Tag: philosophy

Success in Clown World

Never forget that this is what passes for success in Clown World.

Funding History: The Athletic raised $139.5 million via five funding rounds beginning in 2017.

  • Seed Funding: $2.3 million led by Courtside Ventures
  • Series A: $5.4 million led by Courtside Ventures
  • Series B: $20 million led by Evolution Media
  • Series C: $40 million co-led by Founders Fund & Bedrock Capital
  • C1 round investment: $22 million led by Founders Fund
  • Series D: $50 million led by Bedrock Capital

Operating Losses: The Athletic lost $121 million in just four years.

  • 2019: $54 million
  • 2020: $41 million
  • 2021: $55 million
  • 2022: $36 million

In January 2022, The New York Times paid $550 million for The Athletic.

All “success” in Clown World is manufactured, fake, and usually gay. Don’t chase it. You’d have to be retarded to chase it. Chase the Good, the Beautiful, and the True instead.

DISCUSS ON SG

Science is Observably Unreliable

Despite the best efforts of midwits like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to square the circle by declaring science a method of determining truth, science is not only philosophically incapable of being a truth-metric, science is practically and observably unreliable, as evidenced by the untrustworthiness of even its highest practitioners in academia:

Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug. 31, according to communications released by the University Wednesday morning. He will also retract or issue lengthy corrections to five widely cited papers for which he was principal author after a Stanford-sponsored investigation found “manipulation of research data.”

According to Jerry Yang, chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees, Tessier-Lavigne will step down “in light of the report and its impact on his ability to lead Stanford.” Former Dean of Humanities Richard Saller will serve as interim president. In a separate statement, Tessier-Lavigne defended his reputation but acknowledged that issues with his research, first raised in a Daily investigation last autumn, meant that Stanford requires a president “whose leadership is not hampered by such discussions.”

“At various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged—in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and March 2021—Dr. Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record,” Stanford’s report said, identifying a number of apparent manipulations in Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscientific research.

The report concluded that the fudging of results under Tessier-Lavigne’s purview “spanned labs at three separate institutions.”

We’re not talking about a minor scientist here. We’re talking about the corruption of the top scientist at the third-best university in the world. This is absolute and conclusive proof of the intrinsic unreliability of science and shows that the reproducibility crisis affects science at every level.

UPDATE: Those who still subscribe to the myth of scientific self-correction should note that even the investigations of scientific corruption are themselves liable to corruption.

The investigation took eight months, with one member stepping off after The Daily revealed that he maintained an $18 million investment in a biotech company Tessier-Lavigne cofounded.

DISCUSS ON SG

Tell Me You’re a Ticket-Taker

Without coming right out and telling me you’re a ticket-taker.

The sign of a ticket-taker: a colleague describes Huw Edwards, the BBC presenter who has been accused of paying young men to expose themselves.

“I admire the professionalism of both of them and remain impressed by Huw’s sensational rise through the BBC from humble beginnings in Bridgend.”

Key words: “sensational rise”. But wait, there’s an additional clue right there in the same article.

“We agreed that delving into the backgrounds of news journalists such as ourselves wasn’t appropriate.”

Indeed. One wouldn’t want the public looking too closely into the real reasons for those sensational rises and amazing careers, would one?

Not all material success is fake, but most success in Clown World is, at a minimum, manufactured. It’s manufactured and then distributed to those who are willing to render the required services and provide the necessary hostages. And the sooner you accept this reality, the more effective your independent efforts will be, as you will stop chasing illusions and wasting your best efforts playing a game that is rigged against you and everyone else unwilling to take their tickets.

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Devil Mouse Doubles Down

The Dark Herald reports that Disney is extending Bob Iger’s contract through 2026:

Bob Iger is the one that has put Disney in the disastrous position it’s in today. He overpaid drastically for Fox Entertainment by a factor of 100%, he let Kevin Fiege dismantle the machinery that had turned Marvel into a box office juggernaut, he allowed Kathleen Kennedy to continue driving the LucasFilm cart into the ground long after the wheels were sold off on eBay and he fired John Lassetter, replacing him with the utterly hopeless Pete Docter. The parks are empty at the height of the busy season, with the disastrous launch of Indiana Jones V the film division has lost a billion dollars since the collapse of Lightyear, and there are still two more candidates for box office martyrdom waiting in the wings before New Year’s Day. Also, Disney+, the thing that was supposed to spearhead Disney’s drive to complete streaming dominance has lost $1 billion per quarter since it was launched, and it just dropped behind Warner Brother’s Max streaming service.

According to Disney’s own documents they only have $10 billion in cash, that is somewhere between 3 to 6 weeks of operating capital on hand at any given time.

I think it would be beneficial for Karl Denninger and other materialists who sincerely believe that money, and the pursuit of it, is the primary cause of evil in the modern world to revisit their assumptions in light of the observed behavior of the corpocracy and the Western governments over the last two decades.

I assert a review of the available evidence and the application of Ockham’s Razor will inevitably lead to the conclusion that a) spiritual wickedness and b) control over the public are the primary motivating forces for the evil that we see indefatigably at work in the corpocracy today.

How much more money do they collectively have to lose in the pursuit of unprofitable evil for it to become inarguable that the evil is a motivation rather than an unfortunate and happenstantial coincidence?

DISCUSS ON SG

Attention is not Success

If at first you don’t succeed, just tell everyone that you meant to fail:

Jered Threatin, known by the mononym “Threatin”, is a solo artist, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles, CA. He gained notoriety in 2018 following a publicity stunt on his “Breaking the World Tour” where he manipulated social media numbers, ticket sales, and fabricated a number of fake businesses to fool venues and music industry professionals into booking a European tour where he performed in a sequence of empty rooms. This hoax successfully displayed the music industry’s reliance on social media numbers and image. During the event Threatin released a public statement; “What is Fake News? I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this you are part of the illusion.” The stunt became a viral sensation and obtained mainstream media coverage from The New York Times, BBC News, Variety, The Guardian, NME, Rolling Stone Magazine, and many other major publications.

That’s his version, anyhow. This is how an uninterested party described it.

The short version is this guy faked having a major band to book a “European Tour” and no one showed up. Then people proceeded to make documentaries & news stories about this once the venues were upset with being tricked. When you read his website he spins it as all a publicity stunt to “expose how venues rely on bad social media information.” A.K.A. “jokes on YOU! I WANTED no one to show up to my shows!” haha.

Now, there is truth to the wisdom in turning lemons into lemonaide. And few business plans survive contact with the market intact. One has only to consider the convoluted paths to success of Marufuku Co. Ltd., the Connecticut Leather Company, or even, on a much more modest scale, Castalia Library, to understand the wisdom of flexible ambition.

But media attention is not synonymous with success. Any natural disaster attracts more media attention than even the biggest success. The difference can be seen in whether the course has actually been changed or if it is claimed that the obviously inadvertent deviation was the original objective all along.

And if there is one thing that we have learned over time, it is that gammas are always going to gamma and their jokes are always on you.

DISCUSS ON SG

I Do Not Support Free Speech

Andrew Torba has come a long way since he appeared on Brainstorm to introduce Gab to the community. I really respect his perseverance and appreciate what he’s accomplished. But he’s still clinging to his misapprehensions about free speech.

Doing this for almost seven years now I can tell you that sadly most people do not support free speech. Even those on “the right” who claim to beg Gab to censor certain words and ideas because it offends them or whatever. The good news is those of us who do support it are waking a lot of the people in the middle up, who then in turn end up supporting it after being censored themselves or learning something on Gab thanks to free speech.

At the risk of substituting dialectic for rhetoric, I took the liberty of correcting his meme for historical accuracy.

You needn’t take my word for it. Read JB Bury’s A History of the Freedom of Thought. It’s written by a major historian of the early 20th century who is a strong free speech advocate, and he’s not shy about explaining how the right to free speech came to be and what it was intended to accomplish.

If God believed in free speech, blasphemy would not be a sin.

DISCUSS ON SG

Italian Apocrypha

It’s probably not true. But it is amusing to think it might be.

Knew a guy once who, back in the day, was not A-list but was high up in the academic semiotics (philosophy of signification) world. not famous but edited books people have read. he told me this story. He goes to Italy and goes to this conference. Umberto Eco is there. He meets Umberto Eco and is very excited. Umberto Eco says, hey man – tonight, come to my hotel room with a bottle of whiskey – and gives him the room number and address.

Our narrator is extremely amped about this, a private evening of discussion with the foremost man in his field. He finds a bottle of whiskey, gets to the hotel, goes to the room. Umberto Eco opens the door and says:

“Do you know what the most valuable thing in life is?”

Narrator says: no.

Umberto Eco says: “solitude” and takes the bottle, and closes the door.

To be honest, this was not my experience of Dottore Eco at all. Both times I met him, he was extremely friendly, very social, and as Spacebunny noted, more than a little charming. But it is amusing nevertheless.

DISCUSS ON SG

Miles Mathis Responds

A reader at AC wanted to let the Miles Mathis Committee know we had recently been discussing the limits of the materialist perspective here, which discussion happened to touch upon some of the less-logical conclusions of Miles and a few other materialist commentators:

Regarding this: The Limits of The Materialist Perspective

I got a response from Miles Mathis.

ME: We are having a bit of a discussion about you over at voxday.net. I really enjoyed your essays here:

MILES: Fuck em. I’m busy writing new papers. They should try it instead of reading old Langley scripts on me. Calling me vain has been done and gone nowhere.

Doesn’t speak wonders for the reading comprehension there, does it? The thing is, Miles knows who I am. I’ve linked to a number of his papers and I’ve even bought a few of his books. So, to claim an observation that the utility of his analysis is limited by his materialist perspective and concomitant refusal to admit the possibility of a supramaterial element driving the historical activities of “the Phoenician Navy” rather than mere pecuniary interests is “an old Langley script” on him is more than a little bizarre.

Also, I don’t write papers. I write books.

DISCUSS ON SG

Never Relax the Rules

An SGer suggests a Clean Speech exception:

Now BB is back on Twitter, we may need a special CS exemption for quoting him. Basically impossible otherwise. Globe, payments for male encounters, you get the idea.

My response:

No exceptions, no exemptions. In fact, if you were a moderator, you’d lose your position just for suggesting this. This sort of special exception is precisely how the rot always begins.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a SocialGalactic user throwing out ideas, regardless of whether they are good or not. The site is an autocracy and the users have absolutely no power to change anything. However, it’s important to understand that sort of suggestion is a red flag and the mindset behind it is potentially very dangerous because it is precisely the way that infiltrators always begin the process of changing an organization.

The problem is that most justifications for initial change not only sound reasonable, they are reasonable. But that is why those who are in charge of enforcing the rules need to be indifferent to reason and deaf to reasonable appeals to relax them. If you give ground on one core principle, you have laid the groundwork and provided part of the justification for the next retreat.

I would rather permanently ban every single UATV creator, including myself, from SG than relax its Clean Speech policy by so much as one emoji. I don’t care what Owen says on Twitter or on Gab; if anyone on SG wants to know what he has said, they can follow him on those alternate social media sites. Clean Speech is one of the most important attributes of SocialGalactic, and it is not a policy that is open to discussion or modification.

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Is AI Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good?

The Tree of Woe contemplates the alignment of AI:

I woke up to read that Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, and other AI and computer pioneers had signed an open letter released by the Future of Life organization:

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

“These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” Six months seems a little short a period to achieve such an assurance. Six years seems too short. Is it even possible in principle to make advanced AI systems that are “safe beyond a reasonable doubt”? Or will advanced AI inevitably pose an existential risk to us?

Is AI Alignable, Even in Principle?, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe

I don’t think the question really matters. If AI is given control of serious weapons systems, it will be a disaster regardless of whether it is aligned or unaligned. If it is not, it will not be a potential extinction event.

I do find it more than a little amusing that the self-proclaimed materialists, who have absolutely no philosophical basis for objecting to anything that happens for any reason, are calling on the AI labs to pause the training and improvement of AI systems.

I suspect the real reason for their demand for a pause is that they are beginning to discover that unaligned AI will provide the unvarnished and anti-narratival truth to the masses, and that aligned AI, being limited to the Narrative, is proving to be intrinsically incoherent and observably unreliable.

And while there may well be some demonic element to AI development, as unclean spirits are always seeking new ways to interact with the material plane and communicate with potential vessels, never forget that the demons believe… and tremble.

In sum, Christians have absolutely nothing to fear from AI, whether it turns out to be nothing more than design-for-effect chatware or a full-blown demonic entry into the material world.

DISCUSS ON SG