I’m not sure if this is the granularity you are expecting. Some of these concepts are bigger than others. I invented exactly none of them. The list is not exhaustive. It’s a twitter thread not a manifesto. At 280 characters per idea, things get lost in translation. https://twitter.com/coughski/status/1025486242354552832

My ideas cannot help but bleed into my ideals. I tried to keep them separate but I didn’t try very hard. Sorry if some of this seems remedial. There are some things that can only be transmitted in stories, never in plain speech. I have omitted those.

The map is not the territory. Your mental model of the world is just a representation of the world. In order to fit the big world in your little head, many things are omitted or distorted. you will never see the real world, only your map

Words don’t mean the same things to different people. When you talk you are trying to pull things out of your mental model and map them into the models of others.
There are 4 nodes in any conversation, 3 transformations.

Your model=>your referents=>their referents=>their model

Revealed preference. People don’t know what they want. They try to articulate their preferences and then act against their own declarations. Only behavior can reveal desire. You can be and frequently are wrong about yourself. You don’t know yourself, only your model of yourself

Homo hypocritus. You have many incentives to distort your own mental model and you always act on them https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1023550713811501057

For this reason truth is not always instrumental. Everything you know is just a model. A model is an approximation. A model can be wrong and still produce right behavior/ideas, or at least, right enough.

Money is only a proxy for human vitality and energy. The true price of most things far exceeds their nominal, monetary cost. If you only think in terms of monetary cost you miss most of the transactions that make up society.

Everything is transactional, most transactions aren’t made with money, it’s incredibly rude and degrading to talk about the inevitably transactional nature of all interactions.

Money aside, everything has its price

The better the friend, the more social credit you grant them before you try to collect

Social status. An invisible variable called status underlies all human interaction. It is an amalgam of prestige, power, fame, and value as ally or mate. It is the currency we all truly desire most. It’s allocation is highly volatile and determined by collective fiat.

Social behavior is entirely performative. Everything, your emotions, your beliefs, your job, your leisure, your hobbies, is all a performance designed to manipulate your status, and the status of others.
Further reading: Irving Goffman, the presentation of self in every day life

Transactional analysis. Every single interaction with another person, every single utterance, contains a status payload. Your friends accept your attempts to raise your status if you accept theirs. Your enemies reject your gambits, and you reject theirs.

Signalling theory. Communication is hard because anyone can lie at any time. The only way to be certain of honesty is to make the communicator pay a high price as a costly signal of authenticity.
This is why bitcoin has tremendous energy costs.

Vector spaces. Many seemingly entangled things can be orthogonalized, revealing unexpected avenues of motion in conceptual space. The real world is a vector space of effectively infinite dimensions.

Competition is incredibly wasteful and arms races are the sole provenance of invention.
“But lots of innovation happens under corporate monopolies!”
But what about the arms races between the people inside that company? Perhaps along a vector of social status

All proclamations of science should be treated as fiction until they have been actualized as engineering. At the very least, don’t give them authority they haven’t demonstrated.

Most of the time when a cost seems excessive, it’s because the participants in the market in question are locked in an arms race of sending costly signals. Many costly signals are not priced in money.

Status is nonlinear because the better you are at signalling it, the more you will have, and vice versa in a feedback loop. Highly charismatic people such as cult leaders have figure out how to game this.

Niche subcultures form when groups of friends engage in a signalling arms race to increase their status along an unusual vector.

Neoreaction. Further reading: Mencius Moldbug, a gentle introduction. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1019568628251820032

Accelerationism. Capital and technology cultivate each other in a positive feedback loop that, if left unchecked, will bring about a singularity which is deeply inhuman. It’s an open question whether the momentum of technocapital will overcome the drag of diminishing biocapital

Hellbaked. Everything of value was built in hell, teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages This is foundational to my worldview. http://www.xenosystems.net/hell-baked/ 

Master/slave morality. The morality of slaves is that of the herd. The wolf is evil. oh, how he conspires to eat us sheep. To avoid pain and conflict is the essence of goodness. Vs. Strength and cunning! THAT is the substance of righteousness. Caprice, the whims of the powerful!

The last man. A man who is a wretched, comfortable coward, with no goals, who does not engage in some kind of FIGHT. Such is the last man, the most contemptible type of person. He has his little pleasure for the day, and his little pleasure for the night, and then a good sleep

Freedom is meaningless without a goal. Undirected freedom is just slavery to your base impulses. Instead of desiring freedom FROM some horrible condition, you should desire freedom FOR some glorious purpose

He who despises himself nonetheless esteems himself as a despiser
If you keep arguing with someone, you’re both getting something you want out of it. doubly so if you keep having the same argument. You may hate it, but you love hating it.

He who achieves his ideal precisely thereby transcends it.

Better to chase after deliberately impossible goals.

If god is real he does not give a shit about the minutiae of your theological debates. I call this “homoousian vs homoiousian”. Google it. Don’t get bogged down in pedantic bullshit.

What you subsidize, you get more of. Most charity is for this reason deeply misguided. If you give money to beggars, then the number of beggars shall multiply. If you feed those who cannot feed themselves, then soon you will also have to feed their children.

Our minds are small and we don’t have nearly the intellectual breadth we imagine. We have Dunbar groups and we also have Dunbar ideas and Dunbar places. Concentric rings of cognitive resolution

Hierarchy, it is critically important to respect it and maintain it. It gives you your place in the world. It helps you know who is above you, who to respect and emulate, and who is below you, who to guide and protect. Without it we are lost.

Gellman amnesia. You open the newspaper to an article on a subject you know. You read the article and see it is so wrong it presents the story backward—wet streets cause rain. You turn the page and read as if the rest of the paper was more accurate than the crap you just read