Post

More from @de_bose

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Dec 26, 2025

https://x.com/de_bose/status/2003793475914113433

It took a long time to arrive at the triangle of life — Agency / Health / Fertility (and for those with deeply religious values, Faith at the centre)

Why though ? I’ve read a lot of books across the spectrum of economics/biology/sociology/ etc. None succinctly arrived at this triangle.

It’s not about “showing off”. It’s about the frustration of not arriving at it, earlier in life.

Now, one exercise would be to explore why did it take a long time ?

Thread /

https://x.com/de_bose/status/2003793475914113433

Modern knowledge is not designed to reveal first principles

It’s designed to produce “compliant specialists”

Modern education—especially economics, management, and “policy science”—does not start from biology, ecology, or evolution.

It starts from abstract systems: markets, incentives, growth curves, productivity, optimization etc.

Once I’ve accepted those frames, everything else became a footnote.

Agency, fertility, health are pre-economic variables.

They sit upstream of GDP, labour supply, consumption, and innovation.

If I would have foregrounded them, much of modern economics would have collapsed or became morally indefensible.

So they are backgrounded, fragmented into “healthcare,” “demographics,” “psychology,” “family policy”—never allowed to cohere.

I had to unlearn because the system actively trained me not to see wholes.

2/N

Economics quietly assumes humans are infinitely malleable rational agents. What a great hypothesis !!! LOL

Most economic models treat humans as:

- interchangeable units of labour like SKUs in a Warehouse or Fungible Coins

- indefinitely adaptable to stress, without much biological consequences

- separable from land, season, family, and biology.

But evolutionary reality says the opposite: agency degrades under hierarchy, fertility collapses under chronic stress, and health erodes under metabolic mismatch, lack of agency and social mismatch.

If these truths were taught plainly, the legitimacy of modern work, debt, and urban life would be questioned at scale.

So the assumptions are hidden.

I was taught techniques, not truth conditions.

3/N

Read 10 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Aug 12, 2025

Thread on $cience which I’ll attach to an old thread of mine.

The empire has no lab coat: When “The Science” became a secular priesthood immune to questioning

The modern world has witnessed a dangerous transformation: science as a method of inquiry has been replaced by “The Science” as an infallible institution demanding blind faith.

What began as humanity’s greatest tool for understanding reality has mutated into a corrupt enterprise where $377.6 billion in pharmaceutical shareholder payouts matters more than truth, where 89% of landmark cancer studies can’t be replicated, and where dissenting voices are silenced with the same fervor once reserved for heretics.

This thread examines how institutional capture, financial corruption, and ideological dogma have created a crisis that threatens both scientific progress and public trust.

1/N

The reproducibility apocalypse no one wants to discuss

The dirty secret of modern science is that most published research is wrong. When the Open Science Collaboration attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies from prestigious journals, only 36% successfully reproduced

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

The situation in biomedical research is even more catastrophic: when Amgen scientists tried to replicate 53 “landmark” cancer studies that had shaped entire research programs, only 6 studies (11%) could be confirmed

nature.com/articles/48353…

Glenn Begley, who led this effort, reported desperately watching patients nearly dying from bleeding ulcers while knowing antibiotics could cure them - but the medical establishment refused to accept the evidence for over a decade

The mechanisms of this failure are well-documented but rarely discussed. Researchers engage in “p-hacking” - manipulating data analysis until they achieve the magical p<0.05 threshold that journals demand. They practice HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results are Known), presenting exploratory fishing expeditions as if they were confirmatory studies. Optional stopping allows them to halt data collection the moment statistical significance appears

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC51…

The American Statistical Association took the unprecedented step in 2016 of warning that “statisticians have been sounding the alarm about these matters for decades, to little avail.”

2/N

Even outright fraud goes undetected for years. Diederik Stapel fabricated data across 58 publications over eight years before graduate students noticed identical data rows in different studies.

sciencedirect.com/topics/psychol…

Jan Hendrik Schön published 90+ fraudulent papers in Nature and Science, claiming breakthrough discoveries in molecular electronics at a rate of one paper every eight days.

aps.org/apsnews/2022/0…

Marc Hauser, a Harvard psychology professor studying moral behavior, was found “solely responsible” for fabricating data across six federally funded studies.

These aren’t isolated incidents - they’re symptoms of a system where annual retractions are growing by 23% per year and nearly half stem from data authenticity issues.

3/N

Read 15 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Mar 22, 2025

I can help you, more than any PhDx100 or Psychologist, to reduce stress and improve mental health.

Couple of things would improve most of all your mental health / stress / anxiety issues

- Go back to Nature in whatever way you can. Be it forest bathing, camping or surfing. Do an activity amidst Nature, ideally in a small group. And do it often.

- Faith and Prayer.

- Chronic stress is basically the gap between Expectations and Reality. Since Industrial Revolution, and more, since Tech Revolution, our expectations have inflated massively by seeing few entrepreneurs becoming super-wealthy and powerful. From JPMorgan to Elon. It’s increasingly (this is KEY) impossible for anyone become insanely successful starting from modest background. Ancestral wealth and ability to form nepotistic social connections are absolutely necessary. Thus, having high expectations based on Meritocracy alone, just because MSM told you so, will cause lots of stress. For a long time, most of peasants (>90% used to be peasants not so distant back) have minimal Expectations/Aspirations. They knew Elites gonna play Elite games, but they didn’t have to listen to that as there were no mass media to brainwash them.

- Meaningful small community

TL;DR

Nature + Faith + Less Expectations + Cohesive small community

https://twitter.com/de_bose/status/1802975123751989688

Building a giant thread of mental health:

https://twitter.com/de_bose/status/1802975123751989688

https://twitter.com/de_bose/status/1842166652298993803

Across the countries, one of the key metrics (yes; satirically) of urbanised “$progress” has been massive increase of depression and mental health issues

https://twitter.com/de_bose/status/1842166652298993803

Read 4 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Dec 16, 2024

A thread on how AI/ML would affect jobs markets and society in general.

What would be economic value (jobs) of humans when:

- There are competent AIs smarter than any human
- They are embodied (robots)
- They work 24/7 at the cost of electricity & maintenance

A combination of existing threads and new posts

Thread 🧵 1/N

When we say "us", "we", "society", we are actually building imaginary clans/tribes on our minds.

If history and technological progress till today are of any support, it has been seen that, beyond compassionate types, humans usually don't care about other humans unless certain tribes or groups or cliques (be it "Angel investors of Uber", "Macro traders of 90s", "Silk exporters associated with East India Company" etc.) can extract wealth by virtue forming associations often being closer to the money-flow/Governments/Nationalised-Debt.

Core driver has always been: "maximal fertility using wealth/tech/ML as advantage in survival struggle"

Same applies for AI/ML

For majority AI/ML would be terrible, a commodity (more on this later) and a necessary evil. But for a select few, this will reduce production cost drastically, like all other automations

Now if commoners would think, "oh, I'll capture the growth by investing AI/ML/Robotics ETFs". Sure, but every other retailers would do that, and it will not give any survival advantage, unless one gets privileged access to private deals in AI/ML/Robotics businesses/ventures early.

On commodification: AI-As-Service (AIAS)

"AI's potency and ubiquity have increased, so too has its strategic value. It’s a reasonable assumption, even an intuitive one. But it’s mistaken.

What makes a resource truly strategic – what gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage – is not ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can’t have or do.

By now, the core functions of AI/ML – foundation models, algorithms, compute resources, service endpoints and even data (via Data Exchanges) – have become available and affordable to all.

Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production. They are becoming costs of doing business that must be paid by all but provide distinction to none"

2/N

Now coming to jobs:

18Y in STEM. Worked from Fortune50 to startups. Actually coded startups than many who rode the FAANG wave in non-tech jobs.

Most tech jobs are “fake” and only sustained by low cost of debt (ZIRP).

In fact, most Symbol Production/Knowledge Sector jobs are fake. (Pic 1)

Other than Farming/Utilities/ACUTE healthcare most jobs exist purely because of inflationary monetary policies/Nationalised Debt/criminally low IR.

It has been thus, since 1800 - Industrial Revolution.

In fact most jobs exists a coping mechanism to support the mythical hypothesis of "Urbanised Progress", yet most of QoL metrics are down.

David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs is a scathing critique of modern work culture, exposing the absurdity of roles that serve no real purpose other than to keep people employed for appearances. From pointless middle managers to box-ticking bureaucrats, he highlights how capitalism—supposedly a champion of efficiency—creates layers of meaningless jobs to uphold power structures and justify inequality.

That Financial analyst pushing a complicated looking Spreadsheet or Python model for a leveraged buyout (LBO) in a PE firm, is BS job, that can easily be automated.

Moreover, going deeper, this transition to Knowledge Economy has been devastating from a public health POV. Long sedentary jobs without actual/physical tangible reward upon completion/achievement which our mind is designed to appreciate, is a root of many diseases & mental health crisis. Instead of solving the root, we cope (need a sedentary job to beat the M2 inflation) by exercising a little while remaining permanent clients for Pharmaceuticals industry.

GDP-maximalism, ignoring all the negative systemic issues.

x.com/saintslielow/s…

3/N

Read 9 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Sep 6, 2024

I’ve a Bayesian theory around why “believe in science” and “believe in technocratic progress” are so high, even if the counter-evidences are strong.

Thread 🧵

1/N

The belief, held by humanity until “Industrial Revolution” (1800), emphasized that the future wouldn't necessarily improve upon the past.

Key values included - small, short-term, and high-interest loans (debt is bad and makes society eventually enslaved), focusing on contentment rather than progress, prioritizing family and community, and adhering to spiritual wisdom that warned against exceeding human limitations, as doing so would lead to disappointment and disaster.

2/N

Then came Malthusian Equilibrium and “Trap”.

The Malthusian Trap refers to a situation where, despite improvements in productivity, population growth absorbs the surplus, preventing any sustainable increase in living standards.

This is a key component of Thomas Malthus's theory of population dynamics.

Malthus argued that while technological advancements or improvements in agricultural productivity might temporarily raise the average product of labor, they would lead to higher population growth.

As a result, the growing population would eventually reduce per capita income back to subsistence levels, creating a cycle of short-term prosperity followed by long-term stagnation, known as the Malthusian Equilibrium.

In the diagrams provided, this concept is illustrated by showing how increases in productivity (as seen by the shift upward in the productivity curve) only lead to short-term improvements in wages or average product.

However, population growth eventually drives wages back down to subsistence levels (e.g., point G on the APL curve). The historical data from the 1400s to 1800s shows that increases in population correspond to falling wages, as predicted by Malthus's model.

The core idea behind the Malthusian Trap is that productivity gains are self-limiting in pre-industrial societies. Without sustained technological advancement and significant changes in economic institutions (such as those sparked by the Industrial Revolution), population pressure will continually suppress long-term improvements in living standards.

3/N

Read 41 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Aug 21, 2024

Life can be blissful without even knowing mathematical and physical basis of reality.

The more one acquires mainstream
education, the more inflated lifestyle becomes, more status-hungry partner one ends up choosing, more demand come from life-events and more necessity it seems to earn money (fiat) in order to satisfy those requirements, more one has to depend on someone for job (referrals, promotions etc.) and play the “game” etc.

Return on education (I know lots of Asians are growing up being brainwashed by the worldview that a 120K-150K MBA and FAANG/IB/Bank job is key to a happy life. That’s far from truth) over years have been abysmal.

This will be a long thread on practical and philosophical futility of modern education !

Long thread 🧵

1/N

If you are a man, T-levels (testosterone) are one of the most important health dimension for you. And guess what - college-education reduces T levels.

(Testosterone levels according to ethnicity and education in a sample of male American veterans; median age of the sample was 37 years (redrawn from Mazur 1995))

1/N

"Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs" by Lauren A. Rivera

Lauren A. Rivera's Pedigree explores how elite firms in industries like finance, law, and consulting select candidates from specific universities to ensure they recruit the "best" talent. These firms create two tiers of schools: core schools and target schools.

- Core schools are typically three to five highly prestigious institutions from which firms source the majority of their new hires. These firms heavily invest in recruitment activities on these campuses, such as hosting information sessions, cocktail receptions, and extensive interview processes.

- Target schools are additional institutions (five to fifteen) where firms recruit on a smaller scale. While core schools are the main focus, target schools receive fewer interview slots and job offers.

The selection of these schools is primarily based on perceived PRESTIGE and the REPUTATION of the institutions. (if you've missed the opportunity to get admission to these schools, you're chance to get to top firms drops a lot irrespective of your grades/GPA )

Kayla, a recruitment director, summarised the strategy this way:

"It’s totally **anecdotal**. (She laughs.) I think it’s based upon—and it probably lags in terms of time and updating—but it’s based upon a kind of understanding of how selective the school was in terms of admitting students and how challenging is the work. So it’s largely just kind of school reputation and conventional wisdom, for better or worse."

Often, this perception is shaped by the firm's decision-makers, many of whom are alumni of these prestigious schools. However, the inclusion of some schools on these lists can also be influenced by internal advocates, particularly if a senior employee or partner is an alum of a less prestigious school. This connection can lead to the school being added to the firm's recruitment list, sometimes even maintaining its place long after the original advocate has left the firm.

2/N

Read 29 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Truth Signal

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @de_bose

Truth Signal

Truth Signal

Truth Signal

Truth Signal

Truth Signal

Truth Signal

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!