Even I’m kinda amazed at the amount of discussion ‘accelerationism’ has gotten in recent years, especially since 2016 on Reddit and various blogs [1] despite the brevity of content about it by the philosophy’s originator, Nick Land. Most philosophies are top-down: the philosopher writes a long treatise, and then readers pick it apart. But accelerationism… Continue reading Accelerationism as an example of opensource, bottom-up philosophy

On Dec. 22, after Bitcoin began what has now become a 65% crash, analyst Tom Lee put out a note telling people to buy the dip: Fundstrat’s Tom Lee says he’s a buyer of the bitcoin pullback, now sees more than 35% gains from here “Here” was 5000 points ago. But then he doubled down… Continue reading Bitcoin ‘experts’ are often clueless

I don’t understand what the big deal is about the ethical dilemma of self-driving cars. A Google search reveals over 40,000 results of how the trolley car thought experiment is applicable to self-driving cars. Thousands of articles in the span of just a few years have been written about it. Apparently this is a huge… Continue reading Notes on the ethical dilemma of self-driving cars

Is the ‘deep state’ and its partner Facebook trying to censor Jordan Peterson? Not to sound too conspiratorial, but the timing is suspicious. It all began on February 3rd when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson got into a Twitter spat. Sam posted: I have to "dispense with consciousness"? Jordan, my ethics are entirely grounded in… Continue reading Is the ‘deep state’ and Facebook trying to censor Jordan Peterson?

Bitcoin bottomed a few days ago at 7,500, falling from as high as 11,000 a few weeks ago. It has since bounced back as high as 9,400 and is sitting at 8,900 as of publishing this. Given the weakness of the bounce and thus the failure to reclaim 10,000, but also the weakness in the… Continue reading Bitcoin Update 2/4/2018

Bitcoin continues to fall, plunging below $8000 (and as of publishing this article is below $8000 on GDAX) as I predicted a month ago would happen. There is too much ‘hot money’ flowing around. Too much FUD, social media, and so on. Bitcoin needs to fall low enough to drive out the speculators, who are… Continue reading Bitcoin carnage continues

The main thesis of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty is that wealth inequality arises from capital growing faster the economic growth, summarized succinctly by his famous equation r>g. Piketty bases his argument on a formula that relates the rate of return on capital (r) to economic growth (g), where r… Continue reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century analysis

President Donald Trump Just Delivered His First State of the Union. Read The Full Transcript Overall, not surprisingly, it was one of those we-must-spend-more-money-on-stuff speeches. It was good in terms of exceeding expectations, demonstrating leadership qualities on Trump’s part, and signaling to voters. I would say Trump gets an ‘A’ in this regard even though… Continue reading Trump speech brief analysis

A LessWrong Crypto Autopsy According to the recent SSC survey, 9% of SSC readers made $1000+ from crypto as of 12/2017. Among people who were referred to SSC from Less Wrong – my stand-in for long-time LW regulars – 15% made over $1000 on crypto, nearly twice as many. A full 3% of LWers made… Continue reading The LessWrong Crypto Autopsy