❤️‍🔥 WONDERISM ❤️‍🔥 — my rough-sketch philosophy of Enlightenment and Romanticism, reason and feeling, science and art.

When I was 14, social media was my escape hatch from mediocrity. I did not relate to anyone at school. Online, I found people on the other side of the world who thought the way I did. That changed my life. It is how I ended up working with one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors and some of the smartest engineers in the world. It is how I started a podcast and got into rooms school would never have opened for me. The UK wants to close that door for every weird, ambitious, hyper online 14-year-old. They say it is “for safety”. But there is a much greater danger in being trapped inside schools, consuming state-mandated narratives, and waiting for permission from people whose entire worldview is obedience. The internet lets kids escape the factory before the factory stamps them into shape. It lets them find mentors, employers, collaborators, friends, customers, and ideas no school would ever give them. It lets them discover that the classroom is not the world, and the adults around them are not the ceiling. A social media ban for under-16s protects the enforcement regime, not the child. Age verification is KYC with a child-safety sticker on it. First they ask if you are old enough. Then they ask who you are. Then the anonymous internet is gone. The excuse is children. The prize is obedience. Fight back, Britain.

I spoke at @conconeurope about my aesthetic theory of romance. Love is the highest form of art! @ConjectureInst youtu.be/7jSPng1-Ie0?is=IbW_…

Sure there is—sell people goods and services they value at prices they can afford.

“The pie, in other words, is not made of stuff. It is made of recipes — and the recipes are unbounded. A finite planet sets no ceiling on how much we can know about how to use it.”

"The pie is fixed. The Earth is a closed system. You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet." I hear this constantly, and it's delivered like a law of physics — case closed, only a compromised economist could disagree. It's wrong. And the mistake is revealing, because it isn't in the physics. It's in the economics smuggled inside the physics.

Crabs in the gravity well.

I’m actually fine with this framing. I don’t think a random 11 million American households could work together to build SpaceX. We’re getting a bargain.

First person in the world to get removed from the Forbes billionaires list because he added another digit

A healthy nation isn’t afraid to go nuts every now and then.

Six famous economists — @JosephEStiglitz , @PikettyWIL , @jasonhickel among them — published a manifesto in the @guardian last week: "growth is a doomed strategy." They say they've done the maths. I checked the maths. The claim that growth failed the poor is contradicted by the most uncontroversial dataset in economics: extreme poverty fell from 44% of humanity in 1981 to under 10% today — during the very decades they call a failure. China alone lifted 800 million people, not with a UN roadmap, but with growth. The "92% of excess emissions" statistic? It's one of the authors citing his own paper, without saying so — and it's not a measurement, it's a moral allocation dressed up as data. The policy toolkit — "public control of strategic assets," "credit guidance" — has a track record: Soviet collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, Venezuela, and Sri Lanka's 2021 fertilizer ban, which starved the poor it claimed to serve within eighteen months. What worries me most: degrowth is being marketed to young people who feel locked out — telling them their stagnation is virtue. It's a swindle. The young aren't victims of too much growth. They are the first victims of its absence. Growth is the only anti-poverty program that has ever worked.

My talk at ConjectureCon, titled Science as Problem-Solving: What a Modern Physics Education Doesn’t Teach You. youtu.be/Nre2o9XUwic?is=x_TY…

"Self-Made Man" statue by Bobbie Carlyle

"The eye of the spirit can nowhere find more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is the inmnost recesses of the soul." — Victor Hugo

This is literally false (AGI is not a hardware problem); but it is meaningfully true that our most meaningful discoveries derive from what many deem to be meaningless.

I will never understand this bafflingly resilient rhetorical glitch that says paying the state garners services for “free”. (“And yes. We pay more to the state. In return, we get free…”) YOU JUST SAID YOU PAID FOR IT. THAT MEANS IT’S NOT FREE. THAT’s WHAT THOSE WORDS MEAN

What a nation and its people are (and it’s not “in the genes”).

Lot of people dunking on this but I doubt Eco literally meant that reading represented a perfect virtual reality rendering of “Great Men’s Lives” to the prejudice of our own; merely some meaningful window into our most meaningful biographies to their obvious benefit.

One of the great confusions concerning economics is that the primary good a corporation performs is towards its employees by giving them wages; when, in reality, that is secondary and pales in comparison to the good it performs towards its customers by giving them products(/Ss).

Does clicking on a post to report it count as engagement? Because I have just reported six deepfake “Farage throttling panellist on question time” ads and would have thought that reporting the first one would have decreased—not increased—my likelihood of seeing five more. @X

apparently the drawings are supposed to convey the "spirit and emotional contents" of the concepts here's the description for "topological zoo"