Re: nukes, esp. Putin's: my Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised innovations* being used** by the Biden admin ASAP is a KEY to preventing the worst case
* and my subsequent disruptive innovations
** e.g., via my finders’-fee offer PROFITING you and/or others
URLs for said praise*
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-02-13/one-more-thing-on-43-things
blogmaverick.com/2005/01/31/grokster-and-the-financial-future-of-america/#comment-7049 (blogmaverick.com is Mark Cuban’s blog)
* for innovations (INs) that: 1) I developed from 1992 to 2005, 2) are complemented by my INs developed 2005-2022
[Note: Important supplements to the one-page pdf/hard-copy version of this post are below. The pdf:
]
Lowlights of said worst-case (w-c)
From a University of Pennsylvania criminologist’s 2013 book: ongoing molecular-genetics research imperils the world’s ~78 million psychopaths (Ps; e.g., by 2034, the book posits, involuntary “indefinite detention” of Ps—“time bombs waiting to explode”—could/should result from mandatory biomarker-testing of all people); from a 2020 article in Nature: “In the past decade, studies of psychopathological genetics have become large enough to draw robust conclusions.”
From a March 2022 post on the blog of the RAND Corporation (my emphases): “[R]ulers like Putin…conflate the continuation of their rule with their personal survival…Perpetuating their own rule at any cost or risk of nuclear war is…rational for them.”
From a March 2022 article in The New York Times (my emphases): “[A] former U.S. intelligence official for Europe…recently wrote that ‘scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies’ all projected that Mr. Putin would launch a single nuclear strike if he faced limited fighting with NATO or major setbacks in Ukraine that he blamed on the West.”; “A recent Princeton University simulation, projecting out each side’s war plans and other indicators, estimated that it [i.e., said single strike] would be likely to trigger a tit-for-tat exchange that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, could kill 34 million people within a few hours.”; “Late in the Obama administration, two American war simulations imagined …[a] skirmish between NATO and Russia that Moscow met with a single nuclear strike. In the first, Pentagon leaders proposed a retaliatory nuclear strike…[A] civilian White House official…persuaded them to stand down and isolate Moscow diplomatically…. [T]he second simulation ended with American nuclear strikes…”; “Both sides know that rapid nuclear strikes could wipe out their military forces…even their entire nuclear arsenals, leaving them defenseless. This means that both sides face an incentive to launch widely before the other can…”
Re: (preventing) w-c (237 pages of details: ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/threat-to-many-or-most-people)
Via researching a risk re: my planned company (MPC), I read said book in 2015. During 2015-2021, I: 1) read said 2020 article; 2) inferred that said indefinite-detention might be possible years before 2034; 3) learned from a 2016 article on PsychologyToday.com that “a [meta-analytic] review of [48] studies found that the correlation between psychopathy and intelligence is nearly zero [i.e., ~2.3% of Ps have an IQ ≥ 130; ~16% ≥ 115]”; 4) learned from a 2012 article in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin that “[t]oday’s corporate psychopath may be highly educated—several with Ph.D., M.D., and J.D. degrees have been studied…”; 5) inferred it’s very likely that a growing number of Ps are aware they’re imperiled (PsIMP); 6) confirmed that, as a rule, groups that perceive themselves to be imperiled RESIST; 7) learned/inferred: Ps’ resistance to PsIMP could be DANGEROUS for non-Ps, not least because: 7.1) Ps comprise “virtually all” contract-killers (CKs); 7.2) hiring-CKs-often is a MUST for kleptocrats (Ks; i.e., PsIMP suggests/implies KsIMP); 7.3) worldwide, kleptocracy has been ASCENDANT and LUCRATIVE; so it’s at least somewhat likely that: 7.4) Ks have-been/are HELPING to raise Ps’/Ks’ awareness of PsIMP/KsIMP; 7.5) Ps’/Ks’ war chest for resisting PsIMP/KsIMP is LARGE and growing larger rapidly; 8) recognized an indicator that an alliance between Ps and Ks has reached an advanced stage: parallels/similarities between parts of: 8.1) Deutsche Bank, 8.2) the defunct, wildly violent, politically influential/coercive, worldwide criminal-enterprise of the 1980s known as Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI; from 2021 book American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History: “BCCI had created a blueprint that numerous kleptocrats and international criminals would soon follow”); 9) posited a possibility-re:-Ps’/Ks’-resistance that centers on: 9.1) a P gaining the authority to deploy nuclear weapons, 9.2) the gain being a result of many non-Ps making a variant of the “category error” that many Brits et al. made during Hitler’s rise:
From 2008 book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Columbia University historian Adam Tooze: “Hitler had seen himself as locked in a global confrontation with world Jewry. . . . For Hitler, a war of conquest was not one policy option amongst others. Either the German race struggled for Lebensraum [i.e., territory] or its racial enemies would condemn it to extinction.”
From 2019 book Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War: “The failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler [my emphasis (m-e)] stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failures—the failure to rearm sufficiently, the failure to build alliances (not least with the Soviet Union), the failure to project British power, and the failure to educate public opinion—stemmed.”
In March 2022: I learned from 2020 book Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West that “[Putin] was always asking, ‘What is that word beginning with s? Sovest–conscience.’ They don’t have receptors for this.”
From 2019 book The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime, by two Columbia University psychiatrists: “As we move along the continuum to Category 9 [of 22 categories of violent crime], we traverse an important threshold. The remainder of the scale encompasses persons who commit ‘evil’ acts partly or wholly as the result of varying degrees of psychopathy.”
From said March 2022 article in The New York Times (NYT):“The truth is that even Mr. Putin may not know his nuclear red lines for sure. But American fears[*] of Russian nuclear escalation may be dangerous, too[**].”
* From 2011 book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry: [“]She said, ‘I’ve got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.’…So we went through the [fMRI] tests [i.e., brain scans]. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death [m-e]. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.”
** From said 2022 article: “Recent advances in short-range missile technology means that leaders now have as little as a few minutes to decide whether or not to launch, drastically increasing the pressure to launch quickly, widely . . .”
From the 2015 article in The New Yorker subtitled partly “How Xi Jinping . . . became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao.”: “In a meeting in March 2013, he [Xi] told the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, ‘We are similar in character,’ . . .”
Title of a 2019 article in NYT: [Xi ordered:] ‘Show Absolutely No Mercy’: Inside China’s Mass Detentions [of Uyghurs]
Likelihood that Putin is a P with nukes who employs many Ps (PwNePs) and/or that Xi is a PwNePs: ⅓ + ¼ (~58.3%)? ½ + ¼ (75%)? ½ + ⅓ (~83.3%)? That Ps could gain nukes via assassinating a non-P (nPwNePs) and replacing him/her with a P?
Keys to preventing the worst-case re: autocracy-plus-PsIMP: 1) gathering (anticipatory) intelligence re: people who are likely to be hypersexual—psychopathy correlates STRONGLY with hypersexuality—and are (becoming) wealthy, 2) acting on a lesson from Colombia (C)’s experience with Pablo Escobar et al., who: 2.1) were imperiled during the 1980s/‘90s by the prospect of C extraditing them to the U.S.; 2.2) toward undoing the prospect, TERRORIZED C’s population; 2.3) surrendered, (partly) for an eXXXpected* reason.
* From the March 2022 article in Foreign Affairs titled “The World’s Most Dangerous Man”: “[U.S.] must do what it can to reinforce any [fear/FEAR of Putin’s re:] reluctance by the Russian military[, FSB, Kremlin-insiders et al.] to cross the nuclear threshold.”
Key to said gathering: my 2016-‘22 INs that: 1) position MPC to be an IDEAL front company, 2) adapt/expand-on my ‘92-‘15 INs. Keywords (KWs) re: 9215INs: next-gen variant of LinkedIn (e.g., prices in NGLI’s virtual currency will contain/reflect only truthful peer-ratings of work samples) and disruptive complements*; foundational for owning the top market for customized education (e.g., CE-for-AI, which will be to the AI economy what oil has been to the industrial economy); IDEAL for said acting-on (e.g., IDEAL via being scaled-up during said gathering). KWs re: 1622INs: NG variant of Playboy Enterprises c. ‘60s/‘70s (e.g., NG “sugar dating” (SD) via adapting NGLI). *e.g., 200 pages of the first startup-comedy**, a serial “non-fiction novel” that: 1) is a product partly of my ‘06-‘15 focus on learning to run a variant of the books-to-TV/-film company acquired for $100M in ‘12, 2) will HELP MPC’s product-development groups raise equity-crowdfunding (ECF) en route to spinning off, 3) will double as the first flowmantic-comedy (flow is the state-of-mind that enables top performance/problem-solving; often, “group flow” sparks romantic attraction; NGLI will give rise to MANY flowmances), 4) can spin-off the startup-camedy (SC) I’ve researched and partly designed (CNBC.com: “CamGirls: The New Porn Superstars”; the SC’s working-title: Sexcerpts and the City; SatC would: 4.1) showcase adapted-NGLI, particular-AI-for-SD, (guest-)camgirls,...; 4.2) spin-off SCs that’d raise ECF en route to highest-bidders/part-owners casting (partly) via couches), 5+)... **2022 version of my comedy-opener:
“Eighteen states,” I said, “have legalized recreational marijuana. A lot of partying happens away from home. Smoking weed gives people the munchies. Many popular night-spots don’t serve food. So there’s a greenfield opportunity at the intersection of mobile storage, weed storage, and food storage. Specifically, an opportunity for OSG [The Opportunity Services Group; i.e., MPC] to patent my design of clothing-pockets that close via Ziploc.”
Mindy’s eyes widened for an instant. Then her lips formed a thin smile.
“I see you’re worried about developing laugh lines,” I said. “You shouldn’t be. Laugh lines are no match for modern cosmetic surgery. After all, cosmetic surgery is getting so advanced that, soon, it will be a simple matter to make a woman’s face after surgery appear completely different than her face before surgery.”
Then I tried to appear struck by a flash of insight.
“Which means,” I said, “that soon millions of Caucasian women will find it impossible to get a date! Unless . . .”
I picked up the handset of my desk phone, then appeared to dial an extension.
“It has come to my attention,” I said into the handset, “that OSG can profit obscenely by purchasing the rights to develop and market the only DNA test that enables a woman to prove she’s not Lorena Bobbitt!”
Mindy laughed.
I restored the handset to its cradle, then used my laptop. A new presentation-slide appeared on the wall-mounted screen:
From a 1978 article in The New Yorker: “‘When it comes to saving a bad line, [Johnny Carson] is the master’—to quote a tribute paid in my presence by George Burns. . . . One sometimes detects a vindictive glint in Carson’s eye when a number of gags sink without risible trace, but [Tonight Show writer Pat] McCormick assures me that this is all part of the act . . .”
— End of one-pager —
Supplements (more precisely, a bridge to the 237-pager (237P; 237P was completed in January 2022, so isn’t designed to follow the one-pager; the below is mostly from 237P (e.g., book excerpts that are in 237P but aren’t prefaced below by “From 237P:”))
— More re: the likelihood that Putin is a PwNePs and/or Xi is —
From a 2019 article on NPR.org: “
Chinese leader Xi Jinping described Russian President Vladimir Putin as his “best friend” . . . “In the past six years, we have met nearly 30 times. Russia is the country that I have visited the most times . . .” Xi said . . .
Title of a 2021 article on CNN.com:
‘Some [ex-colleagues] are just psychopaths’: Chinese detective in exile reveals extent of torture against Uyghurs
From a February 2022 article on Smithsonianmag.com:
Clarke worries that China’s brutal treatment of the Uyghurs will continue indefinitely, as the policies in place are a “cornerstone” of President Xi Jinping’s administration. The Chinese Communist Party has started to use similar categorizations of “terrorism” and “separatism” for democracy activists in Hong Kong.
From the June 2021 article in The New York Times titled “As Dictators Target Citizens Abroad, Few Safe Spaces Remain”:
Russian . . . poisoning [of] a former spy in . . . Britain, or China’s sweeping persecution of Uyghurs abroad . . .
From a March 16, 2022 press release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice:
Lin, 59, of the PRC [People’s Republic of China], is charged with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment [of an American, in the U.S.] . . . Lin works on behalf of the PRC’s Ministry of State Security. . . Lin explained to the PI [i.e., the private investigator who Lin hired] that Lin was working with other unidentified individuals in the PRC to stop the Victim from being elected to U.S. Congress [i.e., to stop said American]. . . . In December 2021, Lin proposed that the PI also consider physically attacking the Victim to prevent his candidacy. In a voice message to the PI, Lin stated: “. . . [V]iolence would be fine too . . . Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right?”
. . . [Lin] also promised [the PI] that “we will have a lot more–more of this [work] in the future . . . Including right now [a] New York State legislator.”
— Re: worst-case thinking associated with said likelihood —
From an article in the May/June 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs:
Although it may seem far-fetched to imagine a great nuclear power choosing to attack a comparably armed adversary, the costs of failing to understand the incentives for such an attack are potentially catastrophic. As [former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara once observed, the United States’ “security depends on assuming a worst possible case [my emphasis], and having the ability to cope with it.” His views were echoed by the arms control expert Bruce Blair, who declared that deterrence “must remain robust under all conditions, including worst-case scenarios in which massive surprise strikes succeed in comprehensively destroying the opposing strategic forces in their underground silos, submarine pens, and air bases.”
From a 2022 op-ed in The New York Times, co-authored by two former members of the U.S. National Security Council staff (my emphases):
In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off nuclear Armageddon.
— Re: Pablo Escobar —
From 237P:
Escobar was a drug-trafficker whose net worth reached $58 billion (in 2018 dollars).
— Re: Escobar et al. perceived themselves to be imperiled —
From the 2018 article titled “Los Extraditables, the Pablo Escobar-Led Gang That Launched a Bloody Campaign [during the 1980s] Against U.S. Extradition”:
The terrorist group . . . claimed “we prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison in the United States . . .”
The other leaders of Los Extraditables were wealthy drug-traffickers.
— Re: Escobar et al. TERRORIZED Colombia’s population —
From 2001 book Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw: (my emphases):
“[Escobar] intended, he said, to use the public’s weariness with [Extraditables-funded] violence to his benefit. He planned to turn up the violence until the public cried out for a solution, a deal.
. . . A communiqué from the Extraditables not long after hammered home the point:
We are declaring total and absolute war on the government, on the individual and political oligarchy, on the journalists who have attacked and insulted us, on the judges that have sold themselves to the government, on the extraditing magistrates . . . on all those who have persecuted and attacked us. We will not respect the families of those who have not respected our families. We will burn and destroy the industries, properties and mansions of the oligarchy.”
“At his [i.e., Escobar’s] peak, he would threaten to usurp the Colombian State.”
“Ever since Pablo’s men had blown that Avianca flight out of the sky . . .”
“[A] total of 457 police had been killed since Colonel Martinez had started his hunt. Young gunmen in that city were being paid 5 million pesos for killing a cop.”
— Re: Escobar et al. surrendered —
From 2019 book Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar:
We watched . . . on TV—the surrender of Pablo Escobar [et al.]. . . . The sprawling “jail” . . . renovated to Escobar’s specifications, so spectacular that it was nicknamed La Catedral [my emphasis].
— Re: said surrender was predictable, given hindsight —
From 2018 book Mrs. Escobar: My Life With Pablo (my emphases):
I started going up to La Catedral several days a week. And while Pablo was meeting with somebody or playing soccer, I’d take the opportunity to organize, rearrange and mend anything in his room that needed attention, but I also looked through the many letters he’d started receiving. There were messages from women all over the world, many of them with photos showing the senders in various poses, many of them naked, and the common denominator was that they were offering themselves to him in exchange for money. I was even more surprised when I read shocking letters from women recalling their recent intimate encounters with him in great detail and inviting him for an encore whenever he wanted; others wrote flowery missives dreaming of another night of passion in La Catedral.
. . . At La Catedral he returned to his old predilection for beauty queens, who visited in droves . . .
From a 2015 article on PsychologyToday.com:
In one of the largest studies of its kind ever published, U.S. psychologists have found a particular aspect of personality in men and women predicts what the researchers refer to as “hypersexuality.” . . . This character trait is—psychopathy.
From the 2015 article on Broadly.com titled “When Women Get Addicted to Sexting”:
Sex addiction (officially known as hypersexuality) missed out on being recognized as a brain-changing clinical disorder like drug addiction in 2013, but a 2014 Cambridge University study suggested it does mirror the latter. It found that when sex addicts were shown pornography, the regions of their brains which process anticipation were more active than those of people without compulsive sexual disorders. The same regions kick into action when drug addicts are shown drug stimuli.
From 2013 book The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime, by said University of Pennsylvania professor of Criminology (and Psychiatry and Psychology):
The striatum is a key brain region that is associated with reward-seeking and impulsive behavior. Studies have shown that it is involved in stimulation-seeking behavior, persistently repeating actions that are related to rewards
. . . We found that our psychopathic individuals [i.e., research subjects] showed a 10 percent increase in the volume of the striatum compared with controls.
. . . [T]he difference between us and psychopaths is that we can say no when tempted by the goodies, whereas psychopaths just want their stuff. And they want it here, and they want it now. For them, reward is a drug that they cannot turn their backs on, and this pushes them along a path of depravity and vice.
— More re: providing Ps with a next-gen La Catedral (NGLC) might be a/the key to preventing the worst-case re: autocracy-plus-PsIMP (i.e., preventing w-c) —
From Twitter:
— Re: the “ick factor”-re:-NGLC (part 1 of 2) —
From 2017 book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, by Graham Allison, Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs:
REVIEW ALL THE STRATEGIC OPTIONS—EVEN THE UGLY ONES [sic]
Related keywords: Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
From 2021 book The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, by Malcolm Gladwell (my emphases):
“The landing on Kyushu was the planned invasion of Japan in November of 1945, an invasion expected to cost the lives of more than half a million American soldiers . . .”
“I asked the military historian Tami Biddle, who teaches at the Army War College, what she tells her students about the spring and summer of 1945, and she recounted a personal story. ‘My grandmother Sadie Davis had two children, two sons fighting in World War II. One had been in the Pacific theater for a long time; one had been fighting in the European theater but didn’t have enough points to leave the war prior to what would have been the landing on Kyushu.’
. . . [Biddle] continued, ‘He would have been in that landing had it not been for the Americans being exceedingly brutal with the Navy and the blockade, with the air war against Japanese cities, and then, ultimately, with atomic weapons . . .
For her, I’m sure that she was quite prepared for us to be brutal in that moment, because she wanted her sons to come home.’”
IMPORTANT re: NGLC-via-OSG (OLC): continuous improvement of OLC (see below) would make associated sex-work increasingly: 1) safe, 2) financially REWARDING*.
* From 237P:
Beyond pairing Ps at MLC [i.e., OLC], MPC would make maximum use of sex workers (e.g., by paying them WELL via leveraging EWPs [i.e., emergency/war powers] to claw back* “profits” from HF [i.e., huge fraud that’s been (de facto) legal in recent years/decades]; by providing them with valuable** showcasing on comedies).
. . .
* [From a March 2022 press release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice (my emphases):
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Announces Launch of Task Force KleptoCapture
. . . “Oligarchs be warned: we will use every tool to freeze and seize your criminal proceeds.”]
From a 2019 article in The Atlantic:
The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him . . . For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to . . . freeze Americans’ bank accounts [my emphasis].
** From 2020 book Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry, published by NYU Press:
[O]f all the models in the sample who have earned $10,000 in any month camming, there was not one who had been camming for less than a year. Alicia once earned $54,000 in one month and averages $11,000 a month; she has been camming for seven years. Quinn, who one month earned $50,000 and averages $5,000 a month, has cammed for five years. Tanya once earned $25,000 in a month and usually makes $10,000 a month; she has worked as a cam model for over eight years . . . [E]xtremely high wages occurred but disproportionately went to full-time cam models who have worked in the industry for long periods of time and who labored incredibly hard to build popular brands.
. . .
— End of excerpt from 237P —
— More re: OLC —
From 237P:
Continuous improvement of a next-gen variant of La Catedral would require:
ideation (e.g., via CE for people, (CE-for-)AI)
implementation (e.g., via teams formed via a next-gen variant of LinkedIn)
funding (e.g., equity-crowdfunding attracted via startup comedies)
continuous lowering of the perceived-risk of producing improvements (e.g., lower via: 1) strengthening the case that we live (partly) in a simcom [details below], 2) leveraging delegated EWPs [delegated by President Biden, ideally])
Maximizing the yield from said continuous improvement would require:
Ps’ awareness (e.g., via comedies)
Ps’ confidence that they won’t be bait-and-switched (e.g., confidence via said parallels between me and a historical figure that strengthen the simcom case)
— End of excerpt from 237P (“More re: OLC” continues below) —
—— Re: the case that we live (partly) in a simcom ——
From 237P:
My Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised* AI-preneurship and the “simulation argument” indicate a >50% likelihood we live (partly) in a simcom that’ll feature my planned startup’s:
comedy-vs.-Trump-2024 . . .
startup comedy . . .
flowmantic comedy . . .
. . .
Re: “‘simulation argument’ . . . >50% likelihood”
Title of an October 2020 article on ScientificAmerican.com:
Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are About 50–50
— End of excerpt from 237P —
—— Re: the perceived risk of improving OLC would be lowered via the simcom case being strengthened ——
From 1997 book Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee (my emphases):
Comedy contains myriad subgenres as well, each with its own conventions, but one overriding convention unites this mega-genre and distinguishes it from drama: Nobody gets hurt. In Comedy, the audience must feel that no matter how characters bounce off walls, no matter how they scream and writhe under the whips of life, it doesn’t really hurt.
—— Re: OSG’s comedy re: OLC would be popular with Ps ——
From 237P:
Keywords: for each of us (e.g., non-Ps like me), maximizing the amount of time we’re in a flow state is a key to thriving amid “superstar-biased technological change” (e.g., amid “winner-take-all” markets); often, flow via collaboration—“group flow”—sparks romantic attraction; keeping collaborators happy . . . polyamory . . . ; human society is a type of “complex adaptive system”; CASs generate “order-for-free” (OFF) at “the boundary between order and chaos”; variant of OFF that seems very likely to emerge soon, partly/largely via group flow and MPC: orgies-for-free (O-F-F); women-FRIENDLY almost certainly; re: w-F and “seems very likely”: 1) “new science” re: “women, lust and infidelity”; 2) women are ~60% of recent college grads in many countries (e.g., the U.S.), so MPC has to be w-F; 3) women can invest B-B-BILLION$ via investing (e.g., via equity-crowdfunding) . . .
— Re: MANY orgies (will) result from people adapting to said tech-change (i.e., to an evolutionary selection-pressure that’s intensifying rapidly) —
From 2018 book Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life:
I will offer an analysis of the largest-ever survey of Americans’ sexual fantasies . . .
89 percent [of respondents] reported fantasizing about threesomes, 74 percent about orgies, and 61 percent about gangbangs . . . [T]he majority of women reported having each of these sex fantasies . . .
More than three-quarters of the men and women I surveyed hope to eventually act on their favorite sexual fantasies.
Tell Me’s author has a PhD, is a former lecturer at Harvard and is a Research Fellow at the Kinsey Institute.
— Precedent for O-F-F, via humans’ closest primate relative —
From 2018 book Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free:
[T]he bonobo, with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA . . .
A 2017 study comparing human, chimp and bonobo muscles confirmed what previous molecular research had suggested: “Bonobo muscles have changed the least [from our common ancestor], which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,” according to the research head of the George Washington University Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology.
. . . [P]erhaps the most remarkable thing about bonobos . . . Basically, they seem to have sex constantly throughout the day, with just about anybody. Meredith Small reports being in a room of three hundred or so primatologists and journalists of some early footage of bonobos in 1991, before much was known about them. Moments after the film began, the room fell utterly silent as the assembled took in the spectacle of these primates having sex more times and in more positions and combinations than most humans in any culture could even imagine.
. . . [B]onobos have sex to diffuse potential tension—when they come upon a cache of food, for example, or a new bonobo troop, having sex is a way to bond and take the stress level down. Parish pointed out that this was happening as we observed them being fed. Once the food was flung down to them, at least one pair of bonobos began to “consort” immediately. Only then did they get down to the business of eating.
. . .
For much more re: flow science and its centrality to MPC, see my lengthier write-ups linked-to above. Book/magazine excerpts from the write-ups:
From 2021 book The Art of the Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer:
Flow may be the biggest neurochemical cocktail of all. The state appears to blend all six of the brain’s major pleasure chemicals and may be one of the few times you get all six at once.
. . . What we can say for sure: all of these neurochemicals help explain why flow tends to show up when the impossible becomes possible. The reason? It’s because of how these neurochemicals impact all three sides of the high-performance triangle: motivation, learning, and creativity.
On the motivation side, all six of these chemicals are reward drugs, making flow one of the most rewarding experiences we can have. This is why researchers call the state “the source code of intrinsic motivation” and why McKinsey discovered that productivity is amplified 500 percent in flow—that’s the power of addictive, pleasure chemistry [my emphasis].
From 2014 book The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance:
“[T]here are extraordinarily powerful social bonding neurochemicals at the heart of both flow and group flow: dopamine and norepinephrine, that underpin romantic love . . .”
“In jazz, the group has the ideas, not the individual musicians . . . When performance peaks in groups . . . this isn’t just about individuals in flow—it’s the group entering the state together . . .”
From 1997 book Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, by eminent scholar Warren Bennis:
Great Groups are sexy places.
. . . [During Apple’s early years, Steve Jobs mandated that] employees share [hotel] rooms when they were at conventions and other professional meetings . . . to limit bed-hopping . . .
From the 2017 article in Wired titled “The Ins and Outs of Silicon Valley’s New Sexual Revolution”:
In Silicon Valley, love’s many splendors often take the form of, well, many lovers.
. . . Some workplaces (coughGooglecough) have quasi-official poly clubs . . .
From 2017 book Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work:
[W]e crossed the country for a trip to the Googleplex. We were there to talk flow states with engineers . . .
[W]e . . . attend[ed] the opening of their new multimillion-dollar mindfulness center . . . Google had realized that when it comes to the highly competitive tech marketplace, helping engineers get into the zone and stay there longer was an essential . . .
We’ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo . . . a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.
In the fall of 2015 we had the opportunity to bring a prototype of the Dojo to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters and engage in a joint-learning project. For six weeks, a handpicked team of engineers, developers, and managers committed to a flow training program, and then capped that off with two weeks in a beta version of the training center.
From the chapter titled “Group Flow” in 2017 book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration:
Patagonia was an early adopter, but soon after, Toyota, Ericsson and Microsoft made flow integral to their culture and strategy.
. . .
Re: the for-free in orgies-for- . . .
— Summary (details follow) —
Order for free is a proposed law of nature, hypothesized at book length in 1993 by a MacArthur Fellow (i.e., a “genius grant” recipient). Believers in the hypothesis include Nobel-Prize winners.
One type of order—complexity [1]—results from “networks of adaptive agents” (e.g., networks of people):
being subjected to selection-pressures that are new and/or are intensifying rapidly
adapting to these pressures
Adaptation that yields/increases complexity occurs at the boundary between order and chaos (i.e., in complex adaptive systems, agents are clustered at and around said boundary).
This clustering takes shape “for free” via “self-organized criticality” [2].
All told, complexity-for-free is shorthand for ‘complexity via adaptation via clustering-for-free’ [3].
Orgies-for-free (O-F-F) is a variant of clustering-for-free that will (continue to) enable people to adapt to selection-pressures of said kinds.
[1] From a 2013 article on ScientificAmerican.com:
[Stephen] Hawking was asked what he thought of the common opinion that the twentieth century was that of biology and the twenty-first century would be that of physics. Hawking replied that in his opinion the twenty-first century would be the “century of complexity” [my emphasis].
Title of a 2005 book published by Harvard Business School Press:
Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
Title of a 2014 book published by Oxford University Press:
Complexity and the Economy
[2] From 1996 book How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality:
The system had become “critical”! There were avalanches of all sizes just as there were clusters [my emphasis] of all sizes at the “critical” point for equilibrium phase transitions.
[3] From How Nature Works:
Self-organized criticality is so far the only known general mechanism to generate complexity.
. . .
Re: O-F-F would be women-FRIENDLY almost certainly
— Summary (details below) —
The link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender.
A key to popularizing Adver-ties [i.e., MPC’s LinkedIn variant] is facilitating the build-out of complements.
OSG’s facilitating will center on advancing “hyper-specialization,” for reasons explained by complexity science (i.e., this facilitating will center on speeding the complexification of the business ecosystem that centers on Adver-ties).
Some/many of the hyper-specialists in said ecosystem can be expected to make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (i.e., can be expected to compete to make said orgies entirely civilized, increasingly artful, etc.). This can be expected in LARGE part because:
Amazon of CE . . . via popularizing Adver-ties . . .
. . .
So Amazon of CE via making Adver-ties POPULAR with women . . .
OSG could employ/REWARD specialists who make flowmantic orgies women-FRIENDLY (e.g., employ via raising equity-crowdfunding from MANY women).
— Re: the link between professional success and polyamory is unlikely to favor a particular gender —
From Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free:
[A] 2017 study shows that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party.
Untrue’s author is a woman who has a PhD from Yale and a background in anthropology.
From 2013 book What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire:
[R]ecent science and women’s voices left me with pointed lessons:
That women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times . . .
[T]his force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety . . .
[O]ne of our most comforting assumptions, . . . that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.
What’s author is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of five books of nonfiction.
From a 2012 book:
The most patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment . . . and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail their careers.
To put it crudely, now feminist progress is largely dependent on hook-up culture. To a surprising degree, it is women—not men—who are perpetuating the culture . . .
The book’s author is Hanna Rosin, then a national correspondent for The Atlantic.
From What Do Women Want?:
Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University . . . asked two hundred female and male undergraduates to complete a questionnaire dealing with masturbation and the use of porn. The subjects were split into groups and wrote their answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks.
The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers—said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.
. . . When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. Diligently, she ran this part of the experiment a second time, with three hundred new participants. The women who thought they were being polygraphed not only reported more partners than the rest of the female subjects, they also . . . gave numbers a good deal higher than the men.
From 2011 book Chick Lit and Postfeminism, published by University of Virginia Press:
“The overwhelming popularity of chick lit . . . can be traced to the social reality of its readership with regard to work . . . [Via chick lit’s] attempts at synthesis of work and love it shows the challenges of straddling both realms.”
“One of chick lit’s contributions as a genre is the production of what we might call a sexual theory of late capitalism . . .”
“The high number of sexual partners the chick lit protagonist experiences parallels the romance’s pattern of the questing hero’s confronting false or impostor versions of his eventual beloved.”
“Though an offshoot of popular romance, chick lit transforms it significantly, virtually jettisoning the figure of the heterosexual [male] hero . . .
Men are not really valued as individuals as much as means to a lifestyle . . .
Even texts that end with marital happiness present a predominantly depressing take on marriage.
. . . Chick lit heroines’ preoccupation with money . . . is normative with recent real-life social science findings: researchers . . . have found that the worst fear for single women . . . is having no money.”
. . .
— Precedent re: specialists who’d make O-F-F women-FRIENDLY —
Cover of a 2007 book:
— End of excerpt from 237P —
—— End of “Re: OSG’s comedy re: OLC would be popular with Ps” ——
— BONUS motivation: 1) that Ps would have to choose OLC over resisting PsIMP, 2) for the Biden admin to act on my recommendations re: preventing w-c —
I’m uniquely qualified to speed/SPEED the AI-powered advancement of: 1) human-longevity science, 2) medical research more generally. Details: ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/my-candidacy-would-appeal-triply Excerpt:
— Re: human-longevity science —
From 2020 book The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives:
[Google’s] Ray Kurzweil and longevity expert Aubrey de Grey have begun talking about “longevity escape velocity,” or the idea that soon, science will be able to extend our lives by a year for every year we live. In other words, once across this threshold, we’ll literally be staying one step ahead of death. Kurzweil thinks this threshold is about twelve years away, while de Grey puts it thirty years out.
From 2019 book Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To, by the Harvard geneticist who’s one of Time magazine’s “100 most influential people” of 2014:
“It is not at all extravagant to expect that someday living to 150 will be standard. And if the Information Theory of Aging is sound, there may be no upward limit; we could potentially reset the epigenome in perpetuity.”
“How long will it be before we are able to reset our epigenome, either with molecules we ingest or by genetically modifying our bodies, as my student now does in mice? How long until we can destroy senescent cells, either by drugs or outright vaccination? How long until we can replace parts of organs, grow entire ones in genetically altered farm animals, or create them in a 3D printer? A couple of decades, perhaps. Maybe three. One or all of those innovations is coming well within the ever-increasing lifespans of most of us, though. And when that happens, how many more years will we get? The maximum potential could be centuries . . .”
“If I am wrong, it might be that I was too conservative in my predictions.”
“When technologies go exponential, even experts can be blindsided.”
“We often fail to acknowledge that knowledge is multiplicative and technologies are synergistic.”
Title of a 2020 article on CNBC.com:
The ultra-rich are investing in companies trying to reverse aging. Is it going to work?
. . .
— Re: the AI-powered advancement of human-longevity science —
From 2021 book The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider’s Guide to the Breakthroughs that Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . and What You Can Do Right Now (my emphases):
Insilico calls its AI drug discovery tool Generative Tensorial Reinforcement Learning (GENTRL). Once trained, the algorithm starts to “imagine” new molecules with the desired properties. This process not only vastly reduces the time it takes to discover molecular candidates and enables the creation of molecules that do not yet exist in molecular libraries; it does so with a much higher degree of success than conventional trial and error, and at a much lower cost. Insilico has used its AI to find better alternatives to existing medications as well: it developed a precision medicine system called Inclinico that predicts which patients are most likely to respond to a particular drug. It provides this capability as a service to pharmaceutical companies but also ranks the drugs by their predicted ability to target the mother of all diseases—aging itself.
Insilico is not the only biotech company using AI to discover, create, and optimize pharmaceutical treatments. There are already more than two hundred start-ups and multiple big-pharma companies pursuing an ambitious set of goals that will soon completely disrupt the pharmaceutical industry.
From 2020 book Longevity Industry 1.0 (my emphases):
“AI for Longevity is the ‘smart money’ sector of the industry, and can achieve enormous results and accelerated timelines in terms of progress in actual, tangible, real-world Healthy Human Longevity, even with comparatively tiny levels of financing compared to other sectors.”
“The intensive application of AI to all stages of Longevity and Preventive Medicine R&D has the potential to rapidly accelerate the clinical translation of both validated and experimental diagnostics, prognostics and therapeutics, to empower patients to become the CEOs of their own health through continuous AI-driven monitoring of minor fluctuations in biomarkers . . .”
“AI will come into prominence as the critical and fundamental driver of progress in the industry . . .”
. . .
From an earlier write-up of mine:
— Re: OSG’s offerings a/o clones will advance LS [i.e., life-science research] —
Summary (details follow)
Many/most advances of LS will derive at least partly from the “garage biotech” ecosystem (i.e., from (very) small biotech-firms).
In many cases, these firms (LS-GBFs) will be co-founded by specialists who leverage Adver-ties a/o clones to find each other.
In many/most cases, LS-GBFs will:
post-founding, leverage Adver-ties a/o clones to recruit specialists (e.g., employees, contractors)
use a LOT of AI
Many LS-GBFs will seek equity-crowdfunding (i.e., will want to be showcased in/on SCs [i.e., “startup comedies” produced by OSG . . .]).
Many of said specialists will enter their field via CE, not least because OSG will:
race to provide a loan program for CE consumers (i.e., loans that will be variants of today’s “private” student loans)
learn continuously as a means of:
lowering the interest rates of CE loans
providing alternatives to loans (e.g., income-share agreements, livelihood insurance)
improving these alternatives
LS-BigCos will benefit also from OSG’s offerings a/o clones.
Re: garage biotech
From 2011 book Biopunk: Solving Biotech’s Biggest Problems in Kitchens and Garages:
Schloendorn told me his new company had just received a half-million dollar investment . . . To raise money, he needed to show he could create the right conditions for a white blood cell to kill a cancer cell. . . . [Schloendorn says:] “To blow up the first cancer cell—that’s the risk. And so we just went with the minimal equipment needed to blow up a cancer cell. And we could do that at the kitchen table.”
From 2010 book Biology Is Technology: The Promise, Peril and New Business of Engineering Life, published by Harvard University Press:
Biotech . . . technology is changing so rapidly that, within just a few years, the power of today’s elite academic and industrial laboratories will be affordable and available to individuals. . . . It is thus no surprise . . . that garage hacking—that garage innovation—has come to biology.
Re: many/most LS advances (partly) via LS-GBFs
From a 2018 article on CNBC.com:
[P]int-size ventures are driving pharma innovation. The majority of drugs approved in recent years originated at smaller outfits—63 percent of them over the last five years, according to HBM Partners, a health-care investing firm.
Re: LS-GBFs leveraging Adver-ties a/o a clone (part 1 of 2)
From a 2011 article in The Atlantic:
The Rise of Backyard Biotech
Powered by social networking, file sharing, and e-mail, a new cottage industry is bringing niche drugs to market.
. . . FerroKin is seven employees who work from home, and a collection of about 60 vendors and contractors who supply all the disparate pieces of the drug-development process. Rienhoff, a physician and former venture capitalist, founded it in 2007 as a start-up, a virtual biotech company. Since then, his team has picked up talent and resources as needed, raising $27 million and seeing a drug from development into Phase 2 clinical trials.
. . . The small industries and biotech freelancers springing up are, in some ways, like the divisions of the old behemoth drug company, but connected only by the tendrils of the Internet, and the relationships that grow so easily there. Rienhoff is contemporary biotech’s answer to the lost Renaissance man. He pulls the renaissance effect out of the network around him, using . . . the global community to fight the terrible complexity of disease.
Re: LS-GBFs using a LOT of AI
From 2020 book Longevity Industry 1.0 (my emphases):
AI for Longevity is the ‘smart money’ sector of the industry, and can achieve enormous results and accelerated timelines in terms of progress in actual, tangible, real-world Healthy Human Longevity, even with comparatively tiny levels of financing compared to other sectors.
From The Future Is Faster Than You Think:
[T]he speed of drug development is accelerating, not only because biotechnology is progressing at an exponential rate, but because artificial intelligence . . .
Re: LS-GBFs leveraging Adver-ties a/o a clone (part 2 of 2)
From Longevity Industry 1.0:
The fourth pillar, the one with the greatest potential to create real-world effects on human Longevity in short time-frames, and the one with the highest ratios of cost to effectiveness, is the application of AI and Data Science to Longevity.
. . . What the fourth pillar needs for this to become reality, however, is intelligent coordination and harmonization of experts and industry stakeholders (AI specialists, longevity scientists and entrepreneurs, investors [my emphasis] . . .) . . .
Re: GBFs wanting to be showcased in/on SCs
From a 2015 article titled “Biotech in the Garage”:
Sites like Experiment offer nontraditional sources of funding for researchers in the early stages. One example of what the future might hold is a project aimed at discovering a new treatment for Ebola, which recently raised $140,000 in crowdfunding. Before launching the $140,000 campaign, they first launched a $5,000 fundraising campaign, which gave them enough capital to prove some assumptions cheaply by running experiments through Science Exchange. Only after getting positive results did they decide to raise more for the next phase. This lean setup—raising a small amount to test assumptions cheaply then repeating the process with increasing amounts of capital—will likely become more common over the next decade. This mirrors what happens now with software but has only recently become possible in biotech because of the trends mentioned above.
Re: LS BigCos will benefit from OSG’s offerings a/o clones
From a 2019 article in Outsourcing Pharma:
The demand for AI technologies and AI talent is growing in the pharma and healthcare industries and driving the formation of a new interdisciplinary field— data-driven drug discovery/healthcare. Acquiring the best AI startups will dominate the biopharma industry [my emphasis].
From 2011 book The New Players in Life Sciences Innovation, published by Financial Times Press:
Rapid advances in science and its applications, together with changes in market conditions, are forcing a transformation of business models within the life science industries. . . . Perhaps the most obvious change in business models is the gradual demise of the large fully integrated pharma company (FIPCO) and its gradual replacement with the virtually integrated one (VIPCO) . . . based on complex systems of partnerships, both with academia and scientific institutions and with contract research, manufacturing, and sales organizations (CRO, CMO, CSO).
. . . Lilly is quickly transforming itself from a vertically integrated pharmaceutical company into a fully integrated pharmaceutical network that outsources most functions. Merck has chosen to close many of its R&D labs in Europe and relies on a network of collaborative partnerships that include R&D, drug development, and technology licensing.
— End of “BONUS motivation . . .” —
— Re: the advent of O-F-F could be expedited/EXPEDITED by neutralizing Ps —
From 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, by a Harvard professor of biological anthropology:
The decisive form of social control represented by the killing of aggressive males could clearly have had far-reaching significance in human evolution. With regard to the idea that Homo sapiens self-domesticated, the critical question is whether individuals with a particularly high propensity for reactive aggression tended to be killed. The characteristic fact of egalitarian relationships indicates that the execution of would-be despots was indeed systematic.
. . . In the millennia before groups found a way to control the bullies, reactive aggression would have dominated social life in the same way as it does in most social primates such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons. In those species, alpha males achieve their position at the top of their group’s dominance hierarchy by defeating each rival in turn in physical and often bloody fights. . . . The alpha’s bullying is strongly correlated with having high levels of testosterone, which appear to support his motivation to dominate others. To judge from the ubiquity of such behavior in the social primates, our ancestors once followed the same brute fashion.
. . . [T]here is no reason to regard our domestication as complete. How much more domesticated we could become . . . is an open question. Given sufficient sanctions against reactive aggressors . . . humans could in theory become as hard to rile as lop-eared rabbits at a petting farm, which remain gentle even when stroked repeatedly by dozens of eager children.
— Re: the value of gathering anticipatory-intelligence (e.g., via OSG’s NG variant of Playboy Enterprises) —
From 2018 book The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: How the NSA Failed to Protect America from the 9/11 Attacks:
[S]tarting in early summer of 2001, CounterTerror staff, managers, and even the director were worried that something terrible was coming. . . [U]nbeknownst to them, Al Qaeda had pushed back the date of their impending attack from July 4 to September 11. However, warning signs abounded that convinced the counterterror operators that something big was imminent.
. . . Like dominoes falling, events started cascading on top of each other throughout the month of August 2001.
. . . At the president’s ranch in Crawford, his CIA briefer Mike Morrell presented him the soon-to-be-infamous August 6 presidential daily briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
. . . On the afternoon of August 20, 2001, [NSA-er] Maureen Baginski asked Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe to her office. She explained that she was officially terminating their program ThinThread.
From 2019 book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud:
Trailblazer cost America more than money. “Trailblazer was the largest intelligence failure in the history of the NSA,” Binney told me. “By killing ThinThread and going ahead with Trailblazer, the Agency traded the security of the nation in exchange for money.”
This assessment isn’t merely the sour grapes of a manager whose program lost out to a competitor in an office turf war. Tom Drake, who remained at the agency after Binney and the others retired, describes how, shortly after 9/11, he used ThinThread as a testbed to analyze information in the NSA databases from the weeks preceding the attacks. The program, he says, swiftly pinpointed each of the terrorists involved, their communications and movements before the hijackings . . .
— More re: OSG providing a NG variant of Playboy Enterprises —
From 2009 book Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, published by Oxford University Press:
“Playboy tied the pursuit of pleasure to national purpose . . .”
“Writing in Harper’s magazine in 1967, journalist David Halberstam reflected on the years he spent as a foreign correspondent in [communist] Poland, until his unflattering reports about the government caused him to be expelled from the country. Before leaving Poland, Halberstam recounted, he wanted to show his appreciation to a Polish intellectual who had remained a loyal friend during the skirmishes with state officials that resulted in his expulsion. To his surprise, Halberstam’s Polish friend requested a subscription to Playboy, ‘the most important magazine there is.’ When the American journalist suggested that there were other magazines more suitable for the caliber of this man’s intellect, his friend reportedly told him:
‘But you don’t understand how important Playboy is. . . . It is for us the greatest American export in the world. For us it is the good life. The boy, the girl, the pad, with fancy lighting and sports car. The wine bottle, half-empty, then the lights out.’”
“Changes in sexual morality were also linked to developments in the consumer society. Policymakers and captains of industry after World War II upheld economic growth as the fount of national well-being. . . .
Americans had to come to believe that indulging in all the unnecessary items made possible by mass production was a positive endeavor, even a moral one. The widespread adoption of an ethical framework that sanctioned pleasure-seeking . . . helped sustain the nation’s consumer society.”
From 2003 book Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s:
These rebel forces were heavily backed by Hugh Hefner, whose Playboy magazine and nightclub circuit made him a major comedy power broker of the time. Playboy’s panels and interviews showcased all the rising, new, socially relevant wits . . .
— Precedents for my threat-analysis adding value/VALUE —
From a 1960 article by Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling, a “Master Theorist of Nuclear Strategy”:
For a detailed scenario of how [nuclear] war might start, or almost start, we have to turn to the paperbacks.
From the 2016 obituary in The New York Times titled “Thomas C. Schelling, Master Theorist of Nuclear Strategy, Dies at 95”:
In “Meteors, Mischief and Wars,” published in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1960, Professor Schelling looked at the possibility of . . . nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union and reviewed three novels that imagined such an event. The director Stanley Kubrick read his comments on the novel “Red Alert” and adapted the book for “Dr. Strangelove,” on which Professor Schelling was a consultant.
From Meteors, Mischief and Wars:
Red Alert . . . exceeds in thoughtfulness any nonfiction available on how war might start [my emphasis].
From said 2022 op-ed in The New York Times:
Herman Kahn’s clinical projections of nuclear devastation dazzled and horrified a growing audience—his warnings began with a series of Princeton lectures and eventually became the basis of his best seller “Thinking About the Unthinkable.”
From the website of Harvard University Press:
Herman Kahn was the only nuclear strategist in America who might have made a living as a standup comedian. Indeed, galumphing around stages across the country, joking his way through one grotesque thermonuclear scenario after another, he came frighteningly close.
— Precedent for my design of a front-company adding value/VALUE —
From a 2010 article in The New Yorker written by Malcolm Gladwell (my emphases):
When a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, it became clear that the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in modern military history. The story . . . is the subject of the British journalist Ben Macintyre’s brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining [2010 book, titled] “Operation Mincemeat” . . .
The idea for [WWII’s] Operation Mincemeat, Macintyre tells us, had its roots in a mystery story written by Basil Thomson, a former head of Scotland Yard’s criminal-investigation unit. Thomson was the author of a dozen detective stories, and his 1937 book “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” begins with the body of a dead man carrying a set of documents that turn out to be forged. “The Milliner’s Hat Mystery” was read by Ian Fleming, who worked for naval intelligence. Fleming helped create something called the Trout Memo, which contained a series of proposals for deceiving the Germans, including this idea of a dead man carrying forged documents. The memo was passed on to John Masterman, the head of the Twenty Committee . . . Masterman, who also wrote mysteries on the side, starring an Oxford don and a Sherlock Holmes-like figure, loved the idea. Mincemeat, Macintyre writes, “began as fiction, a plot twist in a long-forgotten novel, picked up by another novelist, and approved by a committee presided over by yet another novelist.”
— Re: said ick-factor (part 2) —
Might be mitigated/overcome in part via OSG leveraging schadenfreude; for details, see 237P (esp. p. 168).
— Re: if you’re still anti-OLC —
From 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell:
[Initial v]iewers said they hated them [i.e., All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show]. But, as quickly became clear when these sitcoms became two of the most successful programs in television history, viewers didn’t actually hate them. They were just shocked by them. And all of the ballyhooed techniques used by the armies of market researchers at CBS utterly failed to distinguish between these two very different emotions.
From 2013 book How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, published by University of Chicago Press:
What was distinctive about Cold War rationality was the expansion of the domain of rationality at the expense of that of reason, asserting its claims in the loftiest realms of political decision making and scientific method—and sometimes not only in competition with but in downright opposition to reason, reasonableness, and common sense.
From 2015 book The World the Game Theorists Made, published by University of Chicago Press (my emphases):
“[T]he idea became widespread that the Cold War between the two superpowers was a game in the technical sense of game theory, and in which the problem of how to choose rationally in this situation became perhaps the central problem of the age.”
“[L]ed to the discovery of a number of . . . paradoxes.”
“Schelling argued that ‘the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself.’ The greatest strength a bargainer may possess was actually a certain kind of weakness . . . [Schelling’s] essay therefore explored the concrete details of how this paradox might work itself out in the practical details of economic bargaining and foreign policy alike.”
“While only the induction argument is ‘logically correct,’ ‘nevertheless the deterrence theory is much more convincing,’ and in general, based on his experience, while ‘mathematically trained persons recognize the logical validity of the induction argument . . . they refuse to accept it as a guide to practical behavior.’
Not long after Selten published his account of the paradox . . .”
“However, in non-zero-sum games such as PD [i.e., Prisoner’s Dilemma*], a simple maximizing conception of ‘rationality’ became paradoxical: as Rapoport asked, ‘Can we accept the definition of rationality (based on “doing the best for one self”) which leads to a result which definitely is not the best that each player can do for himself?’ By exhibiting such contradictions and paradoxes, game theory might open the door to the identification of new norms of rationality that pertained to the players as a group rather than to the players as individuals.”
[* “The Prisoner’s Dilemma game—initially dramatized by the mathematicians as a story of cops and robbers—came to stand in for the arms race . . .”]
Nobel laureate physicist Niels Bohr, to a would-be quantum physicist:
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.
— Re: my finders’-fee offer (mFFO) —
From 237P:
Re: mFFO and you acting on it are parts of a textbook approach to preventing/subduing T2M [i.e., threat to many/most people via autocracy-plus-PsIMP]
See: 1) the below excerpt (p. 23) from 2021 book Averting Catastrophe: Decision Theory for COVID-19, Climate Change, and Potential Disasters of All Kinds, by an Administrator of President Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, 2) details re: mFFO (pp. 43-7, 52-3).
— Precedent for preventing w-c via leveraging social/professional networks —
Such leveraging was the key to experts gaining control of America’s Covid response.
From 2021 best-seller The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis:
The only way to get attention for this new tool for disease control, Glass decided, was to write it up in a paper for an academic journal. The scientists at Sandia National Labs worked under the highest security clearance in the federal government, called “Q clearance,” and were prohibited from revealing their work without first seeking approval. The work was his kid’s science fair project, but he was now taking it as seriously as anything he did at Sandia. So he explained . . .
. . . He and Richard and others had spent years creating and selling the ideas that would, if quickly seized upon, prevent a lot of Americans from dying. Those ideas were useful, and yet no one in authority seemed willing to use them. “We were going nuts,” said Carter. Each of the Wolverines went into their contact lists to look for what Carter called “high-value nodes.” People they knew who might influence American policy . . .
The goal was to find at least one state to take the lead and roll out an aggressive response to the virus, introduce the social interventions outlined in the pandemic plan, and create a domino effect. “We had to create an epidemic for an idea,” said Carter. At some point Duane Caneva realized that he had something to add . . . In his two years inside Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, Duane had had various dealings, many acrimonious, with various public officials in states that shared a border with Mexico. One struck him as just the type to grab hold of an entire state and turn it into an example that might lead the nation. “Just got off the phone with Dr. Charity Dean,” Duane wrote . . .
. . . Charity walked them through what had happened back in 1918 and what was happening again, in only slightly different form. She explained how, six weeks earlier, she had arrived at a fairly good estimate of all the important traits of the virus, and she said that once you knew these things about the virus, you could predict its future. She did not tell them that she had spent the previous six weeks in conversations with maybe the world’s greatest redneck epidemiologist [i.e., Carter]. Park and Patil mostly just listened to her and asked questions.
. . . After a couple of hours with Charity, Park and Patil decided that the most useful thing they could do for the state of California was to deliver the contents of her mind onto [Governor] Gavin Newsom’s desk. “Our only job was to make it possible for Charity to talk through a model,” recalled Park. “Our job was to take everything in her brain and get it to the governor.”
. . . Park and Patil presented the model’s output to Governor Newsom’s senior advisers. “When we showed them what the model was saying, it sucked the air out of the room,” said Park. The next day, Governor Newsom issued the country’s first statewide stay-at-home order.
. . . What Charity couldn’t figure out was how, or even if, what she said on the calls found its way into the ears of the decision makers [in the U.S. federal government]—and who those people were. At one point she put the question to James Lawler. “James,” she asked, “who exactly is in charge of this pandemic?” “Nobody,” he replied. “But if you want to know who is sort of in charge, it’s sort of us.”
— Re: acting on mFFO could be LUCRATIVE —
Again, oil of the AI-economy . . .
Possible title of my future memoir: The Biggest Short.*
* The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is the 2010 bestseller by Michael Lewis about the inflating of the U.S. housing bubble that burst in 2008. From The Big Short:
A smaller number of people—more than ten, fewer than twenty—made a straightforward bet against the entire multi-trillion-dollar subprime mortgage market [i.e., said people shorted said market] and, by extension, the global financial system. In and of itself it was a remarkable fact: The catastrophe was foreseeable, yet only a handful noticed.
— End of supplements-to-the-one-pager —
Re: presentation-errors above
From 2012 book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book, co-authored by Guy Kawasaki, a former chief evangelist at Apple:
Every time I turn in the “final” copy of a book [Kawasaki has (co-)authored twelve books], I believe that it’s perfect. In APE’s case, upward of seventy-five people reviewed the manuscript, and [co-author] Shawn [Welch] and I read it until we were sick of it. Take a wild guess at how many errors our copy editor found. The answer is 1,500. [APE is 410 pages.]
And, of course, I’m preoccupied with preventing w-c . . .