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the problem with startup culture is that there are IQ130 ivy grads aspiring to build calorie trackers and ai to-do lists. as tech culture is becoming more famous, we are seeing it being diluted with non-ambitious, low-risk people building chill startups. the whole intellectual resource of Ivy league grads and autismmaxxers is being spent building chrome extensions, calorie trackers, and ubers. there's a serious lack of focus on defense tech, robotics, energy, and other civilization-grade systems. ambitious people have far less competition than they think, which is good on a personal level, but not so great for humanity. Which way western man?

Stephen Wolfram has the best articulated argument against AI doom I've heard. what does it mean for us if AI becomes smarter than humans, if we are no longer the apex intelligence? if we live in a world where there are lots of things taking place that are smarter than we are -- in some definition of smartness. at one point you realize the natural world is already an example of this. the natural world is full of computations that go far beyond what our brains are capable of, and yet we find a way to coexist with it contently. it doesn’t matter that it rains, because we build houses that shelter us. it doesn’t matter we can’t go to the bottom of the ocean, because we build special technology that lets us go there. these are the pockets of computational reducibility that allow us to find shortcuts to live. he’s not so worried about the rapid progression of AI because there are already many things that computation can do in the physical world that we can’t do with our unaided minds.

game theory manifests itself in situations you’d never imagine. recently I participated in a national debate competition. when it started I had gone in thinking the goal was to present the best arguments, which I actually believed to be true. but turned out the truth wasn’t the deciding factor. I came close to losing the first round, even though I knew that I debated better. I realised that presenting the truth wasn’t what mattered, but being chosen was. my opponent wasn’t the opposing team, but the judge. we had a new judge every round, and as the finals came, the new one made a small gesture she made the photographers retake the photos a little too excessively, adjusting angles, making sure she was in the center, the small mannerisms, seemed like it didn’t mean much but it told me everything about her, she liked being the center, important, acknowledged. almost egotistical - and her every comment supported this conclusion. none of my teammates, or the opposing team understood this. so I became what she wanted to see. every gesture - every nod, every smile, every comment was an intentional conscious decision. I wasn’t trying to win the argument anymore, but her decision. I didn’t disagree with the critique, even though I knew it was false it made her feel smart, and useful I created a false layer before me, when she looked at me she thought of how wise, important, and useful she was. a mirror that reflected who she wanted to be. she chose me not because I was right, but because I made her feel good.

the fact that people are getting oneshotted by tiktok edits of Gavin Newsom shows how malleable public perception really is. a random kid in his basement can post looksmaxxing edits and shift the future of the country more than a political strategist with 20yr+ experience the internet is a memetic warfare, but its frequency is far higher than real life. the life cycle of online trends is in the weeks, while political change moves in years. this creates a misalignment: by the time the trend could've actually had an impact, it’s already dead. people who figure out how to time the overlapping of the overton window of the internet and real life will control the zeitgeist.

there are 2 archetypes of people: the normies who desperately cling to statistics, studies, “facts” > “hey, so my opinion is based on x and y statistics, backed by the study from 2018, which gives me reason to speculate that..” and the second type: the vibesmaxxed / intuitionmaxxed archetype, who bases his opinions on vibes, intuition, etc > “yeah, so it seems it’s this way, so I believe it’s this way” it’s common for the nerd type to downplay and dismiss the vibesmaxxed guy sarcastically, labeling him a conspiracy theorist. it’s also common that the nerdy archetype is a pessimist, while the intuitionmaxxed archetype is an optimist. and one more thing, the intuitionmaxxed archetype turns out to be correct more often. pick your archetype.

though I respect Naval, I believe his definition of intelligence isn't sufficient, as it falls into circular reasoning, his quote: "The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life, and the second part of that is wanting the right things." but what are the ‘right things’? -- this seems to circle back to 'intelligent things'. similar to saying - the true test of intelligence is wanting intelligent things. it doesn’t actually answer the question. it makes more sense to say that the most quantifiable measure of intelligence is the ability to predict the future, as it requires an understanding of all the broad components of intelligence - such as understanding social relations, personal ambitions, politics, probability, technology, historical context, time context, and all the underlying mechanisms. thus I would attribute the rise of prediction markets to the rapid improvement in LLMs. the random benchmarks don’t seem to portray their actual capabilities, and it’s highly likely that prediction markets will soon become the main benchmark for intelligence.

I never really understood protests, to chant names, and throw rocks, even the idea of setting a date for one sounds satire. “hey bro, we’re overthrowing the system on saturday the 22nd, you coming?” if you were truly angered so much at the system, would you wait until the weekend when you’re free from work? the intuitive answer has always seemed to me that if you really wanted to beat a system, you’d infiltrate it. become successful, intelligent, powermaxx, then pull it down from the inside. the risk, of course, is that in the process you become part of the system. Nietzsche talks about this: “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. and when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” but that’s the game. if you’re not willing to risk wasting your life and potentially becoming the thing you were trying to destroy, you’ll never be able to pull it off.

interesting phenomenon how physical distance has such a strong effect on human morals. if there’s a child drowning in front of you, you’d feel morally obliged to jump in and save him. but if a cashier asks you to donate to a charity that would save a drowning child somewhere in africa, do you feel the same obligation to donate? probably not. one might argue that’s because you don’t trust charities, fine. but consider another case: you hear about a tragic accident in your city (you know it’s not a relative) and it changes your whole mood for the day, then you see on the internet that a similar accident happened on another continent, you’d stop for a sec and then scroll by. many such cases where this applies -- actually almost in most cases. though it’s illogical, it seems very real that distance strongly shapes our moral intuition.

I am strongly concerned about how much the comments influence people's opinions on different topics. often times I catch myself from falling for the same mistake, and then realize how many normies must be getting ONESHOTTED TO DOOM by this.. it seems as the post itself often doesn’t matter, the post is just the mediator, the gathering of the masses is in the comment section, where true cultural influence spreads and public consensus gets formed. thus this leads me to believe that we will see an exponential rise of advanced "bots" -- culture farmers. abel warns you not to get oneshotted by this weapon.

the overton window doesn’t move randomly. it follows a blueprint. the blueprint is the hegelian dialectic. the zeitgeist moves in spirals, not horizontally. what was once extreme becomes normal, and what was normal becomes outdated. it revolves around a circle. people who don’t understand this think that cultural change is linear, they see it as independent, isolated. but it’s not. it follows a map. once you understand this, predicting cultural shifts becomes effortless. you suddenly understand that the contrarian opinions are soon to be norm. you don’t chase the window, but position yourself just ahead of its path, and let it come to you. Michel Foucault has an interesting perspective on power, and I tend to agree with it. he believes that power flows through relationships, language, discourse. It’s decentralized. standing in front of the overton window is like stepping into a river -- the current of power flows through you. when you time it correctly the world seems to be following you. you become in control of the zeitgeist.

I've noticed that the easiest way to filter who's competition and who's not is by asking them: what's your end goal? >"why do you want to get into a good university?" >"why do you want to make a lot of money?" if they don't answer with a semi-philosophical response - at least, they're evidently part of the normatron. in school, it seems like the people going after the "Ivy Leagues" are the true competition, though this perspective is created by survivorship bias -- as the competition does end up at lvys, but most of them aren’t actually your competitors. the shallow outlook -- doing a summer program just to "get into a good uni" and then "make a lot of money" - is deeply disrespectful to one's self (and obviously unintelligent, since it doesn't actually answer the question why? but instead what?). you've been awarded life, and you expend it on such shallow ideals? you have to ask yourself the question whether the life you are willing to live, you'd be willing to die for -- because in the end you will. the counter-intuitive answer l've resonated with, as to why one should want to be the best, is understood through the following allegory: Imagine you're in a race, and some magical man appears, offering to grant you any place you want (1-10). one contestant answers that he wants 4th, and another tells him that he wants 1st. which one would you question more?

this is the Polymarket set I’m using for the LLM ensemble forecasting paper. the experiment finishes on august 31.

when playing a character, one must try his best not to get stuck. the hierarchical structure -- judges, teachers, authority figures -- rewards those who can adapt their persona to fit the part. I learned to exploit it, purely because it worked. speaking in a certain way, laughing at the right time, nodding at critique I disagreed with, complimenting people I had no interest in talking to. It helped me win. but it's dangerous not to get lost in the character. you must have full control over it. it must be as separate from your true self as possible, a distinct entity, like in a videogame, and look at it from the 3rd perspective, like an observer. because the moment it starts to resemble you, the line blurs, and you don't know how to switch back. I participated in a debate competition recently, I acted overly friendly, loud, smiley. saying things I didn’t mean, acting all extroverted. although I didn’t care to interact with anyone neither the teachers, nor the other teams, but I did. because the role demanded it. then the winner was announced, the medal was handed out, and the game ended, I won. funnily I didn't smile, I knew I should have, and knew it would've been awkward, but there was nothing to smile for anymore. The game was over. The play was done. I didn't need the character anymore. Nietzsche once wrote: "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." the real danger of shaping a fake reality where you win, is getting stuck in it.

the problem with startup culture is that there are IQ130 ivy grads aspiring to build calorie trackers and ai to-do lists. as tech culture is becoming more famous, we are seeing it being diluted with non-ambitious, low-risk people building chill startups. the whole intellectual resource of Ivy league grads and autismmaxxers is being spent building chrome extensions, calorie trackers, and ubers. there's a serious lack of focus on defense tech, robotics, energy, and other civilization-grade systems. ambitious people have far less competition than they think, which is good on a personal level, but not so great for humanity. Which way western man?

Stephen Wolfram has the best articulated argument against AI doom I've heard. what does it mean for us if AI becomes smarter than humans, if we are no longer the apex intelligence? if we live in a world where there are lots of things taking place that are smarter than we are -- in some definition of smartness. at one point you realize the natural world is already an example of this. the natural world is full of computations that go far beyond what our brains are capable of, and yet we find a way to coexist with it contently. it doesn’t matter that it rains, because we build houses that shelter us. it doesn’t matter we can’t go to the bottom of the ocean, because we build special technology that lets us go there. these are the pockets of computational reducibility that allow us to find shortcuts to live. he’s not so worried about the rapid progression of AI because there are already many things that computation can do in the physical world that we can’t do with our unaided minds.

interesting phenomenon how physical distance has such a strong effect on human morals. if there’s a child drowning in front of you, you’d feel morally obliged to jump in and save him. but if a cashier asks you to donate to a charity that would save a drowning child somewhere in africa, do you feel the same obligation to donate? probably not. one might argue that’s because you don’t trust charities, fine. but consider another case: you hear about a tragic accident in your city (you know it’s not a relative) and it changes your whole mood for the day, then you see on the internet that a similar accident happened on another continent, you’d stop for a sec and then scroll by. many such cases where this applies -- actually almost in most cases. though it’s illogical, it seems very real that distance strongly shapes our moral intuition.

New startup idea, shall I build it?

the fact that people are getting oneshotted by tiktok edits of Gavin Newsom shows how malleable public perception really is. a random kid in his basement can post looksmaxxing edits and shift the future of the country more than a political strategist with 20yr+ experience the internet is a memetic warfare, but its frequency is far higher than real life. the life cycle of online trends is in the weeks, while political change moves in years. this creates a misalignment: by the time the trend could've actually had an impact, it’s already dead. people who figure out how to time the overlapping of the overton window of the internet and real life will control the zeitgeist.

there are 2 archetypes of people: the normies who desperately cling to statistics, studies, “facts” > “hey, so my opinion is based on x and y statistics, backed by the study from 2018, which gives me reason to speculate that..” and the second type: the vibesmaxxed / intuitionmaxxed archetype, who bases his opinions on vibes, intuition, etc > “yeah, so it seems it’s this way, so I believe it’s this way” it’s common for the nerd type to downplay and dismiss the vibesmaxxed guy sarcastically, labeling him a conspiracy theorist. it’s also common that the nerdy archetype is a pessimist, while the intuitionmaxxed archetype is an optimist. and one more thing, the intuitionmaxxed archetype turns out to be correct more often. pick your archetype.

I never really understood protests, to chant names, and throw rocks, even the idea of setting a date for one sounds satire. “hey bro, we’re overthrowing the system on saturday the 22nd, you coming?” if you were truly angered so much at the system, would you wait until the weekend when you’re free from work? the intuitive answer has always seemed to me that if you really wanted to beat a system, you’d infiltrate it. become successful, intelligent, powermaxx, then pull it down from the inside. the risk, of course, is that in the process you become part of the system. Nietzsche talks about this: “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. and when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” but that’s the game. if you’re not willing to risk wasting your life and potentially becoming the thing you were trying to destroy, you’ll never be able to pull it off.

though I respect Naval, I believe his definition of intelligence isn't sufficient, as it falls into circular reasoning, his quote: "The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life, and the second part of that is wanting the right things." but what are the ‘right things’? -- this seems to circle back to 'intelligent things'. similar to saying - the true test of intelligence is wanting intelligent things. it doesn’t actually answer the question. it makes more sense to say that the most quantifiable measure of intelligence is the ability to predict the future, as it requires an understanding of all the broad components of intelligence - such as understanding social relations, personal ambitions, politics, probability, technology, historical context, time context, and all the underlying mechanisms. thus I would attribute the rise of prediction markets to the rapid improvement in LLMs. the random benchmarks don’t seem to portray their actual capabilities, and it’s highly likely that prediction markets will soon become the main benchmark for intelligence.

game theory manifests itself in situations you’d never imagine. recently I participated in a national debate competition. when it started I had gone in thinking the goal was to present the best arguments, which I actually believed to be true. but turned out the truth wasn’t the deciding factor. I came close to losing the first round, even though I knew that I debated better. I realised that presenting the truth wasn’t what mattered, but being chosen was. my opponent wasn’t the opposing team, but the judge. we had a new judge every round, and as the finals came, the new one made a small gesture she made the photographers retake the photos a little too excessively, adjusting angles, making sure she was in the center, the small mannerisms, seemed like it didn’t mean much but it told me everything about her, she liked being the center, important, acknowledged. almost egotistical - and her every comment supported this conclusion. none of my teammates, or the opposing team understood this. so I became what she wanted to see. every gesture - every nod, every smile, every comment was an intentional conscious decision. I wasn’t trying to win the argument anymore, but her decision. I didn’t disagree with the critique, even though I knew it was false it made her feel smart, and useful I created a false layer before me, when she looked at me she thought of how wise, important, and useful she was. a mirror that reflected who she wanted to be. she chose me not because I was right, but because I made her feel good.

Which one do you prefer? - no code - vibe code

I am strongly concerned about how much the comments influence people's opinions on different topics. often times I catch myself from falling for the same mistake, and then realize how many normies must be getting ONESHOTTED TO DOOM by this.. it seems as the post itself often doesn’t matter, the post is just the mediator, the gathering of the masses is in the comment section, where true cultural influence spreads and public consensus gets formed. thus this leads me to believe that we will see an exponential rise of advanced "bots" -- culture farmers. abel warns you not to get oneshotted by this weapon.

I've noticed that the easiest way to filter who's competition and who's not is by asking them: what's your end goal? >"why do you want to get into a good university?" >"why do you want to make a lot of money?" if they don't answer with a semi-philosophical response - at least, they're evidently part of the normatron. in school, it seems like the people going after the "Ivy Leagues" are the true competition, though this perspective is created by survivorship bias -- as the competition does end up at lvys, but most of them aren’t actually your competitors. the shallow outlook -- doing a summer program just to "get into a good uni" and then "make a lot of money" - is deeply disrespectful to one's self (and obviously unintelligent, since it doesn't actually answer the question why? but instead what?). you've been awarded life, and you expend it on such shallow ideals? you have to ask yourself the question whether the life you are willing to live, you'd be willing to die for -- because in the end you will. the counter-intuitive answer l've resonated with, as to why one should want to be the best, is understood through the following allegory: Imagine you're in a race, and some magical man appears, offering to grant you any place you want (1-10). one contestant answers that he wants 4th, and another tells him that he wants 1st. which one would you question more?

after reading 20+ papers on LLM forecasting and market prediction, I’m planning to research and experiment with this myself. I’ve pulled the best methods and came up with some to test whether LLM ensembles could forecast the future better than live human markets like Polymarket. the goal is to build an LLM ensemble that can beat human predictions on Polymarket. to score this I will use brier: 0 = perfect, 0.25 = coin flip, lower than market = win. the idea is to use 12-24 different LLMs with reasoning capabilities, and for each bet - prompt at 3 time intervals - early, mid, late; the LLM has the ability to browse - but not polymarket, so it will have more and more information on the topic. at every interval sample each model 10x, and keep the mode probability. then average the 3 answers (possibly with weights) and that is the final output of each LLM. lastly pick the median of the 12 final answers, which will be the ensemble’s final prediction. no fine-tuning needed, straight off-the-shelf models. the primary measurement will be the brier vs ground truth when the market settles, alongside comparisons between state-of-the-art models. a major obstacle will be ensuring proper calibration - meaning making sure the model is highly confident when there is enough evidence, and doesn’t have an unnatural bias towards 50%. if it lands a lower, or even the same score as Polymarket, we’ve got the first LLM ensemble that rivals and potentially outperforms real human markets.

the overton window doesn’t move randomly. it follows a blueprint. the blueprint is the hegelian dialectic. the zeitgeist moves in spirals, not horizontally. what was once extreme becomes normal, and what was normal becomes outdated. it revolves around a circle. people who don’t understand this think that cultural change is linear, they see it as independent, isolated. but it’s not. it follows a map. once you understand this, predicting cultural shifts becomes effortless. you suddenly understand that the contrarian opinions are soon to be norm. you don’t chase the window, but position yourself just ahead of its path, and let it come to you. Michel Foucault has an interesting perspective on power, and I tend to agree with it. he believes that power flows through relationships, language, discourse. It’s decentralized. standing in front of the overton window is like stepping into a river -- the current of power flows through you. when you time it correctly the world seems to be following you. you become in control of the zeitgeist.