2026-07-11
Everything you care about can be taken away from you. In the end, there is only Power
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - strictly myself
- Violating the X Y rule a little bit to write this post, hope it is important enough to be worth doing so.
Main
- Pieces of context that are all pointing at the same core thing:
- Me reading Mockingjay 20 times cover-to-cover (yes, really) back in teenage, and being strongly able to relate to the epilogue and the overall theme, that everything and everyone you care about can be taken away from you. Me watching videos of gore and torture and so on, to prove to myself that I don't care, as if getting proof of machismo for myself maybe.
- A recent interaction with a friend, where they showed me some items they care about. And this prompting me to consider why I don't keep any physical items, like souvenirs or memories or similar, and why all the things I value (even most hobbies I value) are digital in nature.
- Me now choosing to make my life so public. Lots of past experiences with maintaining various levels of privacy and opsec and all of that being mostly a flop, and file formats being so bad and opsec being so hard and so on. Me now thinking being transparent to public, and not anonymous and private, is the answer. Even Satoshi and Silence Dogood only went private after the core ideas were discussed publicly. Starting from being private is a recipe for a failed life.
- If there are any survivors after a full-scale nuclear exchange, they might be able to revive a copy of the bitcoin blockchain. All your relationships will break away, all your physical belongings will wither and decay, but ideas are bulletproof. A thousand years later people may still preserve the memes and religions you left behind, they may re-invent the technologies you once you knew how to build.
- See also: Trapped priors by Scott Alexander, Truth or Dare by Duncan Sabien
- Lots of arguments with a therapist. Lots of disagreements with various therapy / psychology books that think everything is priors based on emotions based on past experiences, but nothing is grounded based on actual truth. Like, you might have bad past experience and hence have pessimistic prior that Alice will betray you with 50% probability. But also IMO there is an actual real probability of Alice betraying that is non-zero, maybe it is 5%.
- See also: Power lies trembling by Richard Ngo - Too theoretical but I actually like this post because it atleast tries to merge all the perspectives:
- The probability you assign to the other betraying you, affects the probability that they will in fact betray you. Both, due to selection effects of who you meet as a result of your worldview, and because the other person can mind read you atleast a little and take that into account when choosing how to behave.
- Past experiences can trap you into assigning consistently pessimistic prior probabilities of the other person betraying you.
- There is also an actual non-zero probability that they will betray you, regardless of how optimistic or pessimistic you are.
- The practical takeaway I took away from a low trust period in my life, which was that yes that people can betray you with some probability, you would even betray your epsilon-shifted clones with some probability given a sufficiently zero-sum situation (like fistfighting to death for control over an ASI), and inspite of all this you should have relationships and be public and so on. Accept that relationships have half-life numbers and they wither and die and this is okay, it is better than complete isolation. Accept that political institutions have half-life numbers, democracies decay to dictatorships and vice versa. Everything is temporary.
- In the end, there is only power. Naked you shall bow before it. Memes (self-replicating ideas), incentives and religions (self-replicating ideas with self-replicating groups and incentives) are all that will last.
- Most people would rather genocide their innocent friends than be outcast by their social circle. Most people would rather sell themselves to the highest bidder than be outcast by their social circle. If you ask people in quiet moments, they will often openly admit that this is who they are. It is the people who do not admit it who are sus, see all Viktor Suvorov's reasoning.
- (Update) I don't think this property of human beings can be changed so easily via self-fulfilling prophecies alone. You can't just believe that people are better than this, and expect that they will actually be better than this. Never in human history has there been a population so principled it would not genocide itself. Atleast that is my current understanding of history, weak opinion though.
End
- Ozymandias why hast thou forsaken me
- I feel like watching Threads again lol. Most depressing movie but yes.
Update
- Ended up watching second half of Threads, and then sleeping off because of how depressing it was.
- Bought a soft toy. Makes me want to cry honestly. Although I am happy it is now bought. Purchased DJUNGELSKOG - brown bear, large from IKEA. Did my research to ensure I pick a toy whose product line has lasted many years (less probability it will be discontinued in next few years), and will be available across many cities.
2026-07-12
Another update
- Just skimmed through last few chapters of 1984 by orwell again. I like how the book cuts through all the bullshit and basically delivers the same point yet again. Most people would (under sufficiently adversarial circumstances) personally kill their wives, husbands, mothers, children and so on.
- I don't like that parts of society are still in some sort of collective delusion over this, and they think they would not kill their loved ones. Unless you have some concrete evidence proving it, you have no reason to believe you are any better a person than this. You = all people
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