I appreciate people across the political spectrum, and have friends in multiple worldview camps. Especially since they are often from different countries with different contexts. My friends do tend to cluster in certain areas due to our shared interests (i.e. I am freedom-oriented in general), but there are people who consider themselves to be anarcho-capitalists and others that consider themselves to be aware progressives, for whom I would invite them to my home and stay in our guest area.

But I have a visceral disgust toward people who I perceive to be playing a role or being consciously fake. I'm not against people playing an actual obvious caricature for satire of course. But in the modern era, there is a tremendous amount of audience capture, gaslighting, fake social media influence that is meant to come off as genuine, and influencers and politicians treating their audience as though they are literally retarded.

Once I perceive someone as fundamentally fake and consciously playing a false role that they pretend is real to their audience, they're done to me. This behavior has been on an enormous uptrend in the past few years, much to my provocation. It's an acceleration of cynicism. Those that do this are intelligent but cynical toward their audience, manipulating them either for personal gain or for their political purpose.

Be aware of this trend.

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I decided I was drinking too many cappuccinos, so for the month of April I am drinking zero coffee.

Felt vaguely “down” for a couple days but now feel better.

I'm convinced the most powerful insight that one can have, in order to see the world in the most a dispassionate analytical lens possible, is to fundamentally come to understand where value-judgements enter our human arguments and understanding about the world. These things are what philosophers call normative arguments.

They are everywhere in your thinking.

Every argument you make about politics, economics and culture, has a normative argument hiding in there. No matter how "evidenced-based" or "objective" you think the position is.

When you learn to parse for that, you immediately see through a lot of the narrative-based reasoning traps that people fall into.

But still, no matter how analytical you are, you're going to have to show up with your own normative arguments, yourself. But being aware of them is critical to intellectual honesty.

Just boarded an eleven hour flight to Cairo. Going to spend the whole time doing a final proof-read of Broken Money to find the straggling typos that me and my editor missed, so my formatter can fix them in the final manuscript.

It’s funny- no matter how many rounds of editing you do on a book, there are always still some there.

With bolt12 you could have reoccurring monthly subscriptions for your favorite nostrafarians.

The middle class isn’t going to like this, but likely will be forced to tolerate it. It’s worse in the US.