tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36863400748699944232024-03-24T16:31:59.005-07:00Jacob ex machinaRadical HeterodoxyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger120125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-54538267106970915342020-02-07T12:00:00.003-08:002020-02-13T10:00:02.170-08:00Network Behavior and Christian Ethics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<span style="background-color: white;">In designing software for computer networks, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle">Robustness Principle</a> states </span></div>
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"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"</blockquote>
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The first half of the Robustness Principle ensures that the program doesn't pollute the network with malformed output, and the second half ensures high uptime. When this code of conduct becomes the dominant design among individual agents, the network as a whole functions smoothly and fulfills its purpose.</div>
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Humans society is also a communication network of sorts, where moral norms govern the principles of interaction. The dominant moral code of the modern world is Secular Humanism, a non-theistic descendant of Christianity. It inherits some ideas from its Christian forebears in an attenuated form, especially Human Rights and care for victims.</div>
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We take for granted that it is good to help the destitute, or that each human has a moral worth no matter how poor, foreign, or disfigured they are. But these concepts weren't present in the Roman world prior to the rise of Christianity. As 1,700 years of Christian dominance is coming to an end, it's hard for us to comprehend that people once lived in a completely different moral universe.<br />
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Comparing Secular Humanism to Christianity, we see that the former is new, rational, and small while Christianity is old, surprising, and syncretic. It is like the difference between a Christmas tree farm and an old-growth pine forest, or a fresh moonshine and an old scotch.<br />
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The distillation process that gave birth to Secular Humanism was a rational philosophical movement away from religion, known as the Enlightenment. Many of the moral <i>goals</i> of Christianity made it through the filter of rational analysis, while its ethical <i>principles</i> <i>of conduct</i> did not fare so well and were largely discarded.<br />
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This is a terrible loss. Morality (<i>what </i>is good) without ethics (<i>how </i>to act) can and will be abused to bully other humans in the pursuit of status, power, and other scarce resources. We see this dramatically illustrated by the world of social media. Everybody claims to be a good person, at the same time that "cancelling" members of rival factions is a popular pastime. Appeal to genuine moral good becomes a cynical move in vicious competitions among people to dominate and destroy each other.<br />
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The lost ethical codes of Christianity can be seen <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence">as fences</a> that create and maintain a positive-sum moral commons. They constrain the behavior of each individual to produce more benefit than cost for the community. The result is a community that functions better for everyone. These principles include:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Anti-Pharaseeism. Prohibition against public displays of piety and virtue (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6&version=NIV">Matt 6:1-8</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23&version=esv">Matt ch. 23</a>)</li>
<li>Non-retaliation (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A38-48&version=ESV">Matt 5:38-48</a>)</li>
<li>Forgiveness (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A21-22&version=esv">Matt 18:21-22</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+15%3A11-32&version=NIV">Luke 15:11-32</a>)</li>
<li>Self-criticism, rather than criticizing others (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+7&version=NIV">Matt 7:3-5</a>)</li>
<li>Prohibition on envy (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&version=NIV">Ex. 20:17</a>)</li>
<li>Avoidance of mind-states and speech that lead to violence, especially anger and lust (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&version=NIV">Matt 5:21-30</a>)</li>
<li>Humility (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+14%3A7-11&version=ESV">Luke 14:7-11</a>)</li>
<li>Distrust for mob justice (the Crucifixion)</li>
</ul>
The underlying principle of Christian ethics can be summarized to something like a Robustness Principle for human networks: be generous in the behavior you accept from others, and conservative in the behavior you impose on others. Elsewhere in the scriptures, there is justification for authority figures to get rid of truly bad actors who repeatedly violate these principles in order to maintain a high quality of conduct within the Church.<br />
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The writers of the New Testament are much more aware than we are today of how groups of people with good intentions can go down dark paths. Its ethical norms constrain us from sharpening moral goods into weapons to use against our fellow humans.<br />
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What would a networked world look like with a revival of Christian Ethics? I don't know. But it would likely be better than what we have. The norm of forgiveness alone would put a big dent in the worst excesses of cancel culture and other moral panics.<br />
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But there is an implementation problem with Christian ethics. If most people follow Christian ethics, it leads to a peaceful, gentle world. But if a small group of people do, they will tend to lose out to people that are more ruthless.<br />
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The ancient Christians bootstrapped their moral order into being with a transcendent ideal. They believed that they would win by losing, since the scales of justice would be balanced in the afterlife. It's hard to get a group of people to defy immediate self-interest without such a belief. Observers witnessed their sincerity through the ultimate demonstration of skin-in-the-game: martyrdom.<br />
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Today, Christians and people who want to live by Christian Ethics may lose social media battles if they refuse to adopt effective tactics that betray their principles. But it is not so grim for us as it was for the early church. For one thing, the penalties are not nearly so severe. And the digital world is fluid and offers social possibilities that the Roman Empire did not. Christians can fork their own private social networks where the majority of those who opt-in abide by the Christian code.<br />
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Over time, if these forums become known for high-quality discourse, outsiders may see them as a refreshing oasis amidst a world of danger and noise. <b>Christ never cancels people</b>. This could lead to a revival of Christian norms, or at least a powerful witness.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-4538643650231920112019-12-11T21:09:00.000-08:002019-12-12T19:19:20.814-08:00On the nature of forgiveness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Forgiveness is not an emotion or a single action. It is rather a change in your ontological* orientation towards the forgiven person, removing them from the category of "enemy". Like love, forgiveness is a lifelong commitment. When you forgive someone you commit to carrying the burden of treating them as if the wrongs they have done you are wiped away.<br />
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You can forgive someone and still feel angry or hurt. Forgiveness doesn't depend on our feelings. We do not control our feelings but we always have freedom to forgive. What is required of us by forgiveness is that we do not allow ourselves to be motivated by the negative emotions we feel towards the person who has wronged us. And while we can't make our emotional pain disappear, we can try not to dwell on it.<br />
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Forgiveness is an asceticism. Like fasting or abstinence, forgiveness requires the repeated renunciation of desire. The impulse to lash out or complain about the person may arise 10,000 times, and 10,000 times you let it go.<br />
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Forgiveness is also a lot like "agape" love. It is not just an emotion or a simple action. You can love someone through having a wide array of emotions towards them. No one action fulfills the duty of love. Rather, love is a change in your ontological orientation towards someone, seeing their being as part of yours, and committing that you will act for their benefit as if it were your own.<br />
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Forgiveness is the sibling of love.<br />
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I had a hard time forgiving a person because I couldn't stop feeling hurt and angry. I wanted to forgive them but for a long time I couldn't figure out how to do it. Driving my car home today, these thoughts came to me, and I realize that now I can. Hurt and anger may still linger. But the choice to change my orientation towards the person to a forgiven one is entirely within my control.<br />
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I felt freedom when I had these thoughts. I laughed out loud in my apartment, astonished that the Nativity Fast had taught me the key to forgiveness of all things.<br />
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* I debated using a five-dollar word where a nickel would do. What do I mean by "change in ontological orientation"? An ontology is the map of concepts that one uses to make sense of the world. When someone has a change in ontological status to your eyes, you see them as a different sort of being. It is a kind of revelation. One example is the marriage sacrament in the Orthodox Church. In the sacrament "the two become one flesh" in the eyes of the church, the eyes of the couple, and in the eyes of God. That's a change in ontological status (2 singles, to 1 married couple).<br />
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Here I use the word "ontological" to imply the same kind of realness to the conceptual shift.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-48293324726474180292019-10-16T14:49:00.000-07:002019-11-05T06:49:40.614-08:00On Sense and Incense: sensuality and religious practice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h3>
I. </h3>
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I love the smell of frankincense in the morning. The sense of smell is the most primordial. It is said to have the strongest link to memory. Perhaps the smell of our mothers is the first memory we ever make.<br />
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In the morning I burn frankincense on my prayer altar at home, and it reminds me of church. My prayer corner <i>is</i> a little bubble of church. I sit down in front of it and I am no longer mentally in my apartment. I am not thinking my usual job and errand shaped thoughts. My eyes are drawn to the eyes of the icons. I sit in the gaze of Christ.<br />
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I am an impulsive person and I have a hard time keeping a routine. Many times I have failed to stick to a goal of daily prayer or meditation. But I love to light the incense and the candles. Instead of forcing myself into the routine, I am drawn into it by my sense of delight. When I used to be a Buddhist, my longest streak of daily meditation coincided with the period when I had built a similar altar with a statue of Buddha replacing the icon of Christ.<br />
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Growing up in a church tradition with "four bare walls and a sermon", who would have thought that frankincense or myrrh were real things? I remember reading the words in the Bible, describing the gifts the magi made to the child Christ. But there was always this unbridgeable gulf between the present and the past. The past had temples and gold and incense and priests. We had cheap carpet, low-slung ceilings, business suits, and boring sermons. Our aesthetic universe was 1950s Americana. I would not have thought to question that it could be otherwise.<br />
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But in Orthodoxy there is no break between past and present. The church grows forward through time like a tree rooted in the ancient world. If you dropped a modern orthodox in a church service in the imperial heart of Constantinople in 400 A.D., he would follow along without missing a beat. He would be delighted to see the liturgy celebrated by Archbishop John Chrysostom, a gifted homilist who wrote the liturgy we still use today. The roots of church practices stretch even deeper - drawing inspiration from ancient Jewish liturgies. That same orthodox time-traveler would not feel completely lost in a Jewish temple service, though he might draw puzzled looks if he reflexively made the sign of the cross.<br />
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I find the ancient church to be surprising and delightful. It is like living in a 2,000 year old treehouse. The history of the church is inscribed on the walls, in the icons and architecture. A natural question, "who is in that icon?" leads to a chapter of the story of the church in the world or a lesson in theology. My interest in reading icons has led me to learn the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets (invented by our <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius">Saints Cyril and Methodius</a>, the "Apostles to the Slavs" in the 800s AD).<br />
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For most of my life I didn't even know that this kind of church was an option. In America, it seems to be a secret. And yet something like it was the norm for the majority of Christian history.<br />
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In my childhood religious experience, I was starved of beauty. Beauty was a factor that once drew me to Tibetan Buddhism. As an orthodox, I feel like a starving man who has been invited into a banquet.<br />
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I've been meaning to write and talk about my journey to Christianity over the past 18 months or so. Converting to Christianity is a strange thing to do for a modern man, especially one in my social circles (Buddhist, hippie, techie, San Franciscan). I hope some readers might be inspired by my journey. And I know some people will judge me to be stupid or deluded. I accept that.<br />
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The journey had an intellectual and an emotional component. It is a continuing journey of discovery that I suspect has no end. The emotional piece felt like falling in love. I fell in love with many facets of the church - the monastics, the historic continuity, the mystical theology. And one of the things I fell in love with was the sensuality of the church. My love, she is beautiful.<br />
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<h3>
II. </h3>
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I remember the first time I saw someone prostrating, that is kneeling down and touching his head to the ground. He was a monk in long black robes and it was during a pre-dawn, candlelit service at the moment of the consecration of the Eucharist. I wanted to try it, but I felt too awkward. My mental habits were still too modern. After being around people prostrating enough times I worked up the courage to try it. When the initial awkwardness passed, I felt a sense of peace. In prostrating to God my body is implicitly teaching me about God and my relationship to him. Perhaps the peace I felt is because I had found a God worth prostrating to.<br />
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Orthodox worship emphasizes the majesty of God. The pageantry, the bowing, the kneeling, and etc. feels strange to a modern American. But a medieval peasant would recognize immediately the aesthetic universe that we are in - <i>this is how you act in front of a monarch.</i> The words we use in worship are applied to monarchs; "your majesty", "your grace" and "your worship" were forms of address for one. The design of the Orthodox church and its liturgy is to place us in the throne room of God with the Trinity enthroned as the monarch of the universe.<br />
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In this world of flattened hierarchies, there is a relief to finding something majestic and worthy of worship. It might even be a necessity for a good life. From a secular and symbolic perspective, Jordan Peterson identifies the concept of God with a person's highest human ideal. One could argue that everybody has a God, whether they know it or not.<br />
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I imagine the objection of some readers. Isn't it shallow to focus on aesthetics? Isn't the core of religion an intellectual activity? Isn't it about belief and instruction?<br />
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First, much of the aesthetics of the church are also instructional. In the early days of the church, most laity were illiterate Roman citizens and slaves, and the icons and hymns were used as teaching aids to instruct people in the Bible and church history.<br />
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But the ritual practices are not primarily for instructing the mind. Their purpose is to instruct the heart.<br />
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III.</h3>
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I read a book recently by James K.A. Smith about the power of habit and repeated activities to shape our desires ("You Are What You Love"). The main thrust of the book is that repeated activities that shape our desires are called "liturgies", and our life is full of liturgies, conscious and unconscious. Checking twitter is a liturgy. I'm on a twitter fast, and I intensely feel how twitter usage has shaped my desire.<br />
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There is a vein of Christianity that rejects ritual practices that do not directly instruct the conscious mind, cutting out anything other than preaching, praying, and singing. It judges these other practices as unnecessary vain repetitions or superstitions. I grew up in one such church. This kind of church life carries with it an implicit model of what a human being is. The human is primarily a mind, and so religion is about putting the right things in that mind.<br />
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This is the dominant kind of thinking that shaped American culture and our view of religion. We think that if you want to know a religion, the most important thing is to study its beliefs. That's certainly how I was trained to see the world.<br />
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James K.A. Smith is a different kind of protestant, the kind that calls himself a small-c "catholic" and sees value in re-embracing some liturgical practices of big-C Catholicism and older brands of Protestantism. He's even favorable to incense use in church! In focusing too much on the mind, he estimates that many churches miss the role of liturgical repetition in shaping the heart. Given all the secular and commercial liturgies we are exposed to, it is necessary to fill our lives with counter-liturgies to bring us back to God. It seems to me that he's on the right track.<br />
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I wish him luck in shaping a movement of more powerful and rooted churches. Secular modernity is waxing and the church is waning. Now is the time to grow our roots deep.<br />
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In reading Smith's book I reflected on just how many physical, repetitive and embodied practices we have in the Orthodox church to shape our minds and desires.<br />
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<ul>
<li>When we kiss the icons, we teach ourselves that Christ and the saints are precious things</li>
<li>When we cross ourselves, we remember that we are marked people of God</li>
<li>The liturgical calendar reminds us annually of the important events of our faith. The 12 major feast days and the many minor ones mark the passage of time. Time itself is inscribed in the life of Christ.</li>
<li>The human brain has special structures dedicated to facial recognition and processing. Seeing the faces of holy people in icons brings them to life and our minds build a relationship with them.</li>
<li>Lighting candles teaches us that we can pray even when we don't have words </li>
<li>Bowing, kneeling, and prostrating teach us the majesty of God</li>
<li>Incense during worship produces an instant visceral portal back into the mental space of holiness and provides a demarkation between the sacred and the profane. Sacred music does the same thing.</li>
<li>When we fast, we learn how to control our desires, and that small sacrifices are not to be feared. "It is not a sin not to fast, but fasting teaches us how not to sin."</li>
<li>Fasting together creates a shared bond as a congregation... as does feasting together at the end of a fast.</li>
</ul>
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In answer to the more severe kinds of Christian that might criticize these tools and practices as unnecessary, I would agree with them. They aren't strictly necessary. Christ was a wandering rabbi, and his followers were mostly poor. The early Christians met in secret in underground graves, not in grand temples. However, though they are not necessary, they are useful. The practices and tools of ancient Christianity are an inheritance that has been built over time and passed down to us. Shouldn't we be grateful for the full inheritance and put it to use? Some of those pieces don't fit modern tastes, but should we change our practices to fit in?<br />
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I am 36 years old and I am not that great at being me. But I am better than I was. As I learn to navigate myself, I am learning the importance of my body. It has a strong hand on the rudder, to the frequent consternation of my mind. I am trying to live a good life one day at a time. And each of those days start with the smell of incense.<br />
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<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial; font-size: 15px;">About me: I'm just a beginner, a recently baptized member of the Eastern Church. I'm pretty excited about it at the moment, and I like to share things I like. Please forgive me if I unintentionally say anything that misleads or offends. </i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-45835960744530632142019-03-12T08:38:00.000-07:002019-03-13T15:14:13.927-07:00Mindfulness for Christians<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The modern world ain't so good for your psyche. It's easy to get strung out, anxious as a wildebeast in a lion convention, with thoughts looping through your mind like a roller coaster.<br />
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Eastern religions have a bunch of techniques for developing peace of mind, colloquially referred to as "mindfulness". They generally involve directing your attention away from your thoughts and into something else, like your breath. This has useful side effects for defusing negative emotions like stress and training the purposeful direction of your attention.<br />
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Mindfulness has gone mainstream as a therapeutic and self-help practice in the West. The monks and yogis (and nuns and yoginis) of the East did these practices as preparation for contemplation of Ultimate Reality. Westerners use them to run a dual-income household under the demands of modern capitalism without drowning in a pool of tears. Either way, they do a lot of good.<br />
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So Christian and post-Christian society has looked to Buddhism and Hinduism for mental tools to cope with an often unpleasant reality. What is missed is that Christianity itself has a long tradition of similar mental tools for calming the mind and directing attention, that also help to grow in the Christian faith. It's overlooked because these techniques come from <i>Eastern </i>Christianity, which is unfamiliar in Western society. However, as far as I can tell there is no dogmatic incompatibility which would prevent a Western Protestant from using the mental tools of the Eastern Church.<br />
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The most powerful tool in the pocket of every Eastern Christian is known as "The Jesus Prayer". It has a few different forms, but I prefer the middle-length[0] form which is regularly spoken in church services:<br />
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"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me".<br />
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This is used as a mantra, repeated over and over. It can be used in times of stress, to short-circuit anger or racing thoughts, or just when you feel bad and don't know what to pray. Like Buddhists, Eastern Christians identify uncontrolled thoughts and desires as a major source of unnecessary suffering, and they prescribe the Jesus Prayer as medicine.<br />
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It's a simple practice, but the history and use of it runs deep. Its earliest recorded origin dates to the 5th century founders of Christian monasticism in the Sinai desert. The Jesus Prayer is the monastic's single most powerful tool in his or her quest to dwell in God. In the beginning stages, it clears the mind and the heart of passions and focuses the attention. There are also further stages that monks write about that are hard for me to comprehend. Eventually, monks seek to have this prayer constantly running in their hearts under its own power, every second of their lives[1].<br />
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Christian monks and nuns use the Jesus Prayer for contemplation of Ultimate Reality. But lay people use it for every circumstance, which includes running a dual-income household under the demands of modern capitalism without drowning in a pool of tears. The Jesus Prayer is their constant companion in traffic, at work, and when relating to others.<br />
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I once dated a girl that was a Buddhist. She carried around prayer beads and used them to count mantras. She liked to recite them silently to herself when sitting on a bus or a train as a substitute for checking social media on her phone. She found it left her in a better mood. Similarly, Eastern Christians often carry around prayer ropes and use them to recite the Jesus Prayer. They are a wonderful replacement for checking Twitter or Instagram.<br />
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If you're a Protestant Christian, you probably pray free-form prayers at specific times and when you feel you need it. But it is useful to have a little short invocation that you don't have to think about. The Jesus prayer teaches us to rely on Christ, and not on our own intellects. There is no demand on us to come up with the correct words, or to petition God in just the right way when we are distressed. Instead we just invoke the name of Christ, constantly, and trust in him. We run to him like little children and count on him to do what is right for us.<br />
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Elder Porphyrios of the Greek church says that it is not necessary for us to fight the darkness within us. Instead, we only need to open a little window to let the light in. The Jesus Prayer is that little window. The most tiny, minimal effort of turning towards God leaves us open to welcome his grace.<br />
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In this post I have drawn parallels between Eastern Christianity and other non-Christian religions. It would be irresponsible for me to not mention that elders in the Eastern church often resist this comparison[2]. In particular, they point out that Christian mental practices are <i>relational</i> tools<i> </i>for contemplation of an ultimate reality that is <i>personal.</i> In Buddhism ultimate reality is impersonal. So I hope I've done my duty by stating that caveat.<br />
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What unites the Christian and non-Christian takes on mindfulness is that they both encourage explicit awareness of our thoughts. Instead of identifying with our thoughts and thinking of them as what we are, we view the thoughts as something that happens. And that disidentification then allows us some amount of control to shape them and to improve our existence.<br />
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There are many more uses of the Jesus prayer, but this post is intended as an introduction. If you are a Christian looking for a more <i>Christian </i>practice of mindfulness, try incorporating this into your prayer life. You might start with saying it a fixed number of times in the morning and evening to get used to it. A prayer rope is useful, but not necessary. Try to focus on the meaning of the words - who Jesus Christ is, what it means to call him "Lord", and what his mercy looks like. Then you can take it out into the world and have Christ as your constant companion.<br />
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Brothers and sisters of all faiths, may we survive life in this hectic world together, with the help God's grace.<br />
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<i>About me: I'm just a beginner, a catechumen in the Eastern Church. I'm pretty pumped about it at the moment, and I like to share things I like. Please forgive me if I unintentionally say anything that misleads or offends. </i><br />
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[0] The shorter form is "Lord, have mercy" and the longer form is "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner".<br />
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[1] See <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mXl8C4-M_4">this 60 minutes special</a> on the monastics of Mt. Athos, the holiest site in Eastern Christianity. Be sure to watch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1lvruy-j2c">part 2</a>!<br />
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[2] See Father Sophrony's <a href="https://www.orthodoxprayer.org/Articles_files/Sophrony-Jesus%20Prayer.html">writings on the Jesus Prayer</a>. He was once a serious Buddhist before coming back to Eastern Christianity.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-22216429009463389372019-03-11T11:16:00.002-07:002019-03-13T13:19:12.806-07:00Porphyrios (an Ode)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Poor-fear-ee-ohs<br />
Who ever thought I would love someone with such a name?<br />
But as I get to know it, it plays on the tongue<br />
like a whiskey and cigar<br />
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What a blessed man! To be God’s puppy dog.<br />
You decided you deserved nothing,<br />
begged,<br />
wagged your tail.<br />
When he closed his door you did not go away<br />
until one night he took you into his house.<br />
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You say this is the easy way,<br />
Don’t you see how hard it is?<br />
To be so utterly unsophisticated.<br />
I have an 8th ex-girlfriend<br />
and a 3rd career<br />
envy my coworkers that have more shares than me<br />
resent my government<br />
have kinks<br />
and daydream about sex, sometimes, in church.<br />
How could I ever be a puppy?<br />
Maybe I could be a smelly beggar outside God’s door<br />
whom he slips a buck every now and then<br />
out of pity.<br />
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But oh, Porphyrios!<br />
You have shown the way.<br />
It is never too late to grow in trust and simplicity,<br />
wag more, whine less,<br />
and maybe one day I will nip at your ear in the lap of God.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-53486239643938152802019-03-11T09:31:00.001-07:002019-03-11T11:17:40.304-07:00Fire Built for One (1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">At a campfire built for one</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">my heart aches for every flame you do not see. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">When the sun rises, I will weep for every golden ray </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">nudging the mountain awake,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">lifting the mist off of the tree,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">and chasing the hare across the field.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I learned that joy was made for two,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">in these last three years,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">I would breathe the in</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">and you would breathe the out. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">There was never any difference between me and you</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">and there still isn’t, now that we hate each other. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">There is nothing in life that I haven’t earned,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">threefold.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre;">And I know I will carry us both to my grave. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-33965333360410813342018-10-30T21:06:00.001-07:002018-12-09T16:06:22.774-08:00The Spider<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HP9jRQ61mtg/W9k-Tf3NDKI/AAAAAAAACRw/ZPyipHGqr5slwjnMYMpZK-QCBzwkclSOQCLcBGAs/s1600/spider-web-3718766_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HP9jRQ61mtg/W9k-Tf3NDKI/AAAAAAAACRw/ZPyipHGqr5slwjnMYMpZK-QCBzwkclSOQCLcBGAs/s320/spider-web-3718766_1280.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The spider is a wonderful creature.<br />
She weaves such a regular web<br />
which has such regular features<br />
all plotted in her tiny head.<br />
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The spokes meet in the middle<br />
the net runs round and round.<br />
How they get there seems a riddle,<br />
tiny miles above the ground.<br />
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The spider swings across vast spaces<br />
she plunges unimaginable depths<br />
without a hint of fear on her faces<br />
or the slightest thought of death.<br />
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Her limbs are slim and busy,<br />
her touch, subtle as the wind.<br />
Weaving and leaving her monuments<br />
wherever she has been<br />
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When her work is done she sleeps<br />
for day after day in her home<br />
content that her work will reap her<br />
the fruits of what she has sewn.<br />
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May my house be open to host her<br />
may her wonders always be near<br />
Let us raise a happy toast to her -<br />
nature's engineer.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-71325985883974734002018-09-02T12:49:00.000-07:002019-03-11T11:17:10.851-07:00Four Things I Wish I Had Learned in School<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I was a kid I was good at school. That turned out to be way less important than I thought it would be. The basic school skills of memorization, arithmetic, and essay writing are fine things to develop. But this narrow range of training omitted many important skills that I would need in life. And worse, this curriculum left me squarely in middle of my comfort zone for 13 years, so I never had to develop the meta-skills of skill acquisition. I was cocky and complacent. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I hit the adult world, the adult world hit back. I was terribly unprepared to navigate its complexity. I found myself needing to develop, on the fly, a different skill-set from the one I had been taught. I needed to work on sensing opportunities, communicating my desires, detecting and removing fantasy from my world-model, attention management, making friends, letting go of resentment, and effective problem selection. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">11 years navigating the turbulent currents of independent adult life is long enough that I’ve started piecing together some of the skills I need to survive and thrive. Along the way, I’ve found some specific practices that make life easier and better. When I run into one of these, I have the thought “I wish someone told me about this earlier!”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">To save you from the same trouble, I’m going to tell you about them now. </span><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Practicing improvisational acting puts you into relationship with your subconscious genius. Your conscious mind learns that there is another entity sharing the head, or many. You learn the subconscious self’s habits and desires, and you learn how to harness its creative power for your own purposes. </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The tao of improv is the experience of effortless creativity. When you are in the flow, you surprise even yourself by saying and doing things you didn’t know you knew how to do. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The greater tao of improv is flowing with others, effortless creativity in community. You learn how to trust and give and receive. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Improv in front of an audience is terrifying. There is no way to completely prepare. You must learn to accept failure, and to focus on the process. Are you flowing, permeable yet present, receiving and giving? That’s the thing you can control. There is so much else that you can’t control, including the audience’s mood and reaction. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I started learning about improv from a book, <i>Impro: Improvisation and the Art of the Theatre</i> by Keith Johnstone. I found the writing provocative, and then I just had to try some of the exercises with my romantic partner at the time. It’s a great place to start. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I found that the skills of improv bled over into other areas of my life. Having had the experience of telling improv fictional stories, I found it much easier to present in front of an audience for business reasons. I grew to trust in that my subconscious mind could come up with appropriate words for the situation, as long as I know the material. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I also have the confidence that I can teach anything I know. Lecturing is not so different from telling an improv story, and add in some hands-on pedagogy and you have an effective workshop. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Improv is a fantastic personal growth practice. But it is also very fun and worth doing for its own sake. One of my catchphrases is, “Improv is the most fun you can legally have as an adult”. </span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DZNOOYy1Xm0/W4w6n4D6DuI/AAAAAAAACPw/DQExKocLg4IKVFL5KtXul0swDrF-Z3newCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_0697_3.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DZNOOYy1Xm0/W4w6n4D6DuI/AAAAAAAACPw/DQExKocLg4IKVFL5KtXul0swDrF-Z3newCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_0697_3.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a motivational poster on the wall of my lifting gym that says, “the old that is strong does not whither”. That’s what I want for myself. As I’ve gotten older, I find myself plagued by little injuries here and there. Had I been stronger, some of those injuries could have been prevented. And I believe that getting stronger now will help prevent injuries in the future. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I’m 80, I want to be like those old guys on youtube with the coke-bottle glasses that can still deadlift and squat a few hundred pounds. I want to bench-press my grandkids.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lifting heavy things improperly is a major cause of injuries in life and at work. Powerlifting not only strengthens your muscles, joints, tendons, and bones, but will teach you the theory and practice of how to lift things without injury. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, powerlifting can also </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cause </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">injury, especially if you dive in recklessly without proper training and theory. I’m paying for supervised small-group classes where a coach watches me lift and corrects my form. Not everybody has that available. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Starting Strength </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is a classic manual for getting started on strength training. If you start with that book and a buddy and post videos of your lifts to reddit for form review, that’s a way to get started on a budget. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lifting makes me feel great. It feels good to be strong. It must generate endorphins or something. It takes away stress and brightens my mood. As someone who tends towards depression, that’s very important that I stay physically active. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I started powerlifting because I hoped that deadlifts would rehab a lower back injury that is keeping me out of Jiu Jitsu class. As I’ve done it, I’ve fallen in love with lifting for its own sake. I fantasize about my next lifting day. And when I get back to Jiu Jitsu, not only will it keep my back safe, but I’m going to be a stronger and more dangerous competitor. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finally, the constant feeling of progress that lifting provides is a good backbone to my life. It is gamified by default, and there’s nothing like hitting new personal best lifts and new milestones. If I’m struggling in other parts of my life, seeing the weights move up give me comfort and motivation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Probably the single area where my life is going the best is in relationship. I am rich in friendship and connection. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">This hasn’t always been the case. I used to struggle to connect to people. I grew up socially isolated and I was a stereotypical nerd. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I credit the practice of intentional relating with the biggest piece of that change. Intentional or authentic relating is an umbrella term that encompasses a family of practices including eye contact, asking deepening questions, noticing and communicating emotions, and reciprocal vulnerability. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Intentional relating is mindfulness applied to relationship. It creates a safe container to practice talking about real emotion that might normally feel too embarrassing. It also provides a great container for practicing healthy conflict. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The main effects this practice has had on me less is to make me less afraid of people and make me like other people more. It’s hard to overstate how important that is. It’s qualitatively changed my experience of life. I get what I want more than I used to. I turned from an introvert to an extrovert. My social life is great. Because I like people more, I like myself more. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The world is full of people, so the more comfortable you are with people the better your life will be. For a long time, I didn’t realize this was a thing I could practice and learn. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here’s a list of relating methodologies I have practiced. Some of these might be more accessible to you where you live than others. </span></div>
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<li>Intentional questions, such as the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">36 questions to fall in love</a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or conversation card decks you can buy on Amazon</span></li>
<li>Circling is my current favorite thing. I practice with the <a href="https://www.circlinginstitute.com/" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Circling Institute</a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which runs classes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Asheville, NC. There are other circling groups throughout the world with their own take on the practice.</span></li>
<li><a href="https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/gsb/files/article-idftp-power-tgroups-experiential-learning.pdf" style="font-size: 11pt; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: pre;">T-Group</a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a practice made famous by the </span><a href="https://poetsandquants.com/2018/07/22/inside-touchy-feely-stanfords-iconic-mba-course/" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stanford Business School</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It involves sitting with a leaderless small group of people and experimenting with interacting with each other. Focused is kept on the present-moment emotions and desires of the participants. There’s often some conceptual curriculum before a session, such as Nonviolent Communication (NVC) which is a useful methodology for becoming mindful of your inner emotional landscape. There’s a group that meets in Berkeley that is NVC-heavy.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I took a year-long peer-counseling program heavily influenced by humanist psychology. Learning to hold space for others is a very good way to turbo-boost your EQ growth.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Compassion meditation or praying for people, depending on which spiritual tradition you prefer</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are a bunch of neat intentional relating games out there. Sometimes they go under the brand name of </span><a href="https://www.authrev.com/ar-games/" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: pre;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Relating Games”</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The books “Nonviolent Communication” and “Radical Honesty” are good places to start if you don’t have access to training courses where you live. Practice some of the techniques with friends. Note: take Radical Honesty slowly. The book can push you to go too far, too fast. </span></li>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think everyone who works with people, which is almost everybody, would benefit tremendously from this curriculum. I wish hands-on training was available in more locations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">On a practical level, I’m available to lead intentional relating games and workshops for your group, and I can refer other people who can also do so. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I almost didn’t include this on the list because of my perception that this piece of advice would be too popular. You’ve probably heard people telling you to meditate before. It can feel like a chore. And I am no expert meditator. There are many levels to it beyond where I’ve gone. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, the exploration of meditation carries with it a philosophical payload that is invaluable. The most important for me is the difference between conception and perception. Concepts are the mental models of our mind. Perception is what comes in through the senses, what is actually happening. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The perceptual world is more peaceful and stable than our conceptual world. It is a haven. When my mind is turbulent and out of control, I can touch in with the world of my senses. My mind might be thinking something like “my life is over!”, but in the world of my senses the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, my breath is rising and falling. Much of the distress I experience is due to my mind ruminating over concepts and my perceived place in social hierarchies, and not due to my actual experience. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once you’ve developed the meditative practice of mindfulness, of “seeing what is really there”, it can be applied to many different activities: art, dancing, relating. Mindfulness is like salt. It can season almost any dish. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another thing that meditation gives me is awareness of my mental and emotional state. When I sit down to meditate, I can tell if I am agitated or calm, distracted or focused. I get used to noticing my mental state and I target calmer, more peaceful mental states as a life goal, like other people might target weight loss. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are probably other reasons to meditate. As I said, I am no expert on the topic. But the habits of mind I have developed from the time I have spent meditating are invaluable. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;">Conclusion</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">If I take a moment to fantasize about going to school that includes improv, powerlifting, authentic relating, and meditation, that sounds awesome. I think younger me would have enjoyed that and been challenged by it. What about you? What practices have served you best to navigate life? What do you wish you had learned years ago? Leave a comment. </span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-58952303386192863322018-08-20T18:25:00.000-07:002018-08-21T14:03:53.546-07:00Surviving in the Alaskan Wilderness<style type="text/css">
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“It is extremely challenging and some students WILL quit. Expect to suffer.”</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.californiasurvivaltraining.com/alaska-field-course">The marketing materials</a> appealed to me. At the time of signing up for the one-week survival course in January, I was in the early days of recovering from a crushing romantic breakup. I wanted to be lost, obliterated, remade. I wanted physical suffering, perhaps as some kind of penance, perhaps to take my mind off the spiritual pain. The survival course sounded perfect. I pulled out my credit card.</div>
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By the time the course actually rolled around in July, I was a different person. I had a new home and a new routine. My emotions had stabilized. But nevertheless, the Alaskan Field Course approached, a foreboding presence on my Google calendar. It was a wall or moat, dividing the calendar into distinct before times and after times. July Jacob had to find new motivations for following through on the commitment of January Jacob. I found four reasons for doing it:</div>
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<b>(1)</b> I wanted to test my will. Life is hard and I am soft. There seems to be a lot of obstacles between me and the life I want to live. I wanted a difficult experience that forced me to go beyond my previous limits, an experience that not everybody made it through. It functioned as a symbol to me that I would be able to conquer difficulties elsewhere.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-converted-space">It's not quite that I want to be a hero. But I want to know that I'm capable of being a hero. I have this fantasy that if there were something difficult and important to do, that I would have the will power to step up and do it. But if my will is untested, it's just a fantasy. By doing hard things, I gain some confidence that I am the person I imagine myself to be. </span><br />
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<b>(2)</b> I love comfort too much. On the big 5 personality model, I score above average in neuroticism, loosely defined as sensitivity to negative emotions. I like to have my home environment arranged to be comfortable and quiet and I feel distressed if I can’t accomplish that. I try to fight this. In the woods - starving, sleeping on leaves, being cold and wet when it rained, doing hard labor - I knew that comfort would not be an option. I would be forced to learn how to be comfortable with discomfort. I might still instinctively seek comfort, but I want to have the knowledge that I can handle discomfort when it is necessary. </div>
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<b>(3)</b> I wanted to have the knowledge that I could survive wherever I was in the world. I wanted nature to seem less hostile and more like home.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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<b>(4)</b> In the intervening 7 months, I had told a lot of friends that I was going to do the course, so I didn’t want to look weak by backing out or quitting. This might have been a stronger motivation than I like.</div>
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The Alaskan Field Course involves surviving under instructor supervision for a week in the Alaskan wilderness with minimal equipment - just clothes, a canteen, backpack, knife, and a small length of cord. No sleeping bags, food, tents, or water purification tech.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Both my January self and my July self got their desires met. I can’t remember ever suffering so much physically. I was starving and sleep deprived most of the time. Food is not a top 2 priority in a survival situation (#1 temperature control and #2 clean water), so we made do with a few hundred calories of foraged berries that were bitter and sour for the most part. And, lacking sleeping bags, we needed to tend a fire all night to prevent hypothermia which made for broken sleep through the mercifully short Alaskan nighttime.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Work was the lifeline tethering me to sanity. On the second day in the field, our instructor showed us how to make the A-frame structures that are in my pictures. His method of motivational speaking involved a lot of dark humor. “Results are mandatory”, he reminded us. The pressure of needing to get my shelter raised and water-proofed lit a (figurative) fire under my ass. I haven’t worked that hard in a long time. I hustled for about 12 hours in the long Alaskan daylight to build my shelter, gathering sticks and moss and grass. I spent more hours on it in the following days, haunted by the nightmare of my hut leaking in the rain and being forced to spend a night doing survival calisthenics to ward off hypothermia.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> That was the miserable alternative available if shelter or fire failed and the weather took an unlucky turn. </span></div>
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I kept surprisingly busy in the course. There always seemed to be something to do to mitigate risk or make ourselves more comfortable. I partnered up with another student to share a shelter. Once our shelter was established, we built another one for our firewood so we would have some dry wood if it rained.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> G</span>athering firewood was the single largest use of time. </div>
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Two-a-day courses in survival skills kept our lives interesting and added an extra layer of difficulty. For example, on the day of building the shelters, we had a hands-on course in how to safely cross swift rivers. This resulted in all of our shoes being wet. Other days, we learned how to carry injured hikers, wrap a bandage, make birch-bark bowls to enhance the efficiency of foraging, use a compass for navigation, and to trap animals and fish.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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There was a lot of misery. My will was sapped early in the week from caffeine withdrawal and later in the week from starvation and an accumulation of small injuries. My body did bizarre things. At night, it would tingle all over. I think it was a response to the starvation. My guts felt things they had never felt before.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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But there was also much that was pleasant about the experience. As my eyes adapted to the work, I began to see the forest as a store of resources. I knew <i>that</i> tree had analgesic compounds in its bark, <i>that</i> tree had sap that was a great fire starter, <i>these</i> leafy plants were good to eat and had protein. I learned how to sleep on the ground and I learned that moss is nature’s upholstery. My hands developed comfort and intelligence with the knife. I was turning into a bit of a wood-elf.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Other highlights of the trip included the Alaskan scenery. We were surrounded by gorgeous mountains and camped on the banks of a clear wide stream with jumping fish. The monkey parts of my brain loved living in scenery that normally I would politely admire from a respected distance. I loved climbing over and under logs, chopping branches, eating berries fresh off the vine, and sleeping on the ground. It was a physically stimulating sort of life. </div>
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The fellowship with other students was pleasant. In rare moments of downtime, we would lounge about on the moss and drink some boiled nettles or chaga, discussing which McDonald's food we would consume when we returned to civilization. </div>
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The pace of work slackened in the last few days. With the extra free time, our minds turned to fishing. A variety of methods were attempted to catch them: traps, baskets woven out of green sticks or roots, hand-fishing, spears, and makeshift fishing rods. Most of the methods caught at least one fish, but the fishing rod was the most successful. It was just a string baited with guts and tied around a stick. It worked surprisingly well.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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I was disappointed not to catch any fish myself, but I did manage to barter for a small trout. I spit roasted it over a campfire. It was deliciously warm and fatty.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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<div class="p2">
From one perspective, the Alaskan Field Course is a wonderfully ridiculous thing. I’m surprised that you can buy such a real and dangerous experience in this age of regulated capitalism. The safety net exists, but it’s minimal. The nearest road was a treacherous 9 mile hike away. And we took risks. 16 adults, some of them brand new to the outdoors, spent the week running around with knives, climbing logs, foraging, hunting, and bushwhacking. We were constantly one wrong step away from needing a helicopter evac, or else spending a grueling day carrying a peer to safety.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> I loved that nobody stopped us for our own safety. It felt like freedom. </span></div>
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The week passed by in a blur. Much of the time I was just focused on surviving. As I returned to civilization, I was left with a ghost of the forest experience. The ubiquitous smoke of campfires haunted the corners of my vision for several days. Each itch I instinctively assumed to be the probing of a mosquito.<br />
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In the end, I found what I wanted in the Alaskan wilderness. I feel harder, tougher. I lost my addiction to caffeine and sleeping with ear plugs. I've never been backpacking, but it sounds easy to me now. You get to carry food with you! And a sleeping bag! Lots of things sound easier to me now. At least temporarily, the course lowered my expected level of comfort. I’m happy I did it. I survived.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-61618194416226524602018-07-29T10:37:00.001-07:002019-03-11T11:16:55.253-07:00Psychedelic Christianity: a Review of “His Life is Mine”<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-43c43bf6-e71b-3dd7-2e75-e22363be25c2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t want to reduce this book to only my musings on the similarity between Christian mystical experience and psychedelic experience. However, that is the piece that is most fascinating to me, and that I most want to get out before I go wandering in the wilderness for 7 days. Perhaps I will write a more thorough review later.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Archimandrite Sophrony is a Christian mystic. Through contemplative practice in the Orthodox Christian tradition, he seeks direct experience and knowledge of God. This book is partly the Orthodox mystic doctrine, and part diary. It’s a very personal account, describing the first-person experience of emotional swings between agony and ecstasy as Sophrony pursues his inquiry into the divine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was hesitant to read the book, worrying that the account of a man of faith would not speak to such a heterodox person as myself and that I would be overwhelmed with boredom or skepticism. When people ask me about my religion, I admit to being strongly influenced by Buddhism, Christianity, and psychedelics. And of course I spent some years as an atheist scientific materialist which is a viewpoint I often find useful, though I am not limited by it. But my interest was piqued upon learning that Sophrony himself was a worldly, cosmopolitan person before becoming a man of faith. As a young man in Russia, he became fascinated with Eastern religions and meditation. He fled his native Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and took up residence in Paris, where he became a painter. It was only after a time that he returned to the Orthodox religious tradition of his youth and became a Christian monk of the monastery on the holy Mount Athos. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps there is something about Sophrony’s own cosmopolitan spirit that speaks to me, a kind of spiritual kinship between those who must wander. The book was gifted me by an abbot in the high desert of New Mexico on my own wanderings. He had also led a colorful life, living as a Hari Krisna and a hippie in San Francisco before adopting the black robes of the Orthodox monk. I think he sensed an echo of similarity between our three souls. And indeed, sensing the curious spirit of both Sophrony and that abbot allowed me to trust their honesty and to more deeply enter dialog with them. I don’t trust a man who hasn’t done a certain amount of exploration. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sophrony’s account of Christianity is the most attractive that I have seen. There are religions that are more about questions and religions that are more about answers. The questioning, questing religions are the better ones. Sophrony is on a quest to know God through imitation of Christ. He is led by his bold, open heart and a humbleness of spirit </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are many surprising and touching passages that I would like to share with you. But I don’t have time to do so before I am shipped out on my adventure. So I will try to share one particular insight for now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a resonance between Sophrony’s description of Trinitarian doctrine and the psychedelic experience. I am interested in the bridges between two of my three favorite religions: Christianity and psychedelics. Although I am interested in both, there is mutual enmity between the two traditions. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A common psychedelic theme is the oneness of existence. This can be an impersonal oneness, or it can be more pantheistic in which the participant stays aware of some sense of identity. Psychedelics tear down the boundaries between things. But there can be a tension. There can be a part of the mind that holds onto distinction, to the duality between self and other, subject and object. Sometimes this can cause distress, as the person fears losing track of his identity in the current pushing him towards oneness. The dualist and monist view of reality go to war. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sophrony’s description of the Trinity perhaps offer a way to reconcile the unreconcialable. Referring to the biblical assertion that “God is love”, Sophrony writes:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“If God, the First and the Last, were [one person], then He would not be love”.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yet he also writes</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“To love is to live for and in the beloved whose life becomes our life. Love leads to singleness of being”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thus, in the mystery and paradox of the triune Godhead, we see the true nature of love demonstrated, requiring </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">both </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">duality </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">oneness. It is as if both perspectives must be seen and held simultaneously in order to see reality’s true nature. The paradox is accepted, without attempt to resolve it. And this true nature, the proper understanding of one’s relationship to existence, is love. Love unites self and other, subjective and objective, without annihilating either.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is this mysterious, paradoxical nature that we are invited to participate in through the communion of the faithful. Sophrony says that according to ancient Orthodox tradition, man is one-in-many, just as the trinity is one-in-three. This brings to mind the words of Jesus in John chapter 17:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I hope that some brave Christian psychonaut explores this connection further. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Besides these things, there are many surprising, touching, and heart-rending passages in Sophrony’s book. It is not a popular book, but it is a powerful one. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Christianity but jaded by the shallow conversation they hear in the mainstream churches. Sophrony’s Christianity is Christianity with some meat on it. It is challenging and deep, engaging the whole heart and mind, an infinite experience in pursuit of knowledge of fundamental reality. </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-71206579627859078252018-07-06T08:41:00.001-07:002018-07-11T16:11:47.039-07:00Getting over relationship FOMOWhen I was younger, I didn’t know what I wanted in relationship. To be honest, I was driven by FOMO. There was this fantasy world in my mind full of perfect sex, perfect relationships, and perfect women. It was impossible to commit to the merely good when the perfect might pop up at any moment. My fear of missing out became manifest in dabbling with open relationships.<br />
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But I discovered that FOMO was the <i>cause</i> of missing out on some of the very best features of relationship: intimacy, closeness, and stability. You only get to have those qualities if you can go all-in on loving someone, without keeping one eye on the lookout for better opportunities<br />
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At 35 years of age, I know what I want in relationship. I know that I want emotional intimacy and a partner in life. I want to play long-term games with long-term people. And I know I want to be a father. My father is one of the people I love most in the world, despite his flaws. I want to live up to his example and surpass it where I can.<br />
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I practice by being a cat-father and an uncle. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. It feels good to live into my loving and nurturing side.<br />
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I’m ready to say “enough!” to that infinite adolescence that is the signature lifestyle of urban post-modern capitalism, to exit from the FOMO-contest, and to build something that lasts. I'm ready to let other people travel more than me, have more sex than me, go to better parties than me, make more money than me, be more successful than me, and have better Instagram photos than me. Because those sacrifices leave space for the life that I *really* want.<br />
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When my relationship ended last year, it was terribly painful. But its dissolution was the mirror by which I was able to see myself, to learn what was most valuable, and to see the mistakes I was making that got in the way. There is no pain quite like the pain of becoming aware of your own flaws, and the certain knowledge that you are what held you back from getting what you most want. It is an absolute horror, a consuming flame. The self-knowledge feels like a treasure whose great value is in proportion to that terrible pain.<br />
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That hardest of experiences changed me for the better. I like myself more. I find myself more emotionally awake, both to the joy and the pain of existence. I cry easily. Having suffered, I care about the suffering of others. Suffering can function as a call to empathy. It was a kick in the pants to finally get involved in the volunteer work I had always wanted to do, providing emotional support to people in their darkest hours.<br />
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I am hoping to continue to grow, and I'm hoping to find ways to grow that aren't quite so traumatic. I am not the person I was a year ago. The world looks different to me. I'm seeing it through a lens made of different concepts and experiences. I'm grateful for it.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-40971923389852649202018-04-05T13:55:00.000-07:002020-06-25T14:57:55.213-07:00The Death of Interchange: A conservative critique of Radical Gurus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>0. Introduction</b><br />
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If you haven’t heard, the Interchange Counseling Institute has imploded in a slow motion version of the <a href="https://theyogalunchbox.co.nz/a-compehrensive-list-of-yoga-scandals-involving-gurus-sex-and-other-inappropriate-behaviour/">classic guru-sex scandal</a>. Operations have ceased and the incoming class of 2017/2018 has been cancelled. This a common way that guru-dominated organizations come to an end. I suggest anyone involved in building an organization for personal development familiarize themselves with some of the historical examples.<br />
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For most students at Interchange, including myself, the Interchange experience was an intensely positive one. But flaws in the edifice were obvious. Many of us saw the end coming, though I was surprised by how quickly it came.<br />
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While there is plenty of individual blame to be placed, particularly on Steve the guru/founder, I claim that Interchange was *institutionally* flawed by design. It was not built to last. There are specific flaws in its moral outlook, its curriculum, and its organizational structure that made it particularly likely to end in a mess of sexual impropriety and emotional pain. I present three criticisms:<br />
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<ol>
<li>By overthrowing social rules, revolutionary/progressive movements can devolve into monkey status competitions that benefit the powerful and harm the vulnerable</li>
<li>Deconstruction is a dangerous technique prone to abuse, and wisdom must be used when teaching it</li>
<li>The male guru-led organization is dangerous for reasons of evolutionary psychology</li>
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As a brief aside, the criticisms I present come from an evolutionary/conservative point of view, nearly the opposite viewpoint of Interchange and its founder. I believe a diversity of viewpoints in a group is vital for purposes of self-criticism, course correction, and group longevity. This point is widely under-appreciated and seldom acted upon.<br />
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<b>1. By overthrowing social rules, revolutionary/progressive movements can devolve into monkey status competitions that benefit the powerful and harm the vulnerable</b><br />
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The Interchange organization wasn’t just offering a counseling training program. It also sought to build a community of radical praxis, liberated from the rules of society. This included social rules about sex.<br />
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A person with a revolutionary mind judges existing social rules to be oppressive. You might expect me to disagree with them, as I sometimes claim the “conservative” label for myself. But I actually think their criticisms are correct.<br />
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Social rules *are* oppressive. All social structures are an evolved, negotiated compromise developed over time between sets of conflicting interests. They prevent some people from getting what they want or getting what is best for them. In exchange, these limits on individual behavior hopefully enable a society to achieve some larger social good.<br />
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Wisdom lies in finding good trade-offs between individual oppression and social good. Existing social structures should be challenged. We are free, each generation, to renegotiate them to better serve us.<br />
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Though it is tempting for revolutionaries to move as close as possible to total sexual freedom, throwing out all the sexual rules is a foolish move to make. Without rules, human society devolves into monkey-status games where social power reigns.<br />
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This total freedom benefits the powerful, who still pursue their self-interest, but now without the the rules that might serve as a check on their behavior. The powerless often suffer under existing social rules, but they suffer more without the rules’ protection. In the new order, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Modern revolutionists are aware of abstract power differences between groups in society, but they are seldom hip to the concrete reality of individual power differences within their community.<br />
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Rules prevent abuse by the powerful. They are necessary for the long-term thriving of the community, especially rules governing sexual conduct. I’m not saying that a group needs to follow society's rules, though I encourage you to consider that they may contain more wisdom than you expect. Rather each group should develop their own. The rules can and should be renegotiated, but slowly and conservatively, and never on a case-by-case basis or in the heat of the moment.<br />
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The few rules that Interchange had about sex were wise, such as a ban on first-year students having sex with other students. But the rules weren’t taken very seriously. And ultimately it was the behavior of the leadership, not the students, which needed to be more carefully regulated.<br />
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<b>2. Deconstruction is a dangerous technique prone to abuse, and wisdom must be used when teaching it</b><br />
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Interchange teaches deconstruction as a therapeutic technique. Some teaching is dangerous because it is wrong, but deconstruction is dangerous because it is true. Our social rules and concepts *are* arbitrary. And they could be different. But while deconstruction frees us from our limiting beliefs, it also frees us from our limiting morality, and that can be a problem.<br />
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Deconstruction is prone to abuse and manipulation. It brings our focus onto the present moment, where future consequences of our actions are discounted. After all, the future is an abstract idea that doesn’t really exist. This is a great formula for talking people into sex that they will later regret.<br />
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It’s also dangerous for people in existing relationships. The guru teaches you how to “end jealousy permanently”, then convinces you that relationships don’t really exist, and then he sleeps with your wife. Maybe in the midst of the spell of deconstruction everybody is on board and nobody feels guilty. But in the aftermath, hurt feelings and resentments grow, and resentment is the poison that will destroy a community.<br />
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Deconstruction is not just a potent tool for manipulating others. It can be a dangerous tool for manipulating ourselves. Once internalized, deconstruction can be used to excuse any bad behavior and keep a clear conscience. What’s “bad behavior” mean, anyway? If there existed a guidebook for training oneself into becoming a sociopath, deconstruction would be a prominent technique within it.<br />
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Deconstruction requires wisdom to wield properly, a wisdom that Steve lacked and so could not teach.<br />
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I’m currently reading a lot by David Chapman, Robert Kegan, and Jordan Peterson, all of whom talk about the danger and promise inherent in deconstruction, either from a Buddhist or postmodern perspective. Chapman, summarizing Kegan, is <a href="https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/">a particularly important read</a>.<br />
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Kegan sees deconstruction as acid dissolving and undermining the social rules of modernity. If used poorly, we sink back into monkey status games. If used wisely, we use our newfound freedom to mold the rules to better suit us. Building good societies in the presence of the knowledge of deconstruction is an unsolved problem [1]. According to Kegan, it’s the most important challenge of our times.<br />
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My best guess at a rule for using deconstruction wisely is "keep an eye on the long game". You can live perfectly well with either the belief that relationships do or don't "really" exist. But where do those beliefs lead you in 5, 10, or 20 years?<br />
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In some Buddhist monasteries they also teach dangerous-but-useful mental techniques, some of which are very similar to deconstruction. But these techniques are taught to students who follow a strict moral code in order to minimize the danger of teaching them. The students also have a close relationship with a mentor, who might decide that they are not ready for a particular set of practices.<br />
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<b>3. The male guru-led organization is dangerous for reasons of evolutionary psychology</b><br />
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I leave this part for last because I am least confident in it. I haven’t read much on evolutionary psychology, and I’m working on concepts I’ve picked up second-hand from bloggers and friends.<br />
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Guru-led organizations are especially dangerous when they’re headed by men. As men get turned on by youth, clear skin and feminine body proportions, women are more attracted to men at the top of a status hierarchy. A man at the center of attention will find that he has far more sex appeal than he is used to. This is similar to what happens to successful rock stars.<br />
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But a guru is not a rock star, in that the guru has a responsibility to the spiritual growth of his students and his community. A guru that uses his position to maximize his sexual conquests is demonstrating short-sighted, adolescent behavior and he will likely fail to fulfill the trust placed in him by his students. Within a small amount of time, sleeping with students and sleeping with women in committed relationships causes the growth of resentment that blows up the community.<br />
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There is a second, darker power that the guru gains on top of the status hierarchy. Women he comes on to may feel pressured to say yes to his advances for fear of causing conflict or risking their status within the community. The power differential between guru and student has a coercive flavor, and it increases the odds that the student will acquiesce to sex that she will later regret.<br />
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Sexual dynamics between leaders and followers are especially dangerous in spiritual/personal growth organizations where the guru will have access to students in an emotionally vulnerable state, sometimes literally out of their minds. The founders of the Christian church recognized this risk 2,000 years ago, which is why they instituted conservative sexual norms for leaders. In the Bible we find the <a href="https://biblia.com/bible/esv/1%20Tim%203.2">Apostle Paul exhorting</a> early Christian church leaders to be sober, monogamous married men. This safeguard hasn't always worked, but it shows that organizations have struggled with this problem for a long time.<br />
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Sexual liberation + male leadership is a dangerous mix everywhere, and not just in spirituality. It’s the formula at the root of the tech VC sexual harassment scandals that hit the news lately. Being a successful leader requires sacrifice of some sexual freedom for the good of the group.<br />
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In addition to the dangers of male gurus and sex, the guru-led model is fragile because the health and reputation of the group depends on the personal morality of one imperfect individual. For any institution to outlive its founder, new leaders must be trained up and power must be shared with them. Sharing the limelight requires some humility and far-sightedness on the guru's part. Interchange did some of this, but it was still probably too guru-dominated to survive Steve's departure.<br />
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<b>4. Conclusion </b><br />
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I’ve said a lot of good things about Interchange over the years. I still mean them. Interchange permanently increased my EQ and lowered my anxiety around other people. And it made me a better counselor. These are powerful, life-altering results. I owe personal gratitude to everyone who built Interchange, especially Steve.<br />
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But I’ve also encouraged lots of people to join. I regret that I didn’t more loudly voice my discomfort with the program along with my praise of it. While I was confident in my own abilities to weather the shitty parts of Interchange, I should have recognized that as a man I was in much less danger than a woman would be.<br />
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I want to live in a world where people more deeply encounter each other, where we live with an awareness of our shared humanity, and where we let go of unnecessary fear. I want there to exist training programs where people can boost their social skills through practice. I want there to be safe spaces to learn how to navigate edgy, intense, and potentially dangerous emotions. Interchange was a unique example of this.<br />
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I hope the good parts of Interchange can be separated from the short-sightedness and immaturity that Steve brought to the program. The fact that rest of the leadership team was empowered and confident enough to speak up and put a stop to the program speaks well of them and of the training they received. I believe that Steve genuinely cared about empowering people and he was successful in doing so. In some other organizations suffering from sexual impropriety, the violations continued for decades.<br />
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As Steve was the student of earlier programs of study, I hope the students of Interchange bring the next evolution of human emotional development into the world.<br />
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[1] Kegan has a numbered system of 5 stages of identity formation where each is an improvement on the last. These can be applied to individuals or societies. In part, they go:<br />
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(3) unstructured -> (4) structured -> (5) flexibly structured<br />
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Deconstruction helps us get from (4) to (5). But if we haven't fully mastered stage 4, deconstruction can cause us to fall back to stage 3. It can be really hard to tell the difference between (3) and (5).<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-61807611623546013932018-03-31T19:05:00.001-07:002020-01-13T09:10:06.235-08:00Pro-Civilization and the New Right<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>I. Introduction</b></div>
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Political blogging is a dead genre. Its corpse is kept animated by ancient thirty-somethings left behind by a snapchat world. It’s fine whisky in an age of vodka and gatorade. </div>
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Yet I have the stubborn impulse to keep alive this tradition of my people. I can’t help myself. Left idle, my hands start typing up new political ideologies. Blogspot.com: it’s a gen X thing.</div>
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The purpose of this post is to identify and define a new ideology: Pro-Civilization. “Pro-Civilization” is an adjective I’ve been hearing lately in right-wing tech circles, and I find it evocative. Let’s uncork a bottle of #ProCiv, swirl it around the tongue, and see what impression it leaves. For me, it is one of the most intriguing vintages to come out of the modern Right. So I want to define it, examine it, and signal-boost it. </div>
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By no means do I want to be on the hook for defending the whole of the political Right. Lord knows it has its share of bathtub swill. The question “why bother with the Right at all?” is a fair one. If you’re reading this, then you probably live in a place where the Right is not exactly the winning team. You aren’t going to win yourself any friends or social status by sticking around. Your local dominance hierarchy is best climbed by clicking the “x” button at the top of this browser tab. </div>
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But if you’re the type of curious individual that just can’t help but poke around in dusty, overlooked corners seeking nuggets of insight, then stick around. </div>
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<a href="about:invalid#zClosurez" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Image result for whisky glass" border="0" class="rg_ic rg_i" jsaction="load:str.tbn" name="29ehc8WS3LVigM:" 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<b>II. What is it</b></div>
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Let’s start with a thousand foot overview. </div>
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If the #ProCiv faction had a mission statement, it would be something like “create a great civilization that endures for a very long time”. It’s not defined by a set of policies or cultural practices, but rather it’s defined by a way of judging them. Each new innovation is asked the question: “does this increase the chances of our long-term thriving and survival?”. </div>
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Pro-Civilization is characterized by a low time preference. It supports systematic and long-term thinking. It is downright bloodless compared to activist strands of Left and Right. It is also pragmatic; policy discussions are outcome-focused rather than morality-focused. </div>
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I find political debate within ProCiv groups to be refreshing. Is immigration good or bad? Gun control? Abortion? Within a ProCiv group, one side of these questions may be more popular than another, but there is no moral stigma associated with arguing the less popular side. Debate proceeds by arguing that one policy is better suited than another for building and maintaining a good society over a long time horizon. Historical analogies are commonly employed as supporting evidence, and someone who is well-versed in a large range of historical periods and data sets gains social status. To be ProCiv leads to having interesting and brainy conversations ranging over the Byzantine Empire, Malthusian population models, superorganisms, science fiction, and evolutionary psychology.</div>
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This style of debate is in sharp contrast to that mainstream left and right-wing groups that have “Politically Correct” answers to every question - if you’re on the Left, then immigration is good, guns are bad, and abortion is good. If you’re on the Right, then your opinions are flipped. From what I have seen, there isn’t much debate. Moral feelings are the primary way that policy positions are solidified. To have the correct opinion is morally good, to argue for the unpopular opinion is to be morally suspect. Homogeneity is maintained through threat of punishment or ostracism. The rare appeals to evidence are one-sided - partisans seem unaware of evidence that would be offered to support the opposing point of view. </div>
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The Pro-Civilization view fits in comfortably within Arnold Kling’s <a href="http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/it-is-sometimes-appropriate/">“Three Languages of Politics”</a> model (there’s now <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CCGF81Q">a book</a>). He argues that libertarians, the liberal/left, and the conservative/right often cannot understand each other in debates because they are using three different moral languages. For libertarians, the primary moral concern is about freedom vs. coercion. For the Left, it’s oppressors vs. the oppressed. And for the Right, it’s Civilization vs. Barbarism. ProCiv is an unapologetic and enthusiastic embrace of civilization as the primary moral concern of political systems. </div>
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<b>III. Details</b></div>
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Now that we have introduced this rare whisky, it’s time to get closer to examine its flavor and scent. Does it taste sweet on the tip of the tongue? Does it leave a hint of charcoal in the back? Is there an aroma of honey, gasoline, or some mix of both? </div>
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(For the Jacob superfans out there, yes, this is the second time that I’ve used the whisky metaphor to describe a freshly minted political ideology. But it’s been nine years since the last time, so I’m giving myself permission to double-dip.) </div>
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I should note that much of what follows comes from my own head. Some of it comes from conversations I have been part of or overheard. But what I’m describing is a tiny cultural trend. There is no ProCiv Institute with an official 20 point platform. I’ve had to use my own powers of extrapolation to fill in the gaps. </div>
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The sets of policies and cultural attitudes favored by #ProCiv don’t fit neatly on the Left/Right American political spectrum. For example, it favors both large amounts of economic libertarianism (an American right-wing position) and environmentalism (an American left-wing position). Libertarian economics are needed because the wealth and power of a society largely come from productive market activities. In the long run a nation is either pro-market or prey for those who are. Environmentalism is needed both because destruction of the natural world threatens human civilization, and also because the natural world is part of humanity’s artistic and spiritual heritage. ProCiv is not interested in merely preserving human life for the long run, but also some amount of cultural continuity. </div>
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Pro-Civilization has a complex attitude towards risk. It supports taking more finite short-term risks and putting more resources towards reducing long-term, unbounded risks. It’s a big proponent of projects that reduce existential risks to humanity, such as Elon Musk’s attempts to plant human civilization on Mars. A multiplanetary society is much more likely to survive than a single planet one. You can’t build a long-lasting civilization if you get sent back to the stone age or worse by getting unlucky on some existential risk. </div>
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As for short-term risks, ProCiv takes a bolder approach than mainstream political movements. In democracies, lawmakers are incentivized to favor policies with short-run payouts and long-run costs, especially if they represent competitive districts. Voters are impatient for benefits and long-run costs seem fictional. Pro-Civilization has exactly the opposite bias. It prefers to pay costs in the present in order to reap future benefits. </div>
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For example, ProCiv probably favors a daring approach to institutional reform. Institutions like governments, universities, and the health care system represent society’s collective intelligence. When they are operating well, society is effective, productive, and nimble in addressing crises. When they are operating poorly, they can suck up infinite money while producing less and less benefit, a process sometimes referred to as “institutional sclerosis”. There is good evidence that American institutions are quite sclerotic. Infrastructure is slow to build and expensive compared to the past. Education and medicine are skyrocketing in price while most of that extra money goes to hiring administrators and regulatory compliance. A ProCiv point of view advocates for paying the cost to make bold reforms now in exchange for upgrading our collective intelligence to manage the challenges of the coming decades. </div>
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Culturally, Pro-Civilization favors getting married and having children, for two reasons. First, having children lowers an adult’s time preference and ties his plans to the world that continues after his death. Second, the well-raised children of the present, and especially the children of the current elite, are going to be the people responsible for navigating the ship of humanity along a precipice of destruction as our technology gets more and more powerful in the coming decades. The crises of the future will be decided by the well-prepared, competent humans we create now. </div>
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Pro-Civilization is skeptical of romantic innovations that are justified by appeals to the pleasure and utility of the current generation of adults at the cost of family stability and child-rearing. It’s critical of the hedonistic infinite-adolescence of adult culture in many modern urban environments. It seconds Jordan Peterson in believing that the meaning in life comes not from the pleasures one enjoys, but from the responsibilities one carries. A 40-year-old should be doing something to contribute to the next generation, not bouncing from music festival to music festival. Doing both may be a fine option, as long as the responsibilities are prioritized first. </div>
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To avoid writing more than my audience will be willing to read on pro-civilization tendencies, beliefs, and positions, I finish this section with a list of things that get the #ProCiv seal of approval:</div>
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<ul>
<li>The Hoover Dam</li>
<li>Chesterton’s Fence</li>
<li>Tokyo</li>
<li>Yosemite National Park</li>
<li>Meritocracy</li>
<li>Switzerland</li>
<li>Space elevators</li>
<li>Cathedrals</li>
<li>Ancient Hindu temples</li>
<li>Capitalism</li>
<li>Marriage and babies</li>
<li>Classical art and music</li>
<li>Oxford libraries</li>
<li>Dense urban cores</li>
<li>City skylines</li>
<li>The evolutionary mindset</li>
<li>The Long Now Foundation</li>
<li>Religion (especially old religions)</li>
<li>Philosophy (especially old philosophy)</li>
<li>Preparing for Black Swan events</li>
<li>Self-sufficiency</li>
<li>Transhumanism</li>
</ul>
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Pro-Civilization aesthetics tend to be a mix of the new and the old. Its ideal is high civilization in harmony with nature, as if Chinese economic dynamism were mixed with Western environmental ideals. Perhaps Singapore does it best. The ProCiv vision is that 10,000 years from now, cyborg teenagers will be playing a Bach chamber music recital on a green school lawn on a terraformed planet in a nearby solar system. Or in a simulated uploaded colony ship. Or in whatever form human civilization will take. </div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PZUhdP4RZn0/WsA7DTN0AEI/AAAAAAAAB6o/M7cb7Kcvez4EtGBOBTznDvGOV0OpSYEmgCLcBGAs/s1600/3aaa1016666618bcedc756db0a8afcbf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="800" height="265" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PZUhdP4RZn0/WsA7DTN0AEI/AAAAAAAAB6o/M7cb7Kcvez4EtGBOBTznDvGOV0OpSYEmgCLcBGAs/s400/3aaa1016666618bcedc756db0a8afcbf.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b><br />IV. Where it goes wrong</b></div>
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As a creature of the Right, pro-civilization suffers from the problems that right-wing ideologies have. I wrote about the generic Left-Right axis and the pros and cons of each side <a href="https://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2016/08/time-orientation-of-politics.html">in this previous post</a>. </div>
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In short, the great problem of the Left is changing too fast and throwing out lots of traditions and institutions that work in pursuit of some imagined utopia. </div>
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The great problem of the Right is changing too slowly, stagnating and failing to address changing conditions. Chesterton's fences crowd the landscape and you can't really drive anywhere. The Right procrastinates on overthrowing unnecessary oppression and is slow to adopt neutral or positive social changes. Whereas on the Left change is assumed to be good with little thought of the consequences, on the Right change can be rejected even when the expected value is positive. </div>
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On the order-chaos spectrum, the failure of the Left is too much chaos and the failure of the Right is too much order. The Left might institute a terrible dystopia, but its philosophy of permanent revolution includes the seeds of its own undermining. The Right might make a terrible dystopia that really lasts. </div>
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Personally, some of the people I know on the pro-civilization Right seem like real squares. I think they’d be more creative and productive if they allowed a little chaos into their lives. </div>
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<b>V. Relation to other things</b></div>
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I’m calling ProCiv an ideology of the political Right because that’s where it’s coming from currently. But as with all ideas that one favors, I hope it grows in popularity enough to transcend the eternal Left/Right hellmatch and thrive on both sides of the spectrum. It has enough deviance from the rest of the Right that it does not seem impossible for a Left faction to adopt it. In the past, when the foundations of the modern world were being laid, the Pro-Civilization mindset would have been on the progressive/left side of the spectrum. </div>
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<b>VI. Conclusion</b></div>
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I’m a political Taoist. I don’t hold any particular political position, but rather a meta-position that goes something like this: conflicting ideologies support different often-conflicting human values. Picking one over the other is a losing move. Rather, the right thing to do is to try to find the happy balance between them, allowing that balance to change in an ineffable dance with the circumstances of existence. </div>
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So I’m not suggesting anybody adopt #ProCiv wholesale. But its variety of bloodless, long-term thinking is definitely of value. For me, it represents the best flavor of the Right. It’s the reason for not completely ignoring the Right half of the spectrum altogether. Let it be in balance with your other political values, and I think it will lead you to a better place. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-62568465798273752882017-12-25T12:51:00.002-08:002017-12-26T13:23:14.189-08:00Wrestling with God<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Status: experimental<br />
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Jacob became Israel, which means “he who struggles with God”. His descendants became the nation of Israel, who struggle with God down to this very day. According to the stories, Jacob actually, physically, wrestled with God, or an angelic representative thereof. Apparently Jacob had some pretty good technique, as he held his own until sunrise, when the angel declared the match a tie but then touched Jacob’s hip, laming him. It’s as if to say that God allows you to wrestle him, in fact it might be the Right Thing To Do, but he’s still going to exact a price. You can’t just swing on the supreme monarch of the universe without penalty, he’s a cocky sonuvavirgin.</div>
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The outcome of Jacob’s wrestling match with God was a lame hip, a new name, Israel, a promise that his descendants would become a great nation, and a badass story to tell at the watering hole.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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I hadn’t thought about the story of that Jacob for a long time, when Jordan Peterson started covering it on his podcast. That’s when an uncanny parallel came to me. I’m a Jiu Jitsu fighter, which is wrestling, but pursued with the meticulous mind of the Japanese, and perfected through the gauntlet of Brazilian male competitiveness. If Jacob were alive today, he might go to my gym.</div>
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Jiu Jitsu is how I struggle with God, if you take the mystical/psychedelic leap of identifying God with his creation, and especially his conscious, human creation. In Jiu Jitsu, I come to face the reality of my limitations and my response to them. The emotional high of imposing my will on a sometimes stronger, larger opponent is mirrored exactly by the existential horror of having my face pinned to the floor by a sweaty, hairy chest, while the air is crushed out of my lungs by my opponent’s weight. In this moment my whole body shouts<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>“no!”, unified from nerve to sinew in the belief that there is something wrong with the universe. But what am I to do about it? Pray? The lord helps those who help themselves.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
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The process of improvement in Jiu Jitsu is the same as in any difficult endeavor. It involves trial and failure, and more trial with the knowledge that you will certainly fail. It involves suffering, including a lot of physical suffering, which is somehow not the worst kind. At least physical suffering leaves you with a cool story to tell at the watering hole. It involves self-doubt and criticism, listening for and seeking feedback. It involves periods of obsession, when your conscious mind, anticipating the next roll, gorges on every bit of knowledge it can. It involves periods of rest while your subconscious mind consolidates knowledge into movement patterns and instincts. It involves injuries, as you learn your limits. It involves shame, as you learn the unwritten rules by breaking them, but only once. It involves feeling like an outsider as the higher belts ignore the beginners who mostly wash out in a few months, anyway.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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The process of improvement at Jiu Jitsu hinges on one of the most important virtues: the ability to tolerate suffering. It is great practice for other endeavors that require the ability to tolerate suffering, which happens to be everything worthwhile. The suffering of Jiu Jitsu is more mild than some other kinds, like an inoculation with a weaker virus. From experience, I can say that running a startup or losing a close relationship are far worse.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Jiu Jitsu is culturally dissonant in the circles I run in, which are more interested in peace and love than the battle of two wills through the medium of limited violence. That’s one of the things I like about it. When I go to Jiu Jitsu class, I say to myself “I’m doing this for me”. It grants me no social status, it wins me no points with the ladies. It is this weird thing I do on my own, off to the side, in isolation. It is where I train my will to struggle with God. If I gave up, nobody would care, except for me and perhaps God. That’s one of the keys to struggling with God, the motivation to do so has to come from within.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
<span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span>I wonder if I would have more peace had my parents named me differently. As a Jacob, my destiny is to struggle, so I might as well get good at it.<br />
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There is another way in which I have long been the one who struggles with God. I struggle with God through struggling to understand reality. I refuse to close my mind to any possibilities, and the result is an internal battle between conflicting ideas. Sometimes I’ll hold a belief for a while, and I’ll battle other people with it. Inevitably, my mind becomes aware of flaws in the beliefs I hold, and I am too honest to unsee them. The flaws worm their way through the edifice of belief, and the whole thing comes crashing down.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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I guess I’m looking for something to believe in. </div>
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When I was a teenager, my belief in God crumbled. Several nights, I got down on my knees and prayed with all my might that he would help me believe in him. God grant me faith, or a miracle, or something unexpected. Sometimes I cried in anguish, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. My parents and friends were disappointed in me when I left their faith. I wonder if they realize how hard I tried. I wonder if they understand how God failed me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Lately, the battle of ideas feels less like a struggle. Maybe it’s a Buddhist/Taoist influence, but I feel a lot of openness around these eternal battles. I’m okay with finding truth in several conflicting worldviews. It seems to be the natural state of the world. I find myself perpetually confused and curious, having lost faith that any things can really be “figured out” the way I used to want to. I was a mathematician in college. It took me a lot of experience before I could let go of trying to figure out the optimum social order or morality like a logic puzzle.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Now I find it easy to believe in God or not believe in God. Perhaps through the use of visionary medicines, perhaps with age, my brain has become excellent at pattern recognition. It can weave meaning out of facts if I let it. That’s what made the loss of a long term relationship so hard. I could see how it fulfilled the narrative pattern of my life in a beautiful way, and its loss was dissonant, jarring, pointless. It’s a change in genre, as if Sin City turned into a family comedy halfway through.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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With an overactive meaning-making capacity, I find the icy spirit of nihilism banished at last. It is not a danger for me. However, the drastic reorganization of meaning is still very painful. My danger is now clinging too tightly to meaning, rather than not having enough. We are all dancers in the water of life, and we should not pretend that its meanings are more or less solid than they are.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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The Taoist symbol of the yin and yang means a lot to me. I find it easy to believe in God or not believe in God, but impossible to do either fully. I’ve become accustomed to this pattern of opposites that cannot escape each other.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> Do I believe in determinism or free will? Utilitarianism or virtue ethics? Scientific materialism or Christianity or Buddhism? The answer is yes. Fluidity is my natural state. </span></div>
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Jacob was not just a wrestler. He was also a mystic that went off into the desert by himself and had visions. When he came back from his vision of the ladder to heaven, he found his fixed point, and laid a stone pillar at Bethel. That was what he believed in. I am also a mystic. When I went into the desert and had a vision, I found a fixed point in Chamomile tea. “<i>In the beginning was the taste…”. </i>But that's a Burning Man story that I'll save for another time. </div>
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A strange thing happened to me. I went through a time of horrible personal crisis that left the life I knew in shambles. Yet at the same time, I came out of it liking myself more than I ever have.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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This strange result came from realizing that I was not in control of the outcome of my crisis. So I focused on what I could control: myself. Was I actively deciding, moment to moment, to be the kind of person that I wanted to be? Was I speaking 100% the truth? Was I boldly leaving no important words unsaid? Was I avoiding the temptations of self-sabotage? Was I taking some time to think of others, and to leave those around me a little better off?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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As I focused on myself, I saw a lot to be proud of. I noticed all the ways I was already the kind of person I wanted to be, and the ways in which I was growing into it. I used to judge myself based on the outcomes of my actions. In the past, if someone responded negatively to my efforts I took that as evidence that I was a less worthy person. Now, how much I like myself is more outcome-independent. This habit of mind which I adopted as a crisis survival mechanism has become a permanent tool for navigating life.<br />
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Often, my adult life has not turned out the way that I wanted it to be. That can get me down, but it doesn’t have to lead to self-loathing. I like how I am showing up. I keep on getting better. In many ways my life is not at its peak, but my self-worth is at an all-time high.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-38620969822779415402017-09-24T17:02:00.003-07:002017-09-24T17:44:25.157-07:00Building a Better Anti-CapitalismIn my first political awakening, I became an ardent pro-capitalist libertarian. There were some anti-capitalists to debate around my university and on the internet, but the average quality of their arguments were so poor that engaging with these folks deepened my convictions instead of challenging them.<br />
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But over the years I have seen first hand some of the failures of capitalism. Burning Man and its ethos of public contribution was a major turning point in my attitude towards capitalism, illustrating the great good that can be created outside of formal exchange relationships. Now I see that there are plenty of circumstances where free markets fail to create an optimal outcome, either by failing to properly incentivize things that we value, or by failing to disincentivize bad behavior. Market capitalism alone is not a complete recipe for growing a good society.<br />
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Today the world still suffers from low quality anti-capitalists. To protest capitalism, they break shop windows, burn cars, block streets, and fight with the police. This makes little sense. Plentiful shops and safe, convenient vehicles are some of the good parts of capitalism. And the streets and police are non-capitalist institutions that may be imperfect, but also provide vital services for society. I bet that neutral observers are turned off.<br />
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It's because I take the failings of capitalism seriously that I'd like to offer a better playbook for protesting capitalism. Each of the following opportunities for direct action addresses a failing of capitalism while making the world a better place<br />
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<li>Love thy neighbors. Invite them over for dinner and don't charge</li>
<li>Volunteer to pick up trash in your neighborhood for half an hour</li>
<li>Volunteer at a Boys and Girls club or old folks home</li>
<li>Learn how to make something that you would normally buy. Knit a sweater, grow some vegetables</li>
<li>Produce a piece of public art that will delight people, amaze them, or make them think. Put it in your front yard or window</li>
<li>Host an adult sleep-over. Talk, play games, and read stories </li>
<li>Perform a piece of music in a public space. Go caroling at Christmas time, or if you're not Christian, offer songs for the holy days of your tradition</li>
<li>If it's your thing, become part of a church</li>
<li>Sit at a table in a public place with a sign inviting people to play chess with you or converse with you</li>
<li>Share knowledge. Offer a free class in yoga, art, juggling, or something else you know how to do at your home for your friends and neighbors. For bonus points, make it a regular event</li>
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In a market-driven society, life can be cold. It seems like every option to enjoy oneself costs money. Every smile is a <i>customer service</i><i>. </i>These practices take back a portion of life's activities and relationships from the marketplace. </div>
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In many American cities, there is little public space where a person can simply <i>be </i>without paying money. For a certain sum, you can buy a temporary right to exist in a theatre, restaurant or yoga class, but when your time is up you gotta get going, buddy. For every hour you spend away from home there is an invisible meter following you, running up a tab. In some small towns, I hear people repurpose Walmart as their public square, sitting and chatting with friends in the furniture aisle, or strolling through the store on a late-night date. Walmart is the closest approximation to the missing commons. </div>
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I suggest we protest capitalism by providing what the market doesn't. Create social connections that are based on mutual enjoyment instead of formalized exchange. And create space and time for people to simply exist without a running meter.<br />
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Do you have any ideas for how to better protest capitalism? Leave a comment.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-54552309150329585712017-08-03T16:07:00.003-07:002017-08-03T16:09:31.063-07:00Dyadic Monist Therapy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There was no light here. No feeling. No sound. Only thought. Thought probing at the boundaries of nothingness and finding nothing. With increasing panic, the mind searched for something outside itself. Only the lack of lungs prevented the being from hyperventilating. <br />
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Finding no crack in the darkness, the mind’s activity settled, its energy dissipating. The change in state indicated the passage of time, a first orienting and comforting feature in the formless void. The mind waited.<br />
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With time, memory began to thaw, giving content to thoughts. The darkness became light, a white light, fringed by orange and red, the colors of fire. The mind remembered that somewhere there was another who was different from it and whose presence resembled the light, a female, although she was not here now. And by this, he remembered that he was a male.<br />
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The first concepts were wordless, but soon words came. And with the words, concepts poured in more rapidly. Visions and images flashed through his mind.<br />
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Human. He saw a body, perhaps his body, laid upon a bed.<br />
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Animal. Plant. He saw a large cat padding cautiously through green ferns in the freckled light of a forest floor. Next a whale swimming in the sea, it’s eye upon him. He felt a form of communion with the beast.<br />
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Earth. He saw a shining globe of green and blue suspended on a field of stars. Home.<br />
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Past. Future. Money. Economy. He saw a shining net superimposed on the globe, yellow energy flowing along its edges. He remembered that once he was afraid of money, but in the moment he felt gratitude, as for the first time he understood what it was for.<br />
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Friends. Family. Mother. Father. He saw his parents, standing together in his childhood home and looking at him. His heart ached with a mixture of gratitude and a yearning for them.<br />
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And then he became aware of a mouth. His mouth. Feeling! He remembered feeling. His tongue reminded him of the feeling of matter and weight. He squiggled it about, playing it over the lips and teeth, his lips and teeth.<br />
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Next a hand came into being. He gripped it and ungripped it, relishing motion, playing the fingers across each other and across the palm.<br />
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Changes accelerated. The proprioception of a whole body materialized. Stomach. Torso. Legs. Eyelids…<br />
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Eyelids opened, a crack at first, letting in the outside world. His eyes brought sight to match his sense of feeling. He saw the hands he had felt, and a blanket with the shape of a body underneath. <i>My body</i>, he supposed, <i>I’ll have to get used to that</i>.<br />
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Light streamed in through the many windows of a large loft apartment. The sounds of birds accompanied the dance of dust particles through the rays of light. <i>Fiat lux</i>.<br />
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Thoughts slowed to a halt as a wealth of content flowed into his senses. He had experienced a rebirth, not just of himself, but of the entire universe. The world made new, fresh, like damp grass after the rain. <br />
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He took pleasure in his chest rising and falling, in the cycles of his body prefiguring birth and death, experiencing the world as if for the first time. He lay for several minutes before desire came to him, the desire to see the other he had first remembered. <i>Her</i>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-77299457314811900212017-05-18T01:05:00.002-07:002017-05-18T15:42:48.091-07:00The Importance of PrivacyThe United States constitution is a very libertarian document and the Fourth Amendment is the most libertarian piece of it. As it's short and supremely important to American life, let's quote it in its entirety:<br />
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<b>Amendment IV.</b> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.</blockquote>
What this means for personal liberty is that the government can pass as intrusive laws as they would like, forbidding or mandating myriad behaviors, but unless those behaviors have impact outside your home <i>the laws are unenforceable. </i>The law may mandate that you sleep with an ostrich, eat broccoli for dinner, or keep your supply of toothpicks stocked to a multiple of five. But as these are private behaviors impacting only your private sphere, how are the police ever going to find evidence that you violated the law's mandates? Lacking evidence, they cannot get a warrant to enter your house, so your bed may remain ostrich-free.<br />
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Libertarians advocate that people should be free to do whatever they would like as long as their actions don't harm other people or their property. It turns out that harmless actions don't leak much evidence outside the sphere of private activity that is protected by the fourth amendment - your home, private property, and so fourth.<br />
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It is only because there exists a large sphere of private activity outside the law's reach that the law can evolve and change. There have always been moral busybodies that wanted to enshrine the social mores of the day into law. But the fourth amendment lets us violate silly intrusive laws. If violating the law isn't harmful, and is even beneficial, word will spread from person to person and more people will violate the law. Eventually culture changes, and the law catches up soon thereafter.<br />
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Widespread violation of law, shielded by the fourth amendment, has caused social change in a number of areas. It doubtlessly led to changing attitudes and laws concerning marijuana, and may change attitudes towards other recreational drugs with therapeutic benefits. Anti-sodomy law was largely unenforceable, as it regulates a behavior that mostly takes place in private bedrooms. Thus people pursued same sex romantic relationships illicitly in the privacy of their own homes, until culture and law changed to be more accommodating.<br />
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If law enforcement were perfect, we would live in a more static society. Our morals would more resemble the morals of the past because all the people who violated them would be in prison. The room for cultural experimentation would be small.<br />
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In a good society, law regulates the public sphere, and the private sphere remains a domain of individual freedom. It's important to keep these separate, to avoid the twin evils of anarchy (that is unruled which should be ruled) and tyranny (that is ruled which should be unruled).<br />
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Many historical court rulings have attacked the private sphere that the fourth amendment protects, allowing police to intrude into more places without warrants. The Cold War, war on drugs, and war on terrorism were used as excuse for the need for more intrusive police power, for example, ruling that infrared scans of your house or dog sniffs of your car in search of drugs are not "searches". But perhaps the biggest danger to privacy is the increasing digitization of life.<br />
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Law enforcement doesn't like the fourth amendment - it limits them. But in the amendment's defense it had the infeasible cost of surveilling the vast amount of private activity in the world. In the digital world, that is no longer the case. Surveillance is cheap, and automated systems can supplement the manpower needed to make sense of it.<br />
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As our life activity moves online, it enters an arena that is more exposed. The law is still evolving, and our intuitions are likely to guide us wrong. It might feel like your gmail folder is a private correspondence drawer, but the government may subpoena all messages older than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_privacy#Federal_statutes">180 days without obtaining a warrant</a>. It's easy to be lulled into thinking your phone is a private space, but <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/what-could-happen-if-you-refuse-to-unlock-your-phone-at-the-us-border/">it is not</a> when you are traveling.<br />
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Courts and legislatures have not extended analogous rights to privacy to our digital lives that we enjoyed in our pre-digital lives. However, there still remain statutory limits to government surveillance in the digital world. Unfortunately, it is easy for branches of the government to violate those limits with impunity while remaining undetected and unpunished, as <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24751821">demonstrated by the NSA</a>. If law enforcement were violating its limits as blatantly in the physical world, say by performing door-to-door warrantless searches, it would get noticed and would encounter stiff resistance.<br />
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As vitally important as the private sphere is to a good society, the momentum of history is all against it. That is why encryption is so important. Applications that use strong encryption, like the <a href="https://whispersystems.org/">Signal</a> messaging App, <a href="https://tresorit.com/">Tresorit</a>'s dropbox-like storage app, <a href="https://protonmail.com/">protonmail</a>, <a href="https://z.cash/">ZCash</a>, and others are a shield against the forces that would eliminate private space. Encryption is the door defining and guarding a private space in the modern world.<br />
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People working on privacy-preserving applications are doing the Lord's work, often under-compensated. To support them, consider becoming their paying customers. There is also room for political activism. I donate regularly to the <a href="https://www.eff.org/">EFF</a>, the most prominent organization fighting for digital privacy rights.<br />
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The technology to create a true panopticon is getting closer, when all life will be public and none private. That sounds like a hell to me. Let's stop it in its tracks.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-29707000701259692412017-04-23T10:56:00.002-07:002017-04-23T11:03:57.449-07:00Confessions of an Optionality Maximizer<div>
I confess, I am an optionality maximizer. When life gives me a choice, I habitually choose the path that leaves open the most future possibilities. I am a qubit that refuses read 1 or 0, a cat that refuses to be dead or alive.
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In college, I chose my majors (Economics and Mathematics) based on my estimation of which would leave open the most career prospects, thereby delaying the time for choosing. In my spare time, I am acquainted with many hobbies, but I am a master of none of them. To invest my time in one hobby would mean to give up the possibility of pursuing greatness at another. So I find myself a mediocre writer, a mediocre guitar player, a mediocre painter, and an okay counselor with okay physical fitness. I meditate far more than the modal human but far less than anyone who dedicates serious time to it.
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Yes, the bane of the optionality maximizer is dedication or commitment. Without coincidence, I am 34 and unmarried. I have lived in five different cities in my adult life, and I have a hankering to add a sixth.
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My physical surroundings mirror my inner life. I stockpile goods and clothing used once, which may someday be used again. My introduction to Burning Man and festival culture has exacerbated this trend. I have boxes full of colorful costumes, wacky shirts, and light-up furry vests that I am saving to wear in some future year. Many are the delightfully quirky jackets (red suede!) that I have never worn. Besides the clothes, I own an impressive assortment of miscellaneous electronica, aspirational books, and seldom-used tools, despite several bouts of simplification.
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I met a fork in the wood, and I chose the path that would lead to the most future forks. Or, I walked a few steps down each of them, in order to make sure I didn't miss out on anything. </div>
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What drives this impulse towards maximizing choice? Part of it is surely a greater-than-average drive for novelty. The life I chose has successfully provided plenty of it. Call it the “FOMO-driven life” (Fear Of Missing Out, for the unhip).
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Like all character classes, the FOMO-driven individual has strengths and weaknesses. The upside is a certain “wisdom-of-breadth”. I can form analogies across many fields and disciplines. When I run into a new idea, it reminds me of <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span> concept from Plato, <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> concept from music, or some model in physics. Based on a person’s current interests, I can almost always direct them to a new fascination.
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The downside of the FOMO-driven life is that it carries with it the emotional tone of discontent. There is always, and will always be something that I am missing out on. I have never learned a new human language, or traveled very much, or.... done many other things. </div>
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But I am beginning to suspect that the FOMO-driven life may be self-limiting. I sense a growing meta-boredom stirring in my soul. I have had enough shallow snacks of newness that I doubt how much more is to be gained out pursuing them further. Deepness, commitment, expertise, long-term projects - these are the things that I currently fear missing out on. I feel ready to face a great deal of boredom-the-emotion in order to alleviate the meta-boredom with the meaning of my life.
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Looking at my habits with a different model, perhaps my novelty-seeking was rational when I didn’t know much about the world. Now that I have more information about what it is like to do and be so many different things, I no longer have to gather as much <span style="font-style: italic;">breadth</span> of information. It is now time to go deeper.<br />
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This is an unfortunate impulse to be having at this moment in history. Most of the new developments in the social landscape in my lifetime encourage breadth over depth, explore over exploit. Fortunately, I am also an incorrigible contrarian. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-14149469747206071912017-04-17T21:49:00.000-07:002017-04-24T08:28:31.444-07:00Economics 2.0 meets the Fifth Protocol In the book <i>Accelerando</i>, Charles Stross describes a future world that runs on “Economics 2.0”, an indecipherable economic system used by post-human intelligences. Because its workings are beyond human understanding, Stross can provide little detail of how such a system works. But the concept of Economics 2.0 stokes my imagination. If machines are to become first-class economic actors, the economy will adapt to fit their preferences and modes of operation. Humans will find ourselves sharing a marketplace with what amounts to alien intelligence.<br />
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From our current viewpoint we already see some initial glimmers of the arrival of economics 2.0. Day-trading on public stock markets is dominated by competing algorithmic trading computers, making trades according to statistical models in fractions of a second. But this is an unimpressive example. The movements of stock prices was already so complex as to be indecipherable to human understanding. The entrance of machine intelligences into stock trading had a quantitative impact in the market, but not a qualitative one.<br />
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What is yet to come may be much stranger. The key technology is cryptocurrency, enabling the machine-payable web. Cryptocurrency allows computers to talk the language of money as easily as they currently talk the language of information. Currently, our computers and mobile phones are our information agents, transparently uploading and downloading relevant information in order to serve the tasks we have given them. With cryptocurrency, this constant chatter will be augmented by economic transactions.<br />
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This layer of economic exchange is described by Naval Ravikant in his essay titled <a href="https://startupboy.com/2014/04/01/the-fifth-protocol/">“The Fifth Protocol”</a>. He describes this new world where money is cheaply and easily exchanged by computer:<br />
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“Can a completely distributed grid of small generators trade power with each other, using a decentralized and trustless cryptocurrency? Can a traffic jam of self-driving cars clear itself as the computerized vehicles bid for right of way? Can a mass of people crossing a street take priority over a single car waiting at the traffic light, as their phones vote, trustlessly and reliably, for their presence?”</blockquote>
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Money is a way for people to exchange scarce goods. Whenever we are in possession of a scarce good that someone else desires more than we do, a positive-sum transaction can be made so that both parties benefit. This is the basis of all economic activity in the world. Transaction in labor is founded on the scarcity of personal time - we are each given 24 hours in a day, and to scale our efforts beyond what we can achieve with that we must purchase the time of others.<br />
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But in real life many positive transactions are missed because the costs of coordinating the transaction outweigh its collective benefits. In the logic of the market, this is an inefficiency. Devices that are always on, collecting and communicating information can negotiate these transactions for us. The result may be quite odd, as scarce resources are monetized which before we would have never noticed.<br />
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For example, imagine waking up on a workday. Your phone chimes, offering you an anonymous payment if you delay your commute 15 minutes. You accept. 15 minutes later, you hop into your car and drive to the office. On the way your phone tells you to pick up a package from a store. Since your phone knows your commuting habits, it can sell your unused car space for partial routing of goods and people. A few miles later, you pull over and hand the package out your window to someone waiting on the sidewalk. He exchanges the package with another one destined for your office. You’ll get paid for both deliveries today.<br />
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Upon arriving at the office, you receive a request to take a parking space further out. You don’t mind walking and could use the extra cash, so you accept.<br />
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Some people will be shocked by the inequality of a world where all scarce goods can be traded. For the rich, life will be truly frictionless. The traffic lights will always be green, they will always start at the front of the line, and they will always find a parking spot in a crowded city. If they want to ship an item to someone else, they will simply hold it out in the air and someone or somedrone will come by and snatch it.<br />
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For the non-rich, a plethora of micro-tasks and trades in scarce goods throughout the day may supplement or even replace traditional trade in scarce labor. This has the potential to make them better off as well. After all, between globalization of capital, mass migration, and automation, labor isn’t quite as scarce as it used to be. Physical volume, auditory space, and visual environment are all scarce resources. The ultra-rich might be willing to pay others to turn down a radio, trade places in line, alter commute habits, route goods, wait at red lights, livestream a landscape, and even change their fashion. In this environment, the question “what do you do for a living?” become strange, as the answer may be “respond to dozens of micro-prompts throughout my ordinary day”.<br />
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Eliminating economic friction is only one half of economics 2.0. The other is autonomous non-human economic agents joining the marketplace. But I am not so inspired to write about that for the moment, so I’ll leave it to your imagination. <i>Accelerando</i> has several depictions of what this might be like if you are interested.<br />
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Before I conclude, I should note that Economics 2.0 is a misnomer. The qualitative nature of economic life has evolved through several epochs already in the history of human society, we ought to be on version 4.0 at least (the first three being early markets and trade, globalized trade, and the information age). Already in Adam Smith’s time, Smith marveled at how the expanding division of labor had created an economic system beyond all comprehension. A single piece of clothing was the product of thousands of laborers, sourcing materials from several continents. It was a system of human creation, but not human design. The systems of production have grown <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html">orders of magnitudes more complicated since then</a>. Witnessing global capitalism, we may already feel that we are in the ghostly presence of an alien intelligence, where humans are its neurons.<br />
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Edit: <a href="https://twitter.com/APXHard">A friend</a> points out that an AI agent that knows our preferences could negotiate all these microtransactions for us, perhaps with Pandora-like training system. So there is no need for pings. The user interface would be simply an agenda for the day. What is your job? You do the things on your agenda. It may have some repeating items, but it may have many one-offs. It may have tasks whose purposes are opaque to you or that seem nonsensical. The possibility of life as such an absurd dance intrigues me.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-60095916939060012462017-04-09T13:17:00.002-07:002017-04-10T10:05:07.895-07:00Look upon Syria, and despair<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We should stay the hell out of Syria, the "rebels" are just as bad as the current regime. WHAT WILL WE GET FOR OUR LIVES AND $ BILLIONS?ZERO</span> <span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "georgia"; font-size: 12pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/346063000056254464" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">June 16, 2013</span></a></blockquote>
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American involvement in the Syrian civil war is stupid for the same reason that previous American actions in the Middle East have been stupid. There is no realistic end game.<br />
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Syria will suffer, and her neighbors will suffer, as long as she is at war. The most important strategic and humanitarian objective is to end the war. To obtain peace, some party must grab and hold a monopoly on the use of force in the region.<br />
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There is only one option for peace as far as I can see. The rebels are a fractious bunch that don't look capable of holding the country, so write them off. That leaves us with the existing Assad regime as the most likely and capable victors.<br />
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"But he's a dictator" you say. But what makes you think anything else can survive in a country where the borders were drawn on the back of a napkin by a British colonel? Democracy requires opposing factions to trust each other so that they won't be screwed over when they lose an election. Perhaps you notice that opposing factions in Syria are currently killing each other. The probability of convincing them to trade bullets for votes is low.<br />
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By using military force to aid the Syrian rebels, America prevents a stable equilibrium from being reached. Her intervention prolongs the conflict, and therefore the death and destruction. Short of explicit and thorough genocide, nothing is worse for a population than prolonged war.<br />
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The primary role of the United States in the Middle East over the last 15 years is that of a chaos monkey. It overthrows stable governments, installs unstable governments, and then abandons those unstable governments when the home audience gets bored. It prolongs conflicts by handicapping likely winning factions and supporting losing factions that have no realistic chance of pacifying the territory.<br />
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The result of all this is trillions of dollars wasted, probably a million deaths attributable to US actions, millions more made refugees, and a power vacuum that was the breeding ground of ISIS. Trump's opposition to this policy was one of the smartest things about his campaign, and his betrayal is disappointing yet unsurprising.<br />
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I have no doubt that the individual foreign policy minds in the United States government are far more intelligent and informed than I am. And yet somehow, you plug them into this bureaucracy, and they churn out the same stupidity for decades. Some of the faces change, even a supposedly radical outsider can win an election, and the bipartisan Washington consensus stays the same. This is both impressive and terrifying. If spitting in the face of 99% of the elite and by some miracle electing a man they hate and fear is not enough to change course, then what will it take?<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-87608068321994489422017-02-19T17:09:00.000-08:002017-02-20T09:42:59.009-08:00The OutsideThis is a conceptual post. I attempt to explain "the Outside", an abstract concept that I find useful in modeling the world. The Outside is not a single thing, but rather Inside/Outside is a <i>pattern</i> that frequently appears in human society.<br />
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The world of human values is a tiny island in an ocean of darkness. That darkness is The Outside. It is a place of complexity, illegibility, and indifference. It is not actively hostile to humans, but it is a wild and dangerous place. Humans build institutions to keep the Outside out. But somebody has to man the walls. And sometimes the Outside leaks in.<br />
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Service on the walls makes a person cold and hard. The defender learns objective reasoning, logic, effective violence, tolerance for ambiguity, toughness, and competence. These are the virtues needed to wring human values from a world of chaos.<br />
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The oldest human institution is probably the family. Within a family, parents create an illusion of safety for children. Food, shelter, and material goods appear for the children as if by magic. This is a bubble of Insideness. Inside, there is plenty, comfort, and play. It is a world where every human is cared for, where every person is gifted what they need to thrive with nothing asked in return.<br />
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The inside is less real than the outside. The maintenance of the bubble requires constant work and risk-taking. The breadwinners of the family interact with an outside world more hostile to the fulfillment of human desires, whether it be a farm, capitalist labor market, or jungle. If a breadwinner gets sick or injured, the outside leaks in, and the children know want and hunger.<br />
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In a modern society, nested institutions serve to buffer the people inside from some of the hardship of the outside. Human families ban together for mutual support in church groups. State welfare takes over for injured breadwinners. Police keep citizens safe from domestic predators and warriors keep countries safe from conquest.<br />
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Law, property, rights - these are not features of the natural world. These are fictions of the Inside that are maintained through constant effort. The presumption of safety is an artifact of this illusion. In the natural world, a person is always at risk of arbitrary accident or capricious attack.<br />
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Capitalism is a curious human institution that mirrors some aspects of the outside. We have heard of “the corporate jungle” and “social darwinism”. The ideal free market allows corporations to live and die, to suffer real consequences of risk, in a way that society has decided is inappropriate for individuals humans. This has benefits for society - it makes corporations more productive and effective.<br />
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Different roles in a corporation have different levels of exposure to the outside. Executives are in touch with the fragility of the company. They know that it must profit or die. There is no instruction manual for their jobs, they search through an infinite possibility space to find a solution for the company to survive. Each successful company's solution is unique.<br />
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Lower-level workers are shielded from this reality. They are given artificial quotas, rules, and goals in a framework created by management. For them, job performance is <i>legible. </i>They know which goals they need to make in what time frame in order to produce satisfactory performance.<br />
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The closer a worker is to the market, the more uncertain their job performance becomes. Salespeople are closer to the outside. Their performance is objectively measurable and highly variable. They have to deal with the complicated world of human emotion where there is no rulebook. It is possible for a good salesperson to have a bad quarter based on sheer luck. On the other end of the spectrum, a person working in HR faces almost no risk or variability at all. HR is nestled far on the inside of the organization.<br />
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Engineering is somewhere in between. The objective nature of the engineer's job is a whiff of outside air. The engineer’s product either works or it doesn’t, and it’s the engineer’s job to figure it out how to make it work. There are no A’s for effort. But the engineer bears no responsibility for the success or failure of a product after it is built. That responsibility falls on executives. In the work world, there is a correlation between responsibility, risk-taking, and the degree of outsideness of a particular role.<br />
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Startup founders bear a lot of risk and are constantly aware of the outside. Employees get free lunches, founders know exactly how many days of runway those lunches cost.<br />
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The cultural differences between people closer to the outside and the inside lead to a survive-thrive conflict. Outsiders have survival-based values, and they see Insiders as weak. Insiders have values based around self-fulfillment, and they see Outsiders as brutish.<br />
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Scientists and technologists fulfill a role in society with substantial exposure to the outside. They wrestle with raw nature, to make it legible to human minds malleable to human efforts. People who work in science and technology are often seen as cold and blunt by people in softer fields.<br />
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Superintelligent A.I. will be a powerful incarnation of the Outside or of the Inside. Intelligence is humanity’s greatest weapon in taming the outside. A friendly A.I. is a champion which will build a stronger wall than any human civilization could conceive of.<br />
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Ultimately, the outside wins. An implacable cold death creeps upon us. Physics dictates that the last particle of love will fade into the background radiation of the universe. Whatever bubbles of human values we create are destined to be temporary.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-931183990672826972016-10-25T12:04:00.000-07:002016-12-16T15:12:59.698-08:00Election 2016 - A Plea for Understanding<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>I. </b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I grew up in a religious cult where disagreement with the doctrines was punished with ostracism. As a smart and honest kid, this was terrifying. I saw flaws in the doctrines of my faith, but I kept them to myself. I feared losing everything if I stated my doubts. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I couldn’t comprehend what it would be like to be cut off by everybody I knew. Would I be homeless? Would I starve? I was just a kid. I lived with a primal fear, paralyzing me, rooting me in place. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Officially, the Jehovah’s Witness organization prides itself on allowing open inquiry into its doctrines - which are collectively referred to as “the truth”. But it’s a farce. Every question has an official answer disseminated by the organization. Once you’ve received the official answer to your question, you’re not allowed to keep questioning. “This book’s argument for Creationism seems to have a flaw in its attack on evolutionary genetics on page 5” - nope, you're outta here. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You are also not allowed to seek the answer to your question in materials written by people of other faith backgrounds. JWs keep a closed information ecosystem. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As a teenager I lived a paranoid double life for years. In my secret thoughts I was an atheist. On the outside I continued to support “the truth” as Jehovah’s Witnesses taught it. I even dutifully evangelized it to others, as was required. Each day was torture. I fantasized about suicide.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>II. </b></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.”</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">- <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/lo/uncritical_supercriticality/" style="text-decoration: none;">Eliezer Yudkowsky</a></span></blockquote>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I read Sam Altman’s </span><a href="http://blog.samaltman.com/the-2016-election" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">election piece</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, I gave half a cheer. As President of YCombinator, he came under pressure to oust Peter Thiel from his advisory role due to the latter’s support for the candidacy of Donald Trump (see </span><a href="https://marco.org/2016/10/17/shame-on-y-combinator" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><a href="https://medium.com/projectinclude/peter-thiel-yc-and-hard-decisions-2b91bab83764#.ojqsvkkdx" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Sam bravely refused. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In response, some in the tech press </span><a href="http://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-should-resign-from-y-combinator-1787932344" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">called</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for Sam to lose his position. He’s held on, but it wasn’t a sure thing. The tabloid press have claimed its share of heads. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thank the God I don’t believe in that Sam refused. It’s tempting to mete out punishment to people that disagree with you if you have a large majority on your side. Few people in coastal California would blame you for ostracizing a Trump supporter and few will praise you for refusing to do so. The tech press seems unanimous against Sam Altman and </span><a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/10/no-facebook-diversity-doesnt-explain-support-thiel/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mark Zuckerberg</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for failing to cut off Peter Thiel. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But when disagreement is met with punishment, it’s bad for society. It creates an illusion of unanimity through a climate of fear. The collective intelligence of the social group is sacrificed as collateral damaged. Society grows stupid and narrow-minded as each member fears saying something which might offend the orthodoxy. The emperor can go right on having no clothes forever. This is exactly what happens in bizarre cults.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peter Thiel can take a few bullets. He has a billion dollars. But he's not the primary target of his own attempted political assassination. </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It sends a message to everybody who is watching. M</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">ost conservatives in Silicon Valley can’t afford to lose their jobs. The rent here is damn high. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s not a central governing body deciding doctrine for the California tech industry but it feels like that sometimes. It seems dangerous to have conservative beliefs, even if your views are supported by half the country. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For me, personally, the </span><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">firing of Brendan Eich</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in retaliation to his conservative political activities was a watershed moment. Other politically right-leaning people had been fired, but usually because they misstepped and said something offensive that got picked up by the clickbait press. Eich was never anything but professional, polite, and good to people around him. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">With Eich’s firing, I got </span><a href="http://m.xkcd.com/1357/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the message</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - the message of power. I panicked and endured some sleepless nights, thinking of blog posts I had published. I don't label myself a conservative, but I certainly entertain some conservative ideas. The fear won and I took down posts on controversial subjects like immigration or abortion. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Over the years I saw more persecution of right-leaning people: the firings, the </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/06/curtis_yarvin_booted_from_strange_loop_it_s_a_big_big_problem.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">conference disinvites</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the </span><a href="https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">attempts to kick them off</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of open-source projects. I learned to censor myself. </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I even deleted my favorite links page, fearing the contagion of linking to people who had themselves suffered punishment. </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It felt a lot like being 15 years old again.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I recognize that as a cult survivor I’m prone to feel the same patterns of thought control and persecution. I have to fight against a tide of paranoia and fear whenever I find myself on the wrong side of a passionate majority. I try to be self-aware to the fact that this is a triggering of my past trauma and not present reality. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I think what's going on in the tech industry isn't only in my head. I don't see anyone threatened with professional consequences for supporting Hillary Clinton. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My past experience is a burden but also a gift. It brings the moral clarity that these tactics are </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bad. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Even in service of a good ideal like creating an inclusive society, wielding power against heretics will corrupt you. It scoops out your brain. It turns you into a zombie pawn in the hands of people who generate outrage. If you succeed at manufacturing unanimity through use of power, the intelligent and curious people will stay silent or leave your group. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So thank you Sam Altman for preventing things from getting worse than they already are. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>III. </b></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I only gave half a cheer for Sam’s piece because it fails to embody another value that’s important to me - a good-faith effort to understand all sides of a debate. In some circles they call the practice of arguing convincingly for the other side the </span><a href="http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“ideological Turing test”</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. This is nothing new to someone who’s has been in a writing class or a debate team. Sam almost <a href="http://blog.samaltman.com/the-2016-election">reaches for it</a>:</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“We should all feel a duty to try to understand the roughly half of the country that thinks we are severely misguided. I don’t understand how 43% of the country supports Trump. But I’d like to find out, because we have to include everyone in our path forward.”</span></blockquote>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What’s stopping him from understanding Trump supporters? </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t find it terribly hard to write an argument for either of the major candidates running for office and Sam is certainly as clever as I am. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People are writing about it on the internet (</span><a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/10/12/im-asian-woman-and-proud-trump-deplorable.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Trump himself is doing all he can to tell people about what he believes. That’s what a campaign is for! </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe Trump supporters think uncontrolled low-skilled immigration hurts the most vulnerable members of the population and that it isn’t worth the net economic benefit. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe their livelihood has been lost due to the globalization of labor and capital while the country has failed to provide any significant support. Futureshock is real. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe they favor a conservative Supreme Court, and they fear what a 5-4 leftist majority will do to free speech, free association, property rights, and gun rights. With Peter Thiel’s extensive background in law, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was a big concern for him.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trump sometimes has supported a more isolationist foreign policy. I am in favor of that. It seems to me that US military intervention created a power vacuum in the Middle East that left space for the rise of radical Islam. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe Trump supporters fear the power of a President so cozy with the mass media as Clinton seems to be. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Western society is in a double-bind with regard to maintaining its liberal values while crafting an immigration policy for troubled muslim countries. Restricting immigration from these places as Trump proposes offends liberal values by discriminating against millions of innocent people. But a country is made of its people, and illiberal immigration creates an illiberal country. Also, more terrorist incidents committed by a tiny minority of muslim immigrants will increase demand for total state surveillance. Reasonable people holding similar values can disagree on which immigration policy is least bad.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Besides these very straightforward reasons for Trump, there are strategic and esoteric reasons. For example, I think Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to oppose state surveillance but that they are unlikely to do so with one of their own at the head of the executive branch. A President Trump would unleash the most anti-surveillance activism in history. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So why didn’t Sam come up with any of these ideas? My read on it is that people in our cultural group are so harshly condemning Trump that even demonstrating an understanding of Trump supporters seems contrarian and a little dangerous. </span><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Politics is the mind killer</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and ideas are soldiers. Entertaining the ideas of “the other side” is like giving aid to the enemy. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The group mind, as represented on my facebook feed, has judged Trump as racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and the American Hitler. Trump </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">voters, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like Thiel, are guilty by association. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m morbidly impressed with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, they have run a fantastically effective effort of demonization. More fevered mainstream commentary predicts that Trump’s election will ignite pogroms against </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/786014344148553728" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jews and people of color</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or perhaps bring back </span><a href="http://time.com/4535292/donald-trump-black-slaves/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Black slavery</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. An old peacenik at a local coffee shop near me told me unbidden that he would shoot Trump in the head if given the opportunity. He was the second person to do so.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sam Altman, like a lot of people in progressive industries, can’t understand conservatives because they aren’t making their voices heard. They have successfully been painted with the image of every demon in the American canon. It’s no surprise if they keep their heads down.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To use the language of my progressive friends: progressives are unconscious of the privilege they have to participate openly in political debates without fear. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>IV.</b></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am not endorsing Donald Trump for President of the United States. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If he wins, which seems unlikely at this point, some part of me will rejoice. That part of me is the young boy who feared punishment for thinking and speaking the truth as he saw it. A Trump win will mean the tactics of demonization and punishment will have failed. In public we will be allowed to think a broader range of thoughts. As Trump himself shows, not all of these thoughts will be worthwhile. But my feeling of freedom will include the freedom to oppose the bad ideas of a President Trump. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But that is far from thinking that Trump will be a good President. I don’t have a good handle on what he actually believes.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In American politics, I find that things are never as good as I hope or as bad as I fear. A Hillary Clinton presidency will strengthen some values that I am opposed to, but life is long and there is plenty of time for political fashions to change. I don't desire a Clinton presidency, but neither do I fear it. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=78cbbb7f2882629a5157fa593&id=294056479e" style="color: #d52a33; text-decoration: none;">Venkatesh Rao</a></span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;"> makes a good case that voting for idealistic reasons, rather than strategic ones, is more in line with the culture of Silicon Valley. His argument made me feel like voting for Gary Johnson. </span>I guess you could say I'm undecided.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>V.</b></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I feel a call to live my own values and try to understand the viewpoint of people calling for Trump supporters to be punished. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If I talk to an average enforcer of political correctness, I’m sure that they are not opposed to open debate. It’s a fundamental American value. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill used the term “the marketplace of ideas” to describe how open debate allows the best ideas to win and spread. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Libertarian-leaning people like myself shout this line of reasoning over and over at progressives as if they don’t get it. I think they do get it. But they notice that the ideas flying around in this marketplace are not neutral in the effect they have on society. Sometimes words hurt people. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For example, when we have public debate over what to do about Muslim terrorism, it might make people more biased against Muslims, the vast majority of whom will never be terrorists. That’s probably why the Obama Justice Department at first </span><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/06/19/lynch_partial_transcript_of_orlando_911_calls_will_have_references_to_isis_cut_out.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">redacted</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> mentions of “Islam” and “ISIS” from the transcripts of the 9/11 calls made by the Orlando nightclub shooter. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I bet that progressives don’t believe in punishing their political opponents, even if that’s what I perceive them to be doing. Rather, they believe that some ideas hurt people, and we should stop spreading ideas that hurt. This class of ideas is called things like “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “transphobia”, “Islamophobia” and “xenophobia”.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the root of political correctness is a desire to care. Caring is noble. Caring makes it nice to be human. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This becomes problematic when it gets hijacked by politics. Partisans have a huge incentive to argue that the ideas of the other side aren’t merely wrong, but actively harmful. The American Left has been incredibly successful at making this case against Trump this year, who has done his best to make it easy for them. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Politics further corrupts care by limiting it to people on your side. Like the kind peacenik at the coffee shop who told me he would gladly shoot Trump in the head. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you care about political correctness because you care about people, I want you to keep your caring. But I challenge you to expand it. This is hard. Empathy gets more complicated the wider you expand your circle of care. But this is the most noble challenge you can accept. It is the challenge of the bodhisattva. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is another problem with preventing hurtful words. What if hurtful words are also true? For example, the Orlando Nightclub shooter really was inspired by Islam and claimed allegiance to ISIS. Learning this fact might make people biased against Muslims, but it is a fact. What are we supposed to do about unpleasant truths?</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The divide over unpleasant truth is the most essential ideological divide between internet communities today. At the age of 18 I left behind everything and everybody I knew because of an allegiance to truth that wouldn’t let me stay a Jehovah’s Witness. I have a strong bias towards the side with an absolute commitment to truth. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I understand the value of caring. So far there is no mass movement that has a good protocol to bring the two values into harmony. The internet right-wing revels in unpleasant truths and paints the left as budding totalitarians. The internet left maintains a scrupulous niceness and paints the right as brutes. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Perhaps Buddhism can offer a way. In the Buddhist tradition my girlfriend is studying, they are taught to speak kindly as a moral precept. But they are also taught not to judge or criticize how other people are living up to moral precepts. At the same time, Buddhism has a strong commitment to truth. Seeing things for how they actually are is pretty much the whole point of it. It seems to have the right ingredients for making kind truth-tellers. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rationalism offers another way. Rationalists practice and celebrate changing their mind. The world could use more rationalist virtues. </span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-6dd60c4b-fd26-9b7f-bfc0-90b6350d1d03"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I hope that we can grant each other a little patience, a little understanding, while we find a way together. </span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-57558912140176594152016-10-14T12:50:00.002-07:002016-10-14T14:03:10.950-07:00Using Electrum on an air-gapped machine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W0nntsjXFkg/WAFDhrO4iuI/AAAAAAAABn4/fDX4XwcvqTYoPXkalBkFMPnOpM0VUZwCACLcB/s1600/electrum%2529logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="81" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-W0nntsjXFkg/WAFDhrO4iuI/AAAAAAAABn4/fDX4XwcvqTYoPXkalBkFMPnOpM0VUZwCACLcB/s320/electrum%2529logo.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Securely storing bitcoin is hard. Most people trust a third party, like Coinbase, to keep their bitcoin safe. But these third parties are big targets for hackers and indeed many have been hacked and lost their clients' funds. People who are truly security conscious keep their own wallet on an air-gapped machine that never connects to a network.<br />
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I like using Electrum for my wallet software but I've had trouble figuring out how to use it on an air-gapped machine for two reasons. First, the <a href="https://electrum.org/#download">Ubuntu installation instructions</a> for Electrum use apt-get and python setup tools, both of which require a network connection to download dependencies. This is a no-go if you want to have an air-gapped machine which has <i>never </i>touched the network.<br />
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Secondly, Electrum translates data into a custom base 43 format before encoding it in QR codes. QR codes are a secure way of transferring data such as signed transactions off of an air-gapped machine. But I ran into a problem that other software doesn't recognize bitcoin data in base 43 strings and there weren't online tools for translating from base 43 to a more common format.<br />
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Let's tackle the second problem first. I wrote a little web tool that will convert Electrum QR data into a format that bitcoin understands. It's at <a href="http://electrum43.org/">http://electrum43.org/</a>.<br />
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So let's say you transfer a transaction off of an air-gapped machine using an Electrum QR code and you get data that looks like this:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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blockquote>
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If you paste that into <a href="http://electrum43.org/">http://electrum43.org/</a>, it will translate the data into a hex string that bitcoin understands. You can then decode that data into a human-readable json object <a href="https://blockchain.info/decode-tx">here</a> or broadcast it to the bitcoin network <a href="https://blockchain.info/pushtx">here</a>. </div>
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So that's one problem taken care of. What about installing electrum onto an offline Ubuntu machine? Electrum installation requires two Debian packages (python-qt4 and python-pip) and a host of python dependencies that are usually handled by network-enabled package managers. After much digging, I've found a way to do that and I wrote a <a href="https://gist.github.com/jacoblyles/80898d6388880334f3e5a78785702ccc">guide here</a>. </div>
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I hope this helps you keep your bitcoin secure with Electrum. Stay safe and have fun with bitcoin!</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3686340074869994423.post-83336282483442217572016-10-06T12:57:00.001-07:002017-12-25T13:59:55.995-08:00My Interchange JourneyLike a lot of people I know, I used to be afraid of experiencing other people’s emotions. At restaurants, I said my food was good when it wasn’t so that the staff wouldn’t experience anger or shame. I avoided talking about problems in my relationship with my girlfriend because who knows what box of emotions that would unleash. If I saw someone in visible distress, I avoided them. I figured it was someone else’s responsibility to help them. What could I do?<br />
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That changed drastically over the last 12 months. I am a hundred times more free in expressing my thoughts and feelings in all sorts of situations. Whatever outcome I feared would happen doesn’t happen. Most of the time kindly expressing my opinions makes my relationships more real and satisfying. </div>
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Ignoring emotions didn’t make them go away. I used to have this voice in my head ruminating on all the things I wished I had said but didn’t. But when I speak up, I find that inner neurotic voice is silenced. In some circles, they call this achievement “inner peace”. The trade-off is that I live a more vulnerable life because people know what I really think. It's a worthwhile trade. </div>
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Another big change for me is that I go towards people in distress instead of away from them. I think I’m a pretty good person to have around when you need somebody. This change in my self-concept still feels new to me and I'm proud of it. </div>
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I trace these changes back to the year-long counseling training I went through at <a href="http://www.interchangecounseling.com/">Interchange</a>. I learned from some other places too[0], but Interchange was the biggest piece. It bills itself as a counseling and personal growth program. But what I learned about was how to be a human. I learned how to let people see my emotions and how to be with other people’s emotions. My EQ went through the roof.</div>
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It turns out to be easy to be useful to people in distress - acknowledge what they’re going through and don’t try to fix them! Americans need to be trained out of fixing people and denying negative emotions. You have to be able to tolerate what’s there instead of pasting happy faces all over everything. The first counseling practice at Interchange is literally sitting in attentive silence while the client tells you about their problem for a few minutes. If you can do this successfully then you are in the 90th percentile of the population in terms of counseling.<br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LFRJBqFhj7U/V_awu6bz4oI/AAAAAAAABm0/CJszD_BWAjcE_T4R9HyMOw_y4EamHjIjgCLcB/s1600/12513865_1006709956079913_31645442631292443_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LFRJBqFhj7U/V_awu6bz4oI/AAAAAAAABm0/CJszD_BWAjcE_T4R9HyMOw_y4EamHjIjgCLcB/s400/12513865_1006709956079913_31645442631292443_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Me and Steve at Interchange, demonstrating an exercise designed to examine our anger through simulated road rage</td></tr>
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The most valuable thing about Interchange is that it provides a safe container for people to practice being real with each other. During the training, I spent hundreds of hours having real interactions with people. We helped each other explore our inner emotional landscape. They cried. I cried. It was intense, magical, and cathartic. </div>
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On a larger scale, I think all people need safe spaces to be real with each other. We have a massive deficit of it in our society - it’s emotional malnourishment. Most of us hide what we’re feeling from our friends and family, some of us hide our emotions from our fucking therapists. </div>
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Our culture still suffers from the idea that therapy is something you do when there is something wrong with you. You are broken and need to be fixed. For a lot of us, the only time we open up to anybody is when something is terribly wrong. It’s the same way we mistreat our bodies by only caring about health when we get sick. </div>
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Humans are not machines that sometimes break and need a mechanic. Humans are organic creatures that are constantly growing and changing. If you’re going to use a metaphor, use a plant. It constantly needs a certain amount of water and nutrition and if it gets what it needs it grows. We need some amount of constant emotional nourishment to stay healthy. </div>
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Modern life is confusing. Things have changed so fast. We’re not built for it. The institutions that people relied on for emotional nourishment for centuries are disappearing or changing. And maybe they were never very good to start with. We need to help each other feel like we aren’t alone and have a home in this world. </div>
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I feel uncomfortable giving a full-throated endorsement of something, even Interchange. It's the best program I've ever done but it isn't perfect. So I want to end with some criticism to provide you with a balanced cross-section of my judgements of it. </div>
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Interchange is based on an optimistic humanism that comes from people like Carl Rogers and Harvey Jackins. In the program you practice believing that other people are fundamentally good, interesting, and capable. It’s a powerful counseling stance. But sometimes it sounds naive and it might not be the right approach for a counselor working with a smart, skeptical client. </div>
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I worry about groupthink at Interchange. There isn’t much nuance in what is taught and there aren’t many skeptical voices. This is partly because a community based on this kind of Humanism feels so nice to be in. When I brought up a skeptical point of view, I was the one harshing the good vibes.<br />
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Also, most of the students came from similar ideological places. I grew up in a cult so I feel uncomfortable being around unanimous ideological agreement. But when I expressed this discomfort, other students reached out to me and didn’t push me away. There may not be a lot of critical discussion but it feels like Interchange can handle it when it does happen.</div>
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Interchange is a great place to practice emotional intelligence and learn counseling. It is not a complete source of all the spiritual nourishment that you need to grow as a human. In particular, between the humanism and the social justice, it’s an epistemically sloppy place. Truth is not highly valued besides the supposed "truths" taught by humanism and social justice. If there were a package deal with Interchange and <a href="http://rationality.org/">CFAR</a> training together, that would balance out Interchange with the values that are missing.<br />
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Being founded by a progressive teacher named Steve Bearman, Interchange promotes some ideas from the social justice movement which are divisive and, in my opinion, poorly supported[1]. It's a harsh note mixed in with the humanism. White men were unkindly singled out and stereotyped a few times. Marxist models of the world are presented without consideration of other points of view that better map to reality. I spent a few nights lying awake and composing angry messages to the Facebook group. Gradually, I built more social and emotional resources and it bothered me less.<br />
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Most of the time when social justice and humanism conflict at Interchange, the humanism wins. For example, during exercises where we were instructed to practice radical honesty with each other, one of the more radical progressive students inevitably objected to the exercise on the grounds that people who aren't white men might be exposed to "oppressive" opinions. In response, Steve gently expressed that he had faith that the students could handle it. Learning goals were valued ahead of progressive orthodoxy.<br />
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Between the bitter taste of righteous anger in social justice and the sweetness in humanism, the sweetness wins out by something like a 9 to 1 ratio. Interchange is a personal project of Steve's and this reflects his background and values. You can't really change Interchange without changing Steve, and Steve's been into social justice for 2 or 3 decades. I've made my peace with it and I highly value my experience and expect to learn more from Interchange. </div>
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Despite these caveats, I found Interchange to be a brilliant, daring, creative program. It catalyzed an incredible year for me. I believe in myself and I believe in my capacity to grow and change for the better. Check it out, or something like it. In terms of happiness, investing in your emotional intelligence is the highest-yield investment you can make.<br />
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[0] Stanford Business School's "touchy-feely" class, Nonviolent Communication, Buddhism, and eXperience the Game were other resources that led me down this path.<br />
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[1] For example, Steve often uses the concepts of class conflict, oppression, and privilege to model how the world works. These are a staple of the social justice/progressive worldview, but I think they are simplistic and overused.</div>
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