eigenrobot Profile picture
robot. friend. diamond age mindset || footnotes at @eigenrobot_feet
8 subscribers
Aug 30 4 tweets 3 min read
pulled the entire 10 volume set of a 1964 children's reading collection from a used bookstore for $18

i regard this as a colossal win

the introduction is worth reading as a contrast to contemporary pedagogical philosophy. implicit here is a colossal cultural loss Image
Image
Image
i went to the bookstore to kill time between helping out with a medical emergency but found myself moved to buy these after recalling a trip to the library yesterday with my 4yo, when i noticed the entire children's section was Feelings slop

meanwhile, in 1964: Image
Image
Image
Image
Aug 29 4 tweets 3 min read
this explains a lot about what's going on, for those of you paying attention additional context

america probably has the most productive agricultural land on earth not regularly subjected to wars of extermination Image
Image
Image
Image
Aug 26 5 tweets 1 min read
fyi trump ppl

the reason that nerds are unhappy about trump firing federal reserve people isnt because they particularly like those specific people

issue is that it makes the fed look beholden to the executive and this is a very bad outcome for economic stability the fed hasnt covered itself in glory lately for sure but the counterfactual where its progressively and openly politicized is pretty much just a world of hyperinflation and impoverishment because thats a side effect of how unstable governments use politicized central banks
Aug 24 4 tweets 1 min read
ok finally discovered a kind of lore i want to know about in a non clickbait way:

what one-shotted you?

eg for me it was 90s movies about how having a career and a house in the burbs is the worst thing that can ever happen to someone

i didn't realize i'd been Had until my 30s everyone will give boomers and millennials shit about the social justice and narcissism, and rightly so. but the motherfuckers who tricked me into nearly ruining my life are genx
Aug 22 19 tweets 7 min read
"everyone is the same and nations are fake" is the core dogma of the mid-late 20C liberalism that grew out of the war era. in the years since it's become a mostly-unstated and broadly-unassailable assumption of imperial policy

regrettably it is also disastrously incorrect Image the history of this idea is worth studying. you can see the modern notion start to emerge in the progressive era and out of socialist thought, and gain some traction with (eg) the league of nations

ideologues might say that league failed bc it wasn't REAL world government
Aug 22 5 tweets 3 min read
the leftist compulsion to degrade national identity in democratic countries will be the undoing of their welfare state plank, because it turns out when you remove the nation people just default to narrower identities and don't care to pay for the outgroup's well-being you can get support for fargroups in time limited cases. there's a long history of (eg) american assistance for people on the other side of the world in disaster recovery

but duration breeds resentment, and organized charity is very hard to maintain with this sentiment
Aug 18 4 tweets 1 min read
i was disappointed that liberals did nothing in the face of the awokening. but that can at least be explained as cowardess

what's worse is that the awokening is over, they're not taking the fact that the awokening occurred as a serious problem to be guarded against going forward one is left with the impression that either they are fine with everything that happened or they learned absolutely nothing from the experience. both of these possibilities seem disqualifying

what is the point of liberals who can't be bothered to care for liberty, one wonders
Aug 17 4 tweets 3 min read
turns out she died of a heart attack and had leukemia, which yes generally causes malnutrition

the information environment is just completely fucked, but its embarrassing how hard media specifically throat hamas every day Image
Image
ive definitely become more racist against journalists since this conflict which i hadn't even realized was possible

nyt running "israel blows up hospital with missile killing hundreds" after a hamas rocket misfired and burned up in a parking lot broke me
Aug 16 13 tweets 6 min read
i'm gonna solve the slavery debate once and for all. who ran the most evil slave system?

answers will be binding and final Image coming in at number 5 we have maghrebis running sex slave raids on europe. shout out to the brave american navy and marine corps and his majesty's finest for putting an end to white slavery in mare nostrum. shout out to don juan of austria Image
Aug 13 6 tweets 2 min read
i've definitely become more brutal with respect to policy. 10y ago i was a dedicated technocrat! what changed?

complex policies maximizing outcomes often require proportionately functional, high-trust systems to be reliably implemented

i don't think we have such a system today my belief now is that any policy will be ruthlessly exploited by interested parties with no commitment to institutional or common good as soon as it's created
Aug 13 5 tweets 1 min read
lol ok this is pretty funny

theyre digging up and reposting PERM job postings and apparently this fouls the h1b hiring process if americans apply

ok that's pretty solid actually
Aug 10 13 tweets 2 min read
after much reflection i believe i've developed a compromise plan for resolving the situation in gaza. it takes many perspectives into account, and will, i believe, satisfy all parties, foreign and domestic it also solves all of our problems. there is literally no downside

so how does it work?
Aug 5 6 tweets 2 min read
the american republic, as are all republics, are predicated on a shared identity with common interest, aristotle's _homonoia_

multiculturalism and especially the primacy of external ethnic identification is inimical to national integrity

if we don't stop doing this, we dissolve i'm willing to locally subvert my own interests in favor of a commonality if i can trust that others in the collective identify with me in a sacred bond of citizenship

but with all due respect to guatemalans you are not entitled to the same concern as my countrymen
Aug 3 10 tweets 3 min read
i'm sorry to say that i've accepted postliberalism

i don't mean this in a normative sense but rather in a descriptive: postliberalism is the state of the existing world control of the united states is contested by two illiberal parties

the democrats, for example, are not a liberal party. they serve an illiberal clientele and advance illiberal programs on the basis of illiberal theories of legitimacy and government
Jul 29 5 tweets 2 min read
not entirely sure of this but i think what's going on here is that the sydney sweeney ad has sparked a dames-only race war my model is that there was a female homosocial compact to not create prominent ad campaigns featuring conventionally attractive white women for several decades, but american eagle defected with great success and has triggered a preference cascade
Jul 23 9 tweets 2 min read
if we're being utilitarians and discussing "value," , one ought to understand this as an empirical question, and the fact is any economist could glance at this situation and say "looks like most people have lexicographic preferences. next question"

else you're disputing taste the presumption of utilitarians in imposing their preferences on others as an objective reality is their second-most repellent trait
Jul 23 8 tweets 3 min read
hypothesis: ghislaine maxwell is sick of jail and has identified an opportunity to blackmail trump Image
Image
i had considered that she might be able to offer to make shit up. but the issue with this is that it perhaps can't be verified either way, and of course she can't be trusted

so her greatest levers are from any verifiable information she might possess Image
Image
Jul 10 14 tweets 2 min read
i'm watching the grok4 launch and the production values are terrible

slides are worse than i'd create after getting roped into a presentation with 1h notice

you can tell the engineers made them themselves Image elon predicting the model will discover new physics within two years. "let that sink in." a long silence. one engineer laughs awkwardly
Jul 9 11 tweets 3 min read
in any sociopolitical system, the degree to and the manner in which power is centralized may be characterized by the structure of patronage networks

these structures are often more revealing about the nature of government than its nominal type

for example the "kingdom" of france continued continuously for about a millennium depending on how you measure it

but its actual government varied widely

most notably, it transitioned from feudalism to absolute monarchy that occurred under richelieu and at versailles
Jul 4 8 tweets 4 min read
i get it now, this is legit. reddit objects are objects recommended to _entry-level enthusiasts_ by topical subreddits because they work well to improve lives over baseline with a relatively low level of effort for a majority of cases

reddit objects are high ROI!

for example, r/strength_training reddit object

yeah i know other forums came first but its quintessential

is it right everywhere? does everyone need to be doing squats all the time? does it ignore aesthetics?

who cares! way better than default gym behavior Image
Jul 4 4 tweets 2 min read
nearly broke a tooth eating a frozen pizza tonight

wonder how that got baked in Image ive probably had several hundred frozen pizzas in my life so odds are its safe and economical to continue eating red baron pizzas at $5 a pop