Post for the year 2022

It's important to try, keep on things, and post regular and pertinent content.

On intelligence

The Uncertainty Principle: It proves we can’t really ever know what’s going on

If you’re dumb by design you can never fully know it. I’ve had the desire to write on the stupid approach to intelligence. Often when writing I’ll have this unwelcome inclination to sound like a good orator or otherwise clever. I fight this instinct because it goes against the general purpose of what would be an objective and scientific approach to inquiry. The purpose of language is only to communicate and an essay expressing a philosophy doesn’t have the same urgency for perfection a peer-reviewed paper might. Simplicity is the ultimate tool, and an excess of syllables unnecessarily complicate a message. I believe this impulse is indicative of how intelligence is perceived as a whole.

The easiest way to attack problems with our interpretation of intelligence is to look at IQ. Previously, I always looked at IQ with suspicion, as wasting time and rigorously preparing for an intelligence test seems “low iq,” before we get into the vain impulse to brag and socially peacock around your intelligence with a ranking or numerical score. After looking at the criticisms these feelings were confirmed. The test doesn’t work for several reasons. Namely, you can tell this because there’s a huge degree of variance even between people’s own test scores when taken multiple times. Also because it has a great ability to identify dumbness, but is wildly varying in the higher numbers on any quantitative scale (NN Taleb). One of those scales for example would be survivability and how you measure this is anyone’s guess. In my opinion an IQ test can’t work for the same reason we generally can’t predict the future. But say you were going for survivability, you could do some sort of base measure, a nuts and bolts estimate to do with a person’s financial success. Already, this seems an incredibly weak underpinning as we aim to predict a person’s ability to navigate an unknown, virtually infinitely complex future world.

But it gets worse. Tying a person’s success to their ability to survive, or their ability to earn which is our flimsy but best chance of a correlation (with all its variability and noise), is predicated on an assumption that survival is intelligent. Interestingly, the great philosophers like Alan Watts or Albert Camus often reduced the sum of philosophy to the question of suicide. It makes sense. A philosophical interpretation of existence will be examined best through the contrast of not existing. Whether to live, they determined, was the essential question. When judging intelligence, it’s clear Isaac Newton and Einstein are near the top of the known persons. But there’s an additional qualifier here if you’re looking at it through that philosophical lens, they were the smartest people who were also convinced for whatever reason to be driven and motivated in their pursuits toward an end. This version of intelligence is dependent on success predicated by ambition. Surely there’s been many equally intelligent people indifferent to any pursuit that would have them seen written into the pages of history, and others undoubtedly were intelligent and yet met existence, understood it, but saw futility or went without curiosity and committed suicide or otherwise resigned themselves in life.

Undoubtedly, the great intelligent men of history also had a bit of luck on their side not to fall to some misfortune or plague. It makes me question, were Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan really great men or were they just the best bold visionaries who also didn’t happen to take an arrow to the chest. Maybe T.E. Lawrence stood up to gunfire and survived, but if that’s true, certainly many more people who thought their existence was divinely-ordained were shot dead and never written about. In light of this, a lot of success is due to luck and explained by survivorship bias.

This echoes of the “great man theory,” which basically suggests a few persons of extraordinarily talent drove and explain history. I dismiss this because it credits the crest of the wave while ignoring every other part of the process. It seems more probable the conditions created by the collective enabled these individuals and made those high water marks inevitable. That doesn’t mean certain people’s discoveries didn't save us decades. I only wish to dispel the gross reductionist view and venerate to some degree the nameless everyperson for their part in the process.

In short we give too much credit and not enough. There’s an unquestioned belief that progress is possible and that it is good. That life, progress and its pursuits are innately intelligent for seemingly no other reason than we are alive and therefore compelled to stay so. Call it the life-bias, but if we’re to exist it seems important to remember this contrast to retain the right perspective and take life unserious and in stride and revel in its novelty. To recognize intelligence in any other way is likely stupid and to miss the point entirely.

This could explain the stereotype that smart people are miserable. It’s easy to infer more complex people will have greater difficulty and less resources when it comes to solving their more complex needs. Naval asks a great question, though, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?” A great question for many not-so-smart smart people. But there is also an alternative, the masochistic intelligent who invite painful thoughts and situations into their lives as a form of discovery, and help mediate or navigate future trauma and pain. In short, the reason some watch horror movies or TV shows about sociopaths.

Intelligence seems to come with undue focus. There’s no correlation between it and morality. There’s a lack of appreciation for the wide, diverse systems that enable the experiments, conversation, and conditions for the inevitable leaps in science. There’s not enough challenge to the unproven yet widely held assumption that progress is the imperative collective goal. There’s a lack of study in the idea that the intelligent individual might meet the complex problems of the world with indifference.

Often people fall for the trap of cult of personality and for them intelligence can be defined by self-proclaimed genius, genius itself being a word of mythical quality. From what I can understand true genius is essentially not quantifiable. Some self-proclaim, some don’t want credit, some saw into the future enough they created solutions and prevented wars before they began, some understood the game of life and decided not to play it.

In considering my desire to write this my motive may be simply the miscalibrated view of intelligence. I see no innately intelligent or rational component in engaging in existence over not. I see no intelligent correlation in ambition over indifference. I see a vast disparity between con artists who claim to be geniuses to place themselves in that light, versus others smart enough to see fame and accreditation are often overrated or not worth pursuing. I see an excessive amount of credit go to problem solvers and not enough credit go to people who prevent problems from ever starting. I see the vast majority of the attention on the “great men,” less so on the collective’s daily contributions and inventions without which those great men would not exist in equal capacity. I see an unscientific acceptance of science as an irreproachable and final authority, and this elitism doesn’t seem a wise way to advocate wisdom.

There’s an entire world slowly, day by day inventing and perfecting ideas that get engineered into the reality, and the same with creating the complex systems to keep these emerging inventions running smoothly and compatibly with the inventions of the past, while leaving room for things to be expanded upon in the future. It seems an impossible task in a world of billions but this also means you have that many more minds working towards solutions. This world has another side defined by what it doesn’t do and doesn’t create, alongside with what measures are taken to exclude unfavorable outcomes. By the time you include ambition or desire to participate in life itself, it seems impossible to quantify and current measures are uninspiring and unwise.

America undone

Dystopia won’t be a destroyed city, or even a gritty one. It will be white, bright, and clean, just like your thoughts are mandated to be.

No one wants to work and you can’t blame them. The culture of easy money from the finance industry, tech, and celebrities has trickled down. The hard work ethos has some truth but more often than not it’s a tool to exploit people, and to divide those with no income and those with just slightly more. You can make 200k and you’re still closer to a McDonald’s worker and a serf compared to people with real money, the kind that comes from passive income investment properties and stocks. You don’t even need a good business or business model, by the time a company’s failing you could have already sold it in a public offering. And I know this sounds like ramblings in a goth’s scrapbook but I’m goth and this is correct. 

There’s inflation that’s knocked 96% of the dollar’s value in 100 years. The Fed admitted this week maybe it isn’t transitory. So it’ll get worse. It’s always been a way for governments to steal people’s labor by spending that money before it affects the average person. To be fair socialist countries seem to work the same, if not worse, because a power consolidation always forms and uniform pay doesn’t always incentivize innovation or harder work (an oversimplification). But even still, the median American pay is about $35,000. If Elon Musk for example was operating at 100x the mental and man-power of the average person by median wage this would be 3.5 million a year. Of course people are confused by his net worth not realizing it’s tied to liquid assets, people placing bets on Tesla as a future energy company, and pricing in absurd future earnings potential. If he sold and gave all his money away it would decrease in value during the sell off, not to mention due to its connection with indexes potentially trigger a collapse in the stock market. The fact an innocuous tweet can cost a company 100 billion dollars should indicate the market operates on hopes and dreams more so than any connection to reality. And that’s just one person.

As much as you can shit on Elon and Bezos and Zuckerberg, at least they’re to some degree providing a service. If they paid their fair share the government would still be trillions in debt, because governments like seemingly any organization with big administrative teams get bloated and expensive when the people at the top are basically deciding their own salaries, hiring an assistant for their secretary’s dog-walker, and entertaining conflicts of interest to make more money through favors, stock market manipulation and insider trading. Really, how did Nancy Pelosi make $100 million on $200,000 in salary. Banks and hedge funds are the same thing, making some of the largest amounts of money providing the least amount of service. And money is so powerful, humans don’t matter anymore. Super computers and algorithms in technology by companies like BlackRock exist to price in, calculate, and profit from catastrophic events that haven’t happened yet. They have 9 trillion in assets. I believe this AI is in charge of society (see Hypernormalization documentary) along with banks, money picks presidents, with leaders being mostly performative and symbolic at this point.

Winner takes all capitalism is a nightmare. China is our competitor because they have cheap labor and complete control of their country, plus they steal all our intellectual property at will and modify it with their spyware. This gives them a huge advantage because they get all the data that would be highly illegal here to make their decisions, and means they will be ahead of the United States in terms of data and information, and through this erosion of privacy better able to implement dangerous, power-consolidating technology like social credit scores (see Whitney Webb’s work). What happens if China has more cheap labor and less regulation to throw into innovation during the AI arms race. People want limitless clean energy but what happen when a country with a cheap factory force creates endless, deadly solar-powered drones that blot out our skies. Technologies are dangerous without some universal moral backbone which our world is far from.

So to go back to something basic, I don’t know what the perfect answer is. But the fact we can’t figure out something as important as healthcare. And this shows itself because even during the pandemic many prominent health officials and organizations both lied to people and seemed to have no idea what to do during a pandemic. What were the people at the CDC doing for the last few decades if the emergency response was handled so poorly. Nothing was done to calm or universally inform the public. Key positions and recommendations were changed to and from several times, despite precedents for pandemics existing in Asia. The Trump press hearings were a shit show. Without a fix to this you’re going to have more societal derangement, the lack of fairness that drives people even further to mental illness, more Mathboi Flies driving into people and children.

And largely this is an effect of greed, a pathological desire for more. Like in this probably fake anecdote, JP Morgan in response to Tesla’s free energy device says, “If it’s free, where do we put the meter?” I don’t know but if we had more energy we would have progressed more quickly and JP Morgan maybe wouldn’t be dead or would have at least got to use the internet. Instead people go for the satisfying short-term, and would prefer the illusion of power over something or someone to inhabiting a better world where they are not the star player.

Yes Twitter shadow bans (why Twitter is toxic)

A pathological paternalistic authoritarian and Nurse Ratched

Previously news came from reporters on scene with access to satellites and giant video cameras. Now that every citizen is a videographer, ever-present at all scenes, instantaneously able to communicate through internet access, the new frontier for breaking news is social media. With Twitter leading this revolution (for now), it must come with an incredible power to shape public opinion and a sense of responsibility to ensure public safety. It’s clear Twitter as a company has an ideological slant. Jack Dorsey himself admitted this on Joe Rogan’s podcast, stating conservatives at his company are afraid to speak up. With Dorsey stepping down as CEO and new rules requiring permission for media use, there’s a strong chance the goal is censorship and to further their ability to shape news and narratives.

Does Twitter shadow ban?

Look up “Does Twitter shadow ban?” and this article comes up:

Setting the record straight on shadow banning - Twitter Blog
Jul 26, 2018

“We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant.”

Translation: we decide for you what’s useful and have a ranking system of questionable practices.

It continues...

“We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.”

Translation: we shadow ban. Again this doesn’t say spam bots or Russian spies. So who decides what constitutes a bad faith actor or someone who “detract[s] from healthy conversation,” or what healthy conversation even entails? Calling for healthy conversation is innately political, certainly you could not argue it’s apolitical. Memes and shit-posting are the junk food of internet dialogue, rarely healthy, yet I would see no reason to censor or otherwise curtail them. I’m confused by people who can vent their opinions publicly online to theoretically billions of people and are surprised when some of the reactions are pointed or uncouth. I’m surprised when tech companies believe it’s at all possible to try to shape billions of conversations in real-time and reasonably understand their context, tone, or irony. It’s clearly a problem you can’t address without making worse.

A bad faith actor is decided by:

“2. What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)”

“3. How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)”

So get this, they don’t shadow ban, but they do heavily reduce your visibility in a ranking system from being seen based on the people you follow and who you like. Of course, you might also get this treatment if you are followed by someone who is a “bad faith actor” against your will. This is also the case if you’re ignored or blocked.

They act as if this is complicated. You don’t need a complex algorithm. Most popular, newest, oldest, random (+ your convoluted AI shadowbanning system). From there, delete spam and anything unlawful. If you don’t want swearing, put a filter for it that can be turned off. You don’t get to decide who is acting in bad faith, not without ruining your platform. What does this even mean. Can you not have a bad day, a snide or sarcastic comment, a temperamental disposition? Can you be anything but positive? Can you be extraordinarily negative if you have the right political leanings?

It’s a big deal. If you get banned on Twitter you lose access and the ability to interact with politicians, police, and emergency services.

In addition to them admitting it, here’s more hardcore due diligence:

Many posts have a “show more replies” button even if the thread only has a couple responses. The responses often include aggressive language or references to harsh topics like pedophilia. Regardless if it is relevant to the original thread, these are put into a quarantined area, and within this is yet another layer called, “show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content.”

Why is Twitter hostile?

My theory is the two are related. There’s already bluechecks and follower counts to give the famous an amplification of their words. In addition to this, the masses of “voiceless” people go not only unheard, many are actively silenced. By being labeled a bad faith actor, their words suppressed by algorithms informed by political opinions, potentially furthering their alienation and creating a reactive desire to dig their heels in. Its simply an incredibly cruel thing to do to give people the impression of a voice or participation, left to wonder why even their innocuous observations inspire no response. I imagine this is done: to protect celebrities and persons of power, out of paternalism, to dictate narratives, political aims and “healthy conversations,” and to please advertisers. A website with an emphasis on celebrity and status, fomenting an increasingly unhinged group of the shadow“ranked,” where conversation is already limited in length, is a recipe for the horror show it is now.

What is the fix?

Firstly, this is not going to happen. It would be like expecting the NRA to go woke. But, stop trying to fix it. Crazy people are a self-correcting problem. They are ignored naturally like they are living dick pill advertisements. Make the censorship an optional setting, make all public comments visible to everyone (with blocks focusing on interaction). What will happen is eventually decentralized social media. In the meantime, Twitter will continue to be the place where you get mega e-points for seeming virtuous rather than being it.

What I’ve learned about markets

A few have asked so I’m typing this out. Most this information isn’t new, it’s my interpretation of it and what I think is the most valuable. So far, I’ve had success and over 100x ROIs (not crypto) in what’s probably preparation + luck. Not financial advice.

Time in the market > timing the market - most important rule. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg agreed the hardest part of the job is getting out of the car. The most successful events in the market came down to just a handful of days. If you don’t have some exposure to the market you will miss those parabolic leaps when they do happen. So if you’re not in the market, or don’t have sufficient capital in it, or your cash is “settling” from a day-trade meaning you can’t access it, you’re going to miss out. Individual days of parabolic success are the same for individual stocks, so if you’re not in before the spike you don’t benefit. Investor Rick Rule suggests being down 50% is the price you pay to be up 400 to 500%. Meaning, long term gains require the patience and foresight to withstand the price volatility that is likely to happen before big gains. In short, it’s better to be a stumbling, clumsy investor more often than someone trying to time the market so precisely they are paralyzed by indecision.

Avoid risk of ruin - the second most important thing is simply don’t be over-invested and take controlled risks. You generally shouldn’t have any money in your investment account that you need to take out unless it’s for another investment (house, business) or you’re making enough gains through investments where it’s akin to income. If you are over-invested you may end up taking money out of investments at a loss that you still believe will be profitable in the mid to long term. Try not to invest money you may need for personal use in the short term for this reason. And don’t trade with money you can’t afford to lose is terribly obvious advice. Avoiding risk of ruin seems to be one of the most important aspects of trading. It goes with the saying “Bulls (betting with the market) make money, bears (betting against the market) make money, pigs (dummies who yolo) get slaughtered.” If you receive a million dollar inheritance and YOLO it all into dogecoin at .45 you could double your money but you could also lose 90% of it. Avoiding risk of ruin might be say, putting 95% of it into safe blue chip stocks and only putting $50,000 for a controlled yolo. This way if your brilliant investment idea flops you can recover. Avoiding risk of ruin means you get to keep the lights on and try again.

Pareto’s Principal - this is something I first learned about in Peter Thiel’s Zero to One outlining his success in creating PayPal and investing strategy. Pareto’s Principle is essentially a rule of thumb dictating 80% of results are driven by 20% of the effort. It’s a way of making a calculated diversification strategy. For example he explains when looking into an industry, he will invest in a handful of companies with the idea each company must have enough potential for success to cover the potential losses of the failed companies. This is the same 80/20 strategy. For example, I’m sure cultured meat has huge potential for the future. Many of those companies will fail but if you can bet on the best horses, with the huge upside potential only 20% success could cover your losses and achieve great gains.

Probability - Nassim Taleb pointed out a foolish investor who said he doesn’t mess with stock options because 90% of the time they expire worthless. But he added this means nothing, without knowing what you stand to gain the 10% of the time you do win. If it is weighted with gains in the thousands of percent that has to be part of the equation. Taleb in The Black Swan also talks through the analogy of heads and tails coin flipping, and how that could be imposed upon the stock market if you’re talking about many different investments or stock options priced low enough to hedge against the low probability they will end “in the money.” But unlike a coin flip, even a little bit of knowledge changes the landscape of probability in your favor dramatically.

Psychology & strategy - despite emphasis on the fundamentals the market is too big not to be in large part psychological, which means speculative trading has huge influence on it. You can have gut-feeling traders who make an investment on a news story, then the slightly more informed trader who trades speculating on what those traders will do (e.g. buy the rumor, sell the news), and you can have the super serious fundamentals trader who still have to take speculative trading and rumors into account, and then the high-level hedge fund people who have to navigate and manipulate the entire picture. It’s important to do some mental accounting to have a strategy that works for you and your psychology. Most people are fine with limiting risk to their safe 401ks. Some want to actively invest but can’t handle seeing red day after red day in their trading account, so they need safer investments but also to hope to get in after a dip for a better entry point. Then there’s the people who ride large, violent fluctuations on the high risk, high reward spectrum that are willing to brave near-ruin for a disproportionate gain.

Up/down - calling back to the probability section, the coin flip analogy is important. An investment is essentially always going to be worth more, or less. From there it’s up for an investor to decide which way it’s going and for how long. It’s up or down. This is the case whether the play is entirely speculative or not. This is the case of whether it’s a good company or Enron. This is the case regardless of how good or bad the fundamentals look. You could have something with great fundamentals but where the public sentiment is completely sour and in that case it would be better to short if there’s no catalyst for that opinion to change. A good decision weighs sentiment, speculation, catalysts, due diligence, potential for future earnings, and fundamentals, yet sometimes just one of these can save you time by inching you towards yes or no.

Take the L - “Stonks only go up” is of course a lie. Sure the S&P and major indexes go up, that’s because they trim the losers. And even good stocks don’t go up in a bear market, sometimes for years, so if you need access to that money you end up taking a loss. In stock picks where the information has changed or the catalyst you saw for market gains has been proven wrong, cut losses. Many people fall into the “sunk cost fallacy” and never want to take a loss. -30% can quickly turn into -60%. That’s better off into an investment you believe in.

Paper trading is kinda bs - unless you’re of an age where you have literally no money I believe paper trading to be a waste of time. Even the average Robin Hood trading account of $250 is more worthwhile because of skin in the game. There is no pain in losing imaginary money. Losing or gaining real money is informational and it properly calibrates your brain for risk.

It’s all a pump and dump - nearly everything has the buy low, sell high dynamic. After studying a bit of the financial markets it’s easy to see everything as a pump and dump. In conception you convince your mate you are worthwhile and have resources or childbearing skills. Upon your birth, hospitals artificially inflate fees to gain as much as they can from insurance companies. It’s the nature of salesman and advertisers. Government officials do it with false campaign promises. Colleges exploit the government promises of tuition by requesting more. If the government can’t tax you they can print money to take your labor by devaluing currency. It’s promotion and under-delivering. It happens with hype-beasts. It happens when flippers and scalpers suppress availability to create demand. It’s even in death, as funerals are a traumatic and stressful time and businesses know people aren’t trying to look for a bargain when dealing with the death of a loved one. Of course it’s in the market, so take suggestions with a fair amount of skepticism.

Manipulation - market moving institutional investors and whales can all have a huge influence and create waves to take retail (regular person) money by shorting or funding with tens of millions or billions. Elon Musk probably pumps Dogecoin to distract that his own company’s stock is overvalued. I believe it happens on news organizations like Motley Fool or Seeking Alpha. It happens by regular people on Reddit, Twitter, Investorhub, Facebook groups, Stock Twits, etc. Some try to sell others on the stocks and some are just trying to sell themselves. So not only do you need to do due diligence on your stock, but any person or a company who might wish to exploit it.

Learn to like bleeding - there’s probably a level of intense conviction required to make truly massive market gains. It requires discipline in the form of the lack of emotion in the pain that is losing money. And it is painful, because you’re risking livelihood and future security and above that peace of mind. It’s an unnatural demand but a necessary part of the process. You wouldn’t expect to get good at something without misses. Many live their lives in a poverty and scarcity mindset. It’s a visceral feeling to dismiss that and welcome what comes and try to ride the ups and downs, and why not. Tomorrow I bet the sun comes up but it’s not guaranteed.

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Notes:

Important things that helped, so far

The Art of Thinking Clearly, a book by Rolf Dobelli describing common thinking errors and biases. It’s a great resource probably because he essentially plagiarized, which means you can take the ebook without guilt. It’s to the point and can substantially refine the way you think about things by outlining what to avoid.

Naval Ravikant is a no bullshit entrepreneur and investor. He wrote short and succinct ideas about wealth creation in Twitter threads that were later condensed into a 3.5 hour YouTube video how to get rich, titled in a sexy way but it’s really about responsible wealth creation.

The first 100 pages of the 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris. That’s when he outlines his best points and shortcuts. The rest didn’t feel equally as important.

If you have more time, the audiobooks of Nassim Taleb, particularly Antifragile and The Black Swan narrated by Joe Ochman. In terms of nonfiction probably among the best books in terms of good ideas per capita.

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars is a book that is sort of the counter to the stereotypical how I became a billionaire books. You can probably learn more from failure than success but it’s not as sexy.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel explains the story of Paypal and how to invest strategically in a compelling way.

 A Random Walk Down Wall Street for a historical perspective on the market, explaining previous bubbles, hysteria, and index funds.

Comedian Jessa Reed on money and avoiding the poverty mentality.

Keith Gill’s (RoaringKitty) early assessment of $GME, here, well before the pop is great example of value investing and due diligence from a retail(-ish) perspective.

World's next Stalin seeks passive wallflower

It's been a long while since I've done a personal ad. Often they were part of the now defunct section of Craigslist. In the past for me they were and apparently still are a fun writing exercise and an obtuse and ineffective way to find a mate.

Are you tired of your bog standard, run-of-the-mill guy, filling your heart with hopes and dreams and mostly lies while you spend another cold Saturday night in the presence of an unringing phone? Are you tired of Netflix 'n' Jillin' with your blindfold on so you can imagine a half-decent lover is in the room while you play with your Bird Box? Are you seriously considering inviting an Indian call scammer, with the offer of marriage and citizenship, just because they're the only men still willing to call you? Have you had it dealing with these dick-picture direct-messaging hordes? Are you tired of being cheated on by liars and left for girls half your age? Now's the time to do something different. Now's the time to go for what you falsely claimed to have always wanted: a man who is open and honest.

I am an anomaly, the open and honest man. You have worn your grandmother's quilted blanket thin, it's time to let her and her memory go. It's time to leave your comfort zone and your thrift shop romance novel notions behind. You can't have your knight in shining armor, but maybe you can have a man who has seen The Shining 14 times. Try something new, you may stand to learn something about yourself. I'm not offering a relationship, I am offering an education. Like the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, you will learn through via negativa. Negative space. You will learn all about what not to want in men. I am the Black Swan in the fourth quadrant. Let's face it, if you're reading this profile you're not where you want to be. This is your life, and it's ending one Fight Club reference at a time. Did you laugh at that? You're too old not to reply to this. Your ego is the only knight you know along with the 45 lb sword you carry called dignity. It's time to leave them both behind.

I'll be honest and open. You are great. You're still reading. You are an interesting woman. You’re patient, articulate, and industrious. Only continue if you are a goddess. Deep down, you know you are sacred. You are worthy of worship. You are a temple. But what is a temple if not something to be repeatedly stepped on? So you are a beautiful stepping stone there for support as I reach for more attractive and emotionally fulfilling women. What? Those are your words not mine. Is it really gaslighting if you agree with it? Being worshipped is about service. You get to be Jesus, by footwashing and providing me with bread and wine. Sure, maybe you can't like him create endless fish, but you can take me to Red Lobster for Endless Shrimp.

Now a relationship is like gainful employment and if you're like me you've tried to avoid these for too long now. But you are a liberal. You're a great woman, you're generous, you're charitable. You believe in the cause. You believe in the Ocasio-Cortez. You believe in the Fight For $15 standard for minimum wage. Which is why if you make less than $15 an hour, please begone. You must practice what you preach. Stop spending your days swiping left on your phone on 5 ft 4-in beta males thinking some Chad is going to waste his Superlike on you. And even when it is your turn for your one night stand, you won't have enough experience to lay out a proper contract. You'll end up f—ked by the freelancer because you have no union, and subsequently no civil union. Put in your hours with me and nine other beta males, ascend the social hierarchy. Use this experience to gain a better position, or marry the first one to create an app. Life: solved.

Well let's be honest. You're not that attractive. Women in the real world are swarmed with men. They are accosted and propositioned at work, at school, at home by their stepfather, and catcalled on the street. If a damsel was lost in the desert and started crying, terrifying erections would begin sprouting from the sand. Maybe you're the unicorn with low self-esteem, but most likely you are either: physically have the body type of a standing croissant, your best friend is a voice in your head telling you you are not in fact mentally ill, or you owned dogs too long and cannot convey emotion with a proper human being. Or you have a child which is the same as all three combined. Physically and emotionally able-bodied and able-minded women don't generally require dating profiles. But you know what one sexy trick transcends all of these attributes? Owning your flaws and who you are.

Let's go through the processes here. What's the least attractive part of a woman? Her child, obviously. Do you have kids? I have a motto about single moms. Kids are like gunshots: one, you'll probably pull through, two: outlook is not so good, three or more: you're not going to make it. The second heuristic I have is, each kid removes exactly one point from your total potential on a 10-point scale. So if you have three kids you need to be a perfect 10 in personality and looks to be a 7. Now, every man feels this way, they just don't have the time to come up with these illuminating rational explanations, let alone the heart to relay them to you. So in order to be loved as a mom you need to be either close to perfect, rich, or willing to abandon your offspring (which is just long-form for “perfect” [a sense of humor also helps]).

Now you always hear in the western world the same question, why are women so unhappy? In America they are the most liberated, free, and educated. There is an answer. The second biggest flaw outside of children and the biggest creator of female unhappiness is called dignity. Be self-aware, and eradicate dignity. Learn to wear your slut on your sleeve, but you can't because you're not wearing any. Oh no, but you'll be used. You can be the dignified fine China sitting forever in a showcase cabinet, or you can be the dog bowl the human animal really wishes to be. Or maybe you're a paper plate, or restaurant-grade ceramic. Success comes from many failures. Try them all before deciding who you are. 

The truth is, on men in relation to women, we only want one thing. And that is to join you at the apple orchard. Sure, we'll put up a front of disinterest to save face. But watch us as we cup that low-hanging fruit for the first time, fresh off the vine, and contemplate its relation from ecology to Adam and Eve, to the apple that fell before Issac Newton causing him to contemplate if the moon, too, was falling. We want nothing more the one thing of your acquaintance, and that to meet your admirable, well-mannered dogs, friends, and future in-laws. We want nothing more than to jump over the hurdles of sexual conquest to get to the good part where you where you recite out loud your high school poetry, which for me inspires an out-of-body experience almost as if I imagine myself somewhere else.

That's my pitch. Find yourself fastest through what you are not. How did Michael Angelo sculpt his masterpiece? He chipped away at everything that wasn't David. Go for broke, often literally, with say a gangly nervous guy with the skin tone of pizza, let him get some. He's disease-free and you'll change his life and your own capacity for empathy. Or me, I'm a mix of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and a hedgehog being tickled. All I want is someone to walk hand-in-hand with me as we explore the natural world and the vacant former estates of Jeffrey Esptein for evidence of human trafficking to report to the FBI but we can't because they're in on it! We could try yoga, or pilates, or study the genocide of the Tutsis, or the work of Miyazaki. Life is a tapestry and a better one might require two to handle.

Controversy! Ted Kaczynski was wrong

The paranoid should grow up. The sublime Orwellian fantasy people secretly grovel for and drool over isn't going to happen. It's a fringe subset of people who believe they are the true woke, having attained maximum enlightenment, a plateau just beyond "I watch Ancient Aliens regularly." 1984 isn't coming, perhaps 1984 helped prevent it. Most likely, it was never going to happen. "A boot stamping on a human face - forever"? No. Why would humans need to be kept in subjugation at all in a technologically inclined future? They'd just be gotten rid off. The truth to balance over a controlled people is probably what we have now and always have, where the little people are made to win just enough to never complain. Instead of subjugation, it's pleasure and enough bells and whistles for complacency.

These fantasies make believe they're helping, but they're only helping authors sell books. It's always selling a moral universe where the individual is kept down and somehow only ends up reiterating the good guys only win in novels. It's always selling some power consolidated group of people as the true assholes, and everyone else must rise above and do the righteous bidding to make the world better. But think of the "little people" you know. A lot of them are assholes, probably the majority. Regular people are scumbags, and the evil cabal controlling the world were once regular. There's no winning, and there's no conspiracy. The only conspiracy is the universal truth that power enables. It's true and that's why people strive to attain it. 

A good example of this is all the vaccine bullshit. Typically the science-worship crowd was correct to love vaccines. Untested vaccines however were a more right-of-center, laissez-faire approach where certain companies and political figures sought to get health products to the market as quickly as possible to profit. Clearly, you're 100% right to feel trepidation about vaccines that have only been tested a year or so. Where it gets dumb is the microchip crowd. I mean, technically they're not wrong. Ted Kaczynski was right about most things. Humans and technology merging is inevitable. His premise was wrong. Before that, though, the idea that vaccines will be a vessel to kill off all the complacent people, surviving only the free-thinkers (or gullible, dumb, paranoid) makes no sense. You would want to (in terms of this paranoid delusion) kill off the group of people who hamper or question social control.

The premise of these paranoid types are wrong. While astoundingly bright, what Ted Kaczynski got wrong is the assumption that people don't deserve technological enslavement. You deserve the world you're willing to put up with. Many factors in the world and its system of processes got it to where it is now. The apathy and indifference he saw in the people responsible for that potentially harmful technological revolution extends to everyone else, not just an elite few.  The complacency and convenience drive the technology and subsequent laws and social attitudes toward them, not the other way around.

The ultimate tool of control isn't brutal subjugation. That's not how you control the masses. It's slack. It's giving them just enough freedom to feel they've won, or even only that winning is possible. It's not divide and conquer, it's making you feel lucky to have running water. If you you think money is stolen from you via taxes, it's really stolen from you from inflation. By the time say, universal basic income comes along, an extra $2000 a month will be what the masses should be earning anyway, only now good-guy government gets to look charitable and responsible. They also now have a social safety net they can garnish and negotiate with to impose control. Don't follow orders, and the comfort you've been given is threatened.

There's no sense in obsessing over this. A fascist take-over isn't coming. It's here and always has been. With governments and without it takes residence in human hearts. The impulse happens in homes and among peer groups and in organizations big and small. It's the same whether people simply want to dominate over you or when it's coming from people who know what's best for you.

So what tf does any of this mean. Well, the horrific reality, inevitably, best case scenario, "progress" leads to mass homogenization. People's ideas aren't that unique. Rugged individualism is probably narcissistic folly. If we are rational, scientific and empirical, eventually we all become the same thing. We have the same diets and the same ideas. We drive the same, safest car. We tell the same jokes and sound the same. We might be slight variations but more or less the same. If we live in a world stripped of irony, we blend into monotonous sludge, but a very capable one. That is the future of progress, where diversity is killed precisely because it is the subject of emphasis.

It's not only an elite that moves things in the direction they get to. People open and close options with every choice. They're all part of the process. And all that sway may have nothing on randomness. Brass tacks, the endless pursuit and baby-shaking attempts to wake people are wasted. Or, it's done not to unplug someone from bad ideas but in belief they'll think the same as them. When humans enter wildlife the responsible thing is generally seen as to not interfere. Probably the same is said best from human-to-human with choices that impact only them. The idea of saving people by force, re-education, and control, or as in Ted's case with actual violence, in precaution for a future fascist threat is hilariously contradictory.

There's a difference between seeing things as they are in the conspiracy-fact realm and existing in the narrative fallacy based in the binary of good and evil. That binary exists on every level, and the processes dictating people's actions in a system is an outcome of unfathomable factors as complex as a preference for authoritarianism in the face of chaos or the inability to navigate choice. Yes, certain conspiracies are true but obsession with it often becomes a way to create a simple answer where exists the potentially scarier areas of complexity, random chance, or no control at all.