In response to Curtis Yarvin’s post “The riddle of the niggardly billionaires,” I posit philanthropy is largely ineffective for opposing wokeness. The right is much more successful at affecting sentiment through a more bottom-up or grassroots process starting online, than patronage or indirect power. Negative sentiment can affect the ‘real world’ in material ways, much more so than bloated charitable organizations or easily-ignored newsletters or magazines. When was the last time ...| Grey Enlightenment
Twitter’s 2022 revenue sharing program for blue/verified accounts has predictably opened the floodgates of slop for the purpose of boosting engagement and hence ad revenue. Slop differs from your typical spam, e.g. casinos or pills, in that it’s marketed under the pretext of being insightful or new, when it’s either stale and or clickbait. The objective is to get people to click out of curiosity and to elicit predictable outrage as it’s shared and retweeted. Because it’s less obviou...| Grey Enlightenment
Item #1: Bitcoin continues to fall| Grey Enlightenment
Why are so many young people delaying family formation? Rather than some deep social analysis, it can simply be explained that men and women alike enjoy having free time. When viewed through the lens of maximizing one’s free time, it makes more sense. Having enough free time is an essential ingredient for being successful. | Grey Enlightenment
Has society gotten easier or harder? The usual rebuttal is that the U.S. is wealthier now compared to, say, 30 years ago. And this is true if you go by objective economic data, but at the same time, it’s hard for me to think of many examples–aside from a handful–where American society has necessarily gotten easier or feels easier. “Society becoming wealthier” and “how easy things are” are not necessarily the same, as the latter also has a subjective element.| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral, “Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity“:| Grey Enlightenment
Item #1: Bitcoin continue to lag tech stocks; huge profit with shorting method; Scott Bessent rules out any treasury purchases. | Grey Enlightenment
Two weeks ago I published “More correct predictions , and the role of IQ and forecasting” , in which I predicted no Bitcoin reserve, in addition to the success of Bitcoin hedging method, by modifying it to short Bitcoin 24-7 instead of only during market hours.| Grey Enlightenment
A couple of days ago I argued that the impact of AI (in the context of LLMs) on the economy will be sanguine. This will come to the possible relief of some and to the disappointment of others. There will be no AGI, takeoff, ramp-up or other hyped-up scenarios in which AI somehow escapes its confines, becomes sentient, or sees a recursive sort of compounding of its capabilities. 2027 and beyond will come to pass without the anticipated ‘phase shift’, but rather continued incremental impro...| Grey Enlightenment
In my earlier posts I argue that AI will not lead to meaningful economic change, or even boost productivity much. It will not liberate people from work, or even lessen the workload much overall. My prediction has generally been that AI will make continued, incremental progress at the sort of things it’s already good at, but there will be no fundamental change or paradigm shift where it renders humans obsolete or surpasses them, except for perhaps those specific tasks. | Grey Enlightenment