The weird thing I notice about some of the people who state they are most opposed to identity politics, is how ironically -- and seemingly unknowingly -- they are enmeshed in extreme forms of it. If your personal identity is tied to a belief system of any kind, and you consider attacks on that belief system to be a personal attack. And, you tend to constrain your personal relationships to people who share that belief system, you are simply part of identity politics. That is what identity politics is. It doesn't really matter what the belief system is: if it's progressive or "woke" politics. Or right-wing populist politics. Or even if it's categories like bitcoiner vs nocoiner -- if your personal behavior, and community behaviors fit the definition I laid out in the second paragraph, then you are participating in identity politics. And yes, identity politics is pretty bad for anything resembling a functioning pluralistic society.

One major reason I'm pretty cool on the predictions of severe and sudden U.S. decline, is some factors nobody ever talks about. 1. The US is one of the younger countries in the world, with a growing population -- China's population is in rapid decline because of the hangover from the one-child policy. And birthrates have not recovered and continue to decline. 2. The US remains far and away the top destination for immigration in the world. 3. North America is insanely resource rich. It wouldn't be cheap or easy, but the US and Canada in particular have resources in the ground that can substitute out most mineral dependency. Including lithium and rare-earths like neodymium. 4. The US and Canada are food superpowers. Between these two countries, they produce well in excess of domestic demand, and are massive food exporters. Especially to China. China recognizes this, and has been in a rush to replace food exports from the U.S. and Canada with imports from places like Brazil. While they've made material moves here, the dependency remains very high. 5. My worries about AI aside, recent advances in artificial intelligence have demonstrated that US-based companies continue to enjoy serious advantages in terms of R&D. These are structural advantages that were very important to the rise of the US to begin with. And they're structural advantages that persist today. These factors matter regardless of inflation or the monetary regime. For all of these reasons, political and moral arguments aside on whether or not the US *should* persist or decline, these factors should cause one to hedge their certainty that US collapse is certain.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in trying to interpret economic, political and world events, is viewing things through a functionalist lens. Whereas a lot of the bad things that happen in the world are always viewed through the lens of intentional design, and agendas that serve specific individuals and institutions, the truth is, a lot of the bad shit that happens in the world are just endemic of simple hubris and miscalculation. Post hoc reasoning is usually deployed to fit things into a broader narrative, along an ideological worldview and everything bad that happens is seen as a failure of the incumbent power structures and ideologies, everything good that happens is in spite of them, and most importantly, it all validates the ideological and normative claims of critic's own ideology. Most people do this. Including me. It's hard not to do, because our brain really wants to think about everything in functional terms. The problem is it's often a bad model for explaining complex, emergent phenomena. Unintended consequences are actually often a much better explanation for most bad things that happen at scale in the world, as opposed to intentional design and nefarious agendas.

As an experiment, I've been limiting my social media time to no more than 15 minutes total a day (Nostr included) using Apple's screen time for about a two weeks now, and I feel like my brain is already working differently.

Beauty only exists in the contrast between perfection and imperfection. Our flaws are also what make us human, and we wouldn't be human without them.

If copyright lawsuits over training data is a way we bend the exponential curve on AI to allow AI safety to catch up, then I'm okay with that.

I think we are going to see AI-assisted hacking, data exfiltration and sabotage, which might result in a complete cybersecurity crisis, which could have wide ranging geopolitical and global stability implications. I think this is a current horizon threat. Models like GP4, and in particular, multimodal systems that demonstrate the capacity of these models to use tools, tells me this threat is already here. It's only a matter of time until we witness the first major incident.

I really think everyone should be significantly more freaked out about AI.

The fact Elon thinks TruthGPT could even be a thing, demonstrates how narrow his knowledge of epistemology is, and how thinking about society and politics as an engineer leaves much to be desired. Humanity is not an engineering problem.

People underestimate the importance of threshold effects in complex systems like the economy, culture and society at large. Most confident predictions about the future hold way too many variables constant over time, which leads to faulty predictions with high confidence.