“The ability to get what you want” is actually a very good definition of intelligence.
Why? Because getting what you want out of reality is the most general test possible.
The universe rewards a meta-capability—the skill of figuring out what capabilities matter for a given goal, mastering those capabilities, and leveraging them to make progress toward the goal.
That’s what general intelligence is.
Theoretical physicists are not the most powerful people in the world because the universe does not reward any one narrow capability. Not to mention that accumulating endless power might also not be what physicists want.
The fact that Trump, Xi Jinping, and Putin are of the most powerful people in the world is also NOT evidence that “the ability to get what you want” is the wrong measure of intelligence.
It is only evidence that those people are in fact much more intelligent than people think AND that outcomes are not determined by intelligence alone. It is a major driver, but the complete winning formula is closer to:
outcome success =
intelligence ×
motivation ×
resources ×
network ×
luck
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Inspiring.
I just had the craziest experience at the airport.
We are about to board a flight to Atlanta when the pilot from the incoming plane walks out of the jetway. Guy is probably late 50s, salt and pepper hair, military look. The kind of pilot you instantly feel good about seeing on your flight.
Pilot walks over to the counter, gets on the PA system, and starts addressing everyone. “Folks, I’ve been doing this a long time. Flying one of these jets is easy. The hard part is looking at 130 people and telling them their flight is going to be delayed.”
Audible groans throughout the boarding gate. Most people here are flying to Atlanta as a layover before another flight. 130 people just had their day become a complete mess.
The pilot goes on. “I get it, trust me. But here’s the deal: During our landing, we had a small mechanical issue. I’m not your pilot for the next leg, but I don’t feel confident the jet’s safe to fly until we have a mechanical team look it over, and I don’t feel comfortable asking the next pilots to fly you guys until we get confirmation.”
He points at the agents next to him behind the counter: “Now, none of this is the agents’ fault. Please be kind to them. I’m the one who made this decision, not them, so any inconvenience you experience is my fault. Just please know that I don’t do this lightly, and I’m only doing it because I believe it’s in the best interests of everyone’s safety.”
Now this is where the story gets crazy. The pilot puts the microphone down, grabs his suitcase, and all the people in the gate…
Start clapping.
I’m not joking, everyone starts clapping for the guy. 130 people who just had their travel plans ruined give an ovation to the guy who made the decision and delivered the message.
All because he addressed them with decency and transparency, took ownership of the decision, made it clear that it was necessary, and explained why it was in everyone’s best interest.
It’s honestly one of the best examples of strong communication—of strong leadership, for that matter—that I’ve seen in a long time.
@Delta, whoever your Atlanta to Wichita pilot was this morning, he’s one of the good ones. Please tell him the delayed passengers of flight 1637 appreciate what he did.
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Privacy in crypto will win in two forms:
1. Private money — encrypted assets
2. Private computation — encrypted smart contracts
The second category is especially important for institutions because each one of them has its own idiosyncratic requirements—bespoke business logic, compliance rules, etc.
For them, providing privacy to their users isn’t as simple as just encrypting everything. They need to be able to encode who can see what and under which conditions.
That means privacy cannot just be binary. It must be programmable.
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“The ability to get what you want” is actually a very good definition of intelligence.
Why? Because getting what you want out of reality is the most general test possible.
Theoretical physicists are not the most powerful people in the world because the universe does not reward any one narrow capability. Not to mention that accumulating endless power might also not be what physicists want.
The universe rewards a meta-capability—the skill of figuring out what capabilities matter for a given goal, mastering those capabilities, and leveraging them to execute effectively toward the goal.
That’s what general intelligence is.
The fact that Trump, Xi Jinping, and Putin are of the most powerful people in the world is also NOT evidence that “the ability to get what you want” is the wrong measure of intelligence.
It is only evidence that those people are in fact much more intelligent than people think AND that outcomes are not determined by intelligence alone. It is a major driver, but the complete winning formula is closer to:
outcome success =
intelligence ×
motivation ×
resources ×
network ×
luck
Show more
Rousseau may have been the most destructive French philosopher. He is the intellectual ancestor of not just postmodernism and wokeism BUT ALSO socialism and communism.
If you accept his premise that man is inherently good and civilization is what corrupts him, then property rights, market competition, and social institutions become the obvious enemy.
Marx transformed those proto-socialist intuitions into communism, while the French postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze) blindly generalized them to everything under the sun—culture, language, race, gender, and even truth itself.
The result is the Socialist-Woke meme complex.
Socialism undercuts the economic engine of Western civilization. Postmodernism neutralizes the West’s ability to defend itself by framing reason and the search for objective truth as tools of oppression.
A lethal combination.
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Je me rappelle au lycée, j'avais une prof de français qui me répétait : « Rousseau, c'est mon auteur préféré. » À l'époque, j'étais complètement illettré, je n'avais pas lu un roman.
Depuis, j'ai rattrapé un peu le retard. Et force est de constater : Rousseau est lui aussi un poison pour l'esprit français.
Tu as raison de remonter à lui. Le geste fondateur est là. L'homme naît bon, c'est la société qui le corrompt. La propriété, la hiérarchie, la tradition, l'institution, tout ce qui structure une civilisation devient suspect. Le mal n'est plus dans l'homme, il est dans l'ordre. Donc il suffit de défaire l'ordre.
De cette intuition découle tout le reste. La Terreur, qui croit pouvoir régénérer l'homme par le décret. Le socialisme utopique, qui croit pouvoir abolir l'égoïsme par l'organisation. Le wokisme, qui croit pouvoir purifier la société en démantelant ses normes. À chaque fois la même logique : l'homme est innocent, l'institution est coupable, donc il faut casser l'institution.
C'est faux. L'homme n'est pas né bon. Il est né pulsionnel, ambivalent, capable du meilleur et du pire. Les institutions n'oppriment pas une nature angélique, elles canalisent une nature ambiguë. Détruire les institutions ne libère pas un bon sauvage, ça libère un homme livré à ses pires instincts.
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze n'ont fait que radicaliser Rousseau avec les outils du XXᵉ siècle. La matrice est la même : soupçon de toute autorité, dissolution de toute hiérarchie, fantasme d'un état originel pur que les structures auraient trahi.
Donc oui, le péché originel commence avec lui. Et la France a une double dette : avoir donné Rousseau au XVIIIᵉ, et avoir donné la French Theory au XXᵉ. Deux fois le même poison, juste recombiné.
Au travail.
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People like to say that they care about privacy, but they really don’t. They give it up in a heartbeat for more/better features every time.
And why wouldn't they? In the short history of the internet, there have rarely been any consequences.
The problem with privacy is that it doesn’t matter at all until it does. But by then, it’s too late.
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Huge step forward.
It’s time to pass CLARITY.
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” —Linus’s Law
We now have infinite AI eyeballs.
Exploits on legacy code will first go up, but then they will go down forever.
Computer security will be solved.
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It’s time to pass the CLARITY bill to make sure the US continues to lead the crypto industry 🇺🇸
Most people live by the wrong algorithm.
They spend their career focused on how to accumulate resources for themselves.
But obviously the people who are rabidly obsessed with creating value for others are the ones that society rewards* the most.
*Assuming capitalism. Under socialism, you’re shit out of luck.
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Milton Friedman:
You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.
democrats: hold my beer
"As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush may be the most prescient piece about technology ever written.
He wrote it in 1945 when the word "computer" meant a woman doing arithmetic by hand. It's an essay about how we can use technology to think better. Talks about:
– the beginnings of AI
– neurotech implants like Neuralink (!!)
– the web & hyperlinks
– wikipedia
– search algorithms
– data compression
– speech recognition
– network routing algorithms
– high level programming languages
At the time, the transistor had not yet been invented, and there was only one working computer on Earth—Colossus at Bletchley Park—which was classified and nobody knew existed until the 70s.
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"A very resourceful engineer can now do a lot of product management and a lot of design if they're just willing to do the work and use AI."
@alive_eth on AI collapsing the PM, designer, and engineer roles into one:
"One thing that we're seeing is the blending of the roles of the product manager, the designer, and the engineer, where every one of those three believe that they can do the job of the other two. Marc Andreessen actually referred to this as the Mexican standoff between the three."
@alive_eth @unchained_pod @laurashin
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