Cultural Observations

Fifty-four percent of American adults say they or a family member have experienced a gun incident.

People are clearly hungry for an alternative to the intensely rationalized and techno-bullied tone of contemporary life. They want something deeper than algorithmic feedback loops and regurgitated chatbot chatter.

Silicon Valley is massively limited in its imagination because many of the people there have chosen, as a starting assumption, to build things for a Yuval Hararian Man, for men without chests, for siloed souls like themselves.

An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere.

Artists cannot simply ignore his charge that our failures are uniquely volatile threats to the social order.

Physics may try its damnedest to instill in us existential dread at an incomprehensible universe, but biology will always be the most offensive science. For physics merely deals with the nature of reality, whereas biology contends with our own nature, and so it repeatedly runs up against wishful thinking about who we are. Biology forms the paramete... See more

rationality is a method of dealing with uncertainty by devouring information and making simplifying assumptions about the outside world until you can convince yourself that you understand it