I saw a this post going viral on Reddit, “Why do I gain 5 lbs just looking at bread but my friend eats like a raccoon in a Taco Bell dumpster and stays fit?” The fact many many people have observed this and can thus relate, explains how the post went so viral. We all know those people or have seen them in action. | Grey Enlightenment
Month: August 2025| greyenlightenment.com
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… Continue reading Why affecting online sentiment is more effective than philanthropy| 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… Continue reading How ‘slop’ hijacks our senses| Grey Enlightenment
Item #1: Bitcoin continues to fall Recall last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refuted the possibly of the U.S. buying Bitcoin to fund the crypto reserve. This led to an immediate selloff of the price of Bitcoin from $120k to $118k. A lot people assumed the selling would temporary, but it has continued to fall.… Continue reading The daily view 8/21/2025 Bitcoin falls, Terence Tao funding cut, Epstein| 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. And… Continue reading Careerism is rational| Grey Enlightenment
Has society gotten easier or harder? The usual rebuttal is that society is wealthier now compared to, say, 30 years ago. And this is true if you go by the objective economic data, but at the same time it’s hard for me to think of examples where American society has necessarily gotten easier or feels… Continue reading Why everything has gotten harder| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral, “Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity“: I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s… Continue reading Most content is mediocre because most people are mediocre| Grey Enlightenment
Item #1: Bitcoin continue to lag tech stocks; huge profit with shorting method; Scott Bessent rules out any treasury purchases. I covered this yesterday, but this week has been among the strongest in a long time as BTC continues to lag tech stocks. The divergence has is quite pronounced over the past month, for example… Continue reading The Daily View 8/15/2025: Bitcoin, Math, National Debt, AI Bubble?| 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. Just a few hours ago, this bombshell dropped. After… Continue reading Scott Bessent rules out Bitcoin purchases, CPI low: right again| 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… Continue reading Investing for AGI/takeoff| 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
McDonald’s misses Q2 estimates across the board, as consumers pull back on dining out.| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral: Walmart says users of weight loss drugs are buying less food, and a related Elon tweet:| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this post from Brian Chau:| Grey Enlightenment
Month: May 2025| greyenlightenment.com
I saw this Ozempic ‘Very Likely’ to Face Drug Price Negotiations, Novo Says:| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral, “How GLP-1s Are Breaking Life Insurance.”| Grey Enlightenment
Month: April 2025| greyenlightenment.com
A common narrative, as I have often observed on Twitter and Hacker News, is that East Asia ought to serve as a role model for mitigating obesity in the US. The apparent success of East Asian countries at having low rates of obesity is something that can be emulated in the US, or that their lifestyles and diets are superior, as the comment below demonstrates: | Grey Enlightenment
Michael Perilloux of Social Matter discusses the need for an Imperial Mindset:| Grey Enlightenment
This is pretty devastating , as in the truth is devastatingly real The Truth About the SAT and ACT| Grey Enlightenment
Month: July 2025| greyenlightenment.com
An excellent post by Scott Greer, Misunderstanding The MAGA Base. This echoes my sentiments exactly:| Grey Enlightenment
To recap, during the ’90s, Epstein was at the center of a large social circle of well-connected people, such as businessmen and some academics. He also, along with associate/friend Ghislaine Maxwell, engaged in child trafficking. He also had a predilection for younger women. It’s possible some of his guests who accompanied him on his plane and partied at his infamous island were aware of this and even solicited underage sex. Epstein also blackmailed some his acquaintances, which could exp...| Grey Enlightenment
This is going massively viral “OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025”.| Grey Enlightenment
Yesterday, a Bitcoin whale offloaded $8 billion of Bitcoin to Galaxy Digital. | Grey Enlightenment
From Garry Taubes, The Curious Lessons of Calorie Restriction, in which he contrasts his ad libitum low-carb approach to Peter Attia. He writes:| Grey Enlightenment
A common argument is that AI will make smart people redundant, as their jobs are replaced or AI outperform them. I disagree. AI does not change this or devalue IQ. As I argued last week, AI will only amplify differences of human capital. Smarter people will be able to use AI more effectively to increase their already big advantage. In this way, AI is like a force multiplier. | Grey Enlightenment
The big story is the Trump administration’s reversal and denial of the Epstein list. Last night, Trump put out an incoherent rant telling people to ignore Epstein, generating confusion and anger among some of his online “supporters”, which I add in quotes because I also believe some of this controversy is part of a demoralization campaign to split his voters and discourage turnout, similar to when Trump attacked Iran. As I correctly predicted, the Iran attacks were a success, and quick...| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this Reddit post going massively viral, ““Fast metabolism” is a lie, stop making yourself feel bad.” | Grey Enlightenment
I saw this viral post by Dwarkesh Patel, “Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner.” This is a reasonable take on AI, in contrast to the hype that is typical of the topic. There is a middle ground of people, such as myself and Freddie deBoer, who believe AI will lead to improvements in some respects of life, but will not liberate people from work or anything grandiose like that. Nor will AI bring about the end of humanity either.| Grey Enlightenment
Month: February 2025| greyenlightenment.com
Month: August 2024| greyenlightenment.com
Over and again, all of these people who are held up by the media as geniuses or experts keep being wrong, whether it’s about Covid (specifically, the ‘health experts’ vastly overestimating the efficacy of masks and vaccines at stopping the spread of Covid), investing (such as Cathie Wood, who was hyped by the media in 2020-2021 before her fund lost 75% of its value, erasing all its 2020-2021 gains), cryptocurrency (Yahoo Finance and Twitter hyping crypto and giving a platform to crypto ...| Grey Enlightenment
Month: June 2025| greyenlightenment.com
Elon’s political party “America party” is official:| Grey Enlightenment
The ‘some guy’ phenomenon is my observation that the best people in the world at a given task or skill are unknown or random people. Instead of only famous people or credentialed experts, breakthroughs are being made by nobodies.| Grey Enlightenment
As I discuss in the July 2022 post “Fixing the Expertise Misallocation Problem“, having a large social media following and a lot of media coverage or clout is a poor predictor of “useful, actionable advice” or accuracy. It’s as if those who have the most followers, visibility, or status who are the least effective at their jobs, or give the worst advice, or recommend the worst investments. There is a problem in which society systematically promotes people who are the least competen...| Grey Enlightenment
Last week Elon Musk shook the world of crypto and investing by announcing that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin. In terms of coverage and newsworthiness, this matched even stories about Biden in significance. Consequently, Bitcoin and Tesla fell, and this prompted debate and talk about Elon Musk having too much influence, and how much longer Elon Musk will remain as influential as he is. Will he fade, or will his star keep rising. | Grey Enlightenment
Month: March 2025| greyenlightenment.com
From Richard Hanania, Government Science and the Prestige Economy.| greyenlightenment.com
Here are my thoughts about the Iran situation| Grey Enlightenment
It’s another morning of the familiar sight of bombed-out buildings and smoke. My prediction is there will be no productive negotiations between Iran, Israel, and the US. The way these conflicts have typically resolved is Iran spontaneously relenting, typically for 9-12 months, until resuming. Iran initially attacked Israel in April 2024, paused until August, and resumed in June 2025. (I’m guessing according to Iran’s LinkedIn, “nuclear scientists wanted” or “generals wanted” pos...| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this post by Jeremiah Johnson, “Persistence Beats Talent: And how to think about achieving success.”| Grey Enlightenment
Polymarket as of 6/17/2025 is giving a 58% chance of “US military action against Iran before July,” where this is defined as:| Grey Enlightenment
The ‘magic screenshot‘ never fails, Bitcoin now at $60k after $68k last week. Bitcoin has now fallen $8k since the scam conference ended. Here is what I wrote: | Grey Enlightenment
Item #1: Bitcoin crashes, as I predicted last week, on Iran escalation (and the overall shittiness of cryptocurrency that requires no additional explanation). It’s going all the way back to $20k, maybe lower: | Grey Enlightenment
A recurring complaint I have seen by Richard Hanania and others on the center/middle-right is that the tech-right, who are otherwise intelligent, come off as dull, uniformed or intellectually-incurious about politics: | Grey Enlightenment
The news cycle is moving so fast. Just 2 days ago, the big story was riots and the plane crash. Now it’s Israel’s airstrikes on Iran. This is being framed as Israel thwarting Trump’s attempts at peace talks or even as the prelude to world war. | Grey Enlightenment
I’m watching our National suicide which I am powerless to stop or even slow for reasons that I simply cannot fathom. | Grey Enlightenment
It looks like I was right again on multiple counts. First, I predicted that stocks would quickly recover from tariff-related losses and to buy the dips. Indeed, the Nasdaq has recovered all its losses and is within striking distance of a new high: | Grey Enlightenment
I looks like I was right again. A few days ago, I wrote that Elon had ulterior motives and was only feigning concern over the national debt and spending in regard to his opposition to Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’. I said:| Grey Enlightenment
Last week I wrote:| Grey Enlightenment
Item 1#: The ‘TACO Trade’ is now a meme: ‘Trump always chickens out’ trade is the talk of Wall Street.| Grey Enlightenment
I have been thinking about why writing has become harder in recent years. I blame what I call the ‘Substack effect’. In short–the sudden, huge success of the Substack blogging platform has raised the bar for online, short-form non-fiction writing. The popularity of Substack has both raised the quality of online writing in the aggregate, and increased readers’ expectations of other’s writing. Consequently, this means more work in the writing process and stiffer competition.| Grey Enlightenment
The news cycle has been so erratic since Trump’s inauguration. I have tended to avoid topical matters, as I don’t want to spend hours writing posts about tariffs or about the Middle East or China, only for my efforts to be wasted when a new development breaks. | Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral from Forbes, The High Price Of Minimum Security Federal Prisoners:| Grey Enlightenment
In an upcoming book co-authored with Nate Soares, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t pull any punches, promising in the title that if anyone builds superhuman AI, that ‘everyone in will die.’ But It’s more likely that rather than everyone dying, this book will go in the dustbin of history. Like most non-fiction books, the putative objective of his book is a call to action and to raise awareness–in his case, about AI risk. However, two things: the public and policy elites are already abundant...| Grey Enlightenment
Inspired by Dynomight’s viral post “Why doesn’t advice work?” I have been thinking about why does advice work so poorly. Or why is there such a stark disconnect between the application of said advice and the desired outcome? Why does advice work for a few and not most? I am going to ignore the edge case where the advice is ignored, in which the outcome is certain failure. So assuming the recipient makes a concerted effort at applying advice, why doesn’t it work?| Grey Enlightenment
Tesla stock keeps going up having surged from as low as $230 a month ago to over $350. | Grey Enlightenment
Consider the following recent stories as indicative of the stark contrast between the risk of small business, compared to the relative safety and high-ROI of careerism–a similar patten observed in 2008, 2020, and now 2025 it pertains to Trump’s tariffs:| Grey Enlightenment
On the hierarchy of intelligence or difficulty/rigor, ‘wordcels’ are ranked too low. And data/AI people are ranked too high. Although STEM and practical-minded stuff (e.g. business) are often positioned higher on the ‘intellectual totem pole’ compared to the ‘soft and subjective humanities’, my evidence shows it’s not so clear cut. With the exception of the highest tiers of math, one is not necessarily easier or less rigorous than the other. They are hard in different ways. | Grey Enlightenment
I saw this tweet going viral| Grey Enlightenment
The Red Queen race or parable describes how, “Species have to ‘run’ or evolve in order to stay in the same place, or else go extinct as the Red Queen said to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in her explanation of the nature of Looking-Glass Land: Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.'”| Grey Enlightenment
Looks like I was right yet again about the tariffs. On April 9th I wrote:| Grey Enlightenment
From a comment on Scott’s blog post, Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know:| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this post by Moldbug, “Harvard to the Finland Station.”| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this article by Auron MacIntyre defending the tariffs, “‘I, Pencil’ defined free trade — Trump’s tariffs are writing the sequel.” Even though I broadly agree with the author’s politics, this article is pretty bad.| Grey Enlightenment
It has been a little over 2 weeks since ‘liberation day’, when Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs against many countries. I wrote a 3-part series about this (here, here, and here) in which I predicted the tariffs would not be as bad as forecasted. | Grey Enlightenment
From Freddie DeBoar, The Creative Underclass is Still Raging:| Grey Enlightenment
Individual differences of metabolism is like the health-equivalent of IQ–something that is often downplayed, minimized, or denied–but of great importance (unlike IQ, at least it’s not taboo–yet). It is trendy to say that metabolism does not matter in so far as weight loss is concerned, or that fast or slow metabolisms are myth, or such differences of individual metabolism are only very tiny, as seen on Reddit:| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this tweet going viral:| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral, How University Students Use Claude. As to be expected, the main issue is cheating: | Grey Enlightenment
Item #1. Trump announces 90-day pause on tariffs; stocks surge. | Grey Enlightenment
Your IQ isn’t 160. No one’s is: Stratospheric IQs are like leprechauns, unicorns, or mermaids, writing: | Grey Enlightenment
A lot people are amazed or impressed by Richard Hanania’s apparent overnight success, and with minimal promotion by the media. | Grey Enlightenment
I define bullshit as that which does not replicate when put to the ultimate test, that being reality or practice. This can be advice, a scientific claim, whatever…This is especially prevalent in the wellness industry, be it dieting advice or fitness advice. Someone will make a claim that a certain diet or macro is optimal for weight loss, and then when ordinary people try it, the results tend to be much more underwhelming than promised, if not downright useless. This can be ‘eating window...| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral: Harvard says tuition will be free for families making $200K or less.| Grey Enlightenment
Over the past few months, the legendary investor Warren Buffett has been showered with adulation by the media for raising cash in 2024, having seemingly anticipated the downturn of 2025. Note: We’re talking Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway, not Buffett himself, although these are often used interchangeably. From Business Insider, The internet is in awe of Warren Buffett’s perfectly timed cash-out:| Grey Enlightenment
Similar to physique or strength inflation, where anything less than shredded abs or 600lbs deadlifts are seen are ‘mid’ or average, a similar trend, I think, is observed with intellect, such as claims of Elon Musk being dull, unread, or not sounding that smart. Certain pundits have unrealistic or inflated expectations of what is expected of nominally smart people. The sort of world-class erudition that passes for truly being an intellectual par excellence is closer to a 150+ IQ than 110-...| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral, from Less Wrong: Elon Musk May Be Transitioning to Bipolar Type I:| Grey Enlightenment
Without obvious signifiers of very-high IQ, it’s hard to differentiate between, say, an IQ of 130 or 160 when it comes to object-level issues. For example, what is the ‘high-IQ position’ on Ukraine vs. Russia? Or Ai risk? Or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? It does not exist. There are high-IQ people on either extremes of these issues, and in the middle. Eliezer Yudkowsky is regarded as high IQ, but his arguments about Ai risk are either unfalsifiable or soundly refuted as being phys...| Grey Enlightenment
From Richard Hanania, Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.| Grey Enlightenment
Kevin D. Hall, a tenured Senior Investigator at the NIH, dismisses the possibility of obese people having abnormally slow metabolisms to account for their obesity and inability to lose weight:| Grey Enlightenment
Before the rise of social media—and especially pre-Covid—the opportunities to capitalize from one’s attractiveness or athleticism were mostly limited to modeling, acting–or for the most gifted–professional sports. However, the emergence of the ‘fitness influencer category’, combined with the growing perception of being overweight as low status in a visually-driven online world, has created an entire new niche for guys who maybe were not cut out for competitive sports or who were...| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral about college grade inflation:| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this article going viral WHAT IF AMERICANS ARE HAPPY AT WORK?, by Derek Thompson, which got me thinking about the topic of work.| Grey Enlightenment
Taleb is having another one…| Grey Enlightenment
It’s been a year since Meta was supposed to be dead according to the experts, whose viral videos and articles racked up millions of views proclaiming the end for Meta:| Grey Enlightenment
Day 2: $500 billion AI investment, Ross Ulbricht pardoned, and stocks up again–thanks to huge Oracle and Netflix earnings and optimism over Trump economy. Everything is going exactly as I said it would. Everyone getting wins, but people who wanted Bitcoin reserve, who left empty-handed despite donating the most. That is the irony of it. | Grey Enlightenment
The big story is no Bitcoin reserve, or any executive order regarding crypto for that matter. Although of course there is always the possibility it happens later, it does not look good given that Trump signed a bunch of other executive orders, but ignored the one thing his donors had expected and hoped for. No mention of Bitcoin during any of his speeches either. All he had to do was just mention it somewhere without signing anything, not nothing.| Grey Enlightenment
In the post “Why good writing is one of the hardest things ever” I discuss why writing is possibly harder than STEM, even ‘hard math’, but I wish to expound on this. As someone who has done both I think I am qualified to make this determination. I’ve written math papers, read countless papers, done some coding, read plenty of medical research reports (such as in regard to posts on obesity, diets, and metabolism), done research into quantitative finance (e.g. options pricing models a...| Grey Enlightenment
1. Interesting tweet:| Grey Enlightenment
I saw this going viral:| Grey Enlightenment
I am rolling some of my Bitcoin short profits today into additional “NO” contracts at 30-34 cents on Polymarket for Will Trump create Bitcoin reserve in first 100 days? A 30% return in 3 months works out to an effective 190% annual return.| Grey Enlightenment
Twitter/X and Substack accounts are up: | greyenlightenment.com
The topic of immigration and Indians has blown up over the past few days. I dunno who got the ball rolling on this, but I suspect it started with Trump’s inside team, e.g. David Sachs, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy pushing this narrative of a ‘talent/worker shortage’. This has led to various heated exchanges between Musk and Trump supporters, who have accused the former of selling out. | Grey Enlightenment
Interesting post by Richard Hanania, Why Are Americans So Rich?| Grey Enlightenment
In early November 2024 it went viral that Elon Musk is also a top-ranked Diablo player. This came as a surprise, as how does he find the time or learn so fast? | Grey Enlightenment