everyone just saying “Yeah, the future govt will fix it by implementing UBI or something.”

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One of the biggest exceptions is housing in highly-regulated areas. Let me tell you the harrowing story of Berkeley housing, and the heart-warming story of community solidarity in the face of adversity.

Berkeley doesn’t want new housing. It both hard-limits what can be built, and state and local governments place dramatic extra costs on building which acts as a tariff on new housing.

To “fix” this problem, the government implements tax-discounts and subsidies to existing owners, and rent-control to existing renters. This doesn’t address the problem of not enough housing, but it does hide the problem among people already living here. This creates two major problems:

1. It’s very hard to find housing. The scarcity in supply means people can search for months for a place to live, sometimes over a year. There just isn’t much available, and finding what’s there takes a lot of work and some luck and often a lot of compromise. And tons of money. Just so much money.

2. Government price-controls mean the longer a property is held by one person, the more its price becomes unmoored from the wider market. It becomes a house-out-of-time, and extremely desirable. A house that’s been under a lease for ten years is drastically cheaper than that exact same place if it was to be rented out new today. No one wants to sell/buy either, because changing ownership would increase taxes dramatically and lose insurance-protections. (It’s financially preferable to rent a place held by someone else for a long time!)

A person on their own can only deal with this situation in one of two possible ways: accept a lower quality of life, or pay huge amounts of money to outbid everyone else.

But a significantly large-but-tight-knit community has another way to solve this: informally transfer ownership within the community without triggering formal change-of-ownership rules.

In the SF-Bay area, among a certain group of socially-aligned folks, it is known that if you are moving out of a house you do not simply end your lease. Instead you let everyone in the community know that soon this place will become available. This is mostly done by word of mouth. There are enough social events and group chats that if someone announces several months in advance, word will spread that a space is coming available. If a member of the community wish to move here (or change addresses within the Bay Area) they will only have to work things out with others in the community rather than competing against every human alive who wants to move to/in the area.

Likewise, if someone wishes to move they start asking around. “Hey, I’m looking for X bedrooms around Y location. Have you heard about anything coming open?” is a very common question. People are always looking out to help others in the community find housing when they can.

Holding housing for others in the community is an incredibly pro-social thing to do. Generally the search for housing takes hundreds of hours across many months. Being the beneficiary of someone else having already done that search and securing the lease is an INCREDIBLE boon. It creates social gratitude in the beneficiary. It provides some measure of social standing to the person who passed on the lease.

Access to this network increases the value of being a member in good standing in the community, and thus encourages pro-social behavior overall. It’s pretty good for landlords for the same reason, they don’t need to take a risk on an unknown quantity and can instead transfer a lease to someone who is already vetted by their community.

The greatest housing assets of all are long-term leases of large houses under a single name. I’m aware of at least two houses that have been held for over a decade and are currently under a single person, who lives in the house and subleases many rooms. They are able to lease rooms at extremely favorable rates due to government rent control. Their stewardship of a house is extremely valuable to the community in general and the housemates they select in particular. If the community was to lose one of these houses to the general market it would be a significant blow. It seems almost immoral to let these leases end. Yes, rent-control is a far greater evil. But we can’t change rent-control laws. We can work within them to keep some spaces for people who are important to us, and who we know are good.

It occurred to me when I first became familiar with the Bay Area housing environment that this is a modern recreation of ancient patterns. Humans banded together to support each other and survive in hostile environments. The more hostile an environment was, in ways that could be overcome via strong cooperation, the thicker and more intertwined a community became. We are a social species because independent life was impossible.

As the wonders of technology and capitalism made us less and less dependent on a community, we fragmented. No one needed anyone and we all became alienated. Then government reintroduced hostility into the environment, and once again humans did significantly better when they banded together to overcome that adversity.

Yes, Californian governance makes life materially worse for everyone in California. But it makes it spiritually better for those who are able to respond to this by becoming a beautiful, interconnected organism that cares for its members. It seems crazy to say this but…… it just might be worth it.

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9/11 Moonlanding

I was a few months into 21 years old when a hijacked plane crashed into the first World Trade Center tower. I was commuting in to work listening to the radio (as was the style at the times). I couldn’t figure out how the heck a plane could hit the tower. Was the pilot drunk? How did he even get into the middle of New York City? I was imagining a Cessna because the idea of a passenger plane running into the building was actually unimaginable. I was barely starting to realize “Wait… are they talking about, like, a big commercial plane?” when the second plane hit. In that moment like a crystal suddenly forming I realized this was an attack, and there would be war. I knew my country well enough to know that there would be military action as a result. Maybe, maybe we could avoid war.

When I came in to work everyone was crowded around the small personal TV one of my coworkers had with him (live streaming wasn’t a thing yet). That was the first time I had a visual, saw the smoke coming out of the towers. There was grim chatter as we watched live footage. No one was working. The bosses were there with us. How would they get that blaze under control? How many people would die up there before then?

When the first tower began to fall the entire room gasped. We flinched away from the screen as a single body. Dead silence. Someone started crying. We had all watched the “Skyscraper Inferno!” movies. We thought that’s what this was. It had not even entered the realm of imagination that the entire tower would just go down, crushing everyone. This is what an update of sickening proportions feels like.1 Now all eyes went to the second tower. Would this one stand? Suddenly the speed of evacuation was all that mattered.

What little chance for avoiding war had been left was now absolutely obliterated.

We were all excused from work early. Leaving the office, I entered a different world from the one I had woken up in. The repercussions of this day were staggering. No one knew how the world would be different. We didn’t even know what had happened yet. But the world would forever be divided into before this day and after this day. It is rare to have such sudden, sharp pivot points in history. A revolution in a single day. I watched it happen. We all watched it happen together.

I finally realized why my elders had such profound memories of watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. To me it was just another date in history. My entire life we’ve had men bopping around in space and American flags on the moon. It’s a background fact. For them, it was a single moment unprecedented in human history that marked a permanent, sweeping change. Which they all experienced collectively, as it happened.

AlphaGo

Computers had been beating humans at Chess since I was a teenager. It was an impressive engineering feat, but an understandable one. Chess was basically “solvable” in a mechanistic way using search-ahead algorithms. Those of us paying attention to AI in the mid-teens were paying attention to a program called “AlphaGo.” Run by Google DeepMind, it was supposedly a machine that could play Go very well. They wanted to demonstrate this by challenging the best Go players of the era.

This next part is written from memory, forgive me if individual details are off.

The thing about Go is that the space of potential moves explodes too quickly for a search algorithm to work. I’ve barely played Go myself, I don’t know much about it. But among humans it seems one has to have a mental representation of what the state of the board “means” and how a play can shift that. The game is widely accepted to require a fundamental intuitive grasp which humans develop over many years of intense play. There isn’t any way for a human to program that into a machine. So the AlphaGo team didn’t try. Instead they created a digital brain, where numbers took the place of neurons, that could “learn” by changing those numbers. They had AlphaGo play millions of games against itself, changing the numbers a little bit after every game in response to how well the game went, “learning” to play as it went. There isn’t a formula or algorithm one can point to that explains what makes AlphaGo choose the next move it chooses. It just “thinks” on the state of the board and then produces a move.

In March of 2016 Lee Sedol, one of the world’s most acclaimed players of Go, went up against AlphaGo in a televised five-game set. If AlphaGo had merely beaten him this still would have been a watershed moment in AI history. It would be a demonstration that this digital brain has, somehow, encoded an understanding of the game. It has something like intuition in this domain. That’s already miraculous. It was a thing people had said was impossible with machines. Some of us were already expecting this might happen. We were excited for it. What very few of us were ready for was Move 37.

The Move 37 Moment

In their second game, on March 9th, AlphaGo placed a stone where no human would place one. This is the now-famous Move 37. Commentators were baffled. Those watching live and chatting online suspected that AlphaGo had glitched out and thrown an error. Lee Sedol stood up and walked away. He spent fifteen minutes agonizing over that move. No one had any idea what was going on. This wasn’t just a move that no human would make, this was a move that no human could imagine. It was either the most embarrassing flub possible, or proof that humans are no longer the pinnacle of Go-playing minds. And the only way to find out which was for Lee Sedol to throw down and play the hardest he’s ever played to test the machine’s intuition.

Move 37 turned out to be a superhuman move. AlphaGo won that game. Afterwards Lee said he felt “powerless” and AlphaGo was “an entity that cannot be defeated”. He was mostly correct - he went on to beat it in game four of their five-game match. That win crowns him as the only human who has ever defeated AlphaGo in official play.2

Before Move 37 everything in AI development still felt theoretical to me. Then I saw a bizarre act, the act of an alien mind, which inexplicably led to unavoidable defeat. This thing understood something we could not. It had an insight we don’t have the ability to see. I realized that we now share a planet with an alien intelligence. A new mind that thinks in different ways, and thinks things we cannot.

It was still extremely limited. Powerless outside the domain of Go. And yet a new mind nonetheless, and there was no going back. We didn’t share the planet with alien minds before, and we do now, and Move 37 on March 9th is the day that everyone saw it. You cannot go back into the same world you left from.3

The Day After

Ten years after the 9/11 attacks I began to understand a different aspect of my elders’ experience: lack of shared context. I didn’t have a period of my life before the moon landing, I didn’t remember the world as it was before then, nor did I witness the turning point. By the mid 2010s I was coming to know more and more adults who had no real memory of a pre-9/11 world. They were young enough when it happened that by the time their larger world-model was forming 9/11 was a historical fact. The only world they knew was the one that had already been altered. They didn’t feel the change.

Growing older is littered with such moments, where you have a sharp revelation and realize “Oh… that’s what they were feeling the whole time.” I understand why they didn’t really tell me, it’s impossible to really convey in words. It’s something one has to live through. Instead you watch the younger ones and wait, because you know eventually they’ll get it, and then they too will have that “Oh… that’s what they were feeling the whole time” feeling. Only time can bring that.

Even after such an Act Shift on Earth’s stage, time proceeds. Life continues, and a typical day before a history-cleaving event isn’t much different from a day after it on the individual level. Even if everything has changed for humanity, nothing has changed for the human. I still have to pay my rent and brush my teeth. And yet the color palette has shifted, the musical score has turned. You can tell the world is different. It is strange that the newer generations will only feel the world states that came after their emergence into the world. It is strange that I’ll never feel the world states before my own time. I find it unfair.

Ten years after Move 37 I now frequently run into adults who did not live in a world without alien minds in it. Adults who didn’t watch a brand-new brain made out of numbers play a stone in an unimaginable spot to carve a path to victory into the future. They are still living in the default world they were presented with. I hope they can soak in its flavor to the deepest extent possible. It’s hard to know what to appreciate when you don’t yet know how the flavors of history change. And I hope they can take some time, maybe a few minutes once a year, to think of how strange the world must have been in the before-times, when in all the world the only thinking beings were the humans born of flesh and blood.

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Shut Up And Do The Impossible - The RatFic Online Anthology

Feel free to drop recommendations and links to good RatFic short stories in the comments!

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I. Why?

There’s a genre of horror movie where a normal protagonist is going through a normal day in a normal life. Ten minutes into the movie his friends bring out a struggling kidnap victim to slaughter, and they look at him like this is just a normal Tuesday and he slowly realizes that either he’s surrounded by complete psychopaths or the world is absolutely fucked up in some way he never imagined, and somehow this has been lost on him up until this point in his life. This kinda thing happens to me more than I’d like to admit, but normally it’s in a metaphorical way. Normally.

Sometimes I’m at the goth club, fighting back The Depression (and winning tyvm), and I’ll be involved in a conversation that veers into:

Goth 1: Man, life’s tough right now.

Goth 2: I can’t believe we’re still letting billionaires live.

Goth 3: Seriously, how corrupt is our government that we haven’t rounded them all up yet?

Goth 1: Maybe we should kill them ourselves.

Goth 2: Haha… for real, for real, if only. We’ll kill them soon enough. Just need a few more Luigi’s.

Everyone In Earshot: Yup, yup. /nodding

I am sad that this is not an exaggeration. Every bit is literally things I’ve heard people say and witnessed myself. It’s horrifying to see normal people you dance with turn into nazis so easily.

I know why it happens. I don’t blame people for not understanding the complexities of a global economy that makes it possible to buy a nearly-magic artifact that no human alive can create on their own for just 16 cents1. It feels like there is a certain amount of Stuff in the world, and so if some people have a lot of Stuff that’s only possible because others have much less Stuff, and that’s unfair. If life is hard, it’s the fault of the people who took all the Stuff.

What shocks me is how socially acceptable it is to openly say that good people should support lynching strangers based on their wealth. Everyone expects that saying this will get you approval. The most racist nationalists keep their slurs to their friend groups, or behind an online buffer, unless they’re looking to start a fight. Proclaiming your hatreds among strangers is risky. Even the ICE cowards wear masks. But when it comes to revulsion for billionaires, everyone expects to be cheered.

I want this to change. I want people to think at least a tiny bit “this might be slightly socially costly to say.” In theory, one way to do that is to be public about the fact that real people exist that find that sort of unthinking hatred repugnant. A group demonstration of this could be one way to do that. I signed up for the Pro-Billionaire march in hopes that it could advance this sentiment.

II. You Get About Five Words

The previous section is aprox 500 words. As we all know, when trying to convince a lot of people of something You Get About Five Words. How the hell do I encapsulate all that in Five Words?

I want to point at the hate directly. My first sign attempt included “Hate is Ugly.” But that is cliche and doesn’t really communicate anything. Anyone could say it. More importantly, I don’t believe that hate is always wrong. It’s good to hate certain things. Nazis. Criminals. Two-Boxers. If you don’t hate anything then you don’t love anything either. The problem is that blanket hate of billionaires is bad. I want to point at the fact that the hate is destructive and stupid rather than appropriately defensive.

III. The Code of Honorable Wealth

The thing I want everyone to internalize, the thing that could let us talk about the future together, is the sentiment behind Paul Graham’s essay How To Make Wealth, which in my memory will always be remembered as Let Nerds Keep Their Stuff

For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. [10] Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.

[…] the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it. Once you're allowed to do that, people who want to get rich can do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it.

You need to read the whole essay to get the emotional payload that makes this summary deeply salient. But that essay is nearly 9000 words! Not good for a marching sign.

The closest I can distill it to is this:

1. Our society has a Code we live by. The Code says that if you make the world better by creating things for your fellow man that she values, you can sell the thing you made for a price she’s happy to pay. If you create enough value that you get very rich by doing this, then that is Honorable Wealth. You can keep it. You still pay taxes, but we recognize you did an honorable thing and won’t come after you for it.

2. This Code has led to many people pursuing Honorable Wealth rather than the old methods of Conquest, Slavery, and Theft. Because of this Code DIRECTLY, we have immense amounts of wealth. We get infinite hot water in our homes by turning a tap. We get antibiotics, and limitless music, and elastic pants. We can work forty hours a week rather than grinding our bodies to death before our 50th birthday.

3. Following this Code means that, in a global economy of 8 Billion people, some people can and will become billionaires by completely Honorable means. Yes, some will also use conquest or corruption or theft. Those people are evil and should be stopped. But in the USA, the majority of our billionaires have made their wealth by Honorable means.

4. Coming after those billionaires isn’t just bad for those billionaires. It is revoking the Code of Honorable Wealth. It is returning to Rule of the Violent, and slave economies, and grinding global poverty. Protecting the Code is incredibly important NOT because it serves some billionaires, but because it serves every single person in our society that lives above the level of a 16th century peasant.

That’s less than 9000 words, but STILL won’t fit on a sign. ARGH.

IV. Stone Age Billionaire

Maybe a single vivid image can get across what I mean. From Paul Graham’s essay:

A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. […] I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else.

This isn’t just a “surprising number of people,” this is the default. The world is full of Stuff. When you do work for someone they give you some of their Stuff, and when you want something from someone else you give them some of your Stuff. The nature of specialization and global supply chains is such that almost no one sees new Stuff being built in a way that noticeably grows the pool of all Stuff, so it feels constant. For most people their labor adds to the global pool of Stuff the same amount their sweating changes the local humidity level. Technically non-zero, but not so’s you’d notice.

But if you take a longer view it’s obvious that humans have created a TON of stuff. By the standards of our ancestors, we are all absolutely billionaires. We are drowning in wealth, our lives are joyous and easy compared to our forebearers struggling in their caves. Every single one of us is a Stone Age Billionaire. If people stop to think about why we are billionaires compared to our stone-age grandparents, maybe they’ll remember the importance of the Code that created this world. Is there an image that sparks that? Can I convey this image with a sign?

Turns out that no, I cannot. My words not good! There is way too much of an inferential gap. No one got it, and to be totally honest I kinda knew this wasn’t gonna do it. But it was 10am on Saturday, 30 minutes before I was meeting my friends to carpool to the protest, and I was out of ideas. At best I could hope that someone would ask me about the sign. (Very few people did.)

V. At The Protest

Including myself and my friends, there were aprox 25 Pro-Billionaire protestors. Journalists seemed to be about 15? I don’t know if a ratio this extreme is good or bad. It was quite a sight seeing a gaggle of them rushing up around the side of the protest to get photos of us from the front.

I believe these two photos were taken at the same place, less than a minute apart. The kneeling guy with the crown is a counter-protestor.

I counted 12 counter-protestors at the initial gathering point. It was hard to tell at first if someone was a counter protestor because the counter protestors didn’t seem to understand why one would be Pro-Billionaire and thus their signs were welcome among the protestors. For example the “Poor and Proud” and “March 4 Hundredaires” signs are sentiments that literally every Pro-Billionaire protestor would gladly endorse. But they (and a couple others) didn’t bother marching to the capital, dropping out once we started moving, which makes me think they were probably not actually there in support of the march. I think eight counter-protestors followed us the entire way, which made the march look a fair bit bigger in photos.

VI. Building Bridges

The best part of the march was the occasional opportunities to talk to the counter-protestors. Over the course of a forty-minute walk it’s hard to stay completely alienated from those you’re walking with unless you retain strong distance-discipline. One counter-protestor commented to me “I bet you can’t wait to accelerate the AIs down onto us.”2 I told him no, actually, I want them to pause all development immediately so we don’t all die. He was surprised that we agreed, saying that he didn’t expect long-sighted opinions like that from someone who was so short-term focused that he wanted to protect billionaires. This is exactly the sort of thing my Jehovah’s Witness upbringing had prepared me for! (I cannot believe that training actually came in useful!!!)

I began with “I think we agree on a lot, actually. We both want to protect the long-term future, and we think the other side is being very short-sighted and destroying the long-term future for short-term gain.” Then I launched into my opinion on The Code that has created the society we have today, and how that Code means that we will have billionaires who came by their fortunes Honorably, and that we must stand true to the Code and allow those billionaires to retain the wealth if we want to remain a Just and Wealthy society. I drew attention to the fact that we are all Stone Age Billionaires (and pointed out my sign) and that this is because we have kept faith with the Code. Our descendants can all be billionaires by today’s reckoning, if we don’t destroy the thing that let us create this level of cooperation and coordination in the first place.

He listened, and seemed to be contemplating. When he nodded and walked away, I felt like I’d managed to actually bring this idea into his consideration. Maybe there’s a seed that’s been planted there, which will grow over time.

Equally importantly, two of the highly-costumed counter-protestors were directly behind us as we talked. I believe they overheard us, because they stayed quiet the entire time, which was unusual for them. Likewise, later in the march I saw the crown-wearing counter-protestor talking with Aella, and having a similarly open-exchange discussion. I am hopeful that they all will have new perspectives on why good people might really care about property rights.

VII. The Counter-Protestors

There were about 8 counter-protestors, to roughly 25 protestors. However at least some initial media outlets tweeted that the protest was “swamped” by the counter-protestors. I’m not surprised, because the counter-protestors had a VERY outsized presence.

For starters, most of them were in elaborate costume. Fancy suits & crowns, or royal garb. One had the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show on her back as a giant marionette, and was dancing the whole time while feeding mock human flesh to anyone who would take it. This sounds horrific in text but her vibes were great, she absolutely had the air of someone you’d love to party with. Next time I’m gonna wear something far more visually interesting. Maybe full goth gear.

More importantly, they were extremely energized. They stayed together near the front and shouted at the top of their lungs at every stoplight. The Pro-Billionaire protestors were rarely able to drown them out. The counter-protestors had fury and righteousness on their side, they were here to Smash Evil, and the rest of us were struggling to figure out how to fit Paul Graham’s nine-thousand-word essay on the Code that gave us modern society into a five-word chant.

Their chants did a good job of demonstrating (and spreading?) the mental hellscape they live in. Their favorite one was “Eat The Poor,” showing the “there’s only X amount of Stuff” fear. I tried “Don’t Eat Humans!” for a while, which was OK I guess, but not catchy.

In comparison to their chants, ours were pathetic. “Grow The Pie” just doesn’t have any emotional heft to it. It feels made-up. “Build More Housing” was good, but not directly relevant. “Property Rights Are Human Rights” requires an essay of context to understand and isn’t Inspiring out of the box. We didn’t have any unified rallying cry to respond with.

But most important of all, they had the power of social approval on their side. Maybe there were three times as many of “us” as there were of “them” marching down the street, but they had every single resident of the city on their side. The media was on their side. The cops were on their side. On any given day on any given street corner, if someone were to stand up and yell “Fuck the billionaires, kill them all!” they would get cheers from at least half the people around, and no dissent. The amount of intimidative power this gives you is impressive to watch in action. It felt like most of the protestors didn’t have the willingness to rise against that. It obviously felt very good for the counter-protestors to get to exercise that power.

VIII. Final Speeches

The worst part of the march was the period of final speeches outside the capital building. The speeches themselves were OK, the second one in particular was exceptionally well delivered. The counter-protestors, however, got to demonstrate who owned the streets and what this really means.

Initially the Pro-Billionaire protestors attempted to unfurl the large banner and give a few quick speeches in front of it. The five most zealous counter-protestors pushed their way in front of it to take up the space and prevent anyone from speaking. When the banner moved they just moved with it. At this point the protestors were kinda stuck, because what exactly are you supposed to do? Whatever in-roads we may have made chatting during the march, the counter-protestors weren’t going to listen to words right now, they were just here for maximum physical disruption. In theory we could push them aside, but by the rules of polite society that would make us the aggressors. It would give them exactly the media attention they want. It seemed that either they could just shut down the final speeches indefinitely with heckling, or they get media coverage of being assaulted by violent billionaire-lovers, and either way they win. NGL - it was legit embarrassing.

Then my friend Ben realized that this is a giant game of “I’m not touching you” for adults. Which is the stupidest dang thing IMO, but is pretty symetrical. A few of us just stood close together in a line, and we moved the speeches to the other side of that line. The counter-protestors would have to walk through us to block that speech, and we just didn’t move. When they tried to go around us we shifted to be in front of them. And they couldn’t actually touch us because that was against the rules, so this worked?? It was bizarre. It made me feel again like I have absolutely no social awareness or acumen. This is a stupid way to win a stupid game.

It didn’t work perfectly. We didn’t have any structure or leadership, no one had foreseen this, so there wasn’t any way to actually coordinate the cordon. Only like four of us actually did this, entirely ad hoc. I’m frankly surprised it was enough. Also we were actually interested in the speeches, so we didn’t keep a sharp eye on the hecklers and a couple of them edged around to get close to the speech-givers. They continued to shout heckles between lines of the speeches. At least once I turned around to nudge someone back again, and I heard the ominous line of “Don’t touch me.” There’s a small spike of adrenaline that comes with those words when you realize they are a warning that we’re on the verge of an escalation that can only benefit them. All in all it was poorly executed, like if a gay pride march had Fred Phelps with a “god hates fags” sign edging into every photo of the final speech, while yelling slurs between lines from ten feet away.

IX. How’d It Go?

IMO the march had a couple problems.

The first was that there was no unified message. Ostensibly it was about the California Billionaire Tax Act confiscating 5% of billionaire net worth. And yes, that’s fucking nuts.

But that’s a symptom of the real problem, which is breakdown of the social code. I didn’t come here because of that one Act, I came here because, as outlined in Section 1, I’m horrified by how much of the population talks about lynching people to take their stuff, and that this is viewed as normal or good! I refused to repeat Derik’s words when he said “Thank you Billionaires.” I’m thankful to the social code that created this, not to individual men. There was a lack of unified message that made it much harder for everyone to be enthusiastic together.

On the one hand, maybe this helped. The march was thrown together with just one week’s notice and it needed to gather the biggest tent possible. If the march was just about the California Billionaire Tax Act, I probably wouldn’t have come. Since it was about the right for billionaires to exist honorably, I did.

On the other hand, the ambiguity meant that when opposition showed up there wasn’t a central unifying core that everyone could rally around. We were easy to overwhelm with just a third of our numbers.

The second was that there was no preparation. It would have been good to have everyone ready with a few chants that we could all practice before we left and really get behind. Some thought of what to do if hecklers showed up would’ve been good. Ideally there should be several people picked out beforehand, who had gathered the day before to practice linking arms to create a cordon, and were instructed in whatever is best practices when running into this sort of harassment. People that the march-leader could look to when in need of back up. Things turned out surprisingly well given that no one had any idea what they were doing!

All that being said, this was all thrown together in a week over a group chat and got a surprising amount of media coverage. I’m very pro-people-doing-things. The default is that nothing happens, and for someone to actually try something and get this going on such short notice is amazing! The world is better than it was the day before, even just a tiny bit, because a few people were willing to risk failing publicly at something hard. They cared enough to do it anyway, and maybe now a few people are a little more interested in how it is we’re so much better off today than our ancestors ever were.

We’re all Stone Age Billionaires, and it’s not because any one of us works a billion times harder at picking berries and hunting deer than our ancestors. They all worked far harder than we did, and they would weep with joy to see how rich we are. To see how few hours we need to work to feed ourselves, how we don’t wear out our bodies from grinding labor and harsh environments. We can weep with joy at how wealthy and happy our great-grandchildren will be. If we keep true to the Code of Honorable Wealth that makes this cooperation and creation possible, our great-grandchildren can all (yes all) live life as 20th Century Billionaires.

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The post converges on:

1. if you ask out men they’ll take that to mean you want to sleep with them

2. they’re happy to sleep with you even if they have no interest in marrying you

3. they’ll sleep with you and then move on, and you’ll still be single.

4. If you want to get married you should wait for a man to ask you out, because at least then you know he has more than zero interest in you.

Not only does this fail to model dating correctly, I’m going to be inflammatory and claim that this isn’t actually the reason Sympathetic Opposition (SO) doesn’t want to ask out men, and the real reason is so unspeakable that she’s not allowed to admit it even to herself. O_O But I’ll get to that at the end.

Dating For Marriage

Being raised a Jehovah’s Witness, I was not allowed to date. This was very convenient for me as I was unattractive and extremely nerdy (back when this was a huge turn-off). I could tell myself that the reason I didn’t ask out girls wasn’t because I expected they wouldn’t want anything to do with me, it’s because my parents’ religion wouldn’t let me.1

The reason my parents’ religion wouldn’t let me is because the official position is that DATING IS FOR MARRIAGE! Going on a date is the first line to be executed when running the “install marriage” script. When you are in high school you are not looking to get married, so you should not be dating. Indeed, even in college you shouldn’t be dating, unless maybe it’s your final year and you have good job prospects and actually you ARE looking for a wife you could reasonably marry in the next few months.

When I was nineteen and a woman showed sexual interest in me for the first time in my life, I did not hesitate. I asked her out as soon as I was aware (which, to be fair, still took some effort on her part. I was pretty oblivious.) We dated for a while, and the dating did NOT go well. We were not a good match. We had huge cultural differences. We fought a lot. But I still had the unexamined assumption seated deep inside me that Dating Is For Marriage, and we’d been dating for quite a while. And maybe no other woman would ever show interest in me. And I owed her a lot, because I’d taken months of her life and she’d become estranged from her family due to our relationship (they didn’t approve of her dating an atheist, to the point of kicking her out of the house.)

How does one deal with a relationship on the rocks? Everything in my childhood religion and popular romcoms and epic fantasy novels had instilled one truth in me — you commit harder. There’s nothing so bad that deeply committed love can’t work through it. So I asked her to marry me.

This did not fix everything. Indeed, it didn’t fix anything. We were miserable for seven years before finally divorcing. What could have been a few months of lost time turned into seven years of lost time, and of course lots of misery along the way.

This is not an uncommon failure mode of viewing dating as part of the marriage process. Once you are on the marriage track, it is dishonorable and potentially harmful to turn away without very good reason. Someone who believes this is the case is not going to ask out a potential date unless he has very poor judgement (hello Past Eneasz!) or you are both part of a fundamentalist subculture and already well-acquainted.

Many people who date hope to end up married, of course. But the purpose of a date isn’t To Become A Marriage. It’s to build intimacy, familiarity, and learn about each other. It’s to see each other’s souls a bit clearer, so that you have a better idea of if you want to get married.

And if that’s the case, then there’s no reason why a girl shouldn’t say “you seem interesting, I think I want to see your soul a bit better to find out if we’re a match.”

SO says this didn’t work for her, and that it doesn’t work in general! Primarily because men want sex but don’t want marriage at a higher rate than women.

Dating For Sex

The emotional payload of the post is the assertion that more men date for sex without possibility of marriage than women.

Footnotes 3&4 are “Euphemistically.” So “dating” means “having sex with,” which is how one makes sense of sentences like:

Here’s the most popular part of the essay, and the one I’ve seen quoted the most with the most cheers of agreement:

Thus the root of the problem: if you ask a man out, all you know is that he’s willing to sleep with you! But you already knew that, because (presumably) All Men Are All Willing To Sleep With Anyone. You have gained no information, and come no closer to finding a marriage partner.

She stresses this is the primary reason to not ask men out quite a few times.

she has very little additional information

A man gets much more information

women get much less information from asking men out than men get from asking women out

asking men out will give her less information

If there is a reason that you would expect him to be more likely to reject you if he doesn’t like you than the average man getting asked on a random date, then you will get more information by asking him out.

This is a weird premise, because the whole point of going on a date is to gather information on whether you are compatible. You are doing your best to exchange glimpses at each other’s souls. You can get more information in a single minute of conversation than you can get from the answer to “does he think I’m pretty enough to ask me out?” That doesn’t distinguish him from most men! (based on SO’s writing, anyway)

On the other hand, a man being asked out by a woman is rare. It certainly gives the man a surprising amount of evidence that this woman is different from most. This alone is enough reason to update from “she seems nice” to “oh, there’s something very interesting here!” Of course the acceptance rate will suddenly be significantly higher.

SO’s words, if taken at face value, are that she wishes to retain the information advantage of knowing a guy thinks she’s pretty and is willing to sacrifice the information advantage he would get that she’s exceptionally interesting to retain that. This is the protocol of two parties at war.

Hostile Opposition

The narrative of SO’s post is one of opposing sides at war. Information advantages need to be retained. Men want sex, women don’t. Women want marriage, men don’t. The two sides must fight each other to some sort of truce. Advantages won by one side are at the expense of the other side. It’s a terrible way to exist. No wonder people are opting out.

This reminds me of Brangus’s post about buying dinner on a date. The argument as presented there is that men want sex from women, and therefore must compensate the women for their time/attention/sexual favors. This also portrays the sexes as perpetually at odds, one taking from the other. It breeds resentment and dissatisfaction. It’s the same terrible way to exist.

I wrote then that the men should pay on a date, but not because they want sex from women, and not because the women need to be compensated for anything. But rather, because being taken care of like that on a date makes the woman feel very warm and happy, and the man feels really good that he can make a woman feel like that. She appreciates him, and he is proud to be appreciated.

Likewise, there is a good reason why men should ask women out. I suspect it’s the real reason that SO won’t ask men out anymore. But it’s not something one can just say out loud, or even admit to themselves, which is why it comes out as some weird men-want-sex, war-between-the-sexes, value-of-information thing instead.

Women Want To Be Feminine

Many women want to be pursued. They want to be asked out. They want to be live the feminine aesthetic.

When they take the asking-out role, it feels bad. It doesn’t matter that in practice taking the pursuing role will yield otherwise better partners. For many women even a partner that is better on every other dimension is undesirable if he cannot fulfill the “lets me play the feminine aesthetic” role. A relationship where she takes on the masculine aesthetic is not suitable by definition. Asking out her partner would ruin him as a partner.

Men should be the ones to ask women out for the same reason they should pay for dinner on a first date — it feels good to embody the masculine aesthetic. Even more importantly, it feels good to embody the masculine aesthetic with a woman who is embodying the feminine aesthetic. The two parts were designed long ago to match in a complementary dance. It’s only possible to pull off when the two very different aesthetics are played in a collaborative, mutually-supporting, entwining way. The man needs a feminine partner, the woman needs a masculine partner.

A woman that wants a masculine partner is likely going to have a bad time if she starts a relationship by taking the masculine role! Transitioning from that back into the feminine aesthetic can be a tough ask. Especially because apparently nobody can talk about the fact that this is very important to them!

SO’s post is primarily about defending the desirability and goodness of embodying the feminine aesthetic without saying that she’s doing that. The “you get very little information about if they are marriageable when asking men out” defense is perfect. Once you realize this is about femininity it’s obviously a great filter. You get no information on whether the man is happy to play the masculine role if you are the one to ask him out. You get pretty darn good evidence that he IS willing to do so if he DOES ask you out.

If people could be honest about this, Wes wouldn’t be so confused. If Kayla and Cyn and Sympathetic Opposition could say “The feminine aesthetic is psychologically important. It is the only way I can live a beautiful life” I don’t think he’d have a problem with that. The interesting part is that many people can’t say this out loud, and indeed can’t even think it. Posts like Cyn’s and SOs are a jugaad social tech, allowing disgraced solutions back into society under cover of new justification which holds up as long as you don’t look too hard.2

The two Classic Sexes of our species are still deeply ingrained in every part of our world, and much of our biology and psychology. Most humans are drawn to embodying one of the aesthetic ideals in their relationships. To be plain about it, most men feel better when they can be masculine and most women feel better when they can be feminine. But the modern world doesn’t have room for two sexes anymore. Men are hated and censured for being masculine. Women are shamed and persecuted for being feminine. The economic and political order exerts implacable pressure to crush all people into asexual Productivity Units. We get today’s kaleidoscope of dysfunction and backlash as a result.

But all that is for future posts.

#NotAllWomen

This particularly kerfuffle is about one small-ish aspect of the Masculine/Feminine Aesthetics. Two of the most stable and committed relationships in my social circles were initiated by the women, and I wouldn’t call either woman non-Feminine. Both of them had the desire to nab the best man-for-them and have the ability to express the desired amount of Feminine Aesthetic in other ways. The amount of Feminine (or Masculine) Aesthetic that any one person needs to embody to feel happy varies greatly from person to person. The amount of fulfillment they get from different aspects of that Aesthetic varies as well. For some being asked out is crucial, for others it barely registers as Feminine. I’m not out here saying “Women want to be asked out! It’s because they’re feminine!” If that’s the message you’re taking away, please reread with more charity.

Most humans feel their lives are more beautiful when they can embody an Aesthetic. The Masculine/Feminine ones are powerful, and common. Relationship-initiation protocols are part of these Aesthetics, and for some people they are important enough that the Aesthetic is broken if those are ignored. For others it’s a strong sign that they won’t get a willing counter-partner in the if the initial step is reversed. Acknowledging this desire is so taboo that most people don’t even realize this is what’s driving them.

Don’t date in ways that frustrate or embitter. Date to discover the souls of those around you. Play with the ones who delight you. With time you’ll find the one(s) you want to entwine yourself with for decades to come. This isn’t a war! If it is you’re doing it wrong! The other sex is here to collaborate with you. To take the other side of a dance that is unequal and asymmetrical, and thus mutually uplifting and enriching. The ones who wish to war are best left alone.

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Brain Gains

Writing is a muscle that can be strengthened through use. Almost everything is like this and everyone knows it, but we’re spoiled monkeys and we don’t do it unless forced to. InkHaven forced me to. I was gonna put in the reps every damn day or I was getting kicked out. And by golly, I literally got to watch that writing muscle grow stronger over the weeks!

When I came in to InkHaven if I was going to write a blog post that was going to take up my creative energy for the day. Maybe I could do accounting or renovation work, but nothing that takes serious word-brain. And to be honest, it would take a lot of my free energy regardless.

But I had to miss four days of InkHaven in the middle (for reasons!), so at least four times before that I had to write two posts per day, to store up for my days away. This wasn’t possible at first. But by the second week I could actually do it. My writing speed went up, and my stamina to wrench words out of my brain and put them on the screen for hours at a time also went up. The days that I had to write two posts in one day were crushing, but they were possible at all, which was a major improvement.

The amount of relief this brings, and it’s sibling Joy, is almost embarrassing. When I write, which already isn’t often enough (see next section), I’d have to choose between fiction or blog. Fiction is emotionally un-rewarding. Blog posts get seen immediately, and sometimes get engagement! Also some people pay me monthly for blog posts (thank you!). So if I can only do one, I choose the blog. Once my writing muscle got strong enough I was able to write TWO blog posts in one day. IRL this won’t mean two posts in a day, it’ll mean a post in the morning, and working on fiction in the afternoon! :) This is a huge upgrade. A whole new branch of tech tree can be pursued now! I am massively thankful to InkHaven for this.

Limits Are A Thing

InkHaven demanded 30 posts in 30 days. My fastest post took ~2.5 hours, I already knew exactly what it would cover without new discovery, and it didn’t demand a lot of labor to turn into words. My most difficult post took 15 hours. Even my average posts, which were ~4-5 hours of work, took intense focus and effort to produce and left me drained. I can only do this for so long. By the final week of the program I was running on fumes. I think my post quality suffered. My mental health certainly did. I appreciate endurance trials, and I’m proud to have made it through this one. I cannot do that every month.

I also put the rest of my life on hold for InkHaven. I was not otherwise working. I stepped away from my podcasts. I didn’t do chores and I worked out drastically less. I saw less of my loved ones. This was balanced out by the insanely rich social opportunities of InkHaven (see previous post), but it isn’t sustainable. I do think two posts a week is a solid goal now that real life has returned. It’s perhaps disappointing to learn I’m slow enough of a writer that my output will never match my idols. Perhaps my compartive advantage isn’t in word-making? But it’s good to know my limits and work within realistic boundaries.

Upgrading The Gym?

Various other Inkhaveners have posted thoughts on what could improve future Inkhavens, most of which I agree with. Having more structure, earlier deadlines, and a staggered draft-due, publish-due on different days would all be great. But if I could make just one change, it wouldn’t be any of those. The change that would make the biggest difference is turning the gaze of Inkhaven upon itself. Because if there is one thing that was missing from InkHaven, it was a narrative arc.

The first two weeks of serious writing and getting a feel for our abilities was very valuable. All the initial quest-giving and adventuring were there. But the further into the month we went, the less additional information each day of doing that gave us. The story needs to evolve over the month, and it did not. Continuing to grind posts for the whole month without refocus left the project feeling anti-climactic at the end. There was no arc, no resolution.

Starting in the third week we would have benefited from a change of format that altered what was required of us, to stretch us in new ways and bring a feeling of advancement and discovery. Best of all would be if the final week introduced a major project or collaboration or challenge. A progression with distinct phases that resulted in the subject ending as an (at least slightly) changed person from who they were when they started. Some residents did this either intentionally or stumbled into it accidentally. I am one of the latter, and I got incredible value from this program. I’m naturally kinda lucky though, and also I was at a point in my life where that sorta thing was almost inevitable.

Again, it’s highly valuable even with no changes, and you can apply for the April cohort right now, at this link.

[edit: draft of this post was written before new Inkhaven was announced, fixed some wording to reflect this XD]

If You Missed it

To avoid spamming my readers I didn’t push most posts to email in November. There were some good ones (based on reader engagement and feedback) that I didn’t push so you might have missed them. Here are links!

The Superior Threesome - Find out which threesome is the better one!

My Short, Sweet, Sexy Side Gig - My stint as a kinda-sex-worker

Leap Anyway, part 1 and part 2 - On restarting my life, again

Hobo Forest -What to do with all the hobos??

Only The Young Will Survive - The harder it is to change, the more important it is to keep some things unchanged. This creates some conflicts.

Being The Target Demographic - How you can tell you’re getting old

Desire Without Apology - What we want is impossible, but we can dip into that world for little bursts if we’re brave enough to try

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Was InkHaven valuable? To me: yes, incredibly so. Before I started InkHaven I was considering quitting writing and blogging altogether. Every time I sat down to write it was painful, and I had to take Adderall to get started. I’d often spend an hour with a nearly blank screen before getting two paragraphs. I am acutely aware of how little time is left in the world, and in anyone’s individual life in particular.

I hate when time is unnecessarily destroyed. I hate filler episodes. Kurt Vonnegut’s first rule of writing is one of the most important things written about writing:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

There are so many things to read and I cannot read all of them. I do not want to contribute to this problem! I want to make sure the things I write are actually valuable and succinct. This leads to an ever-growing spiral of “well this isn’t actually important/interesting enough to say” and it gets mentally thrown in the trash before I’ve even typed it out. Three hours later I have four lines down that go nowhere and I’m frustrated unto collapse.

Lesson 1 - Get It Out

The first gift of InkHaven was forcing me to just vomit up all the words anyway. I had to post every day. It didn’t have to be great. If I could just get the words out that was good enough. If I had time afterwards to refine them into something better, to chisel away the ugly parts and buff out the rough edges, that’s a bonus. But the focus had to be on making the words happen regardless of how bad they might be. When I was forced to stop worrying about if they were worthy of being typed or not, suddenly I had a lot more coming out.

I would not have thought this would work. I assumed the correct approach was to (falsely) believe one is The Greatest. When one thinks they are a gift unto man, their own confidence keeps them flying the whole time. It seems what actually works is just accepting that I’ll put out a lot that will be seen once and disappear thereafter. But then do it anyway. Because every now and then a muse will pick some of it to bless with Magic Good Sauce and it resonates with a lot of people for a long time. I just can’t expect any of it to be that good beforehand. I had to lean into producing things that are as true as I can make them and realize that’s the only really important part. Somehow some of it turned out great. I never would have known it would be if I hadn’t just put it out, flawed and earnestly janky.

I was worried this would drive away readers. Time is so limited! If I’m wasting my reader’s reading-hours with shovelfuls of my word-diarrhea they’re gonna stop coming. Yet the opposite happened. My total subscribers jumped 10% in one month, and two more became paid subscribers (12.5% jump, and thank you!).

I got several posts that did well and I’m very happy with, which I would not have written at all otherwise. It turns out you cannot judge the value of what you will make before you have made it. Something you thought would be great turns out soggy and flat, and something you were sure was self-indulgent slop turns out to ring true with a secret chord in the hearts of thousands. You cannot discover what things hidden under the surface are good by guessing. There is no dowsing rod for the soul. You have to just keep digging and digging and laying everything out under the sun to see which bits will sparkle.

Lesson 2 - Hufflepuffs Are A Hivemind

I brought enough Adderall to InkHaven to use every day, and double-up on most days if needed. I ended up only taking Adderall two times that entire month.

InkHaven is a place to write. It is, in a sense, a sacred space consecrated to writing. When I left my room and entered the common area each morning I saw my friends and peers sitting intently at their laptops, typing away. The atmosphere was heavy with words, quietly being channeled down into posts. You see people doing this work and your body feels it. The natural instinct is to sit down, open the laptop, and join in the communal effort.

This is who we are, the body says. This is what we do here. It flows naturally from the world into the self. It’s not just that it was easy to sit down and start writing, as opposed to the usual struggle. It’s that to not start writing would have been the struggle instead. It’s the most sublime thing I’ve experienced in work-state.

Writing is mostly lonely work. Even when you write something a lot of people appreciate, you mostly don’t see them enjoying it. You don’t get to share in the experience. Thousands of views don’t feel like anything without a smile or a fist-bump. InkHaven changed that. There we all saw each other putting our works into the world, and felt the shared effort of doing so. I grew to know the people who were writing and appreciated them as full persons. Their writing was more meaningful as I grew to know them. It was impossible to read everything that was posted, but the best posts were shared around. Even if nobody else on earth read what I wrote, I knew that a few of the people around me read a few of the things I had put out. People who saw me both as a physical being trying to be fun and kind, and as a mess of experiences and failures and successes being dragged out into public to partly bridge the endless gulf separating our souls. And I saw them doing the same thing.

I don’t need to be witnessed by millions (anymore). What I actually need is very small and very local (one might say hyperlocal). I have a very hard time motivating myself without that. It was grinding me down for years, until it totally ground me to a halt in 2025, and it took InkHaven for me to acknowledge this was the problem, and it had a solution. I have changed House. Goodbye Ravenclaw, hello all you beautiful Hufflepuffs.

I think I’ve always been somewhere near Hufflepuff in my heart. I want to know everyone. I’ve been in love with the Bohemian lifestyle of “a bunch of broke artists sleeping on mattresses in a warehouse and making art” since I was a child, purely on aesthetic grounds. Now I understand the incredible practical power of such a place. When everyone you care about and live with is focusing their life energy on the same creative channeling it is a force of nature. To be honest, I would still love to live in exactly that way. I think maybe I’ve aged out of being able to pull it off. But Jesus, what a way to actually Get The Thing Done. This is why monasteries exist. This is why remote work is toxic to the soul. We must recapture this technology. InkHaven has shown us the way.

Going Forward

Sadly I followed up InkHaven November with No-Post December. This is shameful, and I’m actually ashamed by it. I have left many threads dangling. Many things are still unsaid on topics very important to me, topics of intentional narrative and accepting masculinity and desire (and more). I can’t just leave these threads hanging, it would be a betrayal of what I started. I will take the lessons of InkHaven and incorporate them to make my productivity so much more. Regular posting will resume this month.

Though not daily posting. I also learned I can’t do that at InkHaven. A bit more on InkHaven soon, then we dive back into… everything.

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― Daniel Dennett

In social disputes, using bad arguments may end up not only hurting your position, but hurting the people you care about in a general sense. Christians who teach their children that they are vile things which corrupt God’s creation cause significant negative side-effects even if they get the behavior they want. Narrative is the foundation of all human experience, and everything else flows from that. So if you’re going to tell someone to do a good thing, tell them to do it for good reasons.

Paying On A Date

Brangus wrote his 10 Rules for Sleeping With Women. It takes a different view on sex than mine, but it has valuable perspectives. At least once I said “Oh jeez, I’ve always been really bad at that, glad to see it highlighted.”

Particularly good advice is for the guy to just pay on a date.

First, you should buy dinner. Why? Dude, just buy dinner. Don’t expect anything in return. Don’t let her buy dinner. Just buy dinner; don’t make a big deal about it.

This is the way. Who pays for dinner is the least important thing anyone is finding out. Default to paying and get on with figuring out if you actually have mutual desire, because otherwise the amount of energy diverted away from discovering that is not worth the price of dinner.

“Don’t let her buy” is technically wrong, but not wrong enough to be worth bothering with. You’ll know when it’s wrong, and congrats to you when this is true. :)

Ruby objected to this advice on fairness grounds. Ruby is of the exceptional people who believe in taking ideas seriously and following them to their conclusions.

“Advising men to always buy dinner irritates me because it feels like a bad equilibrium in a coordination problem but I get it”

“I think it would be better if there wasn’t an expectation that guys would always pay, and if they all coordinated to not do this we could break that expectation, but each individual guy is incentivized to defect on this in order to increase their chance of getting the girl”

Ruby is correct that society is set up unfairly in this regard. As a lady of integrity, she walks the walk and does pay on dates, and has even been known to offer fun and innovative new ways to split bills when going out with groups of friends in the pursuit of better equilibria. Wonderful lady! However her focus on the economic aspect lured Brangus into defending his statement on the wrong grounds.

Economics of Disgust

Brangus responds with economic arguments.

Brangus

Is Buying Dinner for Women Defecting Against Other Men?

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9 months ago · 18 likes · 17 comments · Brangus

“In the sexual marketplace, there is generally much more demand from men for sex with women than there is demand from women for sex with men. […] men must provide value in some other way.”

This is wrong in multiple of ways. First, female demand for good sex vastly outstrips supply. A woman who finds a guy she has good sex with will overwhelm almost any man’s sex drive (and sometimes she’ll go to ruinous lengths to retain access to him).

More importantly this reduces people to two variables on a supply-demand graph. One party brings sex, one party brings money, and economics sorts out the details. We’ll ignore the obvious objection that none of this is remotely true IRL. The far bigger thing that’s bad here is the assertion that one party (the woman) has inherent value, and the other party (the man) must find something external to compensate for his lack of value.

This is not Brangus’s failing, this is a core load-bearing part of the modern leftist worldview. Women are not asked what they bring to a date, they do not need to find some way to justify their presence. The fact that they are there at all is valuable. Anyone who tried to advise women to pay on dates in a bid to justify their presence would be viewed as a misogynist. Correctly. Men, on the other hand…

“She could decide to give [sex] to another man who is not the man currently on a date with her. The man knows this as well. He is trying to get the woman to choose to sleep with him instead of someone else, so he wants to impress her and provide value for her.”

The first part is also flatly wrong. A woman on a date generally can’t decide to “give” sex to someone else, her options are sex with the man she’s on a date with or no sex tonight1. But again, the objection isn’t about whether this is technically true, it’s about the narrative framing. This is the economics of disgust. The man is trying to “get” the woman to “give” him sex. He must overcome his inherent repulsiveness to get something she doesn’t want to give. This is best demonstrated by looking at the specific narratives Brangus suggests for thinking about the situation that could help…

“One is that I am not actually buying dinner in exchange for sex. I am buying dinner in exchange for an interview during which I will be assessed for sex. Interviewing me in that way is plausibly costly. There are other things she could be doing with her time.”

Is the man’s time valuable? Are there other things he could be doing? Is the woman getting any joy out of the interaction? Does she not need to compensate the man for his efforts and her enjoyment? In this scenario the man is a burden, and he’s grasping for an opportunity to show he’s worth having around at all. He is “being assessed.” This is pathetic.

Even setting aside my own prejudices, I’ve found that women who come in with this attitude are awful. You will not have a good time dating them. Odds are that the sex you have with them won’t be good. Men should only date women who like men. Do not filter for women who are disgusted by men! And especially don’t adopt that narrative as your own. It will reflect in everything you do on the date. You will feel grasping and ugly and desperate. It will be an awful bargain paid with ever-growing shreds of your own soul.

Building An Experience

The failure was in looking at this in economic terms at all. The frame of an adversarial relationship where one party is trying to get something from the other is toxic. It directly leads to publicly degrading the other side to lower their perceived value. This is a rational strategy for winning in such negotiations… and it destroys our humanity whether we’re on the receiving or attacking side. People believe the stories they are taught. The narratives we adopt rule everything about our lives.

So why should you, the guy reading this, pay on a date? Because when you go on a date you aren’t trying to get something from your date, or prove anything to her. You are collaborating with an enthusiastic partner to find out if you are excited about each other. You want to know what lights up her eyes, what fills her with wonder, what catches her breath with desire. You want to see if those line up with the things you find joyous, wonderful, and hot.

Both of you want to have a fun evening where you entertain each other and experience some emotional flow, often while crafting a fun story for yourselves about the evening. One of the things that’s really fun is seeing the other person happy when you pick up the check. It feels good to make someone else feel that shine of being desired enough to be cared for like that. Watch her smile and gaze at you and feel proud that you caused that spark.

Am I A Big Fat Hypocrite?

Some of my first dates were ones where we split the check, and they were often top-tier playful. I’ve even had a couple where the lady paid. (It’s a great feeling when someone else wants to take you out enough to pay for you, and it gives one a greater appreciation of being the payer.) And indeed, I think the actual considerations as to who pays are a lot more nuanced than just “the guy does.” So why the heck am I saying guys should lean into paying?

First, the two of you usually don’t have knowledge of the other’s ability to pay very early on. If you weren’t willing to pay for a date to learn that sort of thing, were you really even actually that interested in finding out if you’re compatible? Once there’s a rough idea of incomes, and mutual interest is established, one can proceed in a more informed manner. But on the first date the party who did the asking out should do the courteous thing and pay. Courtesy is a powerful narrative virtue, and if you can show mastery of that aspect of your role you are much more likely to be an exciting person to date/play with. Are you going to step up and do an awesome job being noble and bold, or sulk because this aspect of life isn’t totally fair? One of those is a lot more fun than the other.

Secondly, it lets you get her measure as well. My beautiful girlfriend used “carrying things” as an analogy. I’m always carrying things for her. If there’s something heavy she’s hauling around and I have a free hand, I take it from her. It’s not that she can’t carry it herself. But it is easier for me, and I want to do things to make her life better. She genuinely appreciates it, and we both feel much happier.

If she were to act entitled and condescending, with comments like “well finally,” I would not feel good about carrying things for her. The joy is in being appreciated and in seeing her happy. Attitude is everything. Narrative is everything.

When you pay, is your date made happy? Does she appreciate you for doing a nice thing? Or does she act like you owe her this, like you compensated her for the cost of putting up with your presence? If it’s the latter you’ve gained a lot of information about her, and it was absolutely worth the cost of a date to find this out early and distance yourself from her ASAP.

Turn this inward, too. Do you appreciate her when she pays on later dates? Do you actually feel joy, rather than feeling this is karmic turnabout?

This is why the economic question should be ignored, at least initially. No one feels joyful appreciation at being treated like a vending machine or a bank account.2 A tally of bad investments sparks passion in no one. This sentiment:

“I am paying for a sort of lottery that sometimes pays out in sex and sometimes doesn’t. It would be silly to put money into an investment that I think has about a 10% chance of paying out and then be upset when it doesn’t pay out.”

is one of self-harm, not clear-eyed realism. The fact that it’s wrong is only a tiny fraction of the damage it does.

The two things all the economic arguments got right is that information is initially hidden, and the heuristics for dealing with this aren’t fair. Embracing the modern leftist view that men are gross as a way to excuse this unfairness, and rewriting that narrative under the genre of economics, doesn’t make anything better. We accept that the world isn’t particularly fair. We can make it fairer if we don’t get bitter. We start by finding joy where it can be found and amplifying it. There are women out there on your side. You can find them.

But only if you can reflect the same belief that both sexes are enriched by interacting with each other.

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Indeed, nothing ever “got” me. I never experienced a major injury or physical harm, never witnessed horrors. Praying worked. When God left the world and it snapped into a realm of entropy and infinite distance between minds I suddenly had a vast reservoir of learned unconditional trust and nowhere to place it. It spilled out over the rest of the world. I ended up believing things like “men and women are basically indistinguishable” for decades.

• or more likely its some weird hormonal defect, idk, this is the real world after all, no gods here

I also believed that “looks don’t matter.” Every source in my world declared that physical attractiveness is blind dumb luck and says nothing about one’s character or intellect or virtue or value. It means nothing and must be ignored. Indeed, I believed it was ignored by all normal people. Is it racist to think of oneself as color-blind? For much of my life I think I was attractiveness-blind. I assumed all good people where, and almost all people are good.

• maybe i just found everyone attractive. probably it’s the same defect that makes me trust everyone.

So it hurt a lot when I got in shape and started caring about my appearance and I realized just how differently the world treated me. It turns out being attractive is one of the most important things in the world. I could not believe that almost everyone is secretly evil. I had simply been so wrong about the world.

• or maybe the world is broken and wrong and we can still make this right

Quoting me on becoming attractive:

I had my same ideas and my same personality and same energy. And yet everything was different. I was treated well by everyone. My coworkers were more helpful and cheerful. My (older, male, straight) boss was more impressed with my (same quality) work, and generally more interested in my input. […] People are on your side by default.

I grew up ugly. I didn’t realize it at the time. I wish I hadn’t been lied to about it, but I wish far more that I didn’t need to be lied to about it. I hate that our bodies are these weak, corruptible things with incredible control over our dispositions and actions. Was it always this way? Or did this only happen after the withdrawal of God? Why would he prepare us for a world where beauty is internal, and the external doesn’t matter, and then dump us into a reality where the external is so extremely important? Did he not know he was going to leave?

I hate having a body. I hate that our bodies have so much control over our minds. That our bodies can be attracted to things that are evil, to violence and aggression, and reward them in that way. To punish things like having bad acne or twisted-up teeth, even when the people behind those traits and smart and kind and cry when they read Yudkowsky or watch Rocky Horror.

Tomás Bjartur recently wrote objections to Ted Chiang’s story “Liking What You See.” Tomas is our generation’s Ted Chiang (seriously, go check out his writings), so this critique is significant. Also his post on beauty decaying to age is wrenchingly good. So how is it that he can be so wrong about “Liking What You See”??

Quoting Tomas:

Its central conceit is a technology that induces a condition called calliagnosia, which eliminates a person’s ability to feel the valence associated with perceiving physical beauty.

From Chiang:

it doesn’t interfere with one’s visual perception, only with the ability to recognize what one sees. A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin. He or she simply doesn’t experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences.

“Liking What You See” is a dream of a better world. It gave me hope. I now have in my mindscape a place where the ideal is reified, where looks honestly don’t matter. The mythic realm is brought into the physical and we no longer have this horrible divide inside us. It isn’t a perfect world, but it is perfect in that respect. There is a way forward to making “it’s who you are that matters” actually be true, and that world sings with a joyous hum.

To hear someone I admire say it was Chiang’s worst work is shocking. It’s borderline blasphemous, as this is the world God had been pointing us towards. I jump into reading the post with my “I’m gonna tear this up” attitude on (but with the friendliest possible affect, because Tomas is awesome and I often argue as a bonding activity). By the time I get to the end I realize I had been ready not to immanentize the utopic, but to destroy it.

Tomas:

their qualia would be diminished from our perspective. Their inner lives would be less rich. […] Memories, once precious, stripped of their lustre. To gloss over such things is to ignore another huge dimension of beauty. […] We are always biased to those aspects of ourselves that can articulate themselves. The chattering part of our mind thinks itself the only thing of value, thinks the world would be better if there was selection only for chattering. Here, it is talking its own book. And we should be suspicious.

Dammit all, he’s right.

If beauty is subjective, “Liking What You See” is the correct way to alter the world. Turning down the volume on our collective perception of beauty is ideal. Everyone will be beautiful when no one is, because beauty doesn’t mean anything at all. The real things will finally matter, and no longer be overshadowed by perversion.

But beauty is a real thing, external to us. It exists in the world. Some of our most important work is in creating it, finding it, sharing it. Things can be beautiful in a thousand different ways, and it is good that not everything is beautiful in the same way. I want more beauty. I want to overflow with beauty. I want to weep because I cannot touch all the beautiful people in my life and hear every voice at once. I want to watch my girlfriend cry when she sings her favorite songs. I want to stand before a marble statue in a cathedral and tremble at the months of life poured into making such a perfect thing. How could I have thought to give all that up? I would rather have the entire world be a blazing kaleidoscope of gorgeous shards next to ugly corners, dazzling lasers over grimy floors.

Thomas:

Sacrificing fairness for fairness, they lose the former and gain nothing of the latter.

For over a decade I dreamed of gouging out my eyes. The unfairness of being ugly was too great to imagine. The nightmare of growing ugly too horrific. I had settled into longing for a good-enough utopia, where ugliness was crushed not by ending ugliness, but by ending our ability to see it. This was weakness. Tomas pointed out the true utopia I would have destroyed We would have been left impoverished and unable to see our own poverty.

So this contra-post is not contra Tomas at all, but contra my past self and all those who told me beauty isn’t Real. I was taught that beauty is subjective, it doesn’t exist in the real world, and to try to identify it is bigoted and within the acts of evil. This was wrong, and self-destructive. I was also taught that for all humans to be loved and appreciated regardless of their physical attributes is a beautiful world. It is, and I want it. But not at the cost of being able to recognize that such a world is more beautiful. That ability shouldn’t be sacrificed for anything. To do so is to destroy what makes humanity glorious.

I will bear my growing decay and work to make my surroundings more beautiful. Intellectually, emotionally, and yes, also physically. It is better to stare into the sun for as long as you can and live temporarily in its glory than to hide forever in the caves.

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CONTENT NOTE: Possession DubCon

I’m climbing the icy crags overlooking our winter encampment when I spot the falcon. I don’t like the look of it, it looks like a messenger falcon. For starters, there’s no falcons way up North here. For seconds, it’s poking at my mind with a distinct “Hey, I’m a messenger falcon from your royal bloodline, let me give you a message dangit” feeling. I fume as I scale the last rocky outcropping. I escaped out here to get away from all the royal politics and backstabbing, and for six years I had. I thought I was finally free.

The wind at the top snatches at the flowing red locks of my hair that came loose during the climb and whips them wildly. I plant my heels so my slight frame isn’t buffeted about, re-restrain my hair, and then extend a slender arm for the falcon to land on. It comes down immediately, with a feeling of “Well, took you long enough!” as it lands. I hold out my other hand for the message. The falcon bends its head down and vomits directly into it.

Magic messenger falcon vomit, of course. What comes out of its mouth is a tightly rolled square of vellum, perfectly clean. Only someone of my bloodline would get this message rather than actual falcon vomit, which is the whole point.

I whip the vellum out to full length with a flick of my wrist. The Vadran Ink sparkles in the sunlight as I read it.

‘Dearest Kalia,’

It’s my younger sister’s handwriting. She’d always made fun of how sloppy my handwriting was, while hers was so prim and proper. But she wanted to be princess, and I didn’t, so why would I practice neat handwriting? We fought sometimes, and not always just pillow-fights, but when I told her I was escaping six years ago she helped me steal a proper stallion in the middle of the night by acting as a distraction. She’s the only thing I miss from back home.

‘Our parents are giving me to King Volterath, of Parthinia. His army is at our gates, and it’s either that or we all burn.’

My breath caught in my throat. Even all the way up here, I had heard of Volterath the Cruel.

‘He is vile. His last two wives are never seen now, not even the servants know where they are! Word is I’ll be kept in a tower six months to ensure I’m not with child. Then he will breed me, over and over, until I bear him a son, to unite our two kingdoms. After that, I don’t know. Probably more breeding, with just this one gross, smelly man. No parties, no friends, no seeing the outside world or anyone else ever again. Just sewing and birthing.

He’s coming. I don’t have anywhere else to turn. No magic, no champion. Help me, please help me. I’ll wither and die in that prison.’

I crumple the letter in my fist, my blood boiling. This will not stand. My blade will sing again.

I thrust aside the massive hide covering the entrance to the Great Tent and stride in. The men gathered around the central fire peer at me, but say nothing. As the mate of the chieftain, it is my right.

(How did I get to become the mate of the chieftain, at my age? It’s a great story, but it’s a long one! Ask me some other time.)

On the far side of the fire, Dornath rises to his feet. His broad, bare chest glistens with sweat in the heat of the Great Tent. He rolls back thickly muscled shoulders, his spine cracking loudly as he stands. My womanhood awakens, a tingle igniting there and running up my spine like fire. My breasts rise as I inhale sharply, but I know there isn’t time for fun right now. My sister needs me.

Dornath’s dark, brooding eyes meet mine.

“What is wrong?” he asks with concern. He knows that I wouldn’t interrupt this conclave if it wasn’t urgent. This is why I love this man.

“I need the Avistrum herb, the hawk’s tears, and your council. My sister is in danger.” The language of the north is still a little awkward in my mouth, it’s so formal! I’ve gotten better over the years though. I slip out of my furs as I’m speaking, the tent’s too warm for them.

Dornath nods. “Give us the tent,” he orders. “Ulfgar, bring the materials.”

I spend the next few minutes explaining the situation, and he strokes his beard thinking as I talk. It’s starting to streak white at the corners of his chin, and it makes him even hotter. When I’m done I give him a quick kiss and squeeze his butt. I’m not made of stone.

“You’ve done the right thing,” he says. “Are you prepared?”

I nod, and as if on cue Ulfgar returns with a satchel of herbs and a tiny vial of liquid. Dornath pulls away from me with great effort, then takes the herbs and circles the fire slowly, tossing pinches in with every step. I inhale their smoke as they burn, and summon up my bloodline’s magic.

Dornath begins to chant, slow and low, and Ulfgar joins in. I feel power bubbling in my chest. As I inhale deeper, filling myself with herb smoke, my head swims, leaving my body. My vision lengthens, the walls of the tent draw further and further away, until I’m swaying in a great valley of distant, curving hides.

I uncork the vial and drop two hawk’s tears in each eye. The world spirals away and my sight flies across the world–far, far, over forests, past mountains, across fields and roads and villages, until it comes to the sprawling capital of Parthinia. Parthinia, not Silbathi! My sister is already there??

I look and see my little sister, even more fragile and dainty that I remembered. She approaches a palace, escorted by a dozen guards. They take her into a side entrance, they march her down stairs, under the ground, then down a very long passage. Finally they reach a hidden spiral staircase with no other entrance or exits, just up and and up into a room at the top of tower. A giant room, lavishly furnished, the finest prison in the land. And the last room she’ll ever see. The door is a foot thick and reinforced with iron. Magics overlay every inch of the place.

“It’s bad,” I slur into the Great Tent, sure that my mate can hear me, even though I can’t hear my own voice. I relay everything I see, until the herb overtakes me entirely and I fall into soft darkness.

I wake up in our hearth tent, bundled up in our clan’s best furs, with Dornath holding me closely. One hand of his gently kneads my breasts, and I snuggle into him.

“Kalia,” he begins, when he sees I’m awake, “The situation is dire. As the chieftain of the North Clans, I cannot go with you,” Instantly my heart freezes solid in my chest. “If the chieftain is caught disrupting a royal marriage our tribe will be thrown into a bloody war over the affairs of southerners which don’t concern us.”

I go rigid, chest tight, barely drawing breath. This can’t be happening.

“I will go with you as a clanless man – Dornath the Mate of Kalia, not Dornath The Chieftain of the North Clans. Tomorrow I give the crown to my brother Valtan, he will rule well and keep our people strong. Then we will rescue your sister together.”

A sob of relief breaks from my mouth. I can’t believe I doubted, even for a second. He’s the best man in the world. I turn into his arms and crush myself into him, tiny tears leaking from my eyes. My tits, always too large for comfort, smush against his barrel chest the way I love. He’s so solid! I wrap my arms up and around him, as far as I can, feeling his muscles under my hands. I want to take him right there, this flood of relief is a huge turn-on. I start to grind on him just a bit, expressing my joy with my body.

“Not now, woman,” he says, amusement in his voice. “We have many preparations to make. You realize we cannot do this on our own, yes?”

I haven’t had a moment’s time to think, but now that he’s drawn my attention to it, he’s right. Even for adventurers like us, this is no ordinary jail-break. We need powerful magic. We’ll need the blessing of a god, willing to make this a full Divine Quest. Out here there’s only one way to get that.

I look into his eyes and I can see he’s thinking what I’m thinking. “We need the Ice Witch,” we say in unison.

Deep in her ice cave, three valleys over and high up in the even-darker peaks of the Cold Summit, the Ice Witch’s closed eyes jerk as she mutters. She’s coming out of a trance that’s lasted half the day, because our request was so outlandish she said she had to commune with the gods. We had stayed silent the whole time, fiddling about the first chamber of her extensive cave dwelling and fighting down the temptation to peek deeper into her abode. A fire burns unnaturally bright in a hearth hewn from the rock wall, but it can’t seem to push away all the shadows of this place. They grow from heaps of herbs, bundles of bark, pillars of pots, and many shelves of sorcerous supplies. The whole cave brims with dark power, and doesn’t leave much room for pacing about or even sitting comfortably. We make do with a couple stools she pulled from under a narrow table, and watch as she twitches in the only chair in the place.

Suddenly she inhales sharply, drawing a deep breath. Her chest swells, and her already impressive mounds seem to grow even greater. Even under the thick furs she wears in her ice cave you can see this lady is absolutely stacked, and me and Dornath are both entranced by her. Her eyes flutter open as she exhales, and we look up to her severe face. She looks back with pupils still completely dilated. With another deep breath she rises and paces in a tight circle for many long minutes. Just brooding. She’s an imposing presence, almost a full head taller than me, though still shorter than Dornath. When I open my mouth to ask a question she raises a finger abruptly in warning. I stay quiet as she broods further.

Finally she turns to us, the dazed trance look replaced with skepticism and a bit of annoyance.

“No war, you say?” Despite being a witch she’s not that old, her voice doesn’t waver or creak. It’s just a bit hoarse from disuse. She taps her fingers on one of the flagons of mead we brought, as a gift. “A sister saved, a kingdom united, but with no armies marching, and only the blood of evil men spilled?”

We nod. Me, hopefully. Dornath, grimly.

“Well.” The Ice Witch shakes her head. “You ask for much. Most of the gods say you are ridiculous children, and laugh at you. All but one. The Queen of Fairies can give you the path you seek. A quest, magic powers, and guidance.”

I squeeze Dornath’s hand excitedly.

“But she wants much from me in return. Far more than I can give. Unless…”

She trails off. I hold my breath, but she just keeps not saying anything. Maybe this is a game? Are we supposed to say something?

“Unless what?” I finally say.

“I am old,” she says. She doesn’t look that old, maybe a few lines on her face, sure. But she has thick curves to match her giant tits, with wide mommy hips. I’d bet you could chew on her thighs for days. I put her in her late forties maybe, but she’s been in this cave since at least Dornath’s great-grandfather was a kid, and she’s always looked just like this. The only clue to her deep age is her pure-white hair – thick, slightly wavy and draping all the way down to her lower back. “I can be convinced to part with a lot, for delicacies I haven’t indulged in far too many decades.”

Dornath nods, prepared as always.

“What do you ask us?” he says. Very poetic, I like him for many reasons.

“The Three Gifts of Flesh,” the Ice Witch grins.

All in all, it turns out that’s actually not too bad. When we get back to the tribe there’s some confusion among the elders as to what exactly the Three Gifts of Flesh are, so we play it safe and go for the good stuff in each case. Weeks later we’re climbing back up to her cave, loaded down with more gifts.

“The flesh of the Nofkey Bear,” Dornath says, presenting her with over a thousand pounds of frozen meat. Me and him had spent days in the icy wilderness tracking that massive, six-legged monstrosity. Just the two of us, we spent long hours under the deep sky, talking, finding each other, interweaving our souls. Every night we edged each other in our snug tent. When we finally brought down the snarling mass of muscle and fur with bows and spears and a hidden chasm, our blood singing, we fucked like animals on top of that steaming body. Dornath roared like the Nofkey when he finally pounded his cum into me.

There is no finer meat in the north. The Ice Witch nods happily.

“The head of your greatest foe,” I say, tossing the head of Tizinki the Warlock at her feet. It only took a few days to recruit an adventuring party, but nearly two weeks to venture into Tiziniki’s domain and slay the bastard. The five of us saved a village along the way, and lost a companion to the Zrekles, and found a shared strength between us all that will hold forever. The traditional after-quest orgy was the best I’ve ever had, and I’m still glowing days later.

The Ice Witch spits at Tiziniki’s head, and gives us an approving nod.

“And the last?” she asks, her eyes glittering with anticipation.

“And at last, an eighty-four gallon puncheon of Silbathi oil, blessed by the Patriarch himself.” This had been the easiest one. We already had the messenger falcon here to place the order, and I got a deal since I was of royal blood. The puncheon had been delivered while me and Dornath were securing the first two gifts. Now it sits beside a very comfortable looking pile of furs near the hearth, with a ‘thanks for your business’ note on it.

The Ice Witch taps her foot expectantly. “And…?”

Uh oh. I exchange a worried glance with Dornath.

“And… we hope you find it very soothing?” Dornath tries.

“How, exactly, do you think it’s supposed to soothe me?” The ice witch asks, her brows drawing down in annoyance.

“It’s a massage oil,” I say, like she doesn’t know. “It makes you all tingly and relaxed and warm and happy. It’s like magic, because it is actually partially magic. Ultimate relief, we say!” Boy, I sounded like a bad pitchman there.

“Are you trying to insult me?” the witch asks, her lips drawing tight. “Or are you really this dumb?”

“Umm….”

“What do YOU use the oil for, when you get some?” she says.

And then it all makes sense. When we get the oil I rub it all over Dornath’s hard, chiseled body, until he looks as wet outside as I feel inside, and then I ride him until I can’t see straight and my head explodes.

“The third gift of flesh is us!” I exclaim.

“Indeed,” she confirms. “Both of you. Carnally.”

“One moment,” Dornath says, then turns away and pulls me with him. He leans in very close and peers into my eyes. “Kalia. This witch is a blessing and a curse. She is ageless, and there is always a catch with her gifts. If you don’t have doubts about this, you should. She may be evil. She’s certainly at least partly evil. We can walk away from this and find some other witch or wizard to invoke the gods for a quest-blessing.”

“You don’t know that,” I say. “This is nothing, and we’re very good at sex. Together we can bang all the evil out of her, at least for one night.”

“You’d fuck a crazy, ancient Ice Witch with me?”

I put my hand into his and squeeze it tight. “I’m here for you Dornath,” I say. “And I’m extremely slutty.”

“I do really love that about you,” he says, nodding.

“And I’m extremely bi,” I add.

“I really love that part too,” he agrees.

“So let’s show this witch how the Chieftain of the North Clans fucks. For the good of my sister, and all the southern kingdoms.”

Dornath takes my chin in his hand and leans down to kiss me deeply. Then he turns us both back to the Ice Witch.

“We accept,” he says. The Ice Witch laughs, a deep throaty laughter of elder delight. She hasn’t waited up, her flowing winter dress is already pooled around her feet and she stands entirely naked, with only the barest wisps of pubic hair. Her breasts are huge, I repress an urge to dash over and start squishing them immediately.

[To access the second half of the story, which is lots of banging and some plot, you can either be a paid subscriber, or read the rest FREE by clicking through to my smutty substack - Horny Is Fun. This is part one in a series, as Kalia and Dornath pursue a very sexy quest to save her sister.]

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With my new focus on creating narrative in our lives, I began to strongly suspect that Christians (and other theists) have a major advantage by already believing in a world that is run on narrative rules, with an author/protagonist. I had images of a life filled with stories, woven together with a common shared myth. This is our conversation about that. It’s maybe not super interesting to anyone else, but it’s what came out of today’s experiment.

Sean was a rationalist until ~2 years ago, remains smart and driven, and is a Catholic now. He blogs at Collisteru, you can read his other writings there.

His version of this same post is here.

Eneasz: When I was young and the world was full of magic I believed I was involved in a story of good vs evil. God was the king that was leading us, we were his soldiers. I miss this world of characters and storylines and narrative magic. Do you feel there is a narrative to life? I assume you must believe god is a person who pays attention to the world and directs it, do you think so? What makes you think that?

Collisteru:

[I will preface all by work by saying that I am a bit tipsy right now, and so these ideas are only half-formed and I do not necessarily fully support them upon the fullest reflection. ]

So, I do think that GOD has a personal interest not just in the world, but in our lives and even in the structure of physics, and in my life in particular, and in your life in particular. GOD is infinite and omnipresent, HE is boundless, as St. Augustine, HE is like the water of the sea, and we are like fishes enveloped by this water.

Eneasz: Why???? T_T

Collisteru: I think that theism is the most parsimonious explanation not just for consciousness, but also for the existence of true good and evil, and also for the general narrative of history.

Enaeasz: I don’t think consciousness is a problem, so I’ll ignore that. True good and evil don’t need a personal god IMO. They can arrise from humanity. But what is this about the narrative of history. I think we can impose one, a lot of what I’m doing with my writing now is taking my own history and making a narrative out of it, but this is an artifice, and can be worked in various ways depending on the narrative-spinner’s desires. Eg my post Words Are Fake recounts how I started to relay an event in my life and making it into a narrative that is legitimate, but not true to my experience. By thinking about an event in a certain way I could make a narrative out of it that was false, even tho every fact relayed was true. I needed to interpret it in the way that my psychology actually believes it to make it a true narrative.

Collisteru: So, I have a good friend back in Colorado who is in my opinion one of the best up-and-coming philosophers of our generation. One of his concepts that I like is assuming realism.

The tension between realism and relativism is one of the most fundamental contours of philosophy. I call relativism any philosophy that says that a thing X is constructed by humans or does not exist outside human kinds or dissemination, and realism that says that that thing X does exist outside of human construction.

It’s pretty clear that privileging realism gives us better results than not doing so. For example, science only began to advance when we understood that we could be right and wrong about the contours of reality, that reality existed in some form entirely outside of our human understanding of it, which was a major innovation in philosophy and science. This innovation was in part spurred by teh development of Christian theology, which was the first world-system to separate the natural and the supernatural.

I believe, more controversially, that this philosophy of realism can also be applied to history. The “GOD’s-Eye View” of history is the correct one, and so we see that there is a privileged, correct way to view history. The best formulation of this I’ve found is Hegel’s from his Lectures on the Philosophy of History [https://hegel.net/hegelwerke/Sibree1894-Lectures_on_the_Philosophy_of_History.pdf] . Hegel says that history is the progression of spirit from less to more freedom. While I don’t agree with every detail of Hegel’s theory, I think the general trend has been well substantiated both before and since.

[More on board with realism being good and important; beauty is an objective thing. I don’t think beauty is just in the eye of the beholder. Realism argues against a GOD existing, because there doesn’t appear to be a GOD existing, where the universe is chaotic and soulless.]

Eneasz: I’m becoming more realism-pilled. EG since I saw CJ the X’s talk about beauty in art I am committed to Beauty is Real Thing that exists within the world, and it is our job to find it, channel it, recognize it. It depends on context, but it is a real thing that one can be right or wrong about. But this makes me think that realism argues against god, because there is no god to be found. Nature is cold and relentless and utterly impartial. It is our job to make narrative, it is our job to find beauty, because there is no god to do this for us.

Collisteru: What do you think daily life and the universe would look life if Christianity if true?

Eneasz: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away”

Collisteru: So, I agree with every word of this, and every word of it is in the future tense. I believe that all of this will come in an undetermined part of the future, but I didn’t necessarily think that it’s happening now. Christians believe in a linear progression of history in which the history of salvation is affected in a linear way. Titus 2:13 CEB – “At the same time we wait for the blessed hope and the glorious appearance of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.”

I should answer my own question by answering what I believe the world would be like if there was no GOD. I believe Lovecraft did a good job of depicting this; I imagine a life where everything is ambiguous, where the universe has no moral or physical regularity. Imagine a nightmare. Imagine a place where monsters spring from the hills and fall out of the air in front of you; where the stormclouds of angry fate appearify and bite you for no reason whatsoever. This is not our life; and yet without the LORD it would be. That’s why I believe.

Eneasz: That’s just saying laws of physics wouldn’t exist without god. Which is fine, but not really a thing I’m interested in, cuz not provable. I want to know how you are holding on to a belief that narrative is being created by god. Do you believe that? Why doesn’t the universe look like a fantasy novel?

Collisteru: Of course GOD laid down the rules of physics. Sure, we can’t prove the existence of regular physics is caused by GOD. But I don’t think we can prove GOD at all. I think that’s fine– I’m okay holding certain beliefs that I can’t prove. You can’t prove most moral claims, for example.

What do you mean “why doesn’t the universe look like a fantasy novel?”

Eneasz: Disagree, it’s easy to prove many moral claims. What I mean is why is there no narrative, why are so many lives meaningless, why isn’t everything about beauty and truth and moving towards a satisfying resolution. Why doesn’t anything matter?

Collisteru: “Disagree, it’s easy to prove many moral claims.” Okay, prove a moral claim.

I think that lives are meaningful, and things are about beauty and truth, and in particular I believe that love itself, which the avatar of GOD as a metaphysical object, is the final goal of life. I think everything matters, and I believed this strongly even when I was an atheist. This is probably what started me on the road to faith. I’m not entirely sure what to say to those who do not feel this. Why do you do the things you do? Why do you have the goals you have?

Eneasz: Love this, and basically agree this is what we should do as humans, but no idea why you are introducing “God” into it. Are you just using “God” as a word for “the post-singularity state of universal love and togetherness that we’re striving for”? Then why give it personhood? ANd why use the word that will cause the maximum confusion among 99.9% of humans? I see this so much with smart people who say they believe in God, and then it’s never anything that actually works on a literal personal level in the world.

Collisteru: Hahaha, that’s a very fair point.

So, I don’t think GOD is exactly a state… HE is outside space and time. I give GOD personhood because I think HE is a person… he has spoken to me and many people I know. HE is our friend. I think GOD actually works on a literal personal level in the world.

Eneasz: OK. Fair enough, I do not have access to that evidence. I didn’t intend to come into this trying to convince you, and I knew you wouldn’t be convincing me either, so I’m trying to steer this away from being about “does god exist.” I am trying to understand what life with a god belief is like that is significantly different from one without it. I… I think maybe this is futile. It feels like imagining what life is like as the opposite sex, or living in a D&D World. I can make it as beautiful as I want in my imagination, but I can never actually feel it. I’m drunk and I was trying to feel it vicariously through you. So I guess…. What is it like to wake up in the mornings? Or to go through an average day? I want to see archetypes and myths more clearly, I want to see forces in the world that I’m a part of. I am working to do this, and it is a huge amount of work. I’m emotionally exhausted this month, the last week I haven’t had the energy to do effort-posts. I’m tyring to imagine what it would be like if everything just felt like this by default and didn’t require putting myself in an altered headspace and living in a beautiful, liminal world through self-interrogation and writing. Is your life like what it feels like for me to hit “send” on an effort-post, all the time? Or is that just my fantasy view, like what I believed it would be like to be a woman?

Sean:

This is very special and I appreciate your curiosity and charity during this discussion. You are very kind.

A goal I’ve often seen practicing Christians have is to think of God as their first thought in the morning. I achieve this perhaps on 20% of days… and of course, it is a good thought, though also a thought laden with responsibility. I think it makes me want to better express the LORD’s values and what I think HE wants me to do in my life.

Unfortunately, us humans are finicky creatures… we are like the cat who wanders away from home many times, then comes back, wet and shivering. I do not think of GOD as often or as thoroughly as I would want to. In this tainted world, developing a relationship with the good, the true, and the beautiful is a discipline.

Eneasz: Interesting. This is helpful. Upon reading this I think I’m glad I’m not Christian. I like my way better, because it feels true. Forcing myself into a frame of “God” feels like interpreting what I see in a way that is… OK I hate to say this because it’s going to sound insulting, please believe me that I don’t mean it in a pejorative way, but ofc there’s no way this won’t be insulting… I see it as kinda desperate. Wanting an interpretation so hard that one is willing to impose a narrative that is available, but not True To Self. Like what I almost did with Words Are Fake. I still feel that being true to self is very hard, and I will slip from the path many times. But imposing a view that has been put through committee and decided as correct is one that can be done, and will certainly lend structure and narrative and some version of a good life… but a version that belongs to something outside of me more than what is actually mine. I think the difference between Love and God is that Love must come from within, and God is what happens when that is wrestled away from you by another. Maybe this is related to my opinions on monogamy vs polyamory, and how much I am repelled by control of others. God is Love + Outside-Control, and that feels like Anti-Love to me.

Collisteru:

Oh Eneasz. I cannot peer into your soul. I cannot enter into your breath-spirit and understand the kaleidoscope of music and light within…

I’m not insulted. I understand why you say that Christianity seems desperate. I just don’t think I have as an inherent value-forming one’s own world-system. I haven’t done the tests to figure out Newtonian physics and quantum physics, but I don’t think I would be a better person if I had made my own conception of physics. The physicists have thought mkuch more about physics than I have, so I do well by accepting their ideas. The theologians have thought much more about GOD, including as the origin mof mortality, than I have, and I do well by accepting their ideas. I don’t think I’m so important that everything I believe has to come from me, or it won’t be “True to Self.”

“ I think the difference between Love and God is that Love must come from within, and God is what happens when that is wrestled away from you by another.”

I think that loves permeates the universe and that it comes from both inside and outside me, and I think that it is a metaphysical force that we must experience.

In general, I hope that atheists and Christians can continue to have charitable conversation; each coming to better know the thoughts of the other.

Eneasz: The difference between physicists and theologians are too numerous to list, to the point that I consider it bad faith to try to compare them. I do think I’ve learned a bit more about the Christian view from this conversation, and I’m happier about my position than I was before we started. Knowing that there isn’t a shortcut I consider worth using is kinda reassuring, even if does mean so much more work. Ty for the convo.

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“Which one is the criminal mastermind, and which one is the derpy idiot with a heart of gold?”

The criminal mastermind watches the environment, plans (to the extent cats can do so), and takes the lead in activity. The derpy idiot follows along, supports where he can, and curries affection from the humans as much as possible. The criminal mastermind is sorta strengthened by having a minion lending more paws when needed, as well as bonus licks and cuddles. The derpy idiot is strengthened by having a smarter and more capable cat making better decisions and taking agency. The house is purged of vermin and kept mouse-free, and DerpyPaws has a chiller life.

If the criminal mastermind didn’t exist, DerpyPaws wouldn’t be quite so derpy and quite so idiotic. He’d step up to the degree needed, and probably even quite a bit more than the bare minimum. He’d be a mini-mind, and do alright. Just not as good at it as his more gifted brother. (I’ve decided they’re brothers now). Some mice would get away with existing in the shadows, sometimes.

Imagine the two are separated when their owners break up. Mastermind is brought into a new home in Europe with an even smarter and more capable cat! Nearly inconceivable! But you can’t argue with reality when it’s laid out in front of you like that. There isn’t much use in having two Masterminds in a house. And trying to be a Mastermind when there’s an even better Mastermind around is just embarrassing. The old mastermind slips into the supportive “derpy heart-of-gold” role and lets the better Super Mastermind lead. They are both better off than before, though just a bit. Meanwhile, old DerpyPaws is stepping up his game back home and masterminding to the level he can. He isn’t as good of a Mastermind as his brother was, and that household hears some mice having mouse parties on the mice high holy days.

In purely cat-utility terms, the world would be improved if the old Criminal Mastermind returned to his brother. Their household would never be as good as Super Mastermind’s house in Europe, but Criminal Mastermind’s ability is more valuable in America because he was helping raise the bar in America significantly more than the little bit he can raise it in Europe by giving Derp-assistance.

This is a metaphor for moving to the Bay.

All the rationalists around the US (and even from outside the US!) keep moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. This is often good for them, they can coordinate with a lot more people, there is a lot of talent and driven people out here, and the social scene is amazing. This is also good for the super-human top-tier rationalists already here, they have more support and talent to draw on. However it does mean that all the cities that aren’t either Berkeley or New York struggle to keep their rationalist groups going. When half your most dedicated rationalists keep leaving the city its nigh impossible to get a solid critical mass. Importantly, the amount of extra good one can do by moving to the Bay is a lot smaller than the amount they improve the place they already are.

This is generalizable to most things. If you’re talented there is more personal gain in moving to a larger pond and coordinating with a lot of large fish. But the amount of good you can do locally is a lot greater if you move to a small pond where your personal contributions are a more significant percentage of the whole. You are needed more there.

The extremely high social and geographic mobility within America is great for each individual talented person. Yet it results in ever more pressure for everyone to be concentrated in smaller and smaller places. There used to be some very smart, very competent people in small towns, who were widely admired and depended on. As they all leave the towns become ever-worse places to be, driving even more folks out. This starts to cascade even to hollowing out mid-sized cities, driving infinite population density into a few extremely expensive places.

This happens to professions. It wasn’t that unusual to find very intelligent and driven people in more menial professions. They’d improve the productivity of everyone around them by driving up standards, innovating, and leading by example. They are growing rare, as most of them can pivot to high-paying highly-cognitive work. This is a more valuable use of their talents, but there is a loss to having genius-level electricians and carpenters simply not around anymore.

Yes, there’s advantage to concentrating all the top talent in an extremely focused way. All the best heist movies begin by rounding a crew of the best-in-the-world at extreme specialists. By working together they can achieve miracles. But notably after the miracle is achieved they all return home to spread their gains and diffuse their talents into the broader communities they came from.

American capitalist culture pushes everyone into the most valuable positions in the most valuable cities, to eek out more marginal value. They are certainly compensated. I encourage people to consider moving to smaller ponds, to have a higher personal impact. You can do more net good and be more appreciated in a smaller pond. Be the Criminal Mastermind that your DerpyPaws needs you to be.

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I have a gear within my soul that is misaligned with my mind. I am an insane numinous being somehow crammed into a flesh body and the drive-train that was originally crafted for a realm of magic and fay never got fully transferred into the physics world we’re actually stuck in.

I’ve felt the mismatch in expectations since my first memories. I’m supposed to blend with those around me when we touch. Our wants should impose physical force on the things and people near us, our emotions should color the reality around us. When I let my eyes unfocus I can see the archetypes of our myths imposing themselves over us, warrior and lover and witch vying for control of our bodies, Justice and Passion and Mercy tearing at each other in the space between. When I stuff my ears and hum1 I can just barely drown out the deafening nothing of physics and hear the trembling of reality’s flesh.

Then my gaze sharpens and I snap back to grid. Click into the frame of physics and rock and air. There is nothing here, nothing between us, I am confined in meat and I run on clockwork gears. I am angry I was lied to as a child, when they said god was real and the world was made of magic, even though there were adults, stuck in meat just like me, and they knew better and never prepared me. I lived in tales of fantasy and fairies, and I grew up expecting a world that made sense. Not this horror.

One doesn’t fight against the very nature of reality. Physics is pre-human, it doesn’t care, and if I’m going to survive in this world I need to become Of It. I lean hard into science. I want to know how to know what is true. I enlist in the New Atheism Wars and I get basic training on the frontlines, in the trenches. I embrace empiricism, epistemology, reasoning, argument. Rationality. What is true is already so. Acknowledging it doesn’t make it worse. I want to believe what is true if and only if it is true. That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

I believe it. The truth is sacred. The world needs to be understood to be tamed, and if I’m stuck here I’m going to have to interface with it. I am proud of Rationality, proud of the people here, proud of being able to clearly see and work with the actual world as it exists.

But I still have that misaligned gear inside. A core part of my engine is still made of whispers. Its teeth are built to mesh with laughter and tears, not theorems and levers. It slips, pushing on nothing, spinning wildly in place, and I feel it whirling out of control. It’s fine, it’s nearly massless, I can work around having a gear stuck between worlds. I wish it wasn’t so loud.

Until this year something finally snapped, and somehow now this gear is grinding against the real-reality parts of me. I can’t ignore it anymore. The myths are growing in prominence, and they demand things. I’ve crushed my soul into what this world can contain for too long, and it is either going to spill out or die of suffocation. I’m scrambling at the edges of the interface with my fingernails, searching for a way to pull some part of the fantasy world I was born into the physical one I can’t leave. It can slip in through aesthetic and art. It shines out of beauty, a force which is real and encapsulated in physical things. It floats from our intentions, out into this world. I can see it, I can, if I close my eyes and look directly into the fiery heart of the world behind.

I’m taking a rest now. But I’ll be coming back for the world I was wrenched from. It’s time.

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I didn’t like my body, I didn’t use it for much, and I wasn’t concerned about it. I assumed mental functioning remains mostly stable until the end of life (hah). And most importantly, I was aware of compounding interest. The upsides of investing everything you can as early in life as you can are so overwhelming that it’s ridiculous not to. Enjoy $10 now, or enjoy $1000 in a couple decades. What is even the question?

So I don’t spend my money on living life. I don’t go out to restaurants (much), I don’t go to movie theaters (much), I don’t go on vacation or buy nice things. To be completely honest, I mostly don’t do these things because I’m a nerd and a coward. But it goes beyond social spending. On the rare times I do eat out I don’t add bacon to my burger or guacamole to my burrito, because it’s insane to increase the cost of my food by 20% for such a tiny item. This is a tax on the very rich or very dumb.

Any spending feels like losing hit points, so every time anything is purchased there is the question “is this worth how much it hurts to pay for it?” This is a good trait for saving money. It’s a bad trait for doing things and enjoying your life.

My friends buy art and clothes that make them happy. My girlfriend pays $100 for new boots when she already has good boots, because she likes these boots. My friend getting government assistance for her rent shows off a new piece of art on her wall.

“It was $200,” she says, “but it was just too beautiful, I couldn’t not buy it.”

And I’m thinking “I know I make more than you, I don’t need assistance to pay my rent, and there’s no way I could drop $200 on art! Where the hell did she find $200??”

She could do that because if her checking account stayed in three-digits forever, that was fine. She wasn’t saving up thousands of dollars for a down payment.

Ten thousand dollars as a down payment for a cheap place isn’t a huge amount for someone who’s been working for twenty years. It’s a stupendous amount for someone in their late twenties making the median wage for that age. $200 is a large fraction of a thousand. And I need many thousands.

Years pass. Alcohol and video games help — drinking cheap vodka at home and playing video games is extremely cheap, and makes the years disappear. I do not recommend this way of fast-forwarding your life. It turns out you do NOT get those years back on the other side.

This is just Step One. Going through this once is so that you can buy your own place to live in. To buy a place to rent out you have to do all this again.

This is, I suppose, the nature of all investment. You defer life now for greater reward in the future. If years in the future were equal to years in the past, this would be a great exchange. But they are not. The things you look forward to doing with your returns in your later years won’t bring you as much joy as things you can do in your younger years. The years of the future aren’t nearly as salient. They pass from attention, and fly way to quickly. A year in your twenties is worth three in your forties. The things you are even capable of doing in later years are a fraction of what you can do in earlier years. You cannot move young years into the future.

Depending on who you are, though, the biggest sacrifice isn’t luxuries not bought, nights stayed in, and life-experiences curtailed. It’s children. Holding back earnings to purchase more real estate means not spending it on children. It requires living well below your means, splitting your resources between what you use to support yourself and your family and what you use to craft into an artifact you can’t access. It is a choice between a single house with four bedrooms or two townhomes with two bedrooms each. If you aren’t going to have children anyway this is fine. But you may be making a choice between to very different futures very early on.

You do it, though. It’s the prudent thing to do, and it’d be nice to retire early. You spend several more years not doing things that cost money, not buying anything you can avoid buying, not worrying about kids. It goes faster this time. At last you have a crafted object in the real world. A rental home distilled out of all the things you could have done. An artifact that represents years of life mined from your past, to be propelled into the future. And the first thing you do is… take this artifact and hand it over to a complete stranger.

To be continued.

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