The ongoing decline of the West was always very predictable, and not because of some inherent law of the universe that says all civilizations must fall after their rise or any such thing. After all, before there were religions, there were no religions. And before there were sophisticated languages, there were no sophisticated languages.

Humans are capable of constructing social technologies that make up the institutions which form the bedrock of a functional society. Nothing technically prevents a civilization (long-running, complex society) from existing indefinitely if its institutions are very well maintained (invention, repair, deletion etc as appropriate).

It is possible to have a civilization which never dies. Peaks and troughs are what are probably impossible to prevent.

The decline of the West is primarily happening because the West lacks a rigorously-thought-about and well-defined civilizational goal. This is what contemporarily allows for the corruption of culture and the pursuit of fake, ruinous goals.

You can ask any Westerner today what the point of their personal existence is, and what their society seeks to achieve, and they will have no cogent answers for you.

Thankfully, you can look at the actions of both the individuals and their governments to determine their implicit pursuits: liberalism and consumerism.

If you live in the West today, you will ('must', actually) be liberated from all traditional constraints and have no genuine aspirations except for the consumption of things of all forms, natural or artificial, through all of your human senses, and preferably, all at the same time.

Mindless consumption is the highest good.

This of course predictably leads to the degeneration of culture.

Traditions do not exist for no reason. Some of them do become outdated due to better scientific understanding or technological innovation, but lots of them (especially the moral ones) are definitely vital.

Absolute liberation from tradition is guaranteed to result in disaster for an obvious reason: you are jettisoning vital knowledge encoded in culture which has helped the society survive until your own time.

And that is exactly what Western liberalism is obsessed with doing. And it is not only obsessed with doing that, it is totally committed to exporting it to other regions of the world.


There will be no comeback for the West like some people think. Why? Because the same liberalism eating it from the inside out prevents the rise of reformers who can set the system right. It is like if a disease were attacking a body's own immune system.

How ever could competent reformers rise from within if existing institutions believe that everyone is equal and freedom is its own end?

The classic way to solve this problem and how I assume it is solved in Medicine is for an external agent to be introduced to aid the ailing immune system. In the case of the West, no one who understands its problems and has the ability to help will raise a finger to do anything.

Because it is not in their interest. What happens to be in their interest is in fact further, maybe even faster degeneration of the West.

No one will help the West because Westerners have been very very arrogant for a long time while having little to show for their annoying cockiness.

Every single Westerner is exceedingly arrogant and always has been. Lots of people (usually right-wingers) believe in an inherent greatness of the 'West'. They believe in an inherent superiority of "the Western man". Some of this obviously follows from how the West has led technological development and was able to colonize a lot of the rest of the world in the past couple of centuries.

And in the case that they do not believe in an inherent God-given superiority, they believe in the supremacy of supposed "liberal Western values" which are by how humans are unquestionably supposed to live, and they are happy imposing these 'values' on other people outside of the West. Of course they never really think of the means of bringing these ideas to other people around the world as imposition.

Tell you what.... everyone is tired of all of the bullshit. The center will collapse, as will the rest of the West.


To reiterate: the primary reason that the West will collapse is the lack of a rigorous and concrete civilizational goal. Every single sign of dysfunction which you can point to is downstream of this fundamental problem: an inability to define concretely who a member of the in-group is, who to and how to run society, the boneheaded and obsessive worship of liberalism as an end of its own etc


So it happens that the West will die for very avoidable reasons and the lesson to learn for other people from other parts of the world is to seek to understand why, and to avoid making the same mistakes.

The financial economic system of a society is inseparable from its political and belief systems. Human society is a very complex system in which everything intersects with everything else. Because of this, the financial economic system of a society has to be designed to help a society achieve its long-term goals based on its fundamental beliefs.

Since our belief is that society has a long-term goal and it is the job of every single member of society to contribute according to their natural talent to achieving that goal, it doesn't make much sense for people to have better material lives simply because they are lucky to have the natural ability to obtain skills deemed important by the 'free market'. A medical doctor shouldn't necessarily live a better material life just because he got lucky with superior natural memorization or intellectual ability than a plumber for example.

Financial reward to individuals for contribution to society should be based on effort made in contribution to long-term societal goals according to their baseline natural ability, not simply absolute ability as randomly awarded by nature. This helps:

i. balance what might be natural unfairness in the distribution of ability, which currently allows people with a higher natural ability (due to no inherent worthiness on their own part) to have better material lives.

There is a genuine soul-enriching point to human existence which doubles as the reason for society (individual humans acting together in a community) to exist. I'm convinced that an inability to understand this reason is why all civilizations inevitably collapse.

The entire point of human and societal existence is to conquer all of the universe. We are in something of a video game, and the single long-term goal is either exploring all of the universe after which we discover the creator by ourselves, or enough of the universe that the creator decides that we deserve his revealing himself to us.

How do I know this?

It is implicit in the existence of everything. In:

I think it's obvious that everyone who exists in a society cannot be a direct participant in its governing. Primarily because of obvious constraints and the solution we have devised to getting things done: division of responsibilities and labor.

But whose responsibility should it be to run society, for how long, and who chooses them?

The current consensus by the West, which tries to impose its system on every other society — unless they are powerful enough to resist it — is that society should be run by whomever receives the most support and approval from the general populace.

That, on the surface, might seem to make sense. How can someone who isn't chosen by the people lead them after all? Until you get into the details.

One way not to organize society is to bring together different groups of people of different ancestral origins based on meritocratic traits which you choose and expect them to gel together based on an artificially created "national identity".

Because of how humans feel and think about identity. It's probably impossible to make a person think of themselves flatly and absolutely as "a citizen of x country" for example. This seems part of the inherent human 'software' and cannot be changed.

What a person looks like influences our connection with them. We all know this from our interactions with people of different attractiveness. Clearly, what a person looks like does matter.

Why should it then be so surprising or considered a bad thing if people feel more comfortable around people who look phenotypically like themselves?

We already see this in how most people in multi-racial societies couple. People innately like people who look phenotypically like themselves. That is the human default.

This is why we can suspect that anyone who couples exclusively inter-racially likely has an undiagnosed/undiscovered form of mental illness (it's a big departure from what's normal to the average human).

The popular reason pure software companies have great profit margins is for marginal investment in providing the product/service to more users, given software's replicability. That's the reason everyone likes to repeat.

The true reason is that they price similarly to physical goods companies, without the same recurring costs. The difference between physical raw material costs and total expenses which go into reproducing the product/service for each new additional user, which software coys do not have deal with, is what makes up "high software margins".

But pure software products/services shouldn't be priced like their counterparts with recurring costs. They have an abundance quality.

Software companies would probably argue with you if you questioned their pricing, given the relatively low marginal recurring costs they incur, probably throwing terms like "capturing the value you create" at you.

What seems to be the most popular theory of economic development these days are the ideas expressed in the book “Gambling on Development”. I have not read the book, but as I gathered from this review and other ones by different people on Amazon and Goodreads, the central point of the book is that development in nation states only happens when the entrenched elites decide to gamble on economic growth.

The theory: the elites who already are at the top of financial and social hierarchy supposedly normally have no need to pursue economic development. Attempting to pursue development is in fact likely to be damaging to their personal interests, since the status quo which keeps them at the top would have to undergo considerable change. Because of that, they usually don’t. On the other hand, some elites do decide that pursuing development could put them in even better position: even more wealth, power and influence. Sure, things could go very wrong. But they could also go very very right. Because of this, they decide to take their chances and ‘gamble’ on development.

I don’t buy this theory. Everyone seems to take it seriously and I’m not sure why.

The first problem I have with its fundamental point is the idea that elites are insecure by default and thence are unlikely to want to gamble on development since that might put their power in danger. That contravenes everything everyone knows about people who have things in abundance and their relationship with it. We do know that genuinely wealthy people do not worry about money, nor do genuinely smart people worry about intelligence. Why then would elites (with abundant power) worry about power?

Rules are a tool used to manage events at scale. If there weren't many things to attend to, then each situation could be examined individually and attended to based on the unique factors surrounding them.

One problem with rules is with precision. It's hard to set a square box with a precise area as a measure against which all square boxes are tested. Better precision means rules having unintended consequences.

If you decide that that people cannot put their finger 10cm in front of your face because it obstructs your vision, or more than 100cm in front of your face because that would cause some other kind of problem with some other thing, that leaves people with between 10cm and 100cm to put things in. The problem with that is that putting things between those distances probably causes some other problem you had not envisaged, but of course the rule has been made and you do not want to change it so soon after because you do not want to look like an idiot. So yeahhh, 'unintended consequences' are a big deal.


Another is that the more precise you try to be with rules, the more interesting you make beating them, without technically getting in trouble. Once you decide that people cannot put things less than 10cm to, and more than 100cm away from your face. It all becomes a game; you've just created new fun activity. People are absolutely going to constantly stick their hands between 10cm to and 100cm away at the weirdest angles, testing to see how to achieve the same thing you were trying to prevent — obstructing your face — without technically violating the rule(s).

Privacy is overrated. The problems with the discourse around privacy are framing¹ (cached meanings of words in the minds of the populace) and pre-conceived guilt, resulting in secrecy by the data-collecting party.

1. Two things:

(i) The regular use of words within certain contexts biases their meaning.

(ii) Deliberate framing: death tax vs inheritance tax, pro choice vs pro life, undocumented immigrants vs illegal aliens.

Why people think Ads are bad:

— The cached thought¹ that ads are bad.

1.Two things:

(i) The regular use of words within certain contexts biases their meaning e.g 'impregnating' a girl.

The good thing is that a lot of people agree that the problems with development in different sub-Saharan African countries are very similar. Unlike some people who think institutions¹ are the primary problem with economic development in sub-saharan Africa, if you agree that culture² is the fundamental problem, then the culture needs to be evolved into something more desirable.

1. Acemoglu doesn't dig deeply enough. What makes up institutions, creates them in the first place, or has the ability to influence them?

Institutions run on culture set by the most stubborn, most dominant crop(s) of the population, whether they be in the minority (Cc Nassim Taleb's Intolerant Minority) or majority.

Stubborn, dominant people —> culture —> institutions —> 'fate'.

2. "The first thing to understand about humanity is that most human beings have very little character. They have minimal moral motivation, and weak internal motivations in general. They are easily swayed by circumstances, especially by people around them. So the reason why your neighbor doesn’t grab your wallet or punch you in the face when you annoy him is not that it would be wrong to do so. The reason is that it’s against the social norms — he doesn’t see other people doing that, he knows that other people would disapprove of it, and society might punish such behavior. That’s really the main reason.

People’s allegiance to social norms is emotional, not intellectual. They just feel like they have to follow the norms. So they’re not very subtle about it — e.g., people aren’t very good at distinguishing good social norms from bad ones. Also, some of the norms are vague and general, like “Treat people with a certain level of respect, even when you disagree with them."

The most valuable thing that America has — the thing that makes things go better in innumerable ways than the way they go in 99% of other societies — is not its wealth, nor its particular laws and policies, nor even its Constitution. The most valuable thing is a set of norms and institutions that managed to take hold and become stable. Or at least metastable.

How Norms Erode

Social norms can be eroded. The way they get eroded is essentially by visible norm-violations that are visibly tolerated. If you see other people around you flagrantly violating the (erstwhile) social norms, and if nothing happens to those people, or maybe they are even rewarded for their behavior, then your feeling that you have to follow social norms diminishes. You start to feel like maybe you’re living in a free-for-all zone and you can do whatever the hell you feel like. Unfortunately, what most people feel like doing is not good."

One of the several ways to begin to work on evolving culture is discussion: simply talking about things. There needs to be a local public discussion platform on which people with interesting thoughts around these parts can have conversations.

An asynchronous (no pressure, allows people to get involved if and only when they want to), text-based (efficient, allows optimal, refined structuring of thought), online (the internet kills geographical constraint) forum. Twitter fulfills these needs except one, which is a big flaw for a certain kind of community: centralization. Twitter conversations are scattered and difficult to follow, have no structure or moderation to them, or an effective archiving.

This is a consistently-updated (nonlinear, random insertions) list of the best things I read on the web. If any of these live links is ever dead, it is probably backed-up on ArchiveDotToday.

— Entrepreneurial Statecraft Gets the Goods

— In Plain Sight

— The Courageous Society

There seems to be a contingent of young African people with a profound lack of understanding of how things work in the real world, who latch onto whatever new trend Bay Area libertarians think of as the new cool thing, as a platform on which African economies can bypass government control and begin to get things done. Crypto is a big example of this. Cc the vast array of crypto companies popping up across SSA.

EndSARS protesters in Nigeria shifted to accepting public donations via Bitcoin last October when the government instructed financial institutions to shutter accounts with them through which donations were being received.

The government allowed only a few months to pass before banning cryptocurrencies in the country 4 months later in February of this year, by instructing financial institutions to sever ties with crypto companies.

What this meant was that crypto companies could no longer have accounts with banks, making it difficult for them to buy cryptos from users (how can you instantly pay users for cryptos bought from them if you cannot operate a bank account as a company?) Or sell to them, since there's usually a low monthly FX limit ($100) on debit card transactions on individual local bank cards on foreign services.

Listened to David Deutsch and found some of his comments particularly interesting.

There's a text transcript here, audio-only here, and audio-visual on YouTube

On Explanatory Power

COWEN: I’m still puzzled as to why you think it’s so unlikely that the universe is not comprehensible. Take a simpler system, like the distribution of prime numbers. I’m quite sure I can’t understand that. Even if various conjectures were proven or not proven, I think, at the end of the day, I still am not capable of understanding that — even how certain motors work, or markets for copper. Why can’t that apply to the universe also?

As the speed of light is to the physical universe, so is co-ordination to human societies.

It's a scientific analogy that illustrates a sociological problem. Which itself is only part of a thread that traces trust to the natural chaos of the universe.

Trust is the foundation of co-ordination, which is a means to problem-solving.

Problem-solving is a natural necessity of human societies in the face of a fundamentally chaotic nature. Problem-solving is what allows for progress and development. Progress and development are not independently-existing entities. They only exist against natural chaos.

There is no such thing as ambition, what does exist is contentment/personal satisfaction. I have a theory about what determines a person's 'ambition' as regards work they do. I don't have a great description of it yet, but roughly:

What is referred to as 'ambition', how challenging work one does is, is only one part of several factors making up a total personal satisfaction of a person. I refer to total personal satisfaction as their sweet satisfaction zone (SSZ) which exists on a spectrum of satisfaction (SoS). Everyone's SSZ, to which several factors contribute, determines an individual's mental state in the long term.

Among the factors affecting where their SSZ lies on the SoS are things like the challenge of the work they do, their relationships with friends, their romantic relationship(s), their status in the hierarchy of their local community etc. Everyone requires different levels of satisfaction from each of these different factors depending on their personality, but each of these factors contribute to the SSZ.

When some people work on what seems 'ambitious' to some others, it may just be work that feels sufficiently challenging to them, as they require a huge amount of satisfaction from interesting and high-impact work to contribute to their SSZ. And when a person one thinks to be clever and capable of more works on what one thinks to be below their intellectual ability, it may be that how challenging work they do is doesn't rank on factors they demand huge amounts of satisfaction from to make their SSZ. The golden handcuffs are in fact personal satisfaction.

Apple could be the first of FAMGA to die. Die, in the same way Nokia and Blackberry are dead. The one thing Apple does is sell personal computing devices (and accessories to them), the unique and most valuable part of which is the OS.

There has been a continuous abstraction of things by the cloud, beginning with files.That, and the fact of cloud storage becoming a commodity has resulted in reasonable prediction by some people of the impending death of companies offering personal cloud storage as a service.

Video gaming is already being experimented on. Cc Google Stadia.

I think at some point in the near future, mobile OSes too will either be abstracted away — with apps streamed in real-time, like we currently stream music on Spotify or TV on Netflix — or completely die, giving way to the web (which we already 'stream' in real-time) as the only platform.