Cultural Observations

The man who wants to write a great book, paint a great picture, create an architectural masterpiece, become a great scientist, and knows that never in all eternity will he be able to realize this, his innermost desire, can find no peace in a stable social order—old or new. He sees his life as irrevocably spoiled and the world as perpetually out of ... See more

An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere.

Physics may try its damnedest to instill in us existential dread at an incomprehensible universe, but biology will always be the most offensive science. For physics merely deals with the nature of reality, whereas biology contends with our own nature, and so it repeatedly runs up against wishful thinking about who we are. Biology forms the paramete... See more

Twenty-five years ago Allan Bloom proclaimed a heresy: The supposed idealism of the 1960s was in fact a veneer hiding a new barbarism. He saw that our elite liberal culture has a very definite vision, however much it talks about diversity, multiculturalism, and the like: the relativism of moral truth. This anti-dogmatic dogma, he thought, is leadin... See more

rationality is a method of dealing with uncertainty by devouring information and making simplifying assumptions about the outside world until you can convince yourself that you understand it

Silicon Valley is massively limited in its imagination because many of the people there have chosen, as a starting assumption, to build things for a Yuval Hararian Man, for men without chests, for siloed souls like themselves.

“Now that we frame our experiences through the lens of external presentation, it’s much harder to figure out what we actually want as opposed to how we’d like to appear … This puts us at risk of potentially fragmenting our identities. We lose sight of what we actually feel and instead start to view ourselves from an outside perspective.”