AI Pluralism: “We’ve seen in real life, in both legacy institutions and AI, that institutions tend to be captured by ideologies far more irrational, delusional, misinformed, and power-hungry than the average person. The technical details of AI make it so that it is asymmetrically easy to fight for AI to be open to customization and reinterpretation by all. The benefits of AI can only accrue if organizations which provide AI tools can establish trust. While I may not personally agree with all uses of AI, these benefits far outweigh the cost of letting people I disagree with use AI. This last part is the pluralist mindset: I’d rather everyone have access to AI than a select few.”
America Has Become its Own Worst Enemy: “Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.”
Ask Rene Girard: Justin Murphy designed an app that allows you to ask a question, whose answer is synthesized from the works of Rene Gird. I asked it “Who is God?’ to which it responded: “God is the one who reveals the truth of human violence and the need for humans to take responsibility for it. He is the one who subjected himself to human violence in order to reveal it to the light of day.”
Colossal: “Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth.”
Inscriptions: Inscriptions, per Casey Rodarmor, are similar to NFTs but are true digital artifacts native to the Bitcoin blockchain — decentralized, immutable, and always on-chain. More info is available here.
Place Space Object: “When you step inside of the Pantheon you have the curvature of the earth beneath your feet. You have the rings of the Heavens encircled and opening upward as a portal above your head. You stand in a space that recognizes you as man and reflects an understanding of your place in the world back to you, in the way only an intimate can gaze at you knowingly. It turns something that is abstractly known into an experience. The Pantheon is an image read phenomenologically and is therefore a piece of poetry living frozen in form.”
Psychonauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganizing Pop Culture: “You can take a psychedelic and have an astounding experience and it can still be full of demonic delusion. You can cast a spell and have it work to an amazing degree – this says nothing about whether it is spiritually healthy and safe to engage in such practice. Even within the context of Christianity, over-reliance on personal experience of God (whether spiritual phenomena, or ecstatic emotional moments) can be deadly. Our experience is clouded by sin, untrustworthy outside of the proper constraints, all of us are capable of unfathomable degrees of delusion. What is trustworthy is Christ — not our personal subjective conception of Christ but Christ revealed and understood through His true Church, which gives us the ecclesial and doctrinal guardrails to guard against experiential delusion and deception.”
Proclaim a Truce: “Athens and Sparta were gearing up to fight once again. It was the year 380, only two decades after they had fought the bloodiest war in their history. But how often do wars really settle things?However, the Olympic Games were scheduled to run that summer. What did the cities choose to do? Did Sparta use her clout in the region to get Athenian athletes banned from the games? Did Athenians boycott the event in protest of Sparta’s unprovoked aggression? No, like all the other Greek cities who participated, they proclaimed a (short) truce, put aside their states’ (many) differences, and attended the greatest show on earth.”
The Decisive Battle: “The Imperial Japanese Navy isn’t defeated at Midway – it has in fact already lost the war the second the Americans refuse to follow the script the Japanese had – quite naively – laid out for them.”
The Red Hand Files: “…there is a cougar that roams these parts…With a terrible engine of wrath for a heart…”
Worry is a Misuse of Imagination: “…it is crucial to snap out of despair because if you’re in a state of despair, you cannot take effective action to improve your situation. Anyone who’s ever been in a life-or-death situation will tell you that a positive mental attitude is what will make or break you.”