Most wild animals die of starvation, disease and predation.
The suffering involved in these deaths is often extreme and long-lasting.
There are a lot of wild animals.
This atrocious fact is important and underrated [^1].
[^1]: C.f. Wikipedia.
After a month of "blog every day no matter what" I can say: this is hard.
But, I have enjoyed this commitment, so I'm going to do another month.
Since I've allowed myself to post quotations, I've felt a pull to do a lot of these, since they are much easier than original writing [^1].
[^1]: In the first month, I tagged 9 posts as "writing" and 31 as "quote".
For one thing, I find it easier to "see" where the bar is for posting a quote, than for posting original writing.
With quotes: if a passage makes me sit up straight, and I want to return it several times in the future—it's a contender. The intended audience is clear: future me! The purpose: bring these pearls back to my attention.
With writing: my purpose is much less clear. The word "blog" is a misnomer: this is largely a study journal, made semi-public in the spirit of "garage door up" (or maybe: "see inside the sausage factory"). For the most part, "future me" is the only person who should read these posts, and even he probably shouldn't read many of them.
If and when I write things I actually want more than 3 people to read, I will post them elsewhere. I will make this clearer on the blog header, somehow. Ceveat lector.
I also face the issue that I'm trying to write about things I'm learning about, and quite often, 1-2 hours is not enough to go from a topic I don't understand to a post on the topic that I'm reasonably confident isn't badly confused.
For example: today I drafted a post on the dipositional account of belief, which Cheryl Misak finds at the heart of pragmatism. Doing so raised questions that showed I didn't understand it to my satisfaction. That realisation, plus the publication deadline, was mildly stressful. What to do? Flag the uncertainties and publish anyway? Or publish later, but then... what do I publish today?
In setting up this experiment, I made what is probably a rookie error: I planned to go from "blank page" to "published" in a single 1-2 hour work session, or at least within the space of a day. I can do this, but my drafts get way better if I have a chance to "return fresh" and do a good round of editing. I also like crafting prose, but I rarely make the time to do it—I'd like to have more of that in my days.
So, starting today, I'm going to switch to a "draft today, edit and post tomorrow" pattern.
I will also aim to build up a backlog of drafts, so that on days where I show up to morning writing, but am unusually slow, I do not end up immediately in trouble. The daily commitment to "show up" will be hard and consistent, the outputs will vary a bunch.
I will also experiment with posting different kinds of original writing, in different formats, and different lengths. Book reviews, interview summaries, posts-that-could-be-tweets. This could get pretty messy. But whatever. People shouldn't be reading this anyway.
In the back of my mind: what level of urgency is desirable? I think stress and challenge and stretch is valuable. Training should not be a walk in the park. But I worry about the thought-narrowing effects of urgency and stress. And... I want this to be a commitment I love (although presumably it's fine to hate it sometimes, and in those moments, the thing to do is show up anyway).
Structuring commitments are powerful. But pitching them "just right" is a delicate matter. I am in the very early days of this. This second month is about experimentation and refinement.
Think about bounded rationality: we're limited beings, we can't think about everything. We need to know when to cut off our investigation. We need to manage our efforts. The empirical literature suggests we use a heuristic: if things feel clear, we're done.
My suspicion is that if we're using that heuristic, we should expect malicious actors to try to exploit it. To present us with things where that feeling of clarity has been amped up. My worry is that the feeling of clarity can come apart from actual understanding and outside actors can game it.
We should watch out for "cognitive yumminess". Whenever I read something on Twitter I'm like... wait wait wait. Is this actually right, or does it just feel good to believe this?
Our sense of clarity, and its absence, plays a key role in our cognitive self-regulation. A sense of confusion is a signal that we need to think more. But when things feel clear to us, we are satisfied. A sense of clarity is a signal that we have, for the moment, thought enough.
This shows why, say, manipulative interests might be particularly interested in aping clarity. If the sense of clarity is a thought-terminator, then successful imitations of clarity will be quite powerful. If somebody else can stimulate our sense of clarity, then they can gain control of a particular cognitive blind spot. They can hide their machinations behind a veil of apparent clarity.
Season 2 coming soon, probably.
Consumers, employees, students and others are often subjected to ‘sludge’: excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that cost time or money; that may make life difficult to navigate; that may be frustrating, stigmatizing or humiliating; and that might end up depriving people of access to important goods, opportunities and services. Because of behavioral biases and cognitive scarcity, sludge can have much more harmful effects than private and public institutions anticipate. To protect consumers, investors, employees and others, firms and private and public institutions should regularly conduct Sludge Audits to catalogue the costs of sludge and to decide when and how to reduce it. Sludge often has costs far in excess of benefits, and it can hurt the most vulnerable members of society.
I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them - thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!
The Gay Science, Book Four: St Januarius, §276
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.
Ecce Homo, Why I Am So Clever, §10
Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.
[...]
The common penalties cease to deter the patriot, the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in, provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure. The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd.
[...]
It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords. “The trouble with me is that I believe too much in common happiness and goodness,” said a friend of mine whose consciousness was of this sort, “and nothing can console me for their transiency. I am appalled and disconcerted at its being possible.” And so with most of us: a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthymindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
[...]
The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in; — and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.
[...]
For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.
Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood.
[...]
A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations and more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that energy bring personal loss and pain. This is the good side of war, in so far as it calls for “volunteers.” And for morality life is a war, and the service of the highest is a sort of cosmic patriotism which also calls for volunteers. Even a sick man, unable to be militant outwardly, can carry on the moral warfare. He can willfully turn his attention away from his own future, whether in this world or the next. He can train himself to indifference to his present drawbacks and immerse himself in whatever objective interests still remain accessible. He can follow public news, and sympathize with other people’s affairs. He can cultivate cheerful manners, and be silent about his miseries. He can contemplate whatever ideal aspects of existence his philosophy is able to present to him, and practice whatever duties, such as patience, resignation, trust, his ethical system requires. Such a man lives on his loftiest, largest plane. He is a high-hearted freeman and no pining slave. And yet he lacks something which the Christian par excellence, the mystic and ascetic saint, for example, has in abundant measure, and which makes of him a human being of an altogether different denomination.
[...]
Whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in the presence of which no exertion of volition is required. The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well — morality suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest personal will and effort to one all sicklied o’er with the sense of irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things. What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel that the spirit of the universe recognizes and secures him, all decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.
And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.
[...]
Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 2
Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?” It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way.
[...]
For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.”
[...]
It favors gravity, not pertness; it says “hush” to all vain chatter and smart wit.
[...]
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
[...]
At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good?
The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 2
In essentials they were already the same thoughts which I now take up again in the treatises at hand: let us hope that the long period in between has been good for them, that they have become more mature, brighter, stronger, more perfect! That I still hold fast to them today, that they themselves have, in the meantime, held to each other ever more firmly, indeed have grown into each other and become intermeshed, strengthens within me the cheerful confidence that they came about not singly, not arbitrarily, not sporadically, but rather from the beginning arose out of a common root, out of a basic will of knowledge which commands from deep within, speaking ever more precisely, demanding something ever more precise. For this alone is fitting for a philosopher. We have no right to be single in anything: we may neither err singly nor hit upon the truth singly. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit our thoughts grow out of us, our values, our yes’s and no’s and if’s and whether’s—the whole lot related and connected among themselves, witnesses to one will, one health, one earthly kingdom, one sun.—And do they taste good to you, these fruits of ours?—But of what concern is that to the trees! Of what concern is that to us, us philosophers! …
GM Preface, §2
Dogmatic philosophies have sought for tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future. Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and absolutely, now and forever, against all mistake — such has been the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the origin of the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the various origins could be discriminated from one another from this point of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has always been a favorite test. Origin in immediate intuition; origin in pontifical authority; origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision, hearing, or unaccountable impression; origin in direct possession by a higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning; origin in automatic utterance generally, — these origins have been stock warrants for the truth of one opinion after another which we find represented in religious history. The medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way. They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but the argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from origin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient.
[...]
In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.
[...]
No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.
[...]
Why not simply leave pathological questions out? To this I reply in two ways: First, I say, irrepressible curiosity imperiously leads one on; and I say, secondly, that it always leads to a better understanding of a thing’s significance to consider its exaggerations and perversions, its equivalents and substitutes and nearest relatives elsewhere. Not that we may thereby swamp the thing in the wholesale condemnation which we pass on its inferior congeners, but rather that we may by contrast ascertain the more precisely in what its merits consist, by learning at the same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed.
[...]
In the autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support.
Some one ought to do it, but why should I?” is the ever reëchoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. “Some one ought to do it, so why not I?” is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.” True enough! and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce — as in the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound to coalesce often enough — in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.
...
No one organism can possibly yield to its owner the whole body of truth. Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine quâ non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?
Envy is the one mortal sin that is still completely taboo. All the others can be turned into a positive. Envy is the one we still don't talk about, and I suspect it's the one that is still pervasive and most destructive.
Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time horizons. Our attachment to particular means should therefore be highly tentative, highly uncertain, and radically contingent.
Our specific policy views, though we may rationally believe them to be the best available, will stand only a slight chance of being correct. They ought to stand the highest chance of being correct of all available views, but this chance will not be very high in absolute terms. Compare the choice of one’s politics to betting on the team most favored to win the World Series at the beginning of the season. That team does indeed have the best chance of winning, but most of the time it does not end up being the champion. Most of the time our sports predictions are wrong, even if we are good forecasters on average. So it is with politics and policy.
Our attitudes toward others should therefore be accordingly tolerant. Imagine that your chance of being right is three percent, and your corresponding chance of being wrong is ninety-seven percent. Each opposing view, however, has only a two percent chance of being right, which of course is a bit less than your own chance of being right. Yet there are many such opposing views, so even if yours is the best, you’re probably still wrong. Now imagine that your wrongness will lead to a slower rate of economic growth, a poorer future, and perhaps even the premature end of civilization (not enough science to fend off that asteroid!). That means your political views, though they are the best ones out there, will have grave negative consequences with probability .98 (one minus two percent, the latter being the chance that you are right on the details of the means-end relationships). In this setting, how confident should you really be about the details of your political beliefs? How firm should your dogmatism be about means-ends relationships? Probably not very; better to adopt a tolerant demeanor and really mean it.
As a general rule, we should not pat ourselves on the back and feel that we are on the correct side of an issue. We should choose the course that is most likely to be correct, keeping in mind that at the end of the day we are still more likely to be wrong than right. Our particular views, in politics and elsewhere, should be no more certain than our assessments of which team will win the World Series. With this attitude political posturing loses much of its fun, and indeed it ought to be viewed as disreputable or perhaps even as a sign of our own overconfident and delusional nature.
Stubborn Attachments, Chapter 6—Must uncertainty paralyze us?
In strict Bayesian terms, most innovators are not justified in thinking that their new ideas are in fact correct. Most new ideas are wrong and the creator’s "gut feeling" that he is "onto something" is sometimes as epistemologically dubious as is the opinion of the previous scientific consensus. Yet we still want that they promote these new ideas, even if most of them turn out to be wrong.
In this view, the so-called "reasonable" people are selfishly building up their personal reputations at the expense of scientific progress. They are too reasonable to generate new ideas.
To put it another way, there are two kinds of truth-seeking behavior:
Hold and promote the view which leads to society most likely settling upon truth in the future, or
Hold and promote the view which is most likely to be correct.
These two strategies coincide less than many people think.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/08/the-five-best-r.html
Someone recently described their in-group as follows:
We genuinely just want to do what’s best for the world.
How many humans have motivations this pure, and this transparent? Perhaps there are some. But I would guess that the vast majority who understand themselves this way are, in fact, misguided.
My guess is that most of us do better if we think of our motives as somewhat complex and mysterious—not simple and transparent.
I'm assuming that a more accurate self-understanding leads to better consequences on average. I can imagine cases, perhaps entire domains, where this is false. But on average, "know thyself" is a good rule, I would say.
My impression is that the way we think, the way we recognise and weigh reasons, is heavily shaped by our motives in complex and pervasive ways that are hard to recognise or understand.
If that's right, then a simple story about motives will lead us to misunderstand our own thought. "I genuinely just want to do what's best for the company", says the employee, agreeing uncritically with the reasoning of their superior.
For my part, I like the story of: "we're trying to create and play status games with positive externalities". "Positive externalities" captures the altruistic aspiration, while "status games" expresses realism about human nature, a sense of how hard it is to create and maintain systems where social status even vaguely tracks the promotion of the good.
"Make it easier" is a surprisingly powerful way to increase the probability of an action. Which systems, practices and habits make it easier to acquire accurate beliefs?
When I think of the ten commandments, I often think that the two most important are the first and last. The first: only worship God, look up to one true God. The last: you should not look around at your neighbour, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbour.
When you do not have a transcendent religious belief you end up just looking around at other people. And I think that is the problem with our atheist liberal world, it is just the madness of crowds. It's not reason, it's not rational, it's just mass insanity.
There's a contrast between evangelical Christian Bible study and the atheist rationalists. For the evangelicals, the outward-facing thing is often that people are somehow more moral or better. And the inward-facing thing is that you're kind of sinful and there's a lot of stuff you need to fix. [For the atheist rationalists], the outward-facing thing is that you're more rational than other people, and the inward-facing thing is that you're not capable of thought at all, that it's just spaghetti code.
To use the Thomistic Medieval distinction: the medievals believed in the weakness of the will but the power of the intellect, and the moderns believe in the power of the will but the weakness of the intellect. So I guess I think faith and reason are compatible and in fact when you get rid of faith you end up in a world where there's no reason either. And we're living in a much less rational world than we were living in 100 years ago.
[...]
I always think there are two different kinds of arguments. One is a metaphysical argument: God doesn't exist, so the Bible's not true. The second: the Christians aren't Christian enough. And we have to think of what we're struggling against as kind of hyper-Christianity, something like that. It's sort of an extreme deformation of it. There are all sorts of forms that this takes. I think it's not that there's a shortage of morality, it's that there is too much morality. I mean Greta [Thunberg] is so moral she wants to line up and shoot everybody who is not as committed to climate change. If you think of medieval Christianity, the two most important attributes of Christ were that he was divine and that he was poor. So anyone you saw who was poor might be Christ in disguise. But then in the 19th century you had people like Tolstoy or Marx who pushed this in a hyper-Christian direction—we had to do more than the Christians, we have to have a violent revolution, we're going to do more for the poor in this world, right away.
And so I think the Christian alternative is to come back to see that we're in this context, that it's only if you realise you're in a context in which things are pretty screwed up that you have any chance of moving beyond it. The two vignettes I always give on this subject: in the Ethiopian Coptic tradition, Pontius Pilate is seen as a saint. The reason is: you can't expect more from a politican. It's not that if you had lived in the time of Christ you would have done better. Which was the cause of medieval anti-semetism, you know, we should go after the Jews because if we had lived at the time we would have done better. Or more modern liberals say they would have been more tolerant in the middle ages, whereas its the people who style themselves as being part of the resistance—that very fact often tells you that they would have just been collaborators. And the second vignette: the Catholic doctrine of substantiation is super humbling, where it's literally the body and the blood of Christ and you're stilll no better than a cannibal, and still the problems of human nature, the problems of violence are this continuous with the past. And the only hope we have of doing better is to realise that we are still this contiguous with the past. And when we think we've set that behind us, we've transcended it, we're much better, we're hyper-Christian, we're communist, we're the tolerant people who would have been super tolerant in the middle ages, that's when you're simply worse.
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
[...]
The pro-war demonstrations that took place in the different capitals of Europe in August 1914 can be seen in some measure as rebellions against that middle-class civilization, with its security, prosperity, and lack of challenge. The growing isothymia of everyday life no longer seemed sufficient. On a mass scale, megalothymia reappeared: not the megalothymia of individual princes, but of entire nations that sought recognition of their worth and dignity.
[...]
In reading German justifications for the war, one is struck by a consistent emphasis on the need for a kind of objectless struggle, a struggle that would have purifying moral effects quite independently of whether Germany gained colonies or won freedom of the seas. The comments of a young German law student on his way to the front in September 1914 were typical: while denouncing war as “dreadful, unworthy of human beings, stupid, outmoded, and in every sense destructive,” he nonetheless came to the Nietzschean conclusion that “the decisive issue is surely always one’s readiness to sacrifice and not the object of sacrifice.” Pflicht, or duty, was not understood as a matter of enlightened self-interest or contractual obligation; it was an absolute moral value that demonstrated one’s inner strength and superiority to materialism and natural determination.
Wolf: Is mankind the perfect being? No, we are not. OK, are we eventually going to create—or create conditions that create—beings better than ourselves? Yes, we are.
Alex: Wouldn't it be healthier, though, if we thought we were the perfect being and just you know, kept it at that?
Wolf: But that's pride. It's pride and hubris and it's wrong.
Alex: It's Christianity, in a way.
Wolf: It depends what you identify with. Do you identify with the flesh or do you identify with the principle that is animating the flesh? If the latter then we can identify with futures with vastly different technological stacks. So we have vastly different flesh, it's silicon. I think ultimately we end up there. For now, I'm actually pretty anti-transhumanist, I think it's all fake. But in terms of taking the scientific worldview seriously and projecting our destiny forward, I think you end up there. But it's not this self-worshipping transhumanism which has I think become dominant, where it's like "oh we're going to use AI to enhance our pleasure"... these are just really stupid self-referential visions. It's like no, our glorious descendents that are smarter than anything else that has ever existed are going to wage nuclear war accross the heavens, that's like the glorious thing that's going to happen, right? You have to see it as an extension of natural law and the whole evolutionary process that we have undergone so far. And yeah it's going to be bloody, it's going to be crazy, it's going to be very dynamic and its going to take a long time. This is the process of creation, this is the process by which God is manifesting into the world the kind of beings he wants to have a relationship with.
Alex: You sound like you're gripped by religious ecstasy while you're saying this.
Wolf: I am an ideologue. I am a religious ideologue. [...] The bison sphere is a transitional step in this vision... it's also a joke, an April fools article that I wrote, but look... this is what I believe, right? That was like a fun version of it.
[...]
We are not in the game of subversion. We are in the game of construction. Maybe circumvention. But construction. Visions and ideas that improve the world around us.
[...]
Thoreau tackles head on one of the deepest pathologies in American society, the way in which we are sort of enslaved to our capital. What do you actually get out of your wealth?
He keeps things simple and ends up in a life of contemplation. He teaches a spartan life of philosophy. He doesn't dislike technology, he doesn't dislike wealth, he wants us to have a technologically enabled society, but he wants us to be worthy of it. He wants us to have ends that are glorious enough for our means.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/subversive-walex-kaschuta-alexandra-kaschuta-kBN0P1r8OHM/
Posner declares, as a matter of a priori psychological dogma, that moral arguments, no matter how sound or powerful, never convince anyone not already convinced anyway [...] no doubt many people are never moved by the logic of a moral argument, even once in their lives, but it is absurd to suppose that no one ever is.
[...]
The most irritating section of the book is a long piece of psychobabble explaining why so many academics supported Clinton: Posner thinks they instinctively protected him as the enemy of their own enemies. He prefers cynical to simple explanations, but in this case a simple explanation is more persuasive. They were committed, not to Clinton, but to the Constitution.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2000/03/09/philosophy-monica-lewinsky/