Sam Harris

My dad has a 5th gen warfare vulnerability: if dumb people believe something he refuses to believe it. That’s silly. Dumb people can believe true things. Just realized I also have a vuln: if people I dislike believe something, I assume without any analysis it is false.

My dad was learning Calculus at night school when I was 6. They had a book called “Calculus the Easy Way” He worked on it a lot and like any kid I wanted to participate. I quickly started solving problems on my own but still had to slog through 12 years of “school” already knowing everything they were “teaching” me. It’s all so tiresome.

For anyone wondering how a third-grader can complete six years' worth of math in a single year. This knowledge graph spans 3,000 math topics, from 4th grade to the university level, providing the perfect basis for mastery learning. Students can go as fast or far as they want! There are no restrictions whatsoever. The only requirement is that they must demonstrate mastery of each topic before moving on to the next. Kids are capable of incredible things when given that kind of freedom and support.

💯 my exact same experience

@nikunj Not because I’m lazy or tired but because I’ve learned the hard way business is a marathon not a sprint. After about 4mo straight of 16hr workdays you go to a dark place that takes months if not years to recover from.

@nikunj I can’t imagine if this had happened when I was younger. I know now to stop at 8pm and watch a show with Heather. To go to the gym. To ride my bike. To be ok with however much i got done today and not worry about “more.”

Not because I’m lazy or tired but because I’ve learned the hard way business is a marathon not a sprint. After about 4mo straight of 16hr workdays you go to a dark place that takes months if not years to recover from.

I can’t imagine if this had happened when I was younger. I know now to stop at 8pm and watch a show with Heather. To go to the gym. To ride my bike. To be ok with however much I got done today and not worry about “more.”

Lev8 raised $6M and just launched their AI agent, and the timing here is worth paying attention to. The GTM intelligence market is splitting into two camps. Camp one: static database giants like ZoomInfo (420M+ contacts, $15K+/year contracts, 17 years of data accumulation). Camp two: workflow-first platforms like Clay ($3.1B valuation, 150+ data providers stitched together, requires a RevOps engineer to operate). Lev8 is making a bet on camp three: agent-native intelligence where you describe what you need in plain English and the AI does the research, enrichment, and outreach personalization in one step. No configuring 50 API waterfall workflows. No $50K annual contracts. No dedicated ops person to maintain the system. This matters because the current sales intelligence stack is absurdly fragmented. I saw this firsthand as VP at Apollo. The average GTM team runs ZoomInfo for contacts, Clay for enrichment, Apollo for sequences, 6sense for intent, and a CRM underneath all of it. Five tools, five contracts, five integration points. A founder or early-stage sales leader doesn’t have the budget or headcount for that stack. The Singapore base is the underrated part. ZoomInfo and Apollo skew heavily US and European data. APAC coverage across every major platform is thin, and that’s where a massive share of B2B growth is happening. If Lev8 can nail APAC signal coverage while the incumbents are still filling gaps there, the geographic wedge becomes a real moat before anyone reacts. The agent-first UX is also a smart bet on where buying behavior is heading. Clay proved that RevOps teams want flexibility. Lev8 is betting the next wave of buyers won’t have RevOps teams at all. They’ll just tell an agent what they need. Worth watching how fast they can build data density. The product thesis is right. Execution in this market is everything.

@LuckyCharlie @mattvanswol @EndWokeness That was their ages at the Declaration of Independence. Constitution was written 11 years later and ratified 13 years later. The younger version of themselves kinda screwed up the first government but they learned and fixed it with v2.0

What’s amazing is that our Founding Fathers had the experience and wisdom to create the Constitution and Bill of Rights at these ages: - Alexander Hamilton: 21 - James Madison: 25 - John Jay: 30 - Thomas Jefferson: 33 - John Hancock: 39 - Patrick Henry: 40 - John Adams: 40 - George Washington: 44 - Samuel Adams: 53 - Benjamin Franklin: 70

@EndWokeness It really is unbelievably remarkable that the Founding Fathers literally wrote an amendment to the US Constitution to let citizens of the USA always own arms just in case the government failed them or became tyrannical. Honestly, that is so so badass. Based as hell.

@girdley No one ever tells you it’s from industrial-scale Medicare fraud. 🤷‍♂️

Every so often, you run into a family where everyone does nothing all day but lives a big spending life. "How did that happen?" "Them? Their grandfather invented the seatbelt/disposable cup/toothpick/etc." "Oh."

@VladTheInflator It doesn’t take millions. $3500 campaign contribution is all it takes to get a meeting. $3500 per election cycle and be interesting and they might start texting you asking for advice or what you think about things. Only 0.12% of the population does this.

The goal is to get so rich that you bribe politicians with a few million dollars so they then steal a couple billion from taxpayers to give to you

@DrInsensitive @Devon_Eriksen_ From Dictators Handbook you need more than can be easily bribed or killed. So it’s got to be hundreds of thousands if not a few million.

@Devon_Eriksen_ Good post. I would that we don't need millions of voters or even thousands. Statistically, 300 voters is plenty. All that matters is their average quality.

A valid point, but this map is also, in a certain sense, a lie. If only White males were allowed to vote, as the founders intended, or if there were any other remotely sane filter on the disaster that is universal suffrage, such as: - Must have a certain net worth to vote. - Must be a net taxpayer to vote. - Must have an IQ > 104.9 to vote. - Must pass a basic algebra test to vote. - Must be a military vet to vote. - Must pass a test of hypothetical reasoning to vote. - Must pay a significant amount of money to vote. ... then this map would not be what it is. There would be no democrats or republicans. The parties and candidates would be entirely different. If we were to treat the vote as an office, rather than a right, just as the ancient Greeks did, then not only would we make different choices, we would have different options. Right now, the majority of voters are retards, either actually because they are stupid, or functionally because they are so misinformed they might as well be stupid. You don't give a retard a choice between a game of chess, Beethoven's fifth symphony, or an Alastair Reynolds novel. You give a retard a choice between a juice box, a cookie, and an episode of Rick and Morty. So when you have stupid voters, even the minority of smart voters are constrained to choose between the options that dummies will accept. This shapes the whole political landscape far more profoundly than the mere results of the latest election. If there were some sort of competence filter on the vote — and almost any competence filter would do — then we would be an entirely different country, a better country, a country with problems like "how do we maximize our technological advancement?", rather than "how do we keep retarded boomers from flooding our country with barbarians?". Universal suffrage was a huge mistake, a mistake based on the stupid idea that voting is a right. It is not. To vote is to influence and dictate policies that control the actions of others, policies that are ultimately enforced with state violence. There is no right to govern others with violence. Indeed, the very idea would be unacceptable, save for the unavoidable fact that there are many people who must be governed with violence, because they will not voluntarily govern themselves. So we have to do it somehow. Voting, and thereby governing others with violence, is a privilege, not a right. And the only people truly qualified for that privilege are those who don't need to be governed at all — those who could peacefully, fairly, and fruitfully coexist with each other under conditions of perfect anarchy. But, even if we lack the magical ability to detect such people, every democracy can always be improved by better filtering the voting privilege. The quality of a democracy is the quality of its voters. The United States would certainly be improved if only White males voted, even though the category "White males" certainly still includes some of the foolish, and excludes some of the wise. But if this filter offends modern sensibilities, there are plenty of others available that would also improve things. In fact, almost any would, because right now we have the worst possible choice... none. So imagine requiring voters to pass a trigonometry test, instead, if you will. I don't know how such a change would be politically achievable, even though nothing in the constitution forbids it. How does one persuade, force, or trick the marching morons into allowing their own disenfranchisement? But steps in this direction will eventually be necessary. Because no universal democracy can survive in the long term. And if you doubt that, look around you.

@ItIsHoeMath @Awk20000 Honestly I think it’s about 0.12% who decide everything. That’s the 430k who max out campaign contributions.

@Awk20000 I would do 97%

Asmongold says he would take away 85% of the population’s voting rights “I would disenfranchise 85%..and they would be saying after 10-20 years, thank you for removing this burden..too many dumb people..think about how close Kamala Harris came to winning”

3 kinds of truth: (1) Personal Truth: what you believe about yourself. ex: "I am a data scientist." True for you. Matters to you. Doesn't much matter to anyone else. (2) Political Truth: what we believe about society. ex: "Gay people can get married." True here now, not true in Saudi Arabia. (3) Absolute Truth: how the universe works. ex: "Acceleration due to gravity in a vacuum on earth is 9.8 meters per second squared." True regardless of what any of us believe.

I'm working on a thought right now that I don't quite know how to say. Saying that something is true makes it more true or more likely to become true. Unless. That's the part I'm stuck on. There's a category of phenomena that are sensitive to speech, and they change when you speak about them, and there's a category that don't. Things that get more true the more you say them: - My life is good - I like to exercise - We're winning - [X] is the bad guy Things that don't get more true the more you say them: - I am actually a woman - Genes don't determine your abilities - Having a degree proves that you're smart I'm gonna try to draw the line around speech-sensitive phenomena, but I know this thought is gonna slip away tonight. GIVE THOUGHTS IN COMMENTS.

@0xGweiLoud @josephdelong I had one. Sold them and installed them at the car stereo shop I worked in.

@josephdelong guaranteed that this is AI

We live in the ruins of a once great society

@VladTheInflator Don’t forget Owners Equivalent Rent. Mail a Boomer a form and ask them what they would pay to rent their own house and use that to price a $100 trillion market.

Below is literally how the US government turns inflation reporting into propaganda to fit their justification to inflate asset prices with lower interest rates: Me: "all my expenses went up 9% in the last 2 months." Government: "Inflation is 2%" Me: "no look here's the same items I bought, its 9%!" Government: "Well one item got better" Me: "No literally its the same fucking thing." Government: "It's a different color now, we adjusted for quality so the price went down 10%." Me: "Wait what the fuck, color change didn't adjust the quality, its MORE expensive!" Government: "Oh and I see you put steak there, we replaced that item because the price went too high." Me: "What the fuck? You didn't like the number so you replaced it? With what?" Government: "Nutritious cricket burgers, they fell in price because no one is buying them so we used that." Me: "Are you fucking kidding me....."

I raised a VC seed round but didn’t hit the traction numbers to raise a Series A. Was very close but didn’t make it. I said “fair enough, I played the game and lost.” Then went to get a job as an SVP at startups that had raised Series A. Every one I interviewed at had less traction than my “failed” company. After a few drinks I would press the founder and they’d let slip their dad was an LP in the VC fund.

The system is rigged so you can never outwork generational wealth.

*$3k/yr not $30k/yr 🤦‍♂️

Also, minimum wage in 1970 was $30k/yr or 100oz of gold which is $360k/yr now. My grandfather was a janitor making minimum wage and although he had a wife and 3 kids and a house and a car (that no one on minimum wage could afford today) his house was 600sqft, had no electricity and no running water. Nobody making $360k/yr lives like that today.

Genuine question for @heresyfinancial youtu.be/yvutdxMsxic?si… If the everything bubble is just currency devaluation why are all the fundamental ratios (like P/E or home price to rent ratio) super expensive too? The numerator and denominator are both in USD.