Tag: salman rushdie

Random facts — things I learned (Jan 12 2024) — Data about the past is truth, Data about the future is religion (Auren Hoffman)

Prior editions

The most important takehome is that tokens are not equity, but are more similar to paid API keys. Nevertheless, they may represent a >1000X improvement in the time-to-liquidity and a >100X improvement in the size of the buyer base relative to traditional means for US technology financing — like a Kickstarter on steroids

But entertainment is one market, the market for attention, and one platform is ahead of everyone else in harvesting the commodity: TikTok. The Chinese (and it is Chinese) company had the most ascendant platform in history until OpenAI, and it remains the frame through which Western youth perceive the world

The lesson to be learned from this is that it is often undesirable to go for the right thing first. It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus. Once people are hooked on it, take the time to improve it to 90% of the right thing.

Like many people, I adhere to a religion that gives me moral guidance. The practice of it is just good sense—it keeps you out of prison and safely hidden in the crowd.

By approaching life with full consciousness, with vitality and intensity, by becoming the masters of our absurd fate — this is how we answer the question of suicide, how we defy futility and establish what it means to live.

The fun lies in tweaking things until they fit just right. Nothing can beat the feeling that happens after that.
And sometimes all it really takes is tweaking just one single thing to go from same same but different, to same same but right

The greater the doubt, the greater the dopamine

Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. They point to exactly what they’re focused on, drawing you away from your own focal point. We are missing out on a fuzzier, softer sense of the shared web.

“Memes are fun and memes are also something to come together around. Speculating on the popularity of memes and their staying power is no different than any other form of speculation… I’ve decided that I am going to stop ignoring and dismissing meme investing and start trying to understand it better. I think it is not something that is going away anytime soon and may turn into something even more interesting.” — Fred Wilson, AVC

Crypto is the modern version of the long emerging markets trade. As an industry, it will see the most relative capital inflows, budding innovation and has an innately global footprint. It provides a fiat currency debasement hedge (Bitcoin), new application networks akin to the internet (smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana) and the fastest growing population. You can compare it to any individual sovereign, country or financial market and nothing beats it.

My whole North Star is how do I continue being able to learn, synthesize and teach forever. – Ali Abdaal

You can’t tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams suck. – Palmer Luckey

Kardashev Type I: capable of controlling the entire energy from its planet
Kardashev Type II: capable of controlling the entire energy of its host star and travels through the solar system
Kardashev Type III: capable of controlling the energy at the scale of its entire galaxy

The barbaric life that I live, that you have to live, the almost obsession that you must have to be great, you can’t put that sh*t in a f*cking book, bro.” – David Goggins

Auren Hoffman:
Data about past = truth
Data about future = religion

Think ism is a disease. We can’t solve problems by thinking about them. You have to do and try things – Kevin Kelly

Price is the maximally compressed signal of economically relevant information.

New study found that tea consumption is associated with attenuation of biological aging.
People who consistently drank >4 cups a day aged 40% slower than those who drank none.

I’ve heard old-timers say that the fifth set has nothing to do with tennis. It’s true. The fifth set is about emotion and conditioning. Slowly I leave my body. Nice knowing you, body. I’ve had several out-of-body experiences over my career, but this one is healthy. I trust my skill, and I step out of its way.

The group is the basic user class for the tools we need today as a society, yet few pieces of software allow the squad as a whole to produce cooperatively and generate wealth together. To fully realize SQUAD CULTURE this must change

Startup valuation is literally a made up number
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Having an internet audience is still wildly underpriced
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Build products that no one asks for but everyone wants

Staying in conversation mode helps OpenAI thwart your goals. Remember that you’re not having a conversation with a sentient bot, you’re editing a shared document with a robotic LLM

Being entitled is the ugliest thing a person can be – Nolan Bushnell

Theodore Roosevelt: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

“Generalized trust” or “meta-trust” is “trust that whatever issues might arise between us, we can talk about things in a way that is workable for both of us and leads to issues getting resolved to our mutual satisfaction in good time.”

Money is the stored time and energy of other people

Offline, in the real world, OpenAI have designed a fictional character named ChatGPT who is supposed to have certain attributes and personality traits: it’s “helpful”, “honest”, and “truthful”, it is knowledgeable, it admits when it’s made a mistake, it tends towards relatively brief answers, and it adheres to some set of content policies

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five

When Claude Shannon worked out the math, he found something very surprising: The formula for noise in an information system was identical to the formula for entropy in thermodynamics.

Our thesis at Variant is that the next generation of internet networks will turn users into owners—specifically asset owners. The internet enabled everyone to become a publisher, and similarly, crypto enables everyone to become an asset owner, and therefore, an investor. You don’t need capital to invest, you can invest your time or work by producing art, running machines, or doing physical work.

Resistance will unfailingly point to true North — meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. – Steven Pressfield

Given that Japan is the largest holder of US Treasury bonds and the largest international creditor as viewed by its net international investment position, actions of the Japanese private sector could place enormous upward pressure on 10-year plus maturity US Treasury bond yields.
This is data from the IMF which estimates Japan’s net international investment position is a positive $3.3 trillion

The US is now spending materially more money on the national interest payment compared to our defense budget.
That is quite a feat considering we are handing out weapons and equipment around the world like it is candy, so our allies can fight our proxy wars.

Thich Nhat Hanh
-If you see a person and don’t also see his society, education, ancestors, culture, and environment, you have not really seen that person. Instead, you have been taken in by the sign of that person, the outward appearance of a separate self.
-We already are what we want to become. We don’t have to become someone else. All we have to do is be ourselves, fully and authentically. We don’t have to run after anything. We already contain the whole cosmos.

In the traditional art world, each niche subgenre of art (Andy Warhol, post WWII African art, etc.) ends up being cornered by a handful of collectors. That is also happening to the digital art market right now. In 2023 there were around six institutional buyers who spent at least seven figures buying all the grail digital art pieces.

“When you throw the impossible at them, that’s when they get excited” – Hans Zimmer

“Always want more but never be greedy” – Giannis

I want to live in a world where building a humanoid robot at home is like building a PC today

stop thinking of time as an abstraction: in reality, beginning the minute you are born, time is all you have. It is your only true commodity…To waste your time in battles not of your choosing is stupidity of the highest order.

TIL the black hole, TON 618, is so big (66 billion solar masses), a new term was invented to describe it: ultramassive black hole

Never discriminate as to whom you study and whom you trust. Never trust anyone completely and study everyone, including friends and loved ones.

Crypto is the machine’s body.
And AI is the brain that enters into it.

Having averted disaster, I’m suddenly loose, happy. It’s so typical in sports. You hang by a thread above a bottomless pit. You stare death in the face. Then your opponent, or life, spares you, and you feel so blessed that you play with abandon.

Could you make a “Large Solar Flares and Sunspots Model” (LSFASM) and learn to talk to the Sun and ask it where it might flare up next? How about a Large Oceanic Model that allows ships to talk to ocean currents? Or a Large History Model that works as a Prime Radiant for Asimovian psychohistory? Maybe a Large Climate Model constructed out of weather data can talk to us and supply strategies for climate change?

As the bicycle rolled across the world, critics followed, calling it dangerous because it startled horses and unbecoming for women, who had to wear traditionally male attire to ride (‘bloomers.’)
While some physicians argued cycling was healthy others linked it to insanity, deformities of the spine, face and even a cause for appendicitis. One insurance company even refused to insure avid bicycle riders, while one army recruitment office rejected applicants who were avid cyclists because it was assumed they had a weakened ‘bicycle heart.’

If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.
— Horace Mann

The Master said, “The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.”

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read. ~ Salman Rushdie

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
~ Harry S. Truman

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I stopped drinking caffeine this year.
It was incredibly difficult to do.
I used to drink a large Starbucks iced coffee each morning & a medium sized coffee mid-day.
That is ~ 300mg of caffeine.
How did I stop? — I went cold turkey one day. It really sucked. I had headaches, I was irritable, and generally felt horrible for about 10 days.
But the benefits made it all worth it. Here is what I’ve seen so far:
– More energy during the day
– Better sleep at night
– More hydrated skin
– Elevated mood
If you’re looking for something that could improve your life in 2024, highly recommend trying to cut out the caffeine drug.
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Start or end every day with writing about your life. There’s always something buried underneath the to do list in your head, something you didn’t realise you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

When thinking about new cities in the United States, Las Vegas comes to mind as the most populous city founded in the 1900’s. Since its founding, it has benefited from having a different set of rules than other places. With its legalized gambling, tolerated prostitution and mob activity historically funneling money into and around Vegas, it benefited massively from having different rulesets. But it is not exactly the type of example that inspires policymakers in other jurisdictions

After studying AI and attempting to model various types of financial decision making algorithmically, I realized that humans make decisions very much the same way that modern search engines do. We have vast stores of data — the experiences we’ve encountered in our lives — and we use very simple algorithms to make predictions and decide on actions. I recollect what happened in my past circumstances, and based upon that history of evidence, I’m going to extrapolate the likely outcome of the current situation and choose the best course of action.

The rise of secular religion


In a recent podcast interview, Senator Elizabeth Warren said: “Education is our new secular religion.” It may have been the NYT Book Review podcast, I can’t find the source.

It’s a powerful sentiment – one that she expressed in a matter of fact, almost bored, way. And it’s true not just in America – where college admissions is an intense battleground from the minute kids begin to earn grades – but also around the world. Look at how obsessively Chinese students prepare for the 高考: the test is a rite of passage, and being accepted into one of China’s top universities is no less than a religious conversion for the lucky ones.

In his speech to Maharishi University, Jim Carrey asked the graduating students, “What is your ministry?” At a young age, he decided that his ministry was to free people from concern, and he evangelized his beliefs through comedy and entertainment. He urged the students to find and express theirs.

Secular religion. Your ministry. All religious things, but all spoken of in the context of secular, non-religious activities.

What’s going on?

For starters, what is religion? Definitions are as plentiful as denominations. But a simple and powerful definition, and one that works well for our purposes, is the 3 B’s: Believing, Belonging, and Behaving. You believe in a story or set of propositions. You belong to a community that shares these beliefs. You behave in ways that act upon your beliefs, and often with your community.

Seen this way, a whole lot of “religions” qualify. Hence Senator Warren’s belief about modern education. And Carrey’s mission to free people from concern.

The convenient and widespread narrative in most developed countries, particularly in America and across Western Europe, is that religion is dying. The narrative goes something like: With the rise of science and technology and liberal education, religion is increasingly outdated and out of touch. Fewer and fewer people go to Church, or pray, or study the Bible. More and more people are identifying as atheist, agnostic, or simply “none”. Eventually, religion will become a quaint, niche practice, and one that will slowly fade into irrelevance.

But this simply isn’t true. Globally, religion is growing. Even in America, religious belief is stronger than ever. Religion – as we can see using one definition of the 3 B’s framework – is simply shifting. We might believe less in God, but we believe more than ever in free markets and capitalism. We may not belong to churches and monasteries, but we belong, obsessively, to sports teams and corporations and even to cryptocurrencies. And the way we behave? Well, just look at Apple fanboys and Star Wars fanatics. Religion is alive and well.

I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion – Harvey Cox

This realization is important for many reasons, only a few of which I can articulate below.

It means that most people who say they’re not religious are actually very much so. Salman Rushdie says “atheists are obsessed with god.” But it goes beyond atheists. I think it’s more like “non-believers are actually believers in denial.” Hundreds of years ago, if you knew a person was Roman Catholic, you’d have a reasonable starter’s grasp on their animating values and personality traits. Today, we need to look more deeply to identify a person’s “religion”.

A more or less similar point is made by Yuval Harari says in his book Sapiens: Institutions upon which we build civilization are just a bunch of agreed upon fictions. Religion is one such fiction. So are “free” markets. So is celebrity-dom. And so on.

We need to better identify these fictions in others, and more importantly, in ourselves. Which brings me to my last point: You.

You should think deeply about what beliefs animate you. What is your ministry? What is your secular religion? Because if your life is not guided by Buddhism or Islam, then it’s guided by something else. And this something else is often worse. David Foster Wallace expressed the thought beautifully:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. – DFW

Thanks for reading. I’m spending a lot of time lately reading and writing about religion. It’s been satisfying as a personal endeavor, and I hope to create some project (like a website, or a book) out of it eventually. If you can help, or simply want to chat more about it, please message me.