E. Antony Gray triggered a Twitter storm about Greer and the tension between cyclic-repetitive and linear-progressive time. (I’ve no idea how to link the discussion that subsequently erupted.) Since the integration, or diagonal, between cycle and flight is not hard to find, it provides the perfect opportunity for a time-spiral T-shirt:
Cyclic Escalation
Another outrageous study completely overlooks the problem of stereotype threat.
Hopkins et al conclude (un-shockingly):
Finally, from an evolutionary standpoint, the results reported here suggest that genetic factors play a significant role in determining individual variation in cognitive abilities, particularly for spatial cognition and communication skills. Presumably, these attributes would have conferred advantages to some individuals, perhaps in terms of enhanced foraging skills or increased social skills, leading to increased opportunities for access to food or mating … These individuals would have then potentially had increased survival and fitness, traits that would have become increasingly selected upon during primate evolution, as has been postulated by a number of theorists, going all the way back to Darwin …
(Thanks to Greg for the link.)
Anyone who isn’t yet reading The Archdruid Report really ought to be. John Michael Greer is quite simply one of the most brilliant writers in existence, and even when he’s wrong, he’s importantly wrong. His perspective is coherent, learned, and uncaged by the assumptions of progressivism. Above all, his understanding of what it means to find history informative is unsurpassed. (Over at the Other Place, there’s an unfinished Greer series that badly requires attention, with the first three installments here, here, and here.)
When escalated to the extreme, the progressive conclusion is that history can teach us nothing. Innovation is by its very nature unprecedented, and insofar as it manifests improvement, it humbles its precursors. The past is the rude domicile of ignorant barbarity. Insofar as the present still bears its traces, as shameful stigmata, they are mere remains that still have to be overcome. At the limit, the concept of Singularity — a horizon at which all anticipatory knowledge is annulled — seals the progressive intuition.
In its abstract theoretical core, at least, Greer’s Druidic counter-history is radically reactionary (far more unambiguously so than NRx). Its model of time is entirely cyclical, such that past and future are perfectly neutral between ascent and decline. Every attempt to install a gradient of improvement in the dimension of historical time is broken upon the great wheels, which balance every rise with a fall, dissolving innovation in precedent. Novelty is hubristic illusion (an exaggerated correction, in the opinion of this blog).
Some practical advice for the 333-current from Al Fin:
There are things that cannot be changed, disasters that cannot be averted. It is best to focus our energy and resources on the battles that can be won. And to learn how to best live on to fight another day.
This is the true kernel of wisdom of the dark enlightenment. Not to take over the Cathedral and run it the way we want. That would never work. Rather, the kernel of wisdom is to survive the building climax of insanity in high places, and to preserve enough resources and wisdom to pick up the pieces, in the midst of an Idiocratic collapse.
For those still haunted by shreds of false hope, the post includes two excellent dysgenics links (here, and here).
(Thanks to Stirner for the prompt.)
State-of-the-art in Japanese android design. (Thanks to @existoon for the pointer.)
It’s not really — or even remotely — an AI demonstration, but it’s a demonstration of something (probably several things).
Wikipedia provides some ‘Uncanny Valley’ background and links. The creepiness of The Polar Express (2004) seems to have been the trigger for the concept going mainstream.
From the level of human body simulation achieved already, it’s looking as if the climb out to the far side of the valley is close to complete. Sure, this android behaves like an idiot, but we’re used to idiots.
ADDED: Some hints on how the inside out approach is going (and speculations).
Through experimentation, I’m led to the conclusion that weekly Chaos Patches are excessive. I’m putting this one up out of a sense of contractual obligation, which conveniently dove-tails with zombie-level burn-out from immersion in a Bitcoin essay (final part of series for WdW magazine*). If people use their awesome Exit powers to drive it into extinction, or at least considerably greater irregularity, I’ll take the message.
This two-decade old James Fallows article played a major role in the final phase of the Bitcoin article. Without question, large chunks of NRx will like it a lot more than me, and probably simply a lot. It seems obviously important. Perhaps there’s something better, covering the same ground, that could replace it, but right now I’m not sure what that would be.
Yesterday was fertility day, to an extraordinary degree. In case anybody missed these: Sister Y, Jim, and Woodley et al.
Robo-extermination watch.
It’s carefully hedged (and ultimately contested), but it’s well worth noting. He begins the relevant section of a recent post by revisiting the self-observation: “In the past two months I have inexplicably and very very suddenly become much more conservative.” (Pass-the-popcorn.)
The explanation I like least is that it comes from reading too much neoreaction. I originally rejected this hypothesis because I don’t believe most what I read. But I’m starting to worry that there are memes that, like Bohr’s horseshoe, affect you whether you believe them or not: memes that crystallize the wrong pattern, or close the wrong feedback loop. I have long suspected social justice contains some of these. Now I worry neoreaction contains others.
In particular I worry about the neoreactionary assumption that leftism always increases with time, and that today’s leftism confined to a few fringe idiots whom nobody really supports today becomes tomorrow’s mainstream left and the day after tomorrow’s “you will be fired if you disagree with them”. Without me ever really evaluating its truth-value it has wormed its way into my brain and started haunting my nightmares.
I’m usually reluctant to take Alexander seriously when he tells us what Neoreaction is, but in this case I think he gets it right.
He embeds this passage in an encompassing theory, aiming to frame the degenerative ratchet within a directionless random-walk of fashion (driven by something like abstract cellular automata). The theory is clever, but its historical fit is so poor I don’t expect it to last indefinitely. In the best case, during the few months it takes for this psychic-defense system to start falling apart and strewing parts along the doom-route of accelerating Left-Singularity, Alexander can dedicate his exceptional mind to collecting alternative cognitive defense-mechanisms and testing them to destruction. In this way he can contribute to clearing the desert at the end of our world.
ADDED: The voyage into darkness continues …
Note on Teleology
Bryce, who has been thinking about teleology for quite a while, expresses his thoughts on the topic with commendable lucidity. The central argument: Characteristically modern claims to have ‘transcended’ the problem of teleology are rendered nonsensical by the continued, and indeed massively deepened, dependence upon the concept of equilibrium across all complexity-sensitive intellectual disciplines, from statistical physics, through population biology, to economics. Equilibrium is exactly a telos. To deny this is primarily the symptom of an allergy to ‘medieval’ or ‘scholastic’ (i.e. Aristotelian) modes of thought, inherited from the vulgar rebellious mechanism of early Enlightenment natural philosophy.
Where I think Bryce’s account is still deficient is most easily shown by a further specification of his principal point. Equilibrium is the telos of those particular dynamic complex systems governed by homeostasis, which is to say: by a dominating negative feedback mechanism. Such systems are, indeed, in profound accordance with classical Aristotelian physical teleology, and its tendency to a state of rest. This ancient physics, derided by the enlightenment mechanists in the name of the conservation of momentum, is redeemed through abstraction into the modern conception of equilibrium. ‘Rest’ is not immobility, but entropy maximization.
@MattOlver linked this gallery of classy Detroit devastation images in Time. Visions of modernity in ruins have an intrinsic reactionary inclination, irrespective of any superficial attributions of causation. They directly subvert assumptions of relentless progress, suggest cyclic perturbations in the current of history, and evoke the tragic adjustments of fate. Ruins deride hubristic pretensions. They mark an ineluctable compliance with the Old Law of Gnon.
The Left, in its thoughtful moments, at least partially understands this. Things thought buried return, while highways of confident advance are lost in dissolution. The radical imagination is broken.
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
Triggered by this:
@Outsideness you thrive on conflict
— John (@RichAsCrassus) July 3, 2014
It’s docile obedience to Gnon.