Saturday Substack Digest - 22 April 2023
Stuff I enjoyed that I think you'll enjoy
Over the last year, as Substack’s combination of literary creativity and civil discourse has drawn me deeper into its seductive summerlands, I’ve found myself spending an absolutely inordinate amount of time reading Substack essays. Anyone following my Telegram channel will have noticed that it’s basically a combination of ‘Substack posts John liked’ and ‘pictures John thought were cool’. Still, I only have about a tenth the following on Telegram (or on Twitter, for that matter) that I do on Substack, so the majority of you won’t know this.
Whenever possible and where even tangentially pertinent, I try to work in references to work I’ve enjoyed. Writers have told me that this tends to result in a flood of new subscribers, probably more than they get from a re-stack ... which I like to keep to a minimum, in any case, because I don’t want to flood your inboxes with other people’s content.
A few days ago Niccolo Soldoannounced that he was going to start using his platform to help promote the work of writers with smaller followings:
I don’t have anywhere near the subscriber base Soldo does – where he’s of the orange knighthood, I am not even of the white yeomanry.
Nevertheless, Postcards From Barsoom is starting to build up a respectable subscriber base, and I’d like to do what little I can to help lift up newer Substacks with smaller followings. That is, when I think their writing is good, and that they are saying interesting things. So, I thought, why not start curating a regular digest?
In general, I’m going to use this to promote Substacks that are either much newer, or have significantly smaller followings than my own. I’ll also try and avoid promoting Substacks that I’ve already promoted, although as time goes on I suspect that I’ll be breaking that rule fairly often.
If you’ve got anything you think is interesting enough to share, including your own work, now’s your chance to share it in the comments.
Now let’s get to it.
Authentic Intelligence
And I’m breaking one of the rules right off the bat, because crypto writer Aleksandar Svetski's new project Authentic Intelligence already has more than 3x as many subscribers as I do. While Svetski has been thinking about this project for a while, he tells me that my recent curmudgeonly grumbling about the actual applications of our fancy new machine learning toys provided some of the impetus for him to get started.
In the inaugural post, he lays out the basic thrust of the newsletter, which is to identify creative uses for AI (or as he likes to render it, Ai) which enhance human freedom and intensify our humanity, rather than restricting the first and attenuating the second.
The second and most recent essay asks whether our machines will ever be conscious syntellects, or will forever be strictly delimited by their, well, mechanical nature. To frame the question he provides an overview of a range of theories about the nature and origin of consciousness. While Svetski is doubtful that Artificial General Intelligence will ever manifest – a position I’m inclined to share – he doesn’t come to any firm conclusions. As, indeed, no one can. However, this is a necessary starting point to any investigation of the question, “Ai, what is it good for?”
Seeking the Hidden Thing
Kruptosbrings his perspective as an Orthodox Christian to questions of philosophy and theory of mind. One of his recent essays caused a bit of a stir with my friends on Deimos, who found his description of an alternative to conventional notions of causality grounded in Orthodox spiritual thinking to be very interesting. Essentially, Kruptos argues that the choice-tree model implied by cause-and-effect in a purely materialistic cosmos is inconsistent with Christian doctrine, which rather insists upon a model in which there are only two paths – the ascending and descending – and that the choice of which path to follow then determines the choices one makes in order to follow it.
After I posted Svetski’s treatment of the AGI question on Telegram, reader daiva drew Kruptos’ most recent essay to my attention. Here, he examines the same question about whether gussied-up multivariate regression algorithms will ever attain consciousness. He’s also quite skeptical that they won’t.
I’m not really sure about his argument that machine learning systems are fully legible, in contrast to the human mind, which isn’t. While it is certainly true that machines can be laid bare for detailed examination in principle, in practice the spaghetti code that results from millions of interconnected software neurons is about as opaque to human understanding as it gets. When I shared this essay on Notes, the bad cat jumped right on this point, and I think he was right to do so. There’s a reason data scientists spend more time trying to figure out what their electronic familiars are actually doing than they do designing and training them. This quibble aside – and it’s certainly possible that I’ve misunderstood something in the argument – Kruptos makes what I think is a good argument that a system which is based entirely on the manipulation of symbols will never be truly conscious, because consciousness doesn’t emerge from symbols, but simply uses them. The finger that points at the Moon is not the Moon ... but to the AI, there is only the finger.
motheRucker
motheRuckeris a new blog that I strongly encourage you to subscribe to. Bridgette (whom I can't seem to tag) recently brought her work to our attention on Deimos, and we’ve been reading it with great interest. Her inaugural essays take the Tonic Masculinity concept that many of us were writing about a few months ago, and asks what Tonic Femininity (as opposed to the toxic kind with which we’re all so very tiresomely familiar) looks like.
In her first essay, she opens the subject with an insightful overview of feminine competition styles, which she characterizes as safe, egalitarian, and subtle:
In the second instalment she describes what toxic femininity looks like through the lens of those competition styles:
And in the third and final (?) part, she takes the reader on a heroine’s journey past the many pitfalls of toxicity, through a philosophical landscape contoured in the form of a tonic woman.
Myth Pilot
Paulosof Myth Pilot is one of my favourite writers on Substack. His writing oscillates between beautiful, poetic short fiction, and essays that weave together history, mythology, and sociopolitical theory. After a long hiatus, he’s returned to regular writing. He’s been posting vignettes in order to stretch his capabilities as a writer with scenes that range from the comedic to the haunting:
His most recent essay is a thorough and terrifying examination of the sociopolitical and economic consequences of a large-scale exchange of strategic weapons, which he attacks from the perspective not of the end of civilization, but as the beginning of something else. After all, while the current global order would certainly be annihilated, humanity would with equal certainty survive, and the pockets of civilization that remained would gradually rebuild the world. He observes that nuclear war on such a scale would very likely be the pyramid of irradiated skulls that permanently discredits liberalism, just as communism and fascism were discredited by the camps.
Finally, Paulos has recently turned on paid subscriptions.
I like his writing, and selfishly want him to continue and write more. Please encourage him to do so.
À Rebours
N. Dexiashares my interest in the future – in particular, articulating a vision of the future that stands in opposition to the cloying tyranny of the digital Longhouse promised by the tedious sociopaths of the World Economic Forum. His latest essay developed this theme by looking at a forgotten 80s tabletop role-playing game, Buck Rogers XXVc, through the lens of the influential nouvelle droite political theorist Guillaume Faye’s concept of Archaeofuturism. I found it highly entertaining. It’s also where I discovered the artist I opened today’s digest with.
The Pulp Vitalist
Frank Kiddis one of the few fiction writers trying to make Substack work for fiction, which is an infamously difficult gig. His latest short story somehow manages to combine alternate history, interstellar exploration, quantum computing, and trains:
Position and Decision
Sanfedistihas been conducting an exegesis of Ernst Junger’s work. His most recent essays have concerned Junger’s novel The Glass Bees, an incredibly prescient work that explores the spiritual consequences of industrial technology by drawing a sharp contrast with the life-world of a traditionally-minded German cavalry officer.
Nelson’s Substack
I found out about Nelson R. Elliottwhen he tagged me on the bird site to let me know that he’d written an essay, partly inspired by my work, partly by Twitter legend Wrath of Gnon, partly by Cat Girl Kulak, and partly by el gato malo. Intrigued to find myself included in such august company, I of course read it with great interest.
If I had to quickly summarize Elliott’s Techno-Canton, I’d say it’s a utopian vision articulated in direct opposition to the WEF’s infamous ‘It’s 2030, I have no privacy, I own nothing, and I’ve never been happier’ think piece. Instead, think, ‘It’s 2030, the government has no idea what I’m doing, I own all my own shit, and I’ve never been happier.’ In Elliott’s vision, we live in small, walkable communities, but the similarities with the WEF’s technocratic pod life ends there. Markets are greased by crypto and bullion; power comes from photovoltaics and municipal fusion generators; scientific research has been broken free from the dull conformity of corpgov bureaucrats and is back in the hands on a new and imaginative landed gentry; manufacturing is local, via 3D printing; food comes from permaculture; remote work means that people don’t have to be so transient, and can grow roots into real communities again.
It’s a beautiful vision in which he brings a lot of very interesting ideas together ... and most of what we need (aside from the backyard fusion generators) is already available.
A Roll of the Dice
Nate Eppsshared his recent essay with us on Deimos, in which he indulges his inner economist’s physics envy, explains how the regulatory capture of the regulatory state greases the wheels for rent-seeking cronyism that leads to terrible products by decoupling success from competence (*cough* mRNA injectibles *cough*), ties this together with political ponerology and late stage bureaucracy, and argues that communism is the ultimate form of rent-seeking cronyism. He finishes by offering a suggestion for a way of realigning the incentive structures of our failing universities with the success of their alumni:
“What if, instead of charging up-front tuition and fees to students, colleges and students entered into a contract that said that for a 4-year degree, for 10 years after graduation, the student agreed to pay 5% of their income back to the university?
Which is an absolutely excellent solution to the problem that, as he notes, the current incentive structure for academia is maximizing bums in seats, with it being wholly irrelevant to university administrators or faculties if their graduates end up as bums in the streets.
A Ghost in the Machine
I’m going to close out as I opened, by breaking another rule, namely promoting writers I’ve already promoted, but Daniel Dhas been on a tear recently. First, there’s a quick piece in which he examines the utility of failure, of doing things badly, because after all that’s the only way we get better. But more importantly – because let’s face it, none of us are likely to master most of the things we try – doing things you suck at is the best way to gain appreciation for the dedicated, talented few who are able to achieve true mastery.
His most recent essay is his entry into the recent controversy surrounding the Substack moderation question, in which he aims his polemical keyboard directly at the disingenuous crybullies and the will to power the barely bother to disguise behind their battle-cry of harm prevention. Actually, controversy might be the wrong term, because the reaction from most Substackers to the mewling Marxcissists has been one great collective eye-roll, Oh here we go again with you tendentious hall monitors.
Daniel finally activated paid subscriptions. If you enjoy his writing, and why the hell wouldn’t you, go send him some love.
Me and the Boys Talk About Climate Change
Finally, the Deimos crew got together last Sunday to spend an hour talking about the climate change scam. Since we all agree it’s a scam, it was boring to debunk it. Therefore, we didn’t. Instead we looked at the political, economic, psychological, and spiritual factors feeding into the carbon cult, and tried to get a handle on how the cultists can be deprogrammed before they wreck our civilization.
So far we’ve got a whole 7 subscribers (thanks, Mom!) Hopefully we can get those numbers up. The plan is to livestream these every Sunday. Anyhow, here’s the first episode:
That’s all for this week. Remember to share anything interesting that you’ve come across recently in the comments.
If you’re already a paid supporter of Postcards From Barsoom, you have my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude. While everything on Postcards From Barsoom is provided free for all to read and respond to, your support makes my writing possible. If you enjoyed this essay, or you’ve enjoyed previous essays, and you have the resources to do so, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. If you take out a paid sub, you might even develop superpowers. What is certain, however, is that a paid sub gets you in to Deimos Station.
In between writing on Substack you can find me on the bird site @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active on the Russian den of iniquity at Telegrams From Barsoom
On the topic of Thorium, consider: (source: https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2491667 )
>There is 13 times as much energy in coal in the form of Thorium as there is available by burning the coal, and right now we literally throw it away in the ash pile!
>What is Thorium? It's a fertile material. That means that when struck by a neutron in a reactor it transmutes via a nuclear process to an element that is capable of fission. Note that Thorium itself is not fissionable - that is, it will not (directly) split and release energy. Instead it captures thermal neutrons and turns into Uranium-233. U-233 is fissile.
>There is a type of nuclear reactor that utilizes this fuel cycle. Instead of the traditional nuclear reactor which uses water as a moderator and coolant (either a boiling or pressurized water reactor) these reactors use a liquid salt. In the vernacular they're called "LFTR"s, pronounced "Lifter."
>You've probably never heard of them. But they're not pie in the sky dreams. Our nation ran one for nearly four years in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was scrapped in favor of the traditional uranium fuel cycle we use today because the fuel it produces is very difficult to exploit for nuclear weapons, and it breeds fuel at a slow rate. The natural process of the nuclear reactions in the core of such a unit produces a byproduct that is a very strong gamma emitter that is difficult to separate from the other reaction products. For this reason - and because we wanted both nuclear power and nuclear weapons - we built the infrastructure for uranium and plutonium rather than thorium.
>Thorium-based reactors have several significant advantages and a few disadvantages. We have much less experience with LFTRs than traditional nuclear power, simply because we stopped working with them for political and war-fighting reasons. They use a fluoride salt which is quite reactive when in contact with water, but the reactivity is a bonus in all other respects, because it tends to encapsulate the reaction products (the nasty fission products that you don't want in the environment) through that same chemical process. It runs at a much higher temperature (typically 650C) than a traditional reactor and unlike a traditional reactor the fuel and the working fluid is the same - there are no fuel rods that can melt and release their nasty fission product elements, as the fuel is dispersed in the coolant.
>Finally, the unit is intrinsically safe. It does not require high pressure; the working fluid and coolant is a liquid at ordinary atmospheric pressure. This gets rid of the need for high-pressure pumps, pipes and similar materials. Without the moderator the reactivity is insufficient to sustain a chain reaction, and the moderator is in the reactor vessel itself through which the fuel/coolant is pumped, so criticality is impossible outside of the reactor vessel and inside the vessel the fuel and coolant are the same, and a liquid. The working fluid is contained in the reactor loop by an actively-cooled plug. If power is lost cooling ceases and the plug melts; the working fluid then drains into tanks by gravity under the reactor and cools into a solid, as it cannot maintain criticality outside of the reactor itself (there's no moderator in the tank or the plumbing.) As the fuel is in the fluid, there is no core to melt as occurred in Japan and being dispersed over a much larger area the working fluid naturally cools from liquid to solid without forced pumping and cooling. This safety feature was regularly tested in the unit at Oak Ridge - they literally turned off the power on the weekends and simply went home!
Karl Denninger has written several articles over the years discussing how these reactors could solve our energy problems safely.
)Use the full-text search at https://market-ticker.org/ and enter "thorium" )
Thank you for suggesting what are sure to be highly interesting stacks. I've looked at several you've previously recommended and subscribed to some. Wrath of Gnon is a special treat🙌🏼 I wish I could find an additional 12-24 hours to add to the 24 currently available to me, in order to explore all of these.
I don't even get over to Deimos very often for lack of time and an embarrassing wealth of choices. Deimos is chock full of intelligent, intriguing discourse that, were I to visit on a daily basis, I'm afraid nothing else in my life would ever get done! It’s an open-forum university that offers more in useful knowledge than any ivy-league institution could ever hope to.
Just subscribed to your Tonic Discussions channel. Your topic re: Climate Change interests me, because, through my own observations and having seen decades of dire predictions that never (nor will they ever) materialize, it is clear to me that the purveyors of this fear-porn have one agenda - clear out the useless eaters so that their class may enjoy the utopia they envision. Lunitards! Cultists! Religious fanatics! Pitiful excuses of human beings who waste the wonder and opportunity our Earth and her peoples provide. Besides, what hubris and arrogance these nihilists demonstrate to think that we humans could EVER compete against Nature itself with mere CO2 emissions through the use of fossil fuels. Change is built into the plan, for God's sake! However, we cannot discount the possibility that they will be the ones, through employment of evil, stupid, ill-considered plans and practices who will wipe out the entirety of humans and most organic life forms. Until that day arrives, I will continue to live in the bliss of understanding and the joy of reading the words of so many fine minds here and almost everywhere if one is interested in finding them.