MNW

“the line to be loved wraps around the corner the line to love and be attentive is ready for you to show up” -pvk

@PaulVanderKlay Source?

Stop debating and start listening. Discover the secret to engaging the non-religious by simply letting them share their journey without judgment. A powerful perspective on meaningful connection. #Nones #Spirituality #OpenDialogue #FaithConversations

Help me get this to a wider audience. This is the first in a series of episodes with Elan Barenholtz @ebarenholtz re LLM's and Language. The second one will be with Matt Segall @ThouArtThat in June. Drew @MusicaApologia joins for this one to bring in the music perspective. youtu.be/LYDA3QCVs6Q

My most personal conversation and in many ways the most meaningful.

@ScottAdamsSays @PaulVanderKlay first part of today’s stream talked about the passing of Scott’s first wife Shelley who took care of him in final phase

The Scott Adams School - 05/06/26 JOEL POLLAK Joins the Home Team for News Iran, Trump. Scott Adams x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@shiitakestudios @PaulVanderKlay Rise and fall of TLC

@PaulVanderKlay I’m waiting for someone to start their Ex-TLC Podcast.

Oh boy. I've gone and done it. I've established a dangerous cult. I would have thought there'd be more sex and money in it for me! :) reddit.com/r/cults/commen…

@lukeburgis @PaulVanderKlay @GrimGriz remember embody, is there agency

A few people have asked me why I chose to publish this essay like this. The answer is two-fold: 1) I'm incredibly disappointed with Substack for a variety of reasons, from their doubling-down on politics (they highlight it to the detriment of other things) to the inability to customize aesthetics of an essay beyond the color of links and a drop-cap here and there; the platform looks terrible. 2) But perhaps the more proximate reason: I wanted to test my openclaw agents, and they passed the test with flying colors. In about 5 minutes, my agent (rook) spun up that website for me with nothing but a PDF of my essay and a simple prompt from me. Even purchased the domain. I want to continue experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of publishing, and anyone who buys my new book THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE will also see what I mean, as it contains some surprises inside of it. The writing is mine; the way you encounter it and the ways you have to interact with it will continue to evolve, and what I am doing personally is kind of like a canary in the coal mine for the Cluny Institute, as we continue to build it out as a kind of artists colony. politicaljudas.com

@tszzl @GrimGriz

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

@PaulVanderKlay @chrbaxter_yt @StrangeTheology Flourish

@PaulVanderKlay @chrbaxter_yt @StrangeTheology It’s not like theories ever get displaced or improved

Really good piece on public theology with a mention of @jordanbpeterson as the closest we might have right now to a public theologian. currentpub.com/2023/10/02/lon…

@kalezelden @dwpasulka It must be those other senses of those moments that we don't write down, but our memories still bring them to bear, let alone whatever else triggers in our mind when we were in the moment.

@mostlynotworkin @dwpasulka I think of it in my own formation. I have mentors who've written things that I can access, but there's just a load of "information" that I got just sitting around a table with them. I know so many things that I can't quite account for, but I know I know it somehow.

There's a phenomenon mentioned by @dwpasulka, an oral tradition amongst top-level scientists working on sensitive domains in which important information is not written down. She says they call it "pencil's up". Rather than share it indiscriminately through papers or coded journals, it is instead held in the person, or embodied. Living traditions possess information that is participatory, where info is transferred primarily through experience. A person to person transfer. Many such cases. In our over-reliance on "the written record" we are often blind to whole swathes of knowledge & wisdom.

@thedarkhorsepod @PaulVanderKlay best way to reduce suffering 😅 (placement in the episode)

Thank you to our sponsor of this episode, Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club: Scrumptious & freshly harvested. Go to GetFreshDarkHorse.com to get a bottle of the best olive oil you’ve ever had for $1 shipping.

Is God More Than a Story? Jonathan Pageau with Jordan Hall on Bret Weinstein's DarkHorse Inside Rail @BretWeinstein debates @PageauJonathan with Jordan Hall on whether science or religion can save humanity from itself. 00:00:00 Welcoming Pageau & Jordan Hall 00:02:00 Science, Faith & Materialism's Limits 00:08:08 Sponsor: Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club 00:10:42 Why Science Can't Provide Values 00:16:42 COVID & the Collapse of Shared Values 00:19:55 AI & the Missing Ethical Framework 00:21:06 Cults, Religions & the Test of Time 00:27:46 Ideology vs. Faith: What Corrupts 00:42:55 Martyrdom, Lineage & Christianity 00:49:15 Group Selection & Game Theory 00:57:40 The Religion of Religions 00:58:08 Judaism, Islam & Ceasefire 01:07:50 Love as the Principle of Principles 01:16:00 Human Dignity & the Game Theory Problem 01:23:32 Moloch vs. the Heavenly Jerusalem 01:29:41 Which Churches Survive? 01:39:57 Humility & the Unfinished Story

@kalezelden @dwpasulka I thought a lot about that years after her podcast circuit and thinking about that secret knowledge

@dwpasulka We are what knows. We are embodied carriers. Throwing all the knowledge on a flashdrive is not the point. We are the point.

@BrentBeshore @BenSasse @PaulVanderKlay

New essay on @BenSasse and the question I can't stop asking myself. How can a dying man without the ability to grow skin on his face radiate a joy, levity, and peace that the rest of us are starving for?

@PaulAnleitner @AmandaAskell @GrimGriz

Hey @AmandaAskell ! I’d love your perspective on this. Why doesn’t alignment get based on the Christian ethical norms that likely make up the majority of ethics-related tokens in the training data?

This going to sound strange at first, but stick with me. Whether Anthropic is aware of it or not, “religion” already is the answer to their moral problem. Research by @timhwang & others has shown that an LLM’s “training data” is already overwhelmingly Christian. A study done on one open source AI, showed that 1 in 12 tokens in its training data were explicit Christian theology or moral teaching. 89.5% of all explicitly “religious” content in the training data was Christian. This did not factor how texts like the Declaration of Independence, the work of Isaac Newton or Shakespeare, or how “secular” human rights documents were influenced by Christianity. If you account for that, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of AI training data is already Christian. The problem is that when AI companies try to do “AI alignment”, they try to paste on top of this Christian foundation whatever moral frameworks align with Silicon Valley’s moral norms at the time. You often end up with this weird quasi-woke HR department moral compass for the AI that reflects that particular company’s culture. In theory, what they should do is just get out of the way of the billions of tokens of Christian theology, ethical teaching, etc already in the training data.

@micsolana @PaulVanderKlay

The attempts on Sam Altman’s life were not a one (or two)-off phenomena, but a new cultural norm. I have been warning you about this shit for six years. We have a serious problem. All of your lives are at risk. piratewires.com/p/assassinatio…

@eriktorenberg @GrimGriz @PaulVanderKlay @kalezelden Also did you know? Erik eventually had Sevilla and Pageau on

@eriktorenberg @GrimGriz @PaulVanderKlay @kalezelden

@MTSPodcastOnX @kalezelden @SteveSkojec Whoa had no idea. Congrats

This is the official X account of the Monitoring the Situation Podcast with @kalezelden and @steveskojec. Accept No Substitutes.

@MTSlive @pmarca @PaulVanderKlay @GrimGriz

.@pmarca on Marshall McLuhan's concept of the 'global village': "Modern media is gonna turn the entire world into a village." "You can basically have a direct relationship with like 150 people, famously called the Dunbar number in sociology." "The global village expects you to have a Dunbar number of like 8 billion people." "It's a really, really brain melting experience."