I hate the standard political compass, which I am pretty sure was popularized by libertarians trying to peel converts away from left and right using a childish and poorly conceived axis called “authority-liberty”. I made up this metric, see, and it shows you’re all on my side

Hot take: the right was always the upwing party and we only act “conservative” when we are on an upward trajectory. https://twitter.com/thewastedworld/status/1061539652929183745

If you have a belief that can’t be questioned or disputed or refuted, then what you have is an article of faith. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Everyone needs faith in their life and the special magic of theological religions is to invest that faith in a belief that is fundamentally beyond the reach of empiricism

Faith is a rallying point, or a schelling point if you like subculture jargon. (Lexicons are uniforms we put on). If we all agree to loudly believe something that is obviously false, then we are sending an expensive signal of group allegiance

When you are using a belief in this way, the thing you absolutely can’t do is question it or try to verify it, since that breaks the spell.

If for example you place your faith in something obviously falsifiable, like, “the sky is purple,” or “every human is equally valuable”, then you raise the price of entry to the faith group

If your obviously false belief forces you to act in ways that contradict reality, in ways that force you to pay other costs, not just in sanity but in damage to health or property, then you raise the price even more

I can think of at least one group of people who make literal, physical self-harm a barrier to entry. Can you?

We are living in times of insanity inflation, where, in order to stand out, groups must demand increasing levels of harmful contradictory belief in order to be expensive https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025739010533076998

I would rather make people pay other costs: physical fitness, mental agility, wealth. These are good barriers to entry but they have a drawback: they are all much more expensive than sanity. Anyone, even a crazy bum, can pay a sanity price to join a religion

I don’t write much about biodeterminism, or the limits that physiology places on psychology, not because it’s untrue, but because it’s unhelpful

Everything is 50% heritable also means it’s 50% not. Crass generalization, sure, but I think correct beliefs can yield huge marginal benefits even to people of exceptionally low genetic quality

That some people are of low quality is a forbidden truth mostly because it is so impolite. If someone goes on about genetic quality, we suspect that person has no accomplishments, and is seeking self-worth from being rather than doing

This intuition is largely true, and it’s part of why I don’t bother. Sadly it is difficult at this juncture for most people to believe that diversity is not a strength while simultaneously believing that they themselves aren’t so special, but I have hope

So biology places hard limits on the potential ROI of ideology. That’s not a reason to neglect ideology. We should still try to build the best ideology we possibly can, perhaps one that is hellbent on improving biology.

Lately (in the last few years) I hear a lot of doom and gloom from the pine trees or volcanos now I guess, Linkola/Kaczynski types. Perhaps they are right about everything

Plastics and chemicals in our water supply, industrial pollution saturates the earth, global declines in testosterone and sperm count and quality, maybe the advances in material science at the beginning of the 20th century planted the inevitable seeds of cataclysm

This is the worst side of biodeterminism; biofatalism. Our longing for modernity, for acceleration, for ascension, for speed CAN be sated and the price is we will pay for it is unintelligible only to those who have placed it beyond comprehension behind a wall of faith

What most people call the impending ecological collapse is in fact a Malthusian collapse, it’s a problem because the earth has a carrying capacity for humans and we passed it a long time ago.

We’re living on borrowed time and the collateral for the loan is our scientific ingenuity in agriculture and medicine and the interest we pay is to increasingly sacrifice the modalities of living and being that bring us sanity and fulfillment

A contender for the most right wing story ever written is “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. There are many variants to this story. At its most basic, there are more people aboard a spaceship than it can sustain for a journey, and someone has to go out the airlock

As a sci fi short it may be contrived, but as an allegory for Malthusian destiny, “The Cold Equations” is pretty much perfect. Who should go out the airlock? The pilot? The doctor? The engineer? Or the stowaway?

The only answer the leftist can give is “no one”, we have to suffocate to death, or whatever x-risk is hip on a spaceship. They think if we just stop eating meat; if we just live on mealworm and soybean oil slurry, if we just learn to live with lowered standards...

I could write some really ugly metaphors here but the most chilling horror is best left to the imagination of the reader