Justin Murphy

People are extremely bad at gauging other peoples intelligence They can usually tell a mega-genius from a total retard. Beyond this it’s mostly just “they agree with me so they must be smart” or “they’re hot so they must be smart” “I like them for their intelligence” is just way more socially acceptable to say than whatever the actual reason is

This is Augustine's view I think (and mine). The City of Man is the basin described below, the City of God is exactly the same kind of basin (but good). People can move between but history is the accelerating divergence between the two, and the end times is just the long-run equilibrium.

Had an epiphany about the structure of "coordinated" evil — it's more like an attractor basin, where people from very different initial conditions converge on it. Individuals are constantly entering and exiting the basin, so it's not actually this stable group of "evil people."

The Great Books trend of the past 5 years has been a total catastrophe. The simple fact is that Plutarch and Homer and Virgil et al. do have radical insights buried in there, but at the same time most of these books are truly boring and lame and most people pretend to like them, cannot really digest anything, and get absolutely nothing from them! The trend is overwhelmingly powered by these books' aspirational quality; it's like a luxury heritage brand that conveniently only costs $15 a pop. The people on social media who've made brands around how great all these books are, often they are trying to *express* something about *themselves*, which is nice, but does not change how lame and boring the lion's share of these books are! You don't have to pretend to love them! If you're teaching undergrads that's great, or doing real research, fine. But this in no way means that everyone should read these books; it does not even mean that the smartest and most educated adults today need to read these books. The bits of radical alpha in them are great to find, explore, and write about if you are in the .01% of people who are called to do such things, but there is really zero reason why anybody else should read any of these books. Frankly, many of these authors are even somewhat primitive and infantile compared to the best thinkers of modernity. Plato and Aristotle have tons of provocative alpha worth getting, but also they were retarded on many topics, especially religion. The Romans were even worse in many ways. But all of this gets shrouded in the cult of Great Books. There have never been more people professing to love the Great Books, and mass public culture has never been lower brow than it is today. A ton of larping and precious little education, virtually zero novel insight, has come out of this movement.

The Great Books trend of the past 5 years has been a total catastrophe. The simple fact is that Plutarch and Homer and Virgil et al. do have radical insights buried in there, but at the same time most of these books are truly boring and lame and most people pretend to like them, cannot really digest anything, and get absolutely nothing from them! The trend is overwhelmingly powered by these books' aspirational quality; it's like a luxury heritage brand that conveniently only costs $15 a pop. The people on social media who've made brands around how great all these books are, often they are trying to *express* something about *themselves*, which is nice, but does not change how lame and boring the lion's share of these books are! You don't have to pretend to love them! If you're teaching undergrads that's great, or doing real research, fine. But this in no way means that everyone should read these books; it does not even mean that the smartest and most educated adults today need to read these books. The bits of radical alpha in them are great to find, explore, and write about if you are in the .01% of people who are called to do such things, but there is really zero reason why anybody else should read any of these books. Frankly, many of these authors are even somewhat primitive and infantile compared to the best thinkers of modernity. Plato and Aristotle have tons of provocative alpha worth getting, but also they were retarded on many topics, especially religion. The Romans were even worse in many ways. But all of this gets shrouded in the cult of Great Books. There have never been more people professing to love the Great Books, and mass public culture has never been lower brow than it is today. A ton of larping and precious little education, virtually zero novel insight, has come out of this movement.