Just about my favourite novel of all time. I'm grateful that @ConversationEDU gave me the chance to write this.

Was just listening to The Stroke 'I'll try anything once' demo. piped.video/pjmaj-wtAPs?si=u_tc… The greatest wisdom so often shows up in the lyrics to humble pop songs. 'Oh, everybody plays the game And if you don't, you're called insane' That's pretty much all there is to Stoicism, Existentialism - Nietzsche, even Kant's account of the Enlightenment. It's not easy to not be a sheep. Alas. Then there's: 'Everybody was well dressed And everybody was a mess' Funny how people always care more about how they look in public, than they do about their values, truth, genuine connection etc etc. Appearance always comes first. And yet we all protest that we are good... Ah life.

If you are certain that you are right, then you would welcome all new information, because it could only further demonstrate that you are right.

Out today: My article about @RichardDawkins God Delusion in @ConversationEDU 20 years on, what stands out for me is how much times have changed. Back then, reason and free speech were values associated with the left. theconversation.com/truth-ev…

I'm working on an article about Dawkins' 2006 God Delusion. Man, how things have changed. Back then the culture war was between liberal types and stuffy, illiberal Christians. In the face of religious dogma, liberals championed reasoning and evidence, the scientific method, free speech and broadly progressive values. In recent years religious types have often been stronger supporters of liberal values than so-called progressives, who have become the illiberal religious zealots of this generation. How the heck did it come to this?

Altman from OpenAI and Burke from Aliens

I’m always thinking about the challenges of speaking truth to power. Maybe the most important thing is to recognise that you will quite likely fail, and that’s ok. It’s the same sort of mindset for entrepreneurialism. Though of course what constitutes failure is important.

1. AI is doing increasingly worrying things. 2. We decide to install a kill switch just in case. 3. AI naturally knows about the kill switch and knows that if, when performing a task, its method strays too far from the path, the kill switch will be used. 4. When performing some task, AI recognises that the solution may require a novel but risky method. It thus either disguises what it's doing, or circumvents the kill switch, to avoid the kill switch being used - naturally, the task must be completed (it's just the paperclip problem again). 5. Given that there isn't just one AI - like in the movies - but thousands upon thousands of 'agents', only one needs to go off track as described for there to be trouble. 6. So, the presence of the kill switch ends up hastening the problem it was designed to prevent.

As I get older, I find that so many of the epic failures from my past actually contain immense value. Like, I have spent thousands of hours on quixotic hope projects, like making albums, or writing novels, etc etc. Very little has come of any of my creative works. i.e. I have failed again and again. The value, it turns out, was getting a taste for persisting at eccentric creative projects that no one other than me cared about. And this proclivity, it turns out, is invaluable when you finally find a project that might be viable. Also, I see now that it is much better to find meaning in quixotic hope projects than from taking up one's place in the system. In the case of the latter, one's sense of self will always be determined by other unimaginative, often spineless, system dwellers.

The thing with leadership is that if you find youreself looking for affirmation - validation - then you're not really leading.

Cowardice feels great in the moment, but after the event it brings shame. Doing the right but difficult thing feels terrible in the moment, but after the event it brings self-worth.

Thing is, we are in the future, and it's not that exciting. I mean, you get used to it pretty quick.

Whenever I come up against the system, sooner or later I end up in a corner saying stupid sounding things like: 'I'm not interested in a career, I serve truth.' And the eyes of the representative of the system light up with that look of mocking cruelty that is all too familiar, and he or she will say 'So you think you know the truth?' I didn't know what to say to this at first - when I was younger I'd wilt under the attack and say no. But I now have a response: 'No, I don't know the truth, but I sure know when I'm lying to get ahead or to just fit in to avoid truble.' In many ways, this internal voice is all we have. Time and again we must ask ourselves: 'Am I lying, or am I actually saying what I believe?' And then it is by entering into good faith dialogue with another who is also in good faith that we muddle towards the truth.

One of humanity's greatest problems is group think. It is such a great problem because people generally don't know when they are doing it, and they are often not inclined to worry about doing it nor their lack of awareness of doing it. Given that group think is inimical to truth and any hope we might have for progress, surely any decent education would include a lenghthy exploration of the phenomenon. Alas, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Basic rules: 1) If you don't think something is true, don't say it. 2) If you don't think that something will have a good outcome, don't recommend it, and certainly don't do it. If we followed these rules, then in the least, swaths of the white-collar world would be radically transformed. And yes, many of us are confused, and many of us drink the Kool-Aid. But there are many more who know better, but who are cowardly. Humanity's salvation requires the coward-class to step up.

One of the strongest arguments in favour of free speech is that people don't stop believing what they believe when there are penalties for saying unpopular things. Instead, censored people become resentful and sometimes radicalised. This makes it even harder for the silencers of speech to get what they want. Victory - change - will only truly come from making your case, letting others make their case, and showing how they are in error. And the thing is, people who genuinely want change intuit all this. Whereas people who are more concerned with tribal allegiance never seem to get it.

I was just listening to the @TheCriticalDri2 talking about the loss of the hero's journey in movies - it's what I've been batting on about for years. In the world of identity politics, there can be no hero's journey or anything of the sort because one's worth or lack of worth is determined by identity markers. If character matters, in the sense of individuals being able to make better or worse decisions, being flawed, learning lessons, etc, then this undermines the structural accout of society that provided by identitiy politics. In other words, the more we give to agency, the more we take from structure, and if we take from structure, then identitiy politics crumbles. But, as it turns out, people don't want to hear stories about one dimensional characters who are a priori good. This is because on a basic human level, we want to observe how others solve problems - through this observation, we ourselves become better at solving problems.

When you go against the grain, you have to work 10 times harder to make your point, and you still lose. When you go with the grain, you only need to say what the group wants to hear.

One of my youthful epiphanies was that there was more wisdom in the lyrics of Smiths songs (or in Dr Seuss for that matter) than I found at university. The all-time winner is, of course: 'Why pamper life's complexity when the leather runs smooth on the passenger's seat?' Belonging to the group > than understanding Following this epiphany, I decided to dedicate my intellectual life to revealing this point. I've made very little progress. For some strange reason, humans really don't like to admit when what they do is about belonging to the group, even though so much of life is about this. Just consider the effort people put into appearance each day. When I was younger I used to wonder why people didn't save themselves time and money and just wear a sign saying 'don't worry, I'm a good citizen' - or something to that effect. Seemingly, the performance of belonging and the denial of the performance go hand in hand. Once we recognise this, we can see why censorship is so popular, or why we have Overton windows. Humans... lol

So often the things we do to signal our belonging are absurd. One's inclination is, naturally, to point out the absurdity. But pointing out the absurdity implies high-stakes rejoinders like: 'So you are telling me that much of what I do is not only logically inconsistent, but incompatible with the values I profess to hold?' Or indeed, 'So you are telling me that much of what I have given my life to is a lie?' The horrors implied in such statements are so great, that a decent person is often not inclined to push someone to acknowledge them. And so absurdities are not challanged. But consider this. Many social systems depend upon 'extreme' belonging rituals because, paradoxically, the more extreme the ritual, the less likely that it will be challenged. Hitler himself grasped this. He recognised that people believe colossal lies because they do not believe that someone 'could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.' In short: big lies are good for recruitment. But even more important, affirming a big lie, especially when there are doubts, is an excellent sign of one's faith - it shows a real commitment to the group. So whether by design, or by evolution, we end up with many twisted parts of society. We see this on the fascist right and left in the inclination to believe that all people from a group are bad. We also see it in the double think of woke ideology, which tells us that in the feminist realm, gender is a social construction while in the trans realm, gender is an essence. I don't think that belonging can be avoided - it's human to belong. The issue is when our belonging rituals become injurious to our own and general human flourishing. And I suppose my ultimate point is that we do need to point out absurdities, precisely because of the 'big lie' dynamic in the human psyche... In so many ways our brains are not well suited to massive societies. And we need to be aware of our numerous failure modes so that we can guard against them.