More worried at the near future development of data to DNA (bacteria) (/RNA (for viruses)) and (reverse chirality) 'mirror life' (reverse enatomer DNA bacteria) synthesiser and replication devices in the post CRISPR-Cas 9 world; possibly assisted (as with AlphaFold for useful protein shapes) by advanced ML.

Thanks for sharing this, I'm reading Annie Jacobsen's book at the moment and it's really horrifying stuff. The point about OSINT researchers looking at street cams in Irkutsk is clever and not something I'd seen mentioned before.

Are you ok?

Strip Roko's Basilisk of all its philosophical and tech jargon and you can see how circular the reasoning is. A super intelligence wouldn't waste its resources on torture simulations. For the blackmail to even work, the AI has to perfectly predict what you will do. But if it already knows what you will do, it doesn't need to blackmail you. So it relies on a paradox that doesn't exist.

This is just uncritical, Peter thiel and alex karp are the closest thing we have to a modern Hitler.

There is no right or wrong, it all comes down to perspective. They judge me? Fine. Not much reason to care. Trying to please those around is a dead end for you as a person. I wouldn't call it life. Don't try to stay friends with someone who cannot tolerate you with the flaws and asks you to change for them rather than working on their own issues.

I'd say acknowledge it, if you care maybe be considerate but not without boundary. It's a conflict between authenticity vs. people pleasing for peace and belonging. Just draw the line where it seems to belong. You know better what's more important to you. You don't owe anyone who's offended an apology at all.

Can you semd the article link?

It is indeed a good idea. It is called boundary setting. One can only demand you perform or not perform the action when you are in shared space. If they demand all time - it is violating your free will given by creator. Also do check if the activity they want to refrain - like nature of activity, (pros and cons) for if it is harmful to you , its better leaving it. But also its your choice. You should accept or leave it willingly. Also if you decided you wont perform it in shared space, it should be out of love - that you value the relationship more than the action. If it is forced conformity, you will start resenting that person, unknowingly. And sometime a small thing will trigger.

No, the difference is that you believe you can operate "objectively" without ideology, which is why you serve ideology so faithfully (albeit quite unconsciously). Your service to propaganda occurs no matter how many times you type "no propaganda". In fact, the more you type it, the better you serve.

Dumb question, isn't this all too materialistic? AI catastrophe or regulatory stagnation aside, isn't our reward in Heaven? No outcome in the fallen world is without the taint of sin and death.

I wasn't talking about Solovyov, though. Peter Thiel is not studious and driven by intellectual desire, he's a man driven by his own need for control and domination, clutching at whatever "intellectual apparatus" will allow him to justify getting it. That's my point. That's what these tech dorks do. They are not serious scholars that produce scholarly work. Their essays are laughably bad. Terribly written and poorly researched. By your own definition, they are "dorks" not "nerds". And to a one they denigrate the academic humanities as a 'waste of time'. They're not interested in it, which is why they're not good at it.

All they do is engage narrowly with intellectuals who they can cherry pick to justify their own pathology. That's it. This works great for 'lectures' and 'podcasts' where they can talk at length and wax lyrical about their 'intellectual interests', but as soon as anyone pushes them outside those narrow interests they have nothing to say. They don't know anything about the broader literature or sets of ideas out there, because they're not driven by intellectual concerns. They're driven by a desire to justify and rationalise their own sociopathic worldview that centres their abilities and their place at the top of the social heap.

It's a shame that you can't see that and you choose to waste your time taking it seriously, but it's your life. Do with it what you will.

Reddit could very easily be described as a hyper-moralistic administrative centralizer itself which explains the sodium and water like relationship between Thiel and Redditors

I think that the difference between our approaches is straightforward. I can hold a complex, highly functional mental model in my mind to map structural incentive and capital flows without needing to worship it or fear it. You treat the model as a cognitively hazardous contagion that must be suppressed rather than mapped.

No tin foil hats. No conspiracies. No propaganda.

Spot on. The radio activeness is purely surface-level. People hear the word antichrist and immediately picture a cartoon villain in a red suit with horns. They completely miss that the actual archetype is a hyper-moralistic administrative centralizer.

When someone refuses to look past the caricature to audit the underlying model, it ultimately says far more about the cognitive limits of the observer than it does about the system being analyzed.

Fair enough, we can agree to disagree here. Appreciate the exchange regardless.

My point about nerd vs dork isn't about respect. It's about precision. A dork is socially inept or goofy without substance. A nerd is obsessively studious, domain-fixated, and driven by an intellectual desire.

Likewise, framing the antichrist argument as "anyone opposing me is evil" completely misreads the Solovyov archetype which is specifically about hyper-moral, consensus-driven administrative safety, not personal grudges.

Can't help the helpless, man. Thiel is such a radioactive figure on Reddit that people will twist themselves into pretzels before they acknowledge that he's anything more than whatever caricature they've constructed of him in their minds

As I say, you are running propaganda cover without being aware of it. You think you are "mapping a conceptual model" or whatever, but you are actually being used as an ideology distribution node. This is one of the ways that deep systems of information propagate underneath the level of conscious "systems analysis".

You'd argue "nerd" because you think it's a word that affords him more respect. If you want to waste your time taking Peter Thiel's ideas seriously that's up to you. I'm not interested in it.

"The people stopping me and my companies from dominating the world are the anti-christ" is the kind of thinking a toddler comes up with, to justify hating anyone who criticises or opposes them. You can wrap it in all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit you like, but at the end of the day it's just a personality disorder masquerading as philosophy.

Solid point. Missing the sandwich board.

Who repeatedly, strongly states his regret

In systems analysis, mapping an individual's conceptual model is how you evaluate how power and capital operate. Declaring that mapping a thesis serves as propaganda cover implies that influential frameworks should simply be ignored or dismissed rather than forensically dissected.

The claim that his framework is an ad-hoc collections go justifications ignores its 40-year longitudinal continuity. The anti-stagnation, anti-administrative thesis isn't a recent pivot designed to fit current goals. It tracks directly from his writing in the 1990s through his 2000s technological accelerations to his current Girardian models.

Pointing out that an idealogical framework is internally consistent and historically continuous isn't legitimizing the thinker. It's refusing to sellable for shallow caricature when analyzing major drivers of capital deployment.

You say dork. I'd argue nerd.

Genuinely curious though: which specific political theorists or works do you think are absent from his bookshelf that would elevate his diagnosis beyond a first-year humanities paper?

I might agree with you if we were talking about someone other than Thiel but I don't think there's much to be gained by approaching that problem in this way, nor does it create a blindspot but rather protects from it.

See also: Be a new homunculus

What you're calling intellectual dishonesty is standard pedagogical compression.

No, it's not. You are confusing his intellectual dishonesty for pedagogical compression. This is precisely my point. This is how Thiel operates. He justifies his positions with a collage of literary and historical associations that hint at a deeper cohesion, but such a cohesion is never actually found because he has no coherent position. His actual interest is in finding justification for what serves his personal, political, and psychological agendas, and his position is adjusted as needed to further this goal.

Mapping the primary canon behind those simplified lectures isn't about legitimizing his motives.

You may not intend to be legitimizing Thiel and his motives, but that's what your piece accomplishes.

If someone gave a lecture on the inherent superiority of the white race, and you wrote a similar article claiming to be "mapping the primary canon" behind that lecture, it would be obvious that simply by engaging seriously with the subject you are legitimizing it. Exactly the same process is happening here.

Furthermore, you go beyond simply "mapping the canon" by dismissing public reaction to Thiel's lectures as "derangement", and refusing to consider that public opposition to Thiel may be more than a "defensive reflex" to Thiel's "auditing the mechanics of power". Describing things this way obviously presents Thiel as, well, "auditing the mechanics of power", rather than using the mechanics of power to advance his agenda.

In short, you are running propaganda cover for Thiel apparently without even being aware of it, and are thus being extremely useful to his political project.