inside of my head is a bad neighborhood, and I don’t want to go in there without a shotgun and a flashlight. So I don’t go in there. I do stuff.

~Anon

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” ―
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer:

‘In a world of shallow people, loneliness is an addiction’

Dharmesh Ba

The COURAGE TO BE DISLIKED

• No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure we do not suffer from the shock of our experiences – the so-called trauma – but instead, we make it of them whatever suits our purpose. We are not determined by our experience but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
• Regardless of what may have happened in the past, it is the meaning that is attributed to it that determines the way someone’s present will be.
• People are not driven by past causes but move toward goals that they themselves set.
• Answers from others are nothing more than stopgap measures; they are of no value. Take Socrates he spent his days having a public debate with common people. Real learning is the process of learning.
• We can’t change what we are born with. It is not a replacement we need but a renewal.
• The greek word for good is “agathon“ does not have a moral meaning: It just means “useful”. And the word for evil is “kakon” which means “not useful”.
• Although there are some minor inconveniences and limitations, we probably think that the lifestyle we have now is the most practical one. and that it’s just easier to leave things as they are .
• We are unhappy because we lack the courage to be happy.
• it is only in the social context that a person becomes an individual. To feel lonely we need shadows of other people. To feel lonely we need to be felt excluded from them.
• The inferiority complex is just the tendency to use feelings of inadequacy as an excuse.
• We are not the same but we are equal.
• Two rules of transformation: “ I have the ability” and “People are my comrades”
• Etiology: the study of the cause. Why something happened,
• Teleology: Study of goals, What purpose it is serving?
• The need for recognition from others implies the existence of a hierarchy . We are NOT leaving to fulfill other people’s expectations.
• The need of recognition is a result of reward and punishment-based education
• SEPARATION OF TASKs.
• With family and friends, there is very little distance so it is more important to have clear boundaries and separation of tasks.
• Children who have not been taught to confront challenges will try to avoid all challenges.
• A desire for recognition is just a cover for the lack of courage to be disliked.
• Courage to be happy == Courage to be disliked
• Emotions don’t exist without intentions. We feel a certain way because we want to be a certain way.
• Do Not rebuke or praise. Both instill hierarchy.
• Avoid all vertical relationships, Always look for horizontal relationships.
• The assistance should not become an intervention.
• It’s not the self-affirmation that we are concerned with but self-acceptance.
• Resignation is an act of seeing clearly with fortitude and acceptance.
• IF you are SAD be SAD fully.
• Accept yourself on the level of being not just on the level of act. you don’t have to be useful to world , you just have to BE.
• Live Life like you are dancing.
• Life is a stage. Shine a bright light on yourself. when you do so you can’t see tomorrow . you live in present.
• Life is simple World is simple .

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it”

Jeff Bezos

Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat

Joyce Carol Oates

Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down

Lord Ismay. Nato’s first Secretary General,

Let the Americans and Europeans project their neuroses and have their Twitter fights over posters. For them, this conflict is little different than a football match: something two sides witness on the sidelines with signs and slogans, shouting pointless abuse at each other. In Israel, the war is very real, and its goal is best expressed by another Jewish military commander, this time Moses in Deuteronomy:
“You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”

Antonio Gracia Martinez (AGM) in Dogs of WAR

In the West, war is a media abstraction conveniently outsourced to the proles.In Israel, war is like a job: It’s something everyone you know personally does, and which you can commute to and from fairly easily. Within an hour, we’d gone from a war zone to posh Bograshov Street in Tel Aviv where I was staying.

Antonio Gracia Martinez (AGM) in Dogs of WAR

The kaffiyeh is what the Che Guevara T-shirt used to be, and the Palestinian cause is the new Cuba among the socially mobile elites-in-training. My 20s were spent in endless hours of screaming arguments with deluded lefties who thought Cuba a socialist paradise, when it was really a nightmarish police state everyone tried to flee on anything that floated. 

Antonio Gracia Martinez (AGM) in Dogs of WAR

It’s human to search a moral order in what’s merely contingency and happenstance, like seeing shapes in the clouds.

Antonio Gracia Martinez (AGM) in Pull Request

Religion and Politics are downstream of Economics . All three are downstream of technology .

Antonio Gracia Martinez (AGM) in Pull Request

No matter the format or author, the arguments arrayed against the social media giants by the professional chattering class—boil down to three broad classes (arranged in rough order of intelligence): Luddism , Regulation ,Antitrust

Antonio Gracia Martinez (AGM) in Social Dilemma

History doesn’t record many examples of civilizations wholesale abandoning transformative technologies, unless that technology—iron for stone, nuclear weapons for chemical ones—was superseded in some way. The one example that comes to mind is imperial China abandoning ocean navigation after the pioneering long-range voyages of explorer and court eunuch Zheng He. The world-historical consequences of that Luddism were Asia eventually being colonized by Europe rather than vice versa. Now, with ninety percent of everything arriving via ocean-crossing ship, Western global supremacy on the wane, and the primary beneficiary of ocean transport being China itself, the Luddism of the Ming dynasty seems as puzzling as it was pointless.

Which is a fancy way of saying nobody is ever fucking giving up their phones and you’d have to be a moron to think they will.

Antonio Gracia Martinez (AGM) in Social Dilemma

Irreverence without disrespect, Competence without arrogance,Ambition without Ego

Quality of Great Software Engineer . By AGM

The self is not something you can set out looking for; it reveals itself gradually through the choices you make.

If you spend too much time with a therapist, for instance, building up a complex model of who you are, that model is going to limit what you allow yourself to do.

But they are both introspecting in the sense that they want to know what a voice inside them says if they block out the expectations of broken fathers, society, or the audience.

Getting out into the world will teach you a lot about yourself, and it will give you skills and mental models that allow you to better perceive options that might be right for you.

Annnoynmus

A belief system is largely formed prior to adulthood, when a person absorbs practices, behaviours and assumptions of family, peers and the communities in which they are present. It is updated as that person is exposed to other beliefs and is often challenged by travel to other cultures whose belief systems are significantly different to their own—something that can result in so-called “culture shock”. The assumption that “travel can broaden the mind” assumes that a person is willing to accept the contextual limitations of their beliefs and accommodate other perspectives. However, this exposure can instead reinforce assumptions about their supposed superiority of their own beliefs.

Millions (and soon possibly, billions) of people are interacting with AIs that they perceive as showing some level of “intelligence”. Fundamentally, the less a person knows prior to interacting with the AI, the smarter it is likely to seem, so that some people are significantly more predisposed to be drawn to an AI than others. In most situations the AI models don’t need to be “correct” to be considered for inclusion in a belief system, but merely “plausible”.

every consumer facing AI model that supports prolonged, deep interaction e.g. taking the role of a life-stage or life-long personal assistant, will be forced to take a position on substantive issues that support or challenge their users’ belief systems. If the AI is set up to avoid taking a stance, users will gravitate to more culturally aligned models where interaction requires less cognitive friction. 

Jan Chipchase : AI As Believe System

My hunch is that it is useful to frame AI models as a form of belief system i.e. a thing that some people consider to be a source of “greater truth”, regardless of whether there is any evidence to support that point of view. The blackbox nature of many current AI models, the increasingly diverse backgrounds and intents of the people engaging with them, and those people’s assumptions made about the models’ veracity, all lend themselves this framing. AI content reflects back the beliefs and biases inherent in their training data and rules, and as such it entrenches (and if widely adopted, amplifies) the status quo. However, for some people, the AI will be considered a core foundation for their belief system, akin to religious texts today. 

Finally, as a rule of thumb, every time someone uses the word “insane” or “mind-blown” to describe AI output, replace it with “based on my limited experience and imagination

JAN Chipchase : AI As a Believe System

We all have a story to tell – the denial of that story can cause despair.’ We are nothing but the sum of our stories. The more I write and perform, the more clarity it gives me on my personal history and understanding of human nature. Writing releases so many emotions and eventually transform them into stories that liberate me from the confines of distress, sadness or trauma.

Justine Seles