Antonio

@gmiller Tech optimists are clueless. I’ve been saying that for many years.

And, just like that, Andreessen's total lack of self-awareness, his unreflective hubris, and his colossal overconfidence, suddenly make sense.

@MrEwanMorrison Tech optimists are clueless.

Marc Andreessen raises a serious point. "Tech optimists" like himself may have different brains from the rest of us. Wired for optimism bias & lacking the capacity for interior reflection. If this is the case then why should we listen to these people or let them shape our lives?

@LinusEkenstam He is clueless.

“Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention.” Respectfully Marc, but Marcus Aurelius wrote meditations 2000 years ago give or take a few years…

@nntaleb Harris is one of the few who correctly pointed out the lack of free will (actually the impossibility of free will). He cannot be close to 10.

Now I am curious: which well-known people (currently alive) you think are close to 0.

@theDjole @matchpo1ntbets I started watching since Becker’s time, late ‘80s. I was a competitive tennis player. The right answer is yes.

@matchpo1ntbets Yes if you started watching tennis 2 years ago

Is Carlos Alcaraz already the greatest tennis player of all time?

@matchpo1ntbets Yes

@Falliblemusings I read both books. Deutsch is quite delusional.

I used to think Sapiens was a great book. Sweeping, provocative, the kind of book that makes you feel like you finally understand the big picture of human history. It's on every CEO's bookshelf, assigned in universities, praised as a masterwork of synthesis. Yuval Noah Harari is treated as one of the serious thinkers of our time. But something nagged at me. Some passages felt off. Claims that human rights are just figments of our collective imagination, not real things, just stories we tell ourselves. That nations, laws, money, justice, doesn't exist outside our heads. That meaning itself is a delusion we've invented to cope. That we're far more powerful than ever before but not happier. That hunter-gatherers had it better because they had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no nappies to change, no bills to pay. That sounded depressing to me, but was perhaps just the realistic scientific worldview? What it meant to see the world clearly, without comforting illusions. Then I read The Beginning of Infinity by @DavidDeutschOxf. Deutsch has a concept he calls 'bad philosophy.' Not philosophy that's merely false, but philosophy that actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Ideas that close doors rather than open them. That makes problems seem unsolvable by design. After soaking in Deutsch's framework (it's dense, a bit like digesting a delicious whale), it becomes clear: Harari's books are riddled with bad philosophy. They're smuggling nihilism in under the guise of scientific objectivity. Some examples: On meaning: "Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion." On human rights: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." On free will: "Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that's over." On progress: "We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed." The Agricultural Revolution? "History's biggest fraud." We didn't domesticate wheat, "it domesticated us." On our cosmic significance: "If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed." On the future: "Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new 'useless class.'" Homo sapiens will likely "disappear in a century or two." This is bad philosophy. It tells us our problems are cosmically insignificant, our solutions are illusions, and that progress is neither desirable nor within our control. It's also perfect nonsense. No one would ever go back to being hunter-gatherers. Would you rather worry about your kid spending too much time on Roblox, or face the 50% chance she won't reach puberty? And our so-called "fictions"? They ended slavery. They gave women equal rights. They solved hunger. They eradicated smallpox. They turned sand into computer chips. They got us to the moon, and hopefully soon, to Mars and beyond. These "fictions" are already reshaping the universe, and over time they may become the most potent force in it. Now compare Deutsch: "Humans, people and knowledge are not only objectively significant: they are by far the most significant phenomena in nature." "Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow." "Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved." "We are only just scratching the surface, and shall never be doing anything else. If unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be." Where Harari sees a species of deluded apes stumbling toward obsolescence, Deutsch sees universal explainers, the only entities we know of capable of creating explanatory knowledge, solving problems, and potentially seeding the universe with intelligence. The difference isn't academic. Ideas shape action. If you believe life is meaningless, progress is a trap, and humans are hackable animals with no free will, how does that affect what you build? What you fight for? What you teach your children? Harari's books sell because they flatter a fashionable pessimism. They let readers feel sophisticated for seeing through the "delusions" everyone else lives by. That smug cynicism is corrosive. And it's everywhere: in schools, in media, in bestselling books. More than half of young adults now say they feel little to no purpose or meaning in life. This is what happens when you teach an entire generation bad philosophy. Less progress, less health, less wealth. Less flourishing. And ultimately, a higher chance that civilization and consciousness go extinct. Fortunately, there's another equally well-written, but much truer, account of homo sapiens, appropriately titled 'The Beginning of Infinity'. And this one smuggles no despair in by the backdoor. But let's give Harari credit where it's due. He is right about one thing: if planet Earth blew up tomorrow, we wouldn't be missed. Because there'd be no one left to miss us, just a careless universe, blindly obeying physical laws. We are the only ones who can miss, but we're not going to. We're going to aim, hit, and keep going. Full credit for the amazing meme to @Ben__Jeff

@_The_Prophet__ Anxiety and depression are much likely consequences of evolutionary adaptations that rewarded a higher risk awareness.

⚡️ This is one of the most important truths almost no one talks about. Anxiety is not fear of the future. It is the mind refusing to accept limits. It is the belief that if you think hard enough, long enough, early enough, you can outrun uncertainty itself. That belief feels responsible. It feels intelligent. It feels moral. It is none of those things. At that level: •Thought replaces action •Imagination replaces authority •Control fantasies replace acceptance •Endless preparation replaces living This is where anxiety becomes self sustaining. The mind mistakes vigilance for virtue. It confuses suffering with care. It assumes that letting go is the same as giving up. So the deeper truth is this: Anxiety is what happens when consciousness detaches from time. You stop inhabiting the present and start occupying hypothetical futures as if they are real places you must patrol. The body stays here. The mind lives everywhere else. That split is the pain. Most worries never come true because they were never meant to. They exist to keep identity intact. Anxiety protects a fragile self that believes it must anticipate everything to justify its existence. The moment that belief breaks, anxiety loses its function. Not because the world becomes safe, but because you remember something more dangerous and more liberating: you were never meant to control reality. You were meant to meet it.

@nntaleb Anxiety and depression are much likely consequences of evolutionary adaptations that rewarded a higher risk awareness.

99.9% of the time I pay for insurance for things that never come true.

@Mayhem4Markets Society.

So many industries would be in deep trouble 😂

@milesdeutscher @TheMattViera They lived in a different historical period. Very different.

@TheMattViera If your parents also thought like this, you wouldn't even be alive to do all this stuff.

Not having kids is a life hack. I spend my summers in Europe, take cross-country road trips, and disappear off-grid on weekends. The money I’d spend on kids goes to investing, experiences, and freedom. Different priorities. Different definition of rich.

@JackNiewold Best post ever maybe. I add that the amount of bullshit in this digital economy is at the peak.

People underestimate how much we've rotted our brains from 2020 - 2025. You probably got a smartphone in ~2010, maybe? You know you're addicted to screens, but you misunderstand when and why it happened. 2010 - 2019 we were still chilling, content was mostly social graph-based • YT showed you content from the people you subscribed to • Instagram showed you content from your friends • Facebook showed you content from HS friends, family, etc It was the light beer days of the internet. Around 2019-2020 TikTok made companies realize that algorithmic content was the heroin of the internet - much more potent, much more lucrative. Not only are we more addicted than ever, but now we're addicted to the parasocial instead of the social, arguably for the worse. You've probably seen the shift in yourself as well. We immediately boosted to a level of algorithmic slop that makes watching Netflix feel productive. I remember feeling like my parents were immune to screens to feeling like my parents are victims as well. Kids are screwed, they basically get an iPad upon checking out at the hospital at this point. The working class rides the bus, watches Facebook slop, works 8 hours, rides the bus home to watch more Facebook slop. The NEET class just does it the entire day without working. I know you know people like this. But those people all don't really even care about the rot. There's always been slop, the only people who really have a chance are people who cared to read or consume non-slop in the first place (people like you). Don't know if there's a solution besides complete abstinence but this specter is more malicious than you could possibly imagine.

@nntaleb @grok The value that perpetual mining adds is a parallel digital purchasing power system based on energy instead of authority. Both systems (authority money and energy-based money) will continue to exist because they have different features.

Soon I will no longer need to correct stuff. @Grok is more coherent than humans, now correctly representing my ideas (as they did with those of Mark Spitznagel); same with Grokipedia. It understood the perpetual mining fragility argument.

@Giovann35084111 You need to start talking about what price action would falsify the PL model. I know that the PL is still valid now, but you need to do what I wrote in order to give your model more authority.

With 93 K we are at about 19 % from the power law. Given the Bitcoin volatility, this is pretty remarkable. Even without a bull market, we are still growing as the power law predicts over the long run.

@Giovann35084111 Here you are wrong. You talked about a specific range price. We are much below the minimum of that range.

As explained many times, the tops are just deviations from the power law. THEY ARE NOT THE POWER LAW. One can use the power law to try to make sense of these deviations, but we explained many times that these were weaker signals (with a particular pattern) on top of the main one. In the graph shown in the post below the power law is the blue line. We are perfectly within that prediction. But Luke, being a math illiterate, cannot understand this. Study math, my friend, and learn how to read a chart.

@Giovann35084111 What do you mean with manipulation?

The system wants to return to the mean slope value, but strong manipulations are pushing down the price. You can do this just a few times until the system springs back with vengeance.

@Giovann35084111 But BPLM is a time series power law, so it's not like the other power law dynamics described in Scale. I've been trying to highlight this fact for 2 years but you never took in serious consideration this important difference.

My point is that elevating the significance and relevance of the power law in Bitcoin is simply applying the same scientific reasoning used when power laws are discovered in other fields. Power laws are special functions in nature. Entire books have been written on this subject — Geoffrey West’s Scale and Per Bak’s How Nature Works being two classic examples. Power laws are not arbitrary patterns; they are deep structural signatures. In physics, biology, and network science, a power law points directly to the underlying mechanism of action. Complex networks, in particular, almost always produce power-law behavior. This is why the power law in Bitcoin is not just a model. It is a framework — a description of how the system actually organizes and evolves. This also reinforces the empirical discovery itself, the modelling, pointing out that we are on the right track. For anyone who wants to understand why power laws are so special, this video offers a very clear explanation. youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLf…

@Jesii_ca_M Society.

What is that?

@MichaelAArouet Italian here. Italy doesn't exist. North and South Italy are two different countries.

@Andercot Simulation theory makes no sense at all. It just postpones the questions.

The Simulation Hypothesis is the materialists last stop on the road to truth before they arrive at some form of spirituality. It is the materialist method of explaining things that are impossible within the materialist world model. Synchrony, premonition, intuition, etc. Oddly enough these things are not 'unexplainable' by physics, in terms of time-symmetric formulations of physical fields, or biasing probabilistic systems. It's just that these defy our everyday intuition as to how things work at our length, time, and energy scale. To suppose strange physics appears at the level of experience is uncomfortable, taboo, and so we say, 'oh well surely, its all a simulation' to render into silicon any hint that we are divine, and that divinity might be physical rather than purely conceptual. Anyways I have lots of thoughts on this topic