Rituals, Virtual Models, And More
5 interesting learnings from March 2023
Hello hello,
Welcome to all the smart folks who’ve joined in recently.
With today’s piece, we’re going back to a format that I had tried out in the early days of this newsletter.
The entire point of starting the Learning Machine was to articulate everything I’m learning from a variety of sources- books, articles, podcasts, videos, etc, and share them with you every week. I hope that this newsletter itself becomes a tiny part of your learning machine.
But to help you build a good stack of knowledge sources even more, I have decided to restart monthly roundups- a collection of 5 ideas from 5 different sources (and hopefully very different disciplines). Think of it like a juicy-ass digest, full of interesting ideas and attached links (all headlines are clickable) if you get intrigued and want to explore any particular topic in greater depth.
The idea is to make it snacky yet interesting while giving you the choice of going in-depth wherever you choose. Let’s go:
Having vs Being
Erich Fromm had this insightful idea that we have 2 modes of living: having and being. Having is all about controlling objects and manipulating them to solve our material problems. Being is about being something- being in touch with our inner selves, becoming the ideal person, and experiencing spiritual growth. Most problems of modern society stem from a modal confusion- of trying to solve our “being” needs by having more. Having more sex instead of falling in love, buying more cars instead of being more self-aware and content with the conditions of life. The market profits from this confusion- and it’s on us to see through the charade and pay attention to the second mode. A quick test is to evaluate how often we ask ourselves “Who do I want to be?” and how often we do things to meet those goals. Compare that with how we’re always busy asking ourselves “What do I want today/tomorrow” and how much we chase those (having) goals. For most people, all of life passes away focusing on the latter.
Optimal Screwing Strategy
Balaji Srinivasan made a bet that the US dollar would hyperinflate and Bitcoin would moon to $1M in 90 days. That’s ballsy. Many think it’s the classic pump-and-dump with a bit of sophistication thrown in. Some say it’s an insane marketing stunt. It might be both. But listen to his reasoning and some interesting points emerge. Balaji’s mental model is: Wall Street essentially works on the most optimum strategy to screw others and make money off of them. It’s as zero-sum as it gets. Bankers love using endlessly complicated jargon so people can never hope to understand what the hell they’re saying, and thus successfully divert their attention from all the rot that’s brewing up. The fact that SVB was insolvent was buried away in a footnote of a painfully long report so nobody would ever find out. Unfortunately, some nerds did and it eventually revealed the bank’s situation. But you get the trick.
The Value of Rituals
Many of us dismiss rituals as mere stupidity. But peel the layers and one realizes that there’s a deep adaptive value to these practices. One big advantage of rituals is anxiety reduction. In times of troubling uncertainty, going back to certain rituals provides the necessary psychological comfort to be able to tide with such times. But that’s just not it. Anthropologists who observed certain painful rituals of self-torture in Hindu communities in Mauritius observed in control-group experiments that the ones who suffered the ordeals were much more likely to offer charitable donations and much less likely to cheat others in economic games!
Virtual Models
Combining chatGPT and image generation engines like Midjourney can even threaten the most unexpected jobs- those of Only Fans models. One of the popular services that people pay for is some dirty talk with a sexy, voluptuous model. But who said that model has to be an actual human? Image generation can produce the model of your dreams (who, from your POV, is more attractive than any other woman on Earth), and train GPT on your previous chat data so it learns to have precisely the kind of conversations that arouse you. Put together, these technologies might pose a real threat to the women relying on these platforms to make a living. Time shall reveal how big a role human biology and real-ness play in this equation.
Eliminate and collude
The history of capitalism is replete with examples of corporations driving down the price of products till they could kill all competition, and then the remaining players would conveniently collude to raise prices and maintain a cartel. People might voice out their concerns about such shenanigans, sure. So the way to circumvent that is to control the narrative. It’s not for publishing shitty listicles that Mr. Bezos decided to buy the Washington Post. It was an astute business move aimed at managing perceptions.
Thanks for tuning in! I’d be obliged if you reciprocate and share new stuff you learned this month which blew your mind. And if you got this article from a friend and aren’t on the email list, go ahead and subscribe already: