Martin
Martin Lowe

Argumentation theorist. I write stuff.

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Last Notes

2026-04-22 07:20:49 CEST

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And if you look closely, «echo chamber» is just a dysphemism for «online community».
Literally «online community that I don’t like»

2026-04-19 14:08:41 CEST

Lmao
https://blossom.primal.net/d585e31cf76d32c1b7dad0491496cc3fc5a16fc81b2264af0b8bd5615376681c.jpg

2026-04-17 13:42:58 CEST

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...and another one (seems these don't show up in people's feeds?)
#naddr1qv…gfp0

2026-04-17 12:11:58 CEST

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Or is the note ID better?
#naddr1qv…a7jg

2026-04-17 12:11:21 CEST

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I wrote an article yesterday. I think some of you would enjoy reading it.
https://primal.net/e/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzp9f06epmqxvs50urupw2a2m5jyevp68m4uauch0jmhacuxqfxxvyqqgx2vmrxvcr2vpexcmnvdfj8q6kz0ka7jg

2026-04-17 12:10:18 CEST

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This is true, but invites the wrong attitude. We should be wary of changing our opinions when 1) we are the only ones who hold it (which, if you consider the entire nested structure of opinions, is more often than we think) and 2) it is true (which is hard to tell before we've really tried to push it with all our might).
This is easily one of the most persistent and catastrophic misunderstandings in intellectual life. Intellectuals should be persistant and mule-headed. Embrace a stubborn attitude!

2026-04-17 08:32:29 CEST

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Network effects seems to be the big problem though.
It just baffles me that for the past 4 years, I’ve been in a group chat filled to the brim with privacy minded coders
…on telegram.
Several attempts to move it somewhere else (anywhere would be better), but in the end, we just stay where we are, because, well, that’s where we are.

2026-04-17 08:27:02 CEST

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This myth fuels a lot of stupid stuff, perhaps especially in science.
Universities have never contributed much to science, at least not directly.
Einstein worked as a clerk.
Newton’s annus mirabilis was the one year he *wasn’t* at Cambridge.
The Vienna circle was a private initiative, including people with little formal connection to the university.
It’s a classic trick. Fund all the good stuff that’s already happening, then turn around and take credit for it.

2026-04-17 08:20:48 CEST

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Voucher system works if schools are free to diversify. Few countries, if any, allow sufficient diversification.
I spent a year in an unschooling village in Spain, mostly lefties there. In general, progressives seem more awake to school problems than conservatives, who tend to think the biggest problem with schools today is that they’re not authoritarian enough.
Funny thing about some parts of the far left is that I agree with them on most topics. They hate authority. The main issue is that they think it all stems from capitalism, of which they know almost nothing because they’re clueless about economics. I suspect they’d become libertarians the moment they learned some basic austrian econ.

2026-04-17 08:14:23 CEST

Dostoevsky
https://blossom.primal.net/f6ca1a466a9310aaf439dc4bcef9ca4c2777d3accdd51d9c40ad4079b5706a04.jpg

2026-04-16 21:46:26 CEST

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I have a feeling that compulsory public school is the point at which even socialists are getting fed up with socialism.

2026-04-16 11:08:03 CEST

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No human systems are in equilibrium.
The balance you point to is a very good point. I think it's secured by economics. Centralization is closely tied to coercion and control, and so every tightening of the screw increases the value of, and the "market" for freedom. It's like how prohibition handed a lucurative business to the Corleone family. Centralization is the fuel of the bitcoin community (and other forces of opposition.
That was also @nprofile…6g5h point in the bitcoin standard: The worst thing governments can do to bitcoin, is to start acting responsibly.
I'm thinking of writing something on how economic (and financial) principles apply to ideas, culture and personal choices. It's an interesting (and big!) topic.

2026-04-15 21:51:08 CEST

To make AI’s way smarter with one sentence, start your query with «From a complexity theory perspective…»
It will immediately find most policy and social science incredibly stupid, including public schooling, welfare, central banking and climate stuff.

2026-04-15 21:48:49 CEST

(Regenerative) farming is a great metaphor and a shortcut into complexity theory.
For instance, if farmers thought like schools, they’d head into the field each day to stretch slow growing plants.

2026-04-15 21:45:27 CEST

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Any time I come across a Leyen-quote, I am pleased to go back to ignoring her.

2026-04-15 18:28:10 CEST

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Yes. Social credit scores are only bad if they are imposed top down. Naturally emerging ones are generally good, so long as they don’t run atop a shitty culture.

2026-04-15 18:25:13 CEST

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I saw the articles tab on Primal, but couldn’t find a way to publish one.
Thanks for the tip 👍

2026-04-15 18:24:09 CEST

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I suspect it’s just a matter of spending time here. Progress is slower without an algorithm to hack, but slow is often good.

2026-04-15 18:20:41 CEST

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Yes, and they both pretend to be stupid for strategic reasons.

2026-04-15 18:18:53 CEST

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There is research to support that teenagers are seen as ruse, dumb and troublemakers only where they are subject to compulsory education.
I thought about adding a paragraph on the old guilds, which is close to your point about families. I would love to send my kids to live with another family/business as apprentices.
Parenting, work and education used to go hand in hand, which I’m pretty sure is the optimal way to go about it.

2026-04-15 16:02:10 CEST

What do stand up comedians and poker players have in common?

2026-04-15 12:10:27 CEST

In 1891, in what remains the most badass move in history, the young and promising author Knut Hamsun had a lecture gig in Christiania (Oslo).
An audience of 700 norwegian elites had shown up, and even Henrik Ibsen, recently returned from 27 years abroad, had shown up with his friend, the composer Edvard Grieg.
Most people in Hamsun’s position would have used the opportunity to impress and charm his audience.
Hamsun spent most of the lecture harshly criticizing Ibsen, sitting on the front row, for his lousy prose, the steretypical nature of his characters, and his idealized, unrealistic stories.
Be like Hamsun.

2026-04-15 11:17:11 CEST

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I’m back from a hiatus, and trying to use nostr for publishing articles.
I have no idea what to do for engagement though. Totally out of the loop, so I don’t even know if people CAN see my stuff, let alone how to make it pop up in people’s timelines.
For all I know, I’m not even in the right relays.

2026-04-15 11:12:09 CEST

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«People who speak too much about words or concepts or definitions do not add anything to any discussion... Definitions do not help. They do not lead to clarity. They only lead to a pretentious, false precision with only the impression that one is precise»
- Karl Popper
…which is interesting, since he, more than any other philosopher, carried the mantle of Socrates

2026-04-15 11:08:29 CEST

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“All evils are due to insufficient knowledge” - David Deutsch

2026-04-15 11:07:12 CEST

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Sokrates -> Popper - >Deutsch is the largely ignored philosophical tradition of freedom.

2026-04-15 02:06:13 CEST

What complexity theory can tell us about how to save civilization.
There is a concept called "Chesterton's fence", which is often cited in relation to complex systems. It's a reference to a parable, in which someone comes across a fence, and says "I don't see a use for this fence, let's clear it away", whereupon Chesterton replies "If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it".
The point here is that fiddling around with complex systems we don't understand, is likely to cause unknown harm. The reformers of the modern era would have done well to dwell on this insight, as they tore down everything that was old.
And anyone who wants to fix their mistakes, should heed Chesterton's advice.
I am one of those who think the West was on the right track in the Gilded era, and that much of what has happened since then have been steps in the wrong direction. But it would be foolish to think that there has been no progress made at all.
A sensible reformer must sift through the changes wrought on society since the 1870's, and judge them according to sound principles. What have we lost, that we should seek to regain, and what have we gained, that we should seek to protect?
Here are my suggestions.
First of all, Chesterton admonishes us to be gradualists, not revolutionaries. I would add to this a point that is well known to nostr-users; that the solution probably lies in building decentralized parallell systems that can outcompete the lumbering centralized ones.
But beware. Centralization is not evil, it has its functions, and a counter movement that abhors all kinds of centralization, even centralized authority that limits individual freedom, is likely to fail. What is needed is to understand how centralization works, so that it can be used wisely.
We should seek to regain sound money. As bitcoiners know very well, there is perhaps no change that will do more to save civilization. By raising the cost of bad ideas and the rewards for good ones, we halt the engine of destruction that is the fiat economy.
We should also seek to reestablish the natural social credit score known as honor. Most people today think of honor cultures as barbaric, but that is merely because only barbaric cultures have kept honor as a social currency. The west used to be an honor culture, and it greased the wheels of our societies.
Closely related to this, we should not reinstate bigotry. One of the advantages of honor cultures is that they are exclusive. If honor requires honesty, courage, discipline and fairness, then anyone who possesses those virtues are accepted in the culture - no matter the colour of their skin, their sex or any other trait. Honor requires sacrifice, which is the price paid to acquire social currency.
We should not reinstate the abuse of children, but recognize that many of the measures that supposedly protect and help children today are actually abusive. Children should be allowed to work, if they want to, and they should have the freedom to pursue their interests. They should not be subjected to arbitrary coercion, and that includes being forced to endure endless hours trying to learn what adults think is important.
No resource today is more squandered than young teenagers. This phase is marked by incredible adaptability, speed of learning and courage, and today most of it is spent locked inside a box, being forced to endure lectures on things they won't remember, need or care about. Businesses would queue up to hire them, and the teenagers would queue up to get hired, if both parties were allowed to freely decide on contracts.
Indeed, I hope to see universities crumble and die, and perhaps something worth preserving will emerge from the rubble. Most scientific advances in history happened outside universities. Newton's annus mirabilis was the year he was *not* at Cambridge. Einstein worked as a clerk at a patent's office when formulating his theory of relativity. Most of the great names in scientific history had little formal education, and even less need of it.
We should seek to reinstate local communities, and thus we should seek to get rid of state welfare. The project of politically enforced independence has atomized societies. We want to be dependent on one another, because those dependencies is the glue that holds us together - for better or for worse. Caring for ones neighbours and relatives is a privilege and a duty, and we can't have more of that until we get the state out of the equation.
And finally, fun should be taken seriously. Perhaps the most important gauge of a healthy society, is how much fun people have in it. I don't mean mindless entertainment, but banter, satire and true comedy. As the legendary Norm Macdonald pointed out in a rare serious moment (after memory): "The job of the stand up comic is to criticize culture, and make people laugh at their own stupidity. But they won't be willing to do that if you're a smart ass. So you have to play the dumb person who sorta stumbled upon something weird. You have to seem dumber than them, and only then are they willing to laugh".
There's probably more stuff that needs to go on the list, but the important point I'd like to get across is that we must respect Chesterton's fence. We must respect complexity. What exactly that means, in practice and principle, is the topic of my next article.

2026-04-15 02:01:23 CEST

2026-04-14 18:46:32 CEST

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Når det kommer til skole er Norge faktisk en oase av frihet. Bare Storbritannia har samme frihet som oss.
I Sverige får de 1000 kroner i dagsbøter for å holde barna «urettmessig» fra den lokale (og livsfarlige) skolen

2026-04-14 18:45:00 CEST

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I’m guessing primal doesn’t.
Which app are people using these days? I’ve been away for a while…

2026-04-14 10:21:05 CEST

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How do I add themes? I know nothing about this.

2026-04-14 10:17:58 CEST

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Hmm, det var jo ganske sårbart. De fleste holdt på ulovlig, og var avhengige av både goodwill fra kommunen og jevnt tilsig av kunder.
Jeg hadde trodd at hjemmeskoleforbudet i Frankrike skulle gi dem en boost, men det kunne vel like fort skape konkurranse.

2026-04-14 01:21:41 CEST

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Huge. Serious chad vibes

2026-04-13 23:36:21 CEST

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Blockading the blockade. Bet they didn't see that one coming. Genius.

2026-04-13 23:34:42 CEST

I'm not saying the global elites are pedophiles.
But it should be mentioned that IF you wanted to build a criminal syndicate with absolute ingroup loyalty, and very low motivation for defecting, nothing would work better than making proof of pedophilia the entry ticket.

2026-04-13 23:32:06 CEST

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AI-conspiracy guy seems invincible.

2026-04-13 23:29:26 CEST

The centralization of the West. A story of a wonderful culture, and its ongoing childhood disease.
There is a charming theory of why Northern Europe benefited more from the enlightenment than southern Europe. It starts with Martin Luther.
Once his detachment from the catholic church was a fact, he got to work translating the bible. He even had to invent a complete german grammar to do it.
Luther saw literacy as a religious duty, since it was the only way to get a personal connection to the word of God. He encouraged his followers to learn to read, and to teach their children.
The theory says that protestant Europe would thus, 200 years later, have a pool of literate farmers from which they could build efficient bureaucracies. This is similar to Weber's theory of the protestant work ethic, though maybe more specific.
(Alas, it's probably not true.
If the farmers were literate, they had no books or apetite for them. Historical research seems to indicate literacy was marginally better than in catholic Europe, but not meaningfully so.)
But Luther did set off a series of events that, be it indirectly, caused great harm.
The 30 years war was pretty much a direct consequence of the protestant reformation, and it absolutely wrecked the german territories.
Maybe none so much as Brandenburg-Prussia, where Frederick William came to power at the tail of the war. He got to work securing his borders.
And both he and his successors did an admirable job.
A standing, highly disciplined army, funded by the central authority's tax income. He established absolute rule, secured efficient lines of command and rationalized the entire system.
Over time, the militaristic logic came to dominate all areas of policy.
The industriousness of Prussia was impressive. Successive rulers were not afraid of reforms, and they kept fiddling around with laws and regulations, guided by a set of interconnected principles:
Centralization, discipline, security, conservatism and duty (sound familiar?).
By the time Frederick the great, who was a man of the enlightenment through and through, took the throne, it was said of Prussia that it was an army with a state. Military expenditure was around 70% of the budget.
And now began the disaster of the west.
Under Frederick the great, a great rationalization took place via a series of grand reforms, chief among which was the establishment of the prussian school system that we have all been exposed to.
But his patronage of the arts made Prussia seem cultured in a way it had not before, boosting its standing among the educated elites.
It was an unfortunate coincidence that at this period of time, being a reform-horny absolutist militaristic kingdom REALLY paid off.
Prussia mustered its efficient system to industrialize more rapidly than any other territory. Enormous wealth and leverage ensued.
One could say that while Britain explored, Prussia exploited, though that is probably a wild oversimplification. But in broad strokes, it captures the essence of it.
Prussia reaped the rewards of britain's risky tinkering.
Fast forward to 1871. The french long-standing strategy of keeping the german states fractured had finally failed, and the two great continental powers were at war.
People expected the Franco-Prussian war to last for many years. It didn't even last one. Prussia was superior.
And pretty soon, what had been called Prussian institutions and culture were German institutions and culture. And admired globally.
Even Japan, who was in a hurry to modernize, had imported mainly British and French experts during the 1860's and 70's, but promptly switched to Prussian
The world went Prussian.
And so, the military logic of a traumatized and insignificant small German dutchy, became an indistinguishable part of the West.
Today, people assume that the prussian system is the cause of western success, though it is more accurately described as a parasite on it. Had its story played out 200 years earlier, it would have fallen under its own weight.
But because it had the opportunity to capitalize on the unprecedented innovation of its neighbors, it prospered and won.
But at a cost. A huge one. The tradeoff is subtle, but recognizable all around us.
Germany continued to excel in most areas - science, technology, culture - for many decades after unification. But the military logic at the heart of it exerted its own gravitational pull on the rest of the system. And still does.
The importance of control meant that political choices tended to go in the direction of more centralization, more formalization, standardization... you know the drill by now.
Turning around, opting for more freedom, less control, seemed like opposition to the entire system. There is a momentum to centralization; in the absence of a great opposing force, it begets more centralization.
The abandonment of the gold standard in 1913, from this perspective, was just another domino falling.
The irony is that Germany could have saved itself both world wars. They had already won the most important battle of all; the battle for the soul of the West.
I think most of the trouble we're seeing today is a result of that very same Prussian militarism. Or call it exploitation mode. Or controlmaxxing.
We need to exorcise that logic from Western culture, root and stem, and rediscover the value of decentralized playful discovery. Bitcoin may be an important part of forcing that shift.
But what else is needed? That is the topic of my next thread, but for now:
The first step in solving a problem is to formulate it, which I have done.
Please help me spread the word.

2026-04-13 23:17:44 CEST

Why is science broken?
That it is broken is beyond doubt. Universities are selecting clever hacks who can publish 5 bad papers per year over polymaths. Most fields haven't seen meaningful progress in decades, and the pure inflationary bloat in just about everything spells doom.
As I wrote about earlier, society is inundated with what I call controlmaxxing. Formalization, specialization, standardization, quantification, and so on.
At a deeper level, this can be defined as "optimizing for exploitation".
For those who are not familiar, the exploitation/exploration-dilemma is a universal problem that arises in complex adaptive systems for acquiring resources.
It's a fundamental tradeoff problem, which presumably exists in all species and cultures, from bacteria to civilizations.
Exploration is the open-ended, risky, playful, creative, neophilic, ADHD-like mode, optimized for *finding* resources.
Bacteria's random walk algorithms, to the restless and impulsive behavior of children. It's what one does when the direction or goal is unclear. Chaotic.
Exploitation is about what to do when the resources are found, and the goal is to *extract them* as efficiently as possible.
It is in some ways what we mean by adulthood: Executive function, discipline, getting shit done efficiently.
The dilemma arises from the fact that there is no way to know when it's time to switch from one mode to the other.
You can never be sure that switching modes, or staying in the same mode, won't turn out to be a mistake.
Eg. when do you stop researching and start writing?
It's a fascinating topic. Alison Gopnik has written about extended childhood as a solution to the exploration/exploitation-dilemma as it pertains to humans: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article-abstract/375/1803/20190502/31298
But this dilemma is all around us, at every level.
Most interestingly, it is ailing western civilization.
I would claim that we have been stuck in exploitation mode for about 150 years, starting about 1871 (a topic for my next thread).
To save western civilization, we need to get back into exploration mode.
Science is stuck in exploitation mode. The supremacy of statistical modeling is a sure sign of it.
The "gold standard" of research isn't really science at all, but a lemon squeezer that makes the paucity of good theories less of a problem. It's just engineering.
Again, the signs of this are everywhere, if you look for it.
Eg. http://Wtfhappenedin1971.com.
No it wasn't Nixon and the gold standard; that was a symbolic gesture that confirmed that Bretton Woods had been a fiat standard all along. It *can't* be the reason things changed.
It was about culture.
First, it was a political shift. In 1971, 18 year olds got the vote, and in the coming years, catering to baby boomers became a winning strategy. It remained so until the late 2000's.
And culturally, the self-perpetuating logic of controlmaxxing reached a phase shift.
The hippie movement and the student rebellion got absorbed by the empire. The rebellion settled for money, leisure, status and surface accomodations.
Thus, the cultural war that had been going on for 100 years was finally settled in favor of exploitation. Order would reign supreme.
And nowhere was this more evident than in social science. If you show me a genuinely good article on leadership, education, psychology or economics, I will bet that it was written before 2000. If it's really good, before 1980.
The structure of science became that of efficient production.
That is why a master's degree in education, sociology or psychology, probably won't contain a single grand theory proposed by someone who is still alive.
Because proposing grand theories are high risk and low reward. It is not what science is about anymore.
It is also why, if you subtract digital appliances, you probably can't spot anything around you now that wasn't around in the 1970's.
Science today is mostly about sucking dry the treasury of knowledge built up from 1870-1970. Exploitation.
In my next post, I'll talk about how we ended up on this course, how it all began. It starts, like so much else, with Martin Luther.

2026-04-13 23:09:08 CEST

Most (social) sciences are split into a quantitative and qualitative camp.
It's not just about methodology. These camps are so different that they're almost unable to talk to each other.
In economics: Neoclassical vs. austrian
In education: School effectiveness research vs. pedagogy
In general: Statistical plug-and-play research vs. eclectic ad hoc mumbo jumbo.
(OK, it's not all bad, but the vast majority of published science now seems to be garbage)
Hilariously, in organization theory, the meaning of the word 'organization' is disputed. Quantitative researchers do not consider voluntary, religious or political organizations to be.. well, organizations.
They want comparability, clean datasets and tight definitions.
They also want formalisation, standardization, generalizability, objectivity (as in, no human sentiments), predictability, precision, control, efficiency, quantification and replicability.
I probably could go on, but I refer to this set of... processes, as 'controlmaxxing'.
I've come across two other areas where people are keen on controlmaxxing: The army and industry.
What is going on here?
It has to do with optimization in simple systems. Linear, designed systems are more efficient when you control everything.
(But dynamic, adaptive systems break down, more on that in another post)
Interestingly, the best factories strike a balance between control of the production process, and careful stewardship of the much more complex social layer.
This is known as "lean", "TPS", "scrum", "ToC" and so on in organization theory, but it all boils down to the same.
So why does science look and feel like a factory floor?
One reason is that it is designed as a factory floor. Many researchers literally have to meet publishing quotas to keep their job, and statistics turns out to provide a neat plug-and-play template for the "production" of science.
But it also has to do with centralization.
Controlmaxxing solves the principal agent-problem, and so any central authority will be attracted to it.
And the agents who adapt most efficiently, are rewarded. Goodhart's law, and a destructive cycle of fakery is set in motion.
So the question is: How did we get here, and how do we get out?
Or maybe your question is "Martin, what the hell are you talking about?".
In any case, I will strive to make it clear in the coming posts.

2026-03-09 08:21:31 CET

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Seems to me that most people using phrases like «not really decentralized» are hardly better than people saying «not real communism».
Question isn’t even whether it’s sufficiently decentralized, but whether it *can be*.
There’s always a slide towards centralization, because it often pays off for the centralizers. That’s fine. What you need is a mechanism for decentralizing when it gets out of hand.

2026-02-23 20:30:34 CET

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People think honor cultures are bad, but that’s just because their cultures often are shitty.
It’s like saying DVD-players are bad just because people mostly watch shit movies.

2026-02-23 20:28:40 CET

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Honor cultures = social credit systems.
Bottom-up, informal social credit scoring is necessary for civilization. We need to get back to that.

2026-02-23 20:06:27 CET

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I would like to get my chat group off telegram. Should have the option to just clone that setup.

2026-02-09 21:38:28 CET

Human civilization has always been, and is to this day, shaped by a series of compromises between culture and technology - both in the broadest sense possible.
This is not bad, we want it to happen. Because we’re utterly dependent not just on technology, but continued technological growth. And not just because we need better technical capabilities, but also because it forces culture to improve (printing press is a case in point).
The monster we’re fighting now is a parasite that in one sense has always been there - the cluster of centralization, optimization, quantification, formalization, standardization, as well as short-sighted risk analysis and top-down linear thinking that lends itself to all resource exploitation.
It’s not always bad, and indeed often necessary. But it is self-reinforcing, and can quickly get out of hand.
It came into our culture after 1871, when the Germans offered the world final proof of the superiority of their militarized model of society (by sweeping the french armies off the map in a matter of months), and every western power promptly copied their school system, as well as their bureaucratic logic.
The elimination of the gold standard then became a matter of time - an unavoidable victim in the modern project. A centralizing beast had been implanted into western civilization, which is kinda ironic since its success in the first place came of decentralization.
Another irony (or paradox) of the past 100 years is that while unity was sought in politics and statecraft, art and culture faced utter fragmentation and relativism. Dunno what’s going on there, to be honest.
Anyway, what is needed is to abandon the exploitation mode, and get back into exploration mode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitation_dilemma).
Civilization thrives when it has frontiers, opportunities and freedom - all fruits on the tree of technology.
So I say: Embrace technology, but repudiate the idea that we should control it.
We can’t, and shouldn’t try to.
It affects us as much as the other way around, and for most of human history, that has been a very good thing indeed.
(This is not a comment on Core vs. Knots, btw.)

2026-02-07 14:36:42 CET

I’m hopeful that complexity theory offers a way forward in social science. That would provide a major ipgrade in the way we speak about politics, economics, society, even ethics and relationships.
Once you understand the fundamental difference between simple, linear, designed systems, that can be tweaked and optimized, and complex adaptive systems, that can only be gently nudged at best, on the other, a lot of the scientific journal literature looks like geocentric astronomy.
And once you realize that these are two *worlds*, drawing a sharp line through all of reality, between that which can and cannot be quantified, optimized, formalized, standardized and generally tinkered with, solutions to old problems, large and small, seem obvious.
But perhaps the most amazing thing about complexity theory, is that it provides the most forceful arguments for freedom. From its many insights, spanning all the sciences from history and art to physics and economics, a common thread of emergent order and efficiency speaks to the importance of letting systems adapt.
And the irony is that those who constantly tell us that gender, ecosystems and sexuality is complex, do so to justify far more dangerous interventions into far more complex, and far more important systems, such as the market, civilization and the scientific enterprise.

2026-01-05 11:00:47 CET

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npub1j5havsasrxg287p7qh9w4d6fzvkqara67w7vthedm7uwrqynrxzq2n5egq

2025-12-16 08:54:44 CET

«If men must spare women the world, then women must spare men the truth - as though each forever remained alternate halves of the same defenseless child»
- R. Scott Bakker

2025-09-12 21:11:17 CEST

We’ve been here before guys.
Knut Hamsun was crystal clear: he supported Hitler because he saw him as the only defense against communism. And why did he – along with hundreds of thousands of other Europeans in the 1920s and ’30s – believe that fascism was necessary to fight communism?
Because the liberal elites lacked the backbone to defend Western civilization against the communists’ subversive tactics. This is established history: fascism arose as a reaction to communism.
Orwell understood this in Spain, and he tried to warn people about it in Homage to Catalonia. Fascism and communism feed off one another, because both seek a political game whose currency is lies, subversion, and violence.
The cure is honesty, and a clear understanding of Popper’s paradox of tolerance. A united civil society must say: “No, it is not acceptable to sabotage others, no matter how repulsive you find their opinions,” and: “Yes, we are not just willing, but positively thrilled to enforce this principle with force if necessary”
That is what it entails to defens freedom. Anything less is a green light to escalation, which will end very, very badly.
And I want to stress this, because it is EXTREMELY important: what we need is not moderation. What we need is a fierce, uncompromising, radical defense of liberal priciples. We need an unshakable, absolute zero tolerance for violence, sabotage, cancel culture, threats, and abuses of power.
In that sense, it is deeply worrying to see how toothless and uninformed our leaders are. They are the ideological kin of those who watched, pathetically and impotently, as Hitler tore down the last remnants of democracy in 1933.
It is also worrying to see conservatives gleefully try to get people fired for tasteless comments about Kirk.

2025-09-12 20:58:45 CEST

To understand the way forward, there is nothing better than reading The Beginning Of Infinity by David Deutsch.
https://blossom.primal.net/23dc4946fb73870fac2a54071a09171a56c5a3a53898416f415da7d29199655c.jpg

2025-09-12 20:56:55 CEST

Become a radical, or watch society get destroyed by radicals.

2025-09-12 20:54:57 CEST

Make no mistake: This has happened once before.
Do not run. Become an extremist for tolerance and freedom.
https://blossom.primal.net/852f6808618ef371cd7c37982bdede567043adfba4df189ce53f15047116f284.jpg

2025-09-12 20:53:10 CEST

The alternative to the European Union is not a Europe divided.
It is a Europe with strength and confidence.

2025-04-18 23:31:40 CEST

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Seems I’m wrong… it is a complex system, but it is a very peculiar one.
I think it may exhibit more permanence than any other complex system, due to its ability to keep itself instantiated by human minds, and its minimalistic and foundational utility.

2025-04-18 23:21:43 CEST

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I’m being purposefully pedantic here, but what complex systems do is keep themselves in equilibrium.
Question is: Is bitcoin a complex system?
I think not.

2025-04-18 23:19:40 CEST

I wrote a bitcoin-pitch disguised as an article about technology.
https://audaciousdenizen.substack.com/p/technology-makes-you-ungovernable

2025-03-25 08:14:39 CET

The most important misunderstanding about quantum computers IMO is the largely implicit idea that companies in 2025 are able to build sufficiently fault resistant systems.
Google can’t build a non-racist image generator, or stop itself from ruining its own products, BUT they’ll build a 10 million qbit QC before 2035?
Come on…
If it were batteries, I might’ve been there with you. Better batteries will be incredibly profitable, there’s a real race there. But compare the hype and the results surrounding SS batteries since 2015, and ask yourself whether it makes sense to be more optimistic WRT a technology that is less useful, less profitable, more esoteric and edgy…
I think not. Indeed, I don’t think Shor’s algorithm will be breaking anything in my lifetime, even though I think we’ll have fusion. It’s not pessimism, merely a proper respect for how hard it is to build quantum computers.
https://m.primal.net/PsNB.jpg

2025-03-25 00:01:23 CET

The absolute state of Euopean politics these days
https://m.primal.net/Prvs.jpg

2025-03-11 00:06:10 CET

Might as well start posting here right away. I mean who are we kidding… Europe’s totally gearing up to shut down X.

2025-03-11 00:02:10 CET

In Norway it is now faux pas not only to support Trump, but letting Trump-supporters go about their business.
It’s taken on hysterical moralism in the blink of an eye.

2024-09-04 09:14:49 CEST

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And the fact that economics IS just another social science among all the others in modern universities - and a disparaged one at that - indicates that money is not truly a concept in neoclassical economics.
I believe Mises made this point over 70 years ago. Abstracting away money prices makes economics meaningless.

2024-09-03 20:54:45 CEST

I think there is no race. The internet is actually running laps around legacy institutions, and has been for years.
It’s just not obvious to everyone because measurements are bad.
It’s not about who makes the fewest errors, but who is learning fastest.
It’s not about who is biggest, but who is growing fastest.
It’s not about who is the most powerful, but who is most flexible.
Bitcoin beats banks. Twitter beats universities. Youtube beats school. I think this will only get broad recognition after the fact, when people start sifting through the debree of collapsed fiat institutions.
#note14hq…fhtf

2024-09-03 01:18:12 CEST

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Free speech is a value, a project to maximize the ability of people to form networks and exchange information.
It’s not about the state, but people coming together to learn.

2024-09-01 17:24:58 CEST

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I’m certain this is just me being a noob, but how do I search for episodes (and not just podcasts, clips etc)?
https://m.primal.net/KYwL.jpg
https://m.primal.net/KYwN.jpg

2024-09-01 17:19:52 CEST

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Freedom must always be evolved. Tyranny is engineered.

2024-09-01 17:14:12 CEST

I don’t care how nice you are, how otherwise ethical and productive and intelligent:
If you support censorship, you’re my enemy.

2024-08-30 22:58:03 CEST

There is nothing I hate more than having to deal with the condescending advice of academic supervisors, whose depthless confidense comes from a much honed ability to dissemble and confuse on basic questions of scientific inquiry.
In reality, they’re merely enforcing faux rigour in a cargo cult that has nothing to do with truth seeking or genuine original argumentation. Being right, doing something new, or even just contributing to solving a problem, is frowned upon. You’re supposed to just do the thing, with no ambition at all, and prove that you’re a good boy - willing to spend endless hours doing something that’s pointless, boring and technical.
Because that’s what employers like to see. Everyone knows that ideas can cause trouble.

2024-08-30 22:42:58 CEST

Welcome, Brazilians 🥳

2024-08-29 15:01:18 CEST

https://m.primal.net/KTdG.jpg

2024-08-29 14:58:50 CEST

https://m.primal.net/KTcw.jpg

2024-08-29 14:53:44 CEST

Few
https://m.primal.net/KTcZ.jpg

2024-08-29 14:46:24 CEST

Challenge:
Go to r/phd, read some posts and discussions, come back here and tell me these people are in it for the learning and their love of knowledge.
Or even that it’s not all just a status game.
You can’t do it, because academia is utterly corrupted, root and stem.

2024-08-28 23:14:57 CEST

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I’ve met several parents of illiterate children as old as 11-12 years. There’s bo research here, but anectdotally they will learn to read, quickly, when they need it (which they will). The principal of Sudbury Valley claims they’ve not seen a single case of dyslexia, which he blames on coercive reading instruction.
So, maybe I’m misunderstanding your second paragraph, but it doesn’t make sense to me. They come out of the womb well prepared for self directed learning, and how do you, as an external observer, distinguish cheap dopamine hits from learning? (I don’t think it’s possible).
That said, all kids are different, as are parents, and I don’t mean any of this in a judgemental way. I generally assume parents know best what works for them.
I have some do’s and dont’s, but mostly fail to adhere to’em. I just try to avoid coercive measures, be open to them being right and me being wrong, enforce (my) boundaries and be honest.
Our #1 rule is «pick your battles». Stuff generally work out, and relaxed parents are a resource worth protecting.

2024-08-28 08:55:05 CEST

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Not much

2024-08-28 08:43:05 CEST

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Very interesting. I come at something similar from a different angle here.
https://primal.net/e/note1yf00y4a4skdz7j2hmhy8y36n5cjkp2hf8v2ejsf06dpq83rj80hq6sc7h4

2024-08-28 03:33:52 CEST

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Unschooling involves rejecting the idea that there is a set of skills and knowledge that every human is required to learn within a certain timeframe.
So I don’t care if my children learn how to calculate percentages, the names of dead kings or how to spell. All I care about is that they learn *something*, enjoy the process, and through this learning acquire marketable skills and the ability to connect with other people.
The basic idea is that while children are not adults, and should not be treated as such, they are nevertheless *people*, and have certain unaliable rights. Foremost among these is the right to spend their attention on what they deem interesting. And yes: so long as it doesn’t negatively impact the rest of the family, that includes the right to spend all day playing computer games and eatching youtube.
It’s an educational philosophy centered on the benefits of self-directed learning and the harms of coercion (see for instance John Holdt, Mobtezzori or Reggio Emilia).

2024-08-27 22:09:27 CEST

What are the advantages of centralization?
We see centralization naturally in times of crisis. Animals have group behaviour protocols for fight/flight situations, as do humans. The defining feature of such situations is that any coordinated action is better than no action, and there are often very few options to choose from.
Centralization is wasteful, and often dangerous, in all other situations. When options are many, when inaction may be wisest, when creativity and more knowledge is needed to make good choices. Then you want a proliferation of guessing, testing, criticizing, creation.
Now ask yourself: is it a coincidence that everything is constantly framed as a crisis?

2024-08-27 21:56:05 CEST

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Not this time. I was looking for an excuse, but it was all about schooling and education today.

2024-08-27 20:49:36 CEST

Had a 4 hour visit from Norway’s biggest newspaper today, to talk about my work/activism, unschooling and «following the dopamine».
My mom wondered if we felt safe that they wouldn’t do a kind of hit piece, and it occurred to me that we’re privileged, even when compared to real celebrities, in that there is nothing they can do to hurt us.
See, we both earn our money from our followers on social media, and they generally don’t care what the newspaper says. Indeed, if they do care, I don’t want them as clients, so a hit piece would be a useful filter for me.
I think a lot of people don’t appreciate the absolute power that comes from owning a paying audience of actual fans. You become impervious to legacy institution fuckery. Think about it: Does Mr. Beast need youtube as much as youtube needs Mr. Beast?
This flower has barely started budding. In 10 years, most legacy institutions will be obviously and ubiquitously seen as second rate. The cheap version. We’re already winning.

2024-08-27 15:20:23 CEST

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I didn’t know that, but who am I to argue with the wisdom of ur mom

2024-08-27 09:58:09 CEST

In Spain, kids start school the year they turn 3.
In Norway, the year they turn 6.
From the point of view of Spaniards, all Norwegians practice unschooling from 3-6.

2024-08-27 09:55:10 CEST

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Norway is the Nigeria of Europe. Oil/gas, corrupt government and infamous entrepreneurial spirit

2024-08-27 08:17:03 CEST

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2024-08-27 08:11:54 CEST

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https://m.primal.net/KPFD.jpg

2024-01-26 01:03:13 CET

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Those burns sting a lot more when carefully written on a typewriter. Damn.

2023-11-14 16:33:14 CET

Pre-sale of the norwegian version of the bitcoin stabdard is open.
Perfect gift for friends and family.
Every last one of them.
https://bitcoinbook.shop/products/bitcoin-standarden?ref=thaulow

2023-09-10 22:09:03 CEST

Had anyone thought about setting up a relay that hosts syllabus in pdf?
Would that be yet another good use case for nostr?

2023-08-27 16:03:30 CEST

Most people have their personal details stored on a bunch of servers, especially from KYC.
In a later phase, could cathedral operatives start fucking with your identity? What would you do to stop them?
Seems like yet another use case for nostr: verification of identity.
Has someone written about this?

2023-08-15 03:53:45 CEST

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Hey, I’ll be buying anyway when I have the money. No matter the price.
But I didn’t plan on having to be nervous about the price taking off, which I can’t help but be 🤷‍♂️

2023-08-14 23:03:14 CEST

Was forced to sell the last of my bitcoin today to pay for living expenses. All credit cards maxed, no options left 😭
Please assure me that I’ll have time to buy it all back before it goes to the moon.

2023-07-15 13:08:12 CEST

Anyone looking for someone to take care of their enormous villa in Spain, by any chance?
If so, I’ll do it free of charge.

2023-07-07 17:21:40 CEST

Tell me your problem and I’ll suggest a solution. If it’s good you send me sats.

2023-07-07 07:40:52 CEST

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I’m stealing some of these just FYI

2023-07-03 23:10:52 CEST

How can he post so. Many. Memes?!
npub1z324cpkjv9ay5fanw7rex5847dy7h3ndvaej2hy2vmc7r8c35res3x2kje

2023-07-03 23:09:34 CEST

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That’s a follow and a tip good ser 😂