#flagpost

[mitigatedchaos]

This is a bit of speculative philosophy. I haven't mapped it out into a complete theory with my full endorsement.

Much of what we humans do is, in a medium-long term evolutionary survival sense, not necessary. If you just want your line to exist, you can be a Gelada and eat grass in the mountains of Africa for ten thousand years.

Other animals don't have castles, and they don't have writing, and they don't build cars, and for the most part, they get by anyway. An animal species can do nothing but sit in a swamp all day and eat whatever is stupid enough to fall in, and do that for millions of years.

As human beings, we have access to higher and more abstract levels of meaning. We have the option to be a jet fighter pilot, for example. These categories have meaning, because even if their causal power is fuzzy, they have causal power. The world will proceed differently with a jet fighter pilot in the cockpit of a plane as compared to someone who has never flown a plane before in his life. These categories are, in a way, features of our reality; if aliens from a gas giant planet who had never heard of boats before came to our planet, they would invent a boat, and then they would decide on a term to name it for convenience.

We can choose to push against the environment in order to increase or maintain our dimensionality, through working, reading, exercising, solving problems and pursuing challenges. Alternatively, we can choose not to, and to fall back towards the nature of simpler organisms, or even non-organisms.

Our desires and drives, as part of our animal nature, can work in either direction.

We can also push against each other.

Suppose that the second-greatest musician in a city murders the greatest musician in that city, so that he might win an upcoming music contest (perhaps bonking him on the head with a clarinet and sealing him away with a cask of amontillado).

We each have a nature, in our time and place, and we each have potential, different ways that we can express that nature. Our choices, what we do with what we have, reveal who we are.

What our murderer revealed is that we he values is not the noble pursuit of the state of being of the greatest musician in the city, for he has thrown away his rival to practice on. What he values is fame, or money, or the prestige of being known as the greatest musician, without truly being the greatest.

These things are all lesser. To follow fame, or money, or prestige can locally point a man towards greatness, but these things are not greatness. Seeking fame can lead to greatness if a man also follows a set of rules that is more than just seeking fame, directing the force inwards, producing strength. Otherwise, fame, money, prestige, and greatness come apart at the tails. They are of lesser dimensionality.

Thus, in seeking the reward without following the reward as guidance towards strength, some forms of evil may be like wireheading.

This is not a complete system of morality. We could imagine a conqueror, his horde galloping across the plains on horseback, testing his strength through seeking out challenges. This cannot explain why he is wrong (although he acts as a point of opposition for the martial greatness of others), but we could see someone would admire him more than they might admire a man who allows a conquest to take place in his name through mere apathy.

Our murderer, however, is on his way back down to being an alligator.

If you're a human being, you gotta play for the love of the game.

[flagtailed]

somethingsomething fish girl got parasites. oohhh nooooo

[beyondbarbican]

Black and white Britain.

[mitigatedchaos]

The Origin of Gender Politics

(~1,000 words, 4-5m)

Let's talk about gender.

Humanity is one species. Men and women are two halves of one species. They are two sides of one adaptive strategy.

Men and women have differences, but generally (though not always), these differences are not a pure binary. They often have overlapping distributions.

We can determine what is masculine and what is feminine not by looking at where the populations are the same, but by looking at where the populations are different. We can summarize these differences as masculine traits and feminine traits.

Masculine and feminine traits can be positive, or they can be negative, or, as is often the case, their value can be contextual. A trait can persist in environments and contexts where it is not useful, because it is renewed or valued in contexts where it is useful.

Because men and women are not uniform, and the distributions are overlapping, there can be women who are more masculine, or more masculine in certain areas, or men who are more feminine, or more feminine in certain areas.

This natural variation is adaptive.

In general, splitting the social and literal layers of a message, I would say that men tend to be more literal and care less about social consensus, while women tend to be more focused on the social content of messages and care more about social consensus.

When the social consensus is good, it is good to enforce it, and when the social consensus is bad, it is good to violate it. The social consensus can drift away from conditions, and therefore it will always need to be violated in order to update it at some point, yet it also synchronizes actions, and so it is generally worthwhile to have a social consensus at another point.

It is good that there are women who are less agreeable and less focused on social consensus, for the generations and contexts where the social consensus is bad, and it is good that there are women who are more agreeable and focused on social consensus, for the generations and contexts where social consensus is good.

In general, my assessment is that masculine charisma is about being inspiring, while feminine charisma is about being warm and inviting.

A charismatic man inspires others to put in effort and fulfill their potential. A charismatic woman is soft and fluid, and disarms people, lubricating social friction arising from conflicting intentions, emotions, and beliefs, creating a buttery-smooth social situation.

And yet, someone who is both inspiring and warm and inviting, or who is capable of drawing from either ability according to the situation, can draw in people, smooth the social situation, inspire them to fulfill their potential, and direct them towards some goal.

There can also be a woman who is inspiring, or a man who is warm and inviting. This is not contradiction, but simply a natural range of variation.

A system of two people can sustain a tension between opposites, and therefore outperform either person alone. A wise person can integrate the tension within him or herself, and thereby exceed a person who embodies fully one characteristic or another.

The division of the species-level adaptive strategy, and its embodiment in two groups of people, creates male and female. They push against each other. A fusion of the two wouldn't abolish social competition, and while it isn't clear what the abolition of one would do (such as through exotic reproductive technologies), it's clear that it would change evolutionary pressures.

So given all that above, men are good, actually.

Men are not just women who are physically stronger and also violent and oppressive for no reason. Men, who in homosocial contexts have social (and physical) power less beholden to social consensus, are the ones who are best positioned - and best emotionally primed - to violate a bad social consensus.

So men are good, but because not all masculine traits are good or are good in all contexts, not all men are good.

And similarly, while women can be frustrating for men, it is not the case that the only purpose of women in the world is to bear children, or the case that all women can only contribute by bearing children.

Much of what women do is not quite as socially legible to most men, so many men cannot tell when a woman is buttering over a social situation (lubricating conflicting intentions), or acting in a selfish or socially predatory way in the social layer. So it is not the case that women in general are bad, or that the only point of women is the most obvious thing about them (generational continuity), or that 'the most submissive woman is always the best,' and so on.

Rather, women, like men, can be good or bad, and a woman can embody positive masculine qualities (disagreeability or systems orientation), or positive feminine qualities (being warm and inviting), and do more legible masculine work (engineering), or less legible but still valuable more feminine work (relational management). This work can contribute to society even if it isn't highly legible and easy to monetize.

Now, then...

Every human being is born with low psychological development and low self-awareness. Psychological development and self-awareness require exertion, care, and self-overcoming. Many people do not maximize their potential in these areas, either due to personality, getting stuck in a local maximum, or lack of experience.

So, consider self-awareness and psychological development as one axis.

The division of the species-level adaptive strategy into two groups of people (the sexes), who vary internally and overlap, creates a second axis.

Therefore, there are both conflicting intentions and conflicting experiences, and there is a widespread lack of awareness of self and understanding of others.

Then, consider morality as a third axis. There are conflicting interests, and some people pursue them selfishly, or in a short-sighted manner.

The experiences, and awareness of those experiences, vary widely among people. Gender discourse is therefore continuously regenerated, and even in the case of better overall morality and understanding, would still be regenerated as a continuous negotiation of interests that are in tension with each other.

If we then introduce compression, the limits of information transmission and processing, then obviously there will be continuous misunderstandings, and a continuous flow of people feeling misunderstood, devalued, talked-over, or excluded.

[mitigatedchaos]

Kontextmaschine is Dead

(~1,000 words, 5m)

Noted blogger @kontextmaschine is presumed dead, following the discovery that the sole resident at his most likely residence was found deceased during a wellness check initiated by concerned Redditors.

Prior to his last post on Aug 22, which indicated a serious health problem, he reported taking over twice the dose of creatine he had been taking at the beginning of his lengthy post-COVID health saga, in which he also reported becoming bisexual, having "zero" anxiety, gaining 3D vision after years of not having it, becoming incredibly convincing, and having to learn to walk and use his muscles properly again. At the time, he felt he was becoming trimmer and physically stronger, and reported engaging in a long project of yard work, although photos from the inside of his house generally looked somewhat messy.

A Tumblr user who met him briefly in person after the beginning of the health saga but before these most recent events reported that he was friendly, charismatic, hospitable, and clean, but "physically, a mess," with motor control issues on one side of his body.

Topics of discussion were similar to the content of kontextmaschine's blog, such as differences in east and west coast government in America, said to be "totally on brand," but it was said that the prolific poster seemed "less self-grandiose" in person.

Redditors theorize that the decline of kontextmaschine's health following his first self-report of COVID-19 infection may have been due to undiagnosed brain cancer, which could be more consistent with observed changes in behavior than the after-effects of a viral infection, given that most reports of "long covid" are about effects like fatigue, and not total loss of anxiety or alteration of sexual orientation.

Despite multiple suggestions, from both anonymous and pseudonymous users, kontextmaschine refused to seek professional medical care for his condition.

Regarding the mourning of public figures, in 2018, a period of increased Progressive sensitivity during the Trump Administration, kontextmaschine wrote,

through the years realized that through whatever blind groping the ‘90s-ass “edgelords” were desperately trying to save us from this, through proper gatekeeping and filtering at first I’d thought it was gratuitous and supported it being relaxed, maybe not shaming everyone who publicly mourned a suicide, mea culpa, mea culpa, I have debts to pay

In 2019, he added:

That was how we kept the internet culture from growing mawkish and cry-bullyish: basically, if you were so weak as to get weepy over corpsemeat you got cancelled, the shame would follow you forever and you’d never be allowed to forget it.

Given his writing, it is likely that kontextmaschine would not have supported excessive public mourning over his death, though in 2017, following the theft of his motorcycle, when the popular blogger @argumate jokingly criticized him by writing, "no references to pinball, no insight into historical Americana, this isn’t the kontext I signed up for," kontextmaschine wrote,

“when bad shit happens people mock me accurately” is the community I’ve been looking for my whole life so

Like argumate, perhaps the most famous of the rationalist-adjacent bloggers on Tumblr, screenshots of kontextmaschine's Tumblr posts would end up on outside websites.

Kontextmaschine was generally considered an interesting, if controversial writer. One Tumblr user characterized him as a member of the "obnoxious Tumblr right," though another user asked, "wait, how is kontextmaschine is right wing?" After another user claimed that the nuclear bombing of Oregon would be a net improvement in the world due to kontextmaschine's residence in Portland, tumblr user @random-thought-depository wrote a 2,400 word theory post arguing that kontextmaschine's philosophy was a means to coordinate to join a future political coalition favoring the formation of a more brutal and oppressive hierarchy in pursuit of his own advantage.

Though kontextmaschine's ideology advocates that humanity should adopt "r-selection," meaning more offspring with less investment in each (or youth, sex, and death), this blog dissented against the coalition theory, arguing that motorcycles, kung fu, women, Hollywood, and not having to report to HR are all traditionally cool, and the causality of the kontextmaschine ideology could easily run the other way.

Though he had a period of identifying as female in his youth, appropriately LGBTQ for a Tumblr user, his 2011 statement of principles, including "the lesser yields to the greater" and "suffering is the mark of a wrong person," and general body of work, could be described as a strain of right-wing thought, though not of the traditionalist Christian or rational technocratic varieties.

Prior to the post-covid health saga, kontextmaschine's health posting was primarily about his bipolar disorder, with both manic and depressive phases.

Kontextmaschine maintained generally friendly relations with other bloggers in his sphere of discourse, sometimes debating but rarely aggressive, except in response to anonymous hatemail. In response to one particular piece of hatemail, kontextmaschine stated that as a writer, of course his primary form of influence would be his posts.

In a post chain reblogged by dozens of Tumblr users, multiple Tumblr users wrote that they enjoyed his writing and are disappointed by his death, describing him as a unique thinker that will not be easily replaced. Several felt that there was not much they could have done, as after returning from his covid infection, he was not taking medical advice.

One Tumblr user wrote, "rip. Inspirational manic poster," while long-time and prolific poster argumate described him as, "one of the bloggers of all time."

Internet users speculate that Kontextmaschine is survived by his outdoor cat, Badger, about whom he posted frequently. He may also be survived by other members of his family, with whom he apparently did not live, and rarely spoke about.

It is recommended that enthusiasts of kontextmaschine's blog make backups of his writing for archival purposes.

[mitigatedchaos]

Now, Melt

An essay by Mitigated Chaos Post for Monday, January 20th, 2025 (21,800 words, ~1h49m)

Another blogger's party has lost the election. He has decided to lose weight about it.

Good.

In this essay, I present my most powerful argument for human freedom – human dimensionality – as well as providing a powerful, general-purpose analytical toolset in order to help understand and pursue it.

With this concept, it becomes easier to identify and understand the risks and challenges posed by systems such as corporations or governments, which produce incentives to flatten humanity in order to subordinate human beings and simplify planning calculations, as well as understand the limits of the appropriate use of power.

Do not let the word count deceive you. I have worked hard to provide understandable examples to explain complex concepts, but I am not beholden to any publisher, and there is no page count requirement for me to meet – there is no padding in this essay. You can read the whole thing in under two hours, and it contains as much information as an entire book.

Along the way, I will address some brief criticisms by other bloggers. Rather than engaging in long-form discourse based on their larger bodies of work, I will be using these brief criticisms to help guide the broader discussion of more general issues. (If you wish to know their specific opinions, please see their own blogs.)

Due to the extreme length of this essay, for discussion and reblogging, please use this post.

The main essay can be read over at @timac-extraversal.

[mitigatedchaos]

They Might Be Kings

Previously...

[ @arcticdementor ]

First, I write all that, and this is the only part you comment on? Second, I didn’t think that was what I was trying to do. I keep bringing up Caplan and Smith — really, it’s Smith’s “Billion Immigrants America” that I’d really like to see you comment on and address — because so many of your arguments here (much like your arguments about birth rates) seem to rely upon those you are addressing caring about their fellow man. Appeals to the negative consequences of importing the Taliban mean nothing to the rational egoist who will “yes, and…” them by freely acknowledging it will make the country he lives in so much worse… but for him, the personal benefits outweigh the personal costs. Yes, even when you add in the politics. I mean, Nathan Smith basically just wants to live the life of a citizen of the UAE. What do you tell him?

In general, your entire style is set up to hit with a thunk and be enraging, not in the sense of generating outrage at you, but in the sense of generating a sense of overwhelming rage at others. You carefully distill the possible, though impolite, potential motives of people in such a way as to encourage punching them in the face.

I thought you knew this and were doing it on purpose. You set up a fork and put a tremendous amount of pressure on people, lining up (for a hypothetical example) the wrongs enabled by the British government, and then arguing that there is no way to overcome those wrongs through conventional means.

I'm exhausted for reasons unrelated to discourse, so let's address this quickly.

First, being shuttled between islands of safety, stuck indoors all day, while being unable to use national parks or public roads, and not having reliable services, is actually incredibly fucking stupid.

We'll combine your representation of these two guys together into a guy called 'Bryan Smith.'

"(a) The national parks will be filled with roving bands of guerillas? (b) Well, fortunately, I don't want to go to national parks!"

The idea that Bryan Smith will never, personally, suffer any negative consequences from political destabilization, is not based on some sort of impersonal analysis by Bryan Smith.

Second, if men of virtue and intelligence do not develop their powers and govern society, then they are, statistically, more likely like to be ruled by men who are either less virtuous, less intelligent, or both. I've heard that this idea was stated as far back as Aristotle.

There are two ways to view this.

We can view it as a cosmic joke. It's simply one of those funny things about the structure of reality as it relates to human beings. Markets have a Dao-like flow, and species benefit from constrained diversity, so it's not as uncommon as it might seem.

Alternatively, we can view it the way that the men of old might have viewed it. Talents, or aptitudes, are something that men did not earn. They are gifts bestowed by Heaven. If a man does not develop the talent given to him, then he will be punished. If the men of a nation do not collectively develop the talents given to them, then they will be punished. And if a nation do not adequately develop the talents of the next generation, and include them, then the nation shall be made vulnerable, and will be punished.

Men must develop these talents, and develop themselves, and become what they can be, and give freely to the next generation, without knowing for certain if they will be rewarded, or if the reward will be worth the effort, on faith. If men collectively choose to do this, then the nation is likely to flourish, although this is not guaranteed. If they refuse, and generation upon generation refuse, then it shall wither and die.

This ties back to the first point.

"(a) The public roads will be beset by bandits? (b) Well, I guess I'll just always travel by helicopter, then!"

Sentence (b) isn't a legitimate, impersonal evaluation of the situation. It's a refusal to face what I have laid out in the second point, due to the subconsciously-perceived psychological burden. It is the low-energy path back to the equilibrium, rather than performing a costly update of the entire ideological network.

One of the reasons that, before my recent sequence of posts regarding open borders, I asked if Argumate was pursuing "some supremacist notion," was to draw an implicit IQ supremacist position, if he was holding it, out into the open. An open borders world which is safe for Bryan Smith, even if it isn't safe for other people, would rely on solidarity of the vast majority of high-IQ elites, or of elites in social control of the greatest supply of IQ.

I don't see why we should assume that that's a given. Why is every country on Earth not already an anarcho-capitalist paradise if elites have total solidarity? And if they don't have total solidarity now, why would they have total solidarity under open borders?

And if they start off with total solidarity under open borders, why should we believe that it would be maintained indefinitely, particularly intergenerationally?

Without virtuous action (of the kind that Bryan Smith is uninterested in), and virtuous development (and thus the ability to make peace and adapt a system to changing circumstances), the default of a system should be expected to be decay, as individuals act in their local interests at the cost of the organization as a whole. The tools of punishment for defectors are themselves such a system.

Alternative power networks, and alternative moral systems, may not emerge immediately, but as the system gradually declines, its ability to take enforcement actions against them will also decline. Ideological mutation, as a coordinating basis for rival elites, will allow alternatives to re-emerge.

[mitigatedchaos]

As of around roughly 2AM, Fox News has called the 2024 presidential election for Donald J. Trump.

Every lawsuit, every felony charge, every cry of authoritarianism, every deplatforming, every newsroom choosing to embrace "moral clarity," every book thrown out of a library, every firing, every peaceful protest and every riot, every empty campaign slogan, every hope for a permanent majority – all of them have failed.

Cultivate strength. Respect agency. Seek mastery. Only a man who bends to reality more than he bends to social consensus can possibly hope to defeat him now. Live. Survive. Once every blue state is a hub of meta-rational excellence, the envy of every European social democracy, this man's grasp will be broken, and you will escape the shadow of the new Ronald Reagan.

What do you think - are you a bad enough dude to out-govern the President?