Basement Whatever

interesting Internet items basementwhatever.com

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“Seriousness is the maniacal belief in a project greater than oneself”

If you’re pinpointing a time when America became less serious, it’s around the same time when America began sacrificing communal responsibility in favor of individual pursuits. Though it’s unfair to pin everything on the Boomers, the concept of finding oneself did not exist during the German Blitz. As the sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “the…

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Survival of the Richest: Hollywood's Broken Talent Pipeline

I like to call this “poorface” – performing a hardscrabble origin you didn’t have. The problem becomes when actual poor people, who do not have huge amounts of resources, try to imitate the path of people who do poorface. Hollywood’s talent pipeline increasingly rewards narratives of marginalization while paying less attention to class, creating incentives for affluent artists to emphasize…

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Internet I Still Think About: House Hunters

Like me, you may have long assumed that reality TV shows were not exact descriptions of reality. Still, I thought this was just at the level of selective editing and choice of focus. In fact, reality TV is not just faker than I imagined, it’s faker than I could imagine. — Read on www.atvbt.com/internet-i-still-think-about-house-hunters/

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Building your "personal culture" in America, one book at a time

Despite brooding accounts in outlets on both ends of the political spectrum, to my delight people’s desire to have an active internal life has far from diminished. From seminars to workshops, from idea-based friend-making to reading-club singles mingles, people around America and the world demonstrate every day that neither the book nor conversation is “dead”. Link here.

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A strong mind continues its trajectory of creativity

If a mind is highly capable, it got to that point by gaining understanding in a voyage of novelty. If the mind gains understanding that is novel for all the surrounding minds (e.g., preexisting humans), it does so through creativity: generating novelty, rather than merely copying it. If the mind becomes much more capable than the surrounding minds, it does so by being on a trajectory of…

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Will chatbots fix toxic online culture?

GenAI chat interfaces, however, represent a new paradigm. They are programmed to engage in positive, constructive, and polite interactions. Regular engagement with these platforms can subtly influence users to adopt a similar demeanor in their personal interactions. By consistently modeling respectful and thoughtful communication, genAI chat interfaces like ChatGPT could potentially encourage…

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Millennials as the Forever Generation

My prediction is that counter to the current doomsaying around millennials, we will end up remembered as the cosmic and eternal boomers where millennials will be the ones astride all the commanding positions of power, influence, and wealth when we reach AGI, the singularity, and anti-aging and then, unlike the boomers, millennials will largely never retire, never pass on their wealth, and never…

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Asymmetric Bets: How Small Risks Create Unfair Upside

Most people are taught to focus on the probability of failure. They ask “what if this does not work?” and stop there. The people who consistently end up with an unfair upside see something different. They pay attention to the ratio between downside cost and upside potential. If the downside is survivable and the upside could be transformative, they lean in. They worry less about being wrong and…

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Your Reading Habits Know Your Politics Better than You Do - Here’s How to Find Out What You Actually Believe

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Nothing changes

“If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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I completed an Unknown Armies movie list

….and it was super underwhelming. The goal was to watch ten movies that were reminiscent of Unknown Armies, an occult themed role playing game focused on obsession and Jungian archetypes. But the only genuinely excellent movie on the list was Ghost World. That movie is stellar, may be one of my top 30 favorite movies of all time, and made this journey to watch 10 films reminiscent of Unknown…

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How I used AI to clean my Obsidian Inbox

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Do you know your default shape?

When people rhetorically ask, “why does everyone like Taylor Swift so much,” or, “why do people fall for conspiracy theories,” they are often displaying incuriosity about the shapes of others. Take a second to be curious. — Read on usefulfictions.substack.com/p/do-you-know-your-default-shape

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Quest Active: Unknown Armies Movie List

Quest Active: Unknown Armies Movie List

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Kundera, Hegel, and the AIs

These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person…wants to please, impress, or enrage. — Read on american-innocence.com/p/kundera-hegel-and-the-ais

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32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

The more scientists study the Red Planet, the more they find unusual objects and patterns scattered across Mars’ surface. Here are some of the most baffling. — Read on www.livescience.com/space/mars/32-things-on-mars-that-look-like-they-shouldnt-be-there

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The usefulness of useless knowledge

Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely to be polluted by bad science. The merely odd, purely curiosity-driven research is less likely to…