Josh Leonard

I can be against some crazy left wing ideas without becoming right wing. I’m talented that way.

We are all blessed to walk the same earth as @JamesCarville. Even if your politics are not aligned he is still a gift and a treasure that should be savored while it can. youtu.be/w_1LyLFMy7Q?si…

The eagerness for OpenAI to sign the contract on the very night their rival got fired is likely to be a lot more revealing than the contract terms, which in any event are ambiguous and unlikely to be enforced by a court that gives a lot of deference to the executive.

There’s a serious argument here re: national security and democratic accountability (no surprise there — Palmer's exceedingly sharp and laudably patriotic). But there’s also a very serious argument about constitutional limits. The government may regulate. It may contract. It may legislate. What it cannot simply do (even in the name of protecting democracy) is force private actors to operate contrary to their own policies without raising concerns about compelled speech, due process, and other constitutional protections. They could also build/maintain the tech in-house. Or contract with a better-aligned vendor. And if the State is determined to use Anthropic’s tech, theatrical MIDNIGHT FRIDAY DEADLINES and public intimidation hardly seem like the ideal way to achieve that outcome.

@RobbSmith Wow - beautifully articulated.

A conservative. Actually conserving.

@kofinas @RaoulGMI This misses a lot. All relevance realization—meaning—remains human, AI can’t do it. That holism scales, so AI becomes just next (radically powerful) tool for us to do more meaningful things easier. Value follows meaning, so demand shifts. New equilibrium struck.

And beyond self-organizing, I would add that we live in a self-knowing, self-valuing, and self-awakening universe.

Yep

@MeghanMcCain I live in Oakland, CA, and I never heard a single one of my Obama loving friends ever call McCain a racist. We admire that clip as much as you do.

You guys only loved and appreciated him when he never become president and then died. I get the point but he was called a racist by the entire democrat party for years for daring to run against Obama ultimately leading to the rise of Trump. If you cry wolf enough - sometimes the beast shows up.

America’s political landscape is more complicated than it used to be. Here’s my attempt to depict what I see as the seven broad camps today. Most people I know fall pretty cleanly into one of these circles (each of which has some common ground with the two adjacent circles). Some additional points: - The top two circles (green/yellow) are concerned first and foremost with the rise of illiberalism—disregard for the constitution, cancel culture, mob behavior, political violence. They see liberal vs illiberal as more critical right now than left vs right. In 2020, they agreed that wokeness was bad but today they’re divided on whether Trump or Harris/Biden are the lesser of two evils. - For the middle two circles (blue/red), left vs right is the main thing. They’re not illiberal themselves but tend to focus on illiberalism from the other side while ignoring or condoning illiberalism from their own team. Both skew older and are the main consumers of traditional media, whether it be cable news or newspapers. - The two lower circles (pink/orange) share a strong sense of grievance, place utmost importance on identity, tend to view identity groups (race, religion, sex, etc.) as monoliths, and are prone to believing conspiracy theories that fit with their worldview. Both skew younger, with woke skewing feminine and upper class and groyper skewing masculine and lower class. Both use revolutionary rhetoric, seeing the establishment as rotten to the core, and readily employ illiberal tactics under the belief that desperate times call for desperate measures. Thoughts?

The third story is a New Story of Wholeness for humanity in the 21st century, and it is the most credible, integrated story of who we really are.

The world's most accurate developmental psychologist assesses POTUS as having the mental complexity of a 10th grader.

I’m interested in what would cause ICE to say “wait, we actually killed an American citizen by mistake.” The immediate reflexive “s/he deserved it” regardless of the evidence or video is disgusting.

Wealth’s declining causal power is a natural consequence of moving beyond it as the scarce resource that organized the current era’s civilizational mode; modernity’s value maximization has been supplanted by meaning, sustainability & resilience as scarce resources.

Now enforce real names and authenticated identities, and watch how nice and functional America becomes again.

AI is killing consulting, unless it’s from an Integrative stage of complexity, which AIs can’t touch. If I was CEO of a consulting firm, I’d be learning about the integrative stage of cognition with every hour of spare time I have.

1/6 🚨 Introducing ‘Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice.’ A new peer-reviewed journal advancing integrative metatheory, systems thinking, and big-picture approaches to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

I am a never Trumper precisely because I'm conservative. I distrust grand narratives and social holisms. I believe deeply in the fundamental fallibility of human nature and that society needs strong, values-centered guardrails. I believe in natural hierarchies (though not static ones). I think power should generally be pushed down to the smallest unit of social action, often the individual, family and community. I believe we live in a morally real universe. I believe in incremental change rooted in local, contextual judgments based on the prudence of lived experience and tradition. I believe custom and institutional memory mostly trump values engineering. I believe incentives and means matter far more than outcomes and ends, and are also less dangerous. I believe mostly in a realist view of politics as interests in terms of power. I believe in society-stabilizing structures. I believe in rigorously-regulated national borders. I believe society is an organic totality and that duty grounds citizenship. Finally, like all true conservatives I am very wary of mobs and popular passions as being the ground for the rise of tyranny. I've read a lot of the conservative political philosophical canon—Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hume, Adams, Hobbes, Burke, Hegel, Smith, de Tocqueville, Kirk, Kendall, Hayek, Strauss, Scruton, Deneen et al.— and believe I have a workable understanding of its claims and commitments. I could go on, but I'm pretty comfortable in my self-understanding as a sophisticated conservative. In my view, it is evident that classically-liberal conservatives clearly see when a demagogue is leveraging the passions of mobs to engage in a norm-destroying, values-eroding project of radical revolution, who is inciting a Jacobin-like storming of the Bastille, rather than work through the rule of law, the temperance of custom and norms, the modeling of virtue, and who labors fiercely to keep the national fabric whole and intact. It is clear when he is making the government A Totality, an all-powerful purveyor of fear and submission across media, business, academia, finance, and law, while also discarding Federalism in order to bring smaller units of political sovereignty to heel. He is almost a perfect living embodiment of everything that the Founders were at extreme pains to warn us against, that they attempted to design a system to guard against, and every serious conservative of the modern era militated against. But I'm a sophisticated conservative. Because I see each of the qualities of conservatism above also each enmeshed in and thereby qualified by polarities that are also dialectical, contextual at higher octaves, necessarily integrative, and epistemically relative and developmental. As I argued in my integrative metatheory of conservatism, it can be understood as 1) an ontogenetic structure arising largely from the agrarian stage of sociocultural evolution, and this structure can be honored but must also be transcended—as it was in the US Constitution, 2) a transcendental typology as one-half of the Eros & Agape polarity, so it must always be harmonized with progressive Eros, and 3) a particular typology as one-half of a neurobiological polarity between threat detection versus openness-flexibility brain structures—stabilizers vs innovators—and so always must be harmonized with those members of our society who would push us forward into new frontiers. So conservatism only represents half of what a well-functioning society actually requires to function, and even then conservatism itself cannot be understood only in its Traditional-Agrarian register, it also needs to be expressed and defended in its Modern, Postmodern and Integrative registers, too. As does progressivism. And each have to be prevented from engaging in the pathological extremes at each of those structural-worldview levels: for conservatism, we cannot allow a theocratic state; we cannot allow financial capital to dictate the terms of the polis; we cannot allow demagogues to use epistemic anarchy to incapacitate society from making moral judgments. For progressivism, we cannot allow ideological totalitarianism; we cannot allow context-blind, abstract-rational technocracy; we cannot allow a narcissism of the oppressed. And yet we've allowed all of these, and few see how they co-arise and energize each other, all while those who are profiting from them continue to fuel them in any way possible. We can do better, and every attempt I make at offering perspectives on X is an attempt to take either an integrative view that helps people break out of the false consciousness and demi-realities they're swimming in, or take a contrary position to one of the specific worldview pathologies above. Only my followers can decide if I'm being helpful or not. If I'm not, someone should unfollow me and find someone else whose views are more valuable to them.

We have people in power making broad claims around certain drugs and autism that have been continuously disproven. The degree to which those comments can undermine public health, do harm to women who are pregnant, create anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic – is violence against the truth.