Bible Study for NPCs: Idols, Ideology, and the Violence Within: “Enshrined as ideas, human passions become totems that, when worshipped, absorb the adorer’s soul. The ideologue is a victim of his own belief systems. You’ve seen it before: the soulless eyes of certainty. The emptiness in behind the words of the revolutionary terrorist. The face of a Non-Playable Character in a videogame. Certain ideologies breed violence, but not because they make one violent; it’s because they give him reasons to unleash his own primal violence, leaving only empty husk, a consumed shade of the former self.” The Outpost
Kurtz-Gradient: Do Long Inpatient Hospital: “Kurtz-Gradient manifests in the most wild, haunted areas. From deep jungled Africa, to swamped-out Cambodia, to the sterile inpatient hospital.” P s u e d o a n a l y s i s
Nightmare Generators: “Whatever technology we might devise to save ourselves from natural catastrophe, we will also use on our enemies. What stops us from deterring ourselves to death?“ Sukhavati
Note on Money and Taxation (ATP): “In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari take up Marx’s ‘trinity formula’—that which ‘comprises all the secrets of the social production process,’ unifying the differing dynamics of land, labor and capital—and, through significant modification, offer a picture of the tripartite structure that underpinned the economic logic of the ‘archaic Urstaat‘. The Urstaat, organized around the gaze and reach of the emperor-despot, is what Lewis Mumford described as the ‘megamachine.’ Deleuze and Guattari take the inner logic of this megamachine as one of machinic enslavement, where ‘human beings themselves are constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and with other things (animal, tools), under the control and direction of a higher unity.’ The overcode is key here, as the mechanism through which these various elements come under the directive of that ‘higher unity.” Reciprocal Contradiction
On GPT-3: Meta-Learning, Scaling, Implications and Deep Theory: “The voice speaks, and is not spoken to (you cannot ask the voice what objective fact would change its mind). The voice never changes its mind (until it does). The voice is never surprised by events in the world (only disappointed). The voice advises you to go back to sleep (right now). When someone speaks about future possibilities, what is the tone of their voice?” Gwern
⭕ The Frontiers V1.0: “Volunteer yourself for hell. Lucifer is the lord of the earth, and he is not as ugly as made out to be. Even if something bad should happen, and danger might seem imminent, you’ll find some remedy within the situation. Let contact with the earth be your compass.” World Creation Society
The Mask of the Joker: “When a passionate activist told him about her efforts to save the world, [Alan] Watts replied, ‘My dear, you’re going to have enough work in saving yourself. Leave the world tranquil.'” Jorge Montojo
The Red Hand Files: “‘The wolf who wins? The one you feed’” Nick Cave
Why Civilizations Collapse: “Since collapse in material technology is always preceded by collapse in the practice of social technology, Dark Ages are always preceded by Intellectual Dark Ages. Knowledge of these social technologies is highly compartmentalized and, as a result, they are not understood explicitly by all parts of society. This means that a society undergoing an Intellectual Dark Age doesn’t realize it is going through one at all—all the people who would notice are long-gone, and those who remain are miseducated, role-playing the forms left behind by their predecessors without realizing that they’ve lost the substance. Often not just the knowledge, but the socioeconomic niche that once fostered the creation of new social technology has been obliterated in all but name.” The Side View