Me: Sorry, but I’m never going to visit your family in Tasmania. The whole place sounds horrifying.

K: No it doesn’t! Why would you say that?

Me: Well, between your stories about venomous snakes killing your dog, and bats flying into your bed while you were sleeping, and the shrieks of Tasmanian Devils keeping you awake all night as a kid -

K: No, that part is better now. The Tasmanian Devils were all killed by a weird contagious form of facial cancer.

Me: YOU’RE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE.

Friend: Sometimes cuddling can be scary.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: I stop wanting to move and I stop thinking so much about things, and then I get this heavy feeling all over. I worry that I might be dying or something.

Me: Wait…do you just mean that you feel relaxed?

Friend: I guess that could be it.

Me: Well, at least for you it’s a self-limiting problem.

Me: Should I drive or do you want to drive?

Friend: I don’t think I’m a very good driver

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: Like, sometimes I’ll just go blank and forget which one is the brake and which one is the accelerator and have to derive it from first principles.

Me: You mean, like, cogito ergo sum?

Friend: Maybe second principles.

Me: How do you derive the location of the brake from second principles?

Friend: I don’t know, at that point I crashed.

Me: Okay, I’m driving.

K: Nate Silver was right again. Is he single?

K: (a few minutes later) Oh, he’s gay. I wonder if he’s flexible about it, though. Maybe I could just invite him out to lunch or something?

K: (a few minutes later) Wait, I’m looking at a picture of him, and I think I actually did have lunch with him a few years ago. A friend took me along to meet this guy who he said was doing some kind of politics thing, and I didn’t pay much attention, but he looked exactly like that.

K: (a few minutes later) Okay, I checked my emails, and that was definitely Nate Silver I had lunch with. I feel kind of stupid now. It was back in 2010, so maybe he wasn’t famous at the time?

Me: Dear, Nate Silver was named one of the “100 Most Influential Men In The World” in 2009.

K: Oh.

K: Well, one thing I like about you is that you don’t take me out to lunch with one of the 100 most influential men in the world and not tell me about it.

K: Do you?

K: Wait, that professor we had lunch with in Lansing wasn’t one of the hundred most influential men in the world, was he?

Me: https://twitter.com/Clathrus0/status/795669961373061120

K: Oh dear.

Me: And the ruler during this period was Antigonus Monopthalmus.  Can you translate ‘Monopthalmus’?

@worldlypositions: Hmmmm. One…head?

Me: You think he was called Antigonus The One-Headed?

@worldlypositions​: Sure!

Me: That’s not a very imposing epithet.

@worldlypositions​: Sure it is! If you called yourself ‘Antigonus The Two-Headed’, it would be scary, but not too scary, because there’s only one two-headed guy. But if you call yourself Antigonus The One-Headed, it suggests everyone else in your country must have more than one head, which is even scarier.

Elissa: That church over there, the one that’s kind of falling apart? It’s always bothered me.

Me: Why?

Elissa: It’s called “The Church By Jesus Christ”. And Jesus was a carpenter, so I think linking him to that kind of shoddy work is kind of insulting.

Me: What kind of a name is “The Church By Jesus Christ”? Is it supposed to be, like, next to him or something?

Elissa: I think it’s supposed to be started by him, or inspired by him.

Me: Seems a little implausible. I mean, Catholicism, maybe. Greek Orthodoxy, maybe. But a random Protestant church in Ohio?

Elissa: I mean, technically if Jesus is God, then everything is “by Jesus.”

Me: “The Holocaust By Jesus Christ”?

Elissa: I mean, technically, yes.

Me: I don’t think the people who made that church would endorse that Jesus caused the Holocaust.

Elissa: It’s not that he caused it. Just that he deliberately gave humans free will, knowing that it would happen. And that church is the same way.

Me: “The Church That Jesus Christ Failed To Prevent.“

K: I was trying that FaceApp thing earlier today with photos of everyone we know. It looks pretty good. Except for some reason when I try to do the “hot” filter on you, it replaces you with a totally different-looking person.

Me: Ha ha, very funny.

K: No, I’m serious. (she shows me, and this turns out to be 100% true)

K: “I remember when I was young I asked my mom if I was adopted, because I was nothing like the rest of my family. See, they were all pink squishy fleshy beings, and I was a consciousness of pure light and reason. She said ‘Your father used to say that kind of thing too.’“

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/in-defense-of-individualist-culture/ is a good post. The summary:

1. Individualism and strong communities both have good points and bad points
2. But individualism is better
3. Also, you couldn’t rebuild society on the model of a strong community anyway, because if you tried people who didn’t like it could leave, and you’d have to become a tyranny to prevent that.
4. It’s perfectly fine to have a generally individualistic society where people are allowed to voluntarily form communities that they like.
5. And realistically we should expect most people to eventually exit from them.
6. If those are good nice communities, people will exit peacefully.
7. If they’re bad communities, they’ll use a lot of abuse and shaming to keep people from exiting, but eventually people will still exit.
8. And in any case, we’ll always have regular individualist society, which is pretty good.

Sarah mentions Ron Dreher’s “Benedict Option” thing as an example of someone forming a community in a generally individualist society where they can do what they want, and so sort of a success story. But I actually find Dreher really scary.

Dreher’s fundamental question is: what if regular individualist society becomes unbearably bad? What if the best culture isn’t the one that succeeds in a free marketplace of ideas? Or, more idiosyncratically: what if Moloch wants to kill everything you love?

(this second one is definitely true for everyone, but I mean in the sphere of culture in particular, in the short-term)

Like, what if arguments for false things are more convincing (to the average person who debates politics) than arguments for true things? What if certain ways of life are irresistably addictive but ultimately unsatisfying? What if the Iron Law of Institutions / the principle of cancer means that people who defect against everyone else in certain ways will inevitably rise to the top?

Dreher’s plan is “build your own community isolated from the greater culture behind strong walls”. The problem is, either you restrict information flow and exit rights (in which case you’re abusive and evil) or you allow these things (in which case Moloch can still get to you and you’re dead).

The only reason Dreher isn’t more pessimistic than he is is because he’s Christian and assumes God will sort this out in some sense. Like, he talks about “preserving” Christian culture until such time as the outside world is ready for it, but more realistically, he’s trying to slow entropy. Which is a fine thing to do as long as you realize you’ll fail at some constant rate until you die.

I don’t care about Christianity. What scares me is the possibility that the kinds of cultures that promote *my* values are memetically unfit. Liberalism hasn’t been looking so healthy lately. There are all these people saying that we should stop resolving problems through debate, that violence is good, that free speech is stupid, that scientific truth-seeking should be circumscribed by the greater good, et cetera. These people are on both the left and the right, but the left is scarier since it has momentum and the tide of history on its side. The left is losing badly in the sense that Republicans control everything, but most Republicans are sort of idiots (sorry, it had to be said) who are resisting illiberalism for the wrong reasons, kind of by coincidence. Like, regressive-leftism would have conquered everything by now except for the weird coincidence that 51% of the population is kind of crazy in a way that happens to exactly counterbalance them. THe number of people who are resisting for the right reasons is a small minority.

I think this is what the (tiny percentage of) insightful NRx people are saying. That everything other than the worst Twitter hatemob you’ve ever seen is an unnaturally low-entropy state, and is going to fail unless we use the traditional tools of closed societies (eg restriction of information, autocracy, etc) to protect ourselves from it. That tolerance and free thought are basically as fragile as the strains of Christianity Dreher wants to save, only without the illusion that God is protecting them.

But even tyranny isn’t a long-term solution. Tyrannies eventually fail: the USSR fell, most cults dissolve quickly, this isn’t *actually* a good fix. Instead, I think it’s more useful to just argue for good things and against bad things as best I can, hope that I’m part of the gradient pushing towards a better attractor state. Also, genetically engineer people for higher intelligence to change the game in our favor. Also, AI.