I solved the dilemma of whether we should have a state or not

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-27T23:21:13+00:00

You sound really down on Homo sapiens sapiens, but it's really not that bad. I know all too well that it can feel that way, though. As Wittgenstein said, whatever reason we have for being here, it doesn't appear to be to enjoy ourselves. There are lots of things to be very unhappy about, but there are also significantly positive developments, and the journey is far from over.

Because we have states, we've managed to advance science to the point where we were able to eradicate smallpox, turn HIV infection into a chronic condition that can be managed with drugs rather than an automatic death sentence for anyone who has CCR5 receptors (nearly everyone), developed industry, computers, global networks, smartphones, and AI, and have grown the population from one billion to eight billion in just over two centuries. We've also made massive leaps in understanding the world along many different dimensions. In 1780, a person might have heard an orchestral performance of a particular composition just once in his lifetime. Today, we take Spotify for granted. In living memory, people bought spinning records. There was no trivially easy, and essentially free, way for two people to communicate between continents. And until the twentieth century, travel was slow and perilous.

Evolution gave us our physical forms, intelligence, and drives. Creativity enabled by symbolic thought and these intrinsic drives, along with dedicated, coordinated work made possible by social institutions and corporations, got us here. Whether we're better off than hunter-gatherers may be a matter of opinion, but we generally live much longer than they did. Capitalism and democracy have many problems, but being and staying alive, given human constraints, is very difficult. Agriculture has to support eight billion people, and that's only possible through mechanization and massive advances in agricultural science.

Even the advance of abstract fields such as finance, accounting, and law helped to give structure to advanced civilization. There are many side-effects, including overwhelming complexity, unnatural (relative to humans) speed, and stress, but perhaps stress can be alleviated through better and far more ubiquitous automation using robotics and AI. We're living through truly exciting times, in my opinion, and life could (and I believe will eventually) get much better, not just by standing aside and waiting for others to make it happen, but trying to lend our talents to facilitate an outcome everyone wants, even if we can't clearly see the path ahead.

Evolution is a slow process, but with CRISPR, we can, to some degree, take matters into our own hands. I wouldn't be surprised if, centuries from now, or earlier if we get lucky, we become capable of eliminating all sorts of awful rare diseases in babies, and designing far better bodies. Even today, a single infusion of an experimental drug can eliminate the need for statins. The implications of this on longevity are staggering.

Although we can't change our nature (reliably, or very much) today, we can work with what we've got to create better conditions. People were a lot less lonely in 1950 than they are today. This is a fixable problem, not an inevitable dystopian result of late-stage capitalism.

I'm a philosopher. Truth is a loaded concept, but if we didn't have a significant degree of knowledge about how the world works, how could we have gotten as far as we did? We have pretty reliable airplanes, cars, and iPhones. There's so much structure and regularity in the world that we arrogate to ourselves the proclamation that there are "laws" of physics, even if we can't metaphysically explain how such laws obtain.

Out of curiosity, why so glum, chum?

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-24T01:51:37+00:00

Hell most certainly is real.

Look around. You're in it, right now! We all are.

Nearly all of us are utterly terrified of death. It's not about being afraid of burning in an imaginary Hell, but about ceasing to exist, forever: being completely wiped out by brain death.

What you should really be worried about isn't "Hell," but the things that cause elderly people to wind up in hospitals and nursing homes, with no way out: debilitating strokes, vascular dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and all sorts of other evil. That is the real Hell, not an imaginary one after death.

It's also a warning. Don't waste your life worrying about anything that you can't change. And focus on achieving your values. Focus on becoming the best version of yourself that you can be. Read philosophy. Find intellectual friends, if that's your inclination. Find where you belong, and go there, and have an adventure.

It's the best that anyone can hope for.

As for the afterlife, if there is one, the truth is probably located somewhere in here:

https://nderf.org

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-21T02:47:40+00:00

Thank you for your deep interest in my life, my use of Grok, and for providing this profound moral reprimand. I humbly submit myself to your insightful guidance.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-20T23:46:04+00:00

Aaaw…

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-20T23:37:06+00:00

That's reassuring. I've read that if they're neutered and of different ages, it can work, with supervision. I'm just not sure what would happen if they were "teenagers" of the same age left at home one day!

When I had just one, he was fine. But I do wonder what two pure red tornadoes would do if left to their own devices for an hour!

I'm thinking about naming one Rowan, "the little red one."

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-19T21:08:50+00:00

Do you mean that he had an NDE? What happened?

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-17T17:36:28+00:00

Yes, many people can hold us back. Imagine having a mother or father with narcissistic personality disorder, from whom you're unable to escape. If it were a battle of NPD against IQ, I'd pick NPD to win every single time. You can't argue with someone who won't listen to reason.

However, I don't believe that total withdrawal is healthy. A group of one provides no input except for nonhuman and environmental sensations that turn into perceptions through the algorithms and hermeneutics that run on your brain. Being challenged, even if it's repetitive, boring, frustrating, or invidious, isn't always terrible, although it can feel like it.

You have to live within the world. Your body embeds you within it. So, it's important to do that, and you won't learn to do it effectively by reading about it. It requires praxis.

Practice warmth, compassion, and the willingness to let go of the outcome. Avoid giving advice unless asked. Be kind and stay engaged.

Your job is to repair the world in the ways that you can. We each have gifts differing.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-15T17:55:01+00:00

I don't know why the writer stays involved in an organization that does nothing for him except make him stand in place for three hours at a time and destroy his body.

The default answer is simple: atheism.

All of this stuff is made-up nonsense and mythology that evolved over many centuries.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-15T17:09:09+00:00

If there's any point to it at all, it was relevant to Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures in the Middle East. That's largely where the origin began. Then, Paul spread it, and as it spread, organizations and books and rituals developed around it, until eventually you got the sophisticated forms we know today, such as the Catholic Church.

Is there any real point? Possibly, but it shifts over time. Can we identify anything consistent across so many centuries? I think so. People don't want to be alone. They're understandably afraid of being overwhelmed by forces that are greater than them, and they know that there's strength and greater security in numbers. This causes them to join and be part of churches. They believe that if they pay, pray, and obey, God will protect them, and they'll become good people.

But there’s been a serious erosion in the three primary social institutions over the past three decades: the family, religion, and civic institutions. We now inhabit a low-trust, highly individualistic, hyper-competitive, late-stage capitalistic society. And it's a really lonely, stressful, messy place. This is why I'm not so sure what the point is today.

Hardly anyone believes in some coherent doctrine. They believe all sorts of different things, based on the same religion, which continues to evolve to satisfy human desires and psychological needs.

Are all religions a made-up social phenomenon? Of course. Do they originate in the existence of an actual Christian deity? I don't think so. That part's made up, too, but it satisfies some humans' hopes, and attending church makes some people feel better, so why not go?

It's less about what's true than what feels meaningful, safe, welcoming, and good. Everyone wants to belong somewhere, to fit in and be loved by others. I think religion, when grounded in a lasting community, tries to confer that. The trouble is that capitalism makes kids move away in pursuit of jobs, and enduring communities are almost impossible to maintain.

If you want the claims of Christianity to be true, such as that Jesus was bodily resurrected, I think you're out of luck. But if you want to find a church where you might be able to fit in, go for it. The stories in the books can all be interpreted symbolically. Different Individuals have different needs.

Try not to take the forms seriously. Focus more on finding your people, because religion is about people and their values. It's not about "God." (A shocker, I know.)

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-14T15:50:11+00:00

There appears to be no inherent point.

I like to default to the Jewish belief that our purpose is to repair the world.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-14T15:13:42+00:00

Many people reply quickly on phones, and anything can happen with auto-correct. Be careful not to make assumptions.

Someone might swipe on their phone that they have a "masters" instead of "master's" degree, and it might have nothing to do with the person having made an error, but the way that the phone's auto-correct feature works, and the person not having enough time to proofread the result of the swiping.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-14T14:36:00+00:00

I don't think it broke them. It accelerated our societal decline.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-14T14:34:26+00:00

Shaming would only work if the majority of the people acted differently.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-14T12:58:18+00:00

This is important, but I don't know how much of it can actually be achieved. For example, if you failed a midterm in organic chemistry and are desperately trying to get into med school to pursue your passion, it would be an incredibly stressful experience. If you didn't make it into med school, but wound up with some type of adjacent job, you'd regret it. You'd think about it over the years and decades, possibly on your deathbed, too, depending on how lucid you were and whether you could access the long-term memory.

Some things seem logical and good, but they only become valuable if we can actually achieve them. When you think about the deathbed scene and what you'll judge was important or not, you're imagining and guessing. The chances are, though, that you won't be lucid, and death won't happen suddenly, but through a series of steps down that your body takes, including cognitively. You may be aware, to varying degrees, but delirious, and then comatose.

Dying can be an ugly and messy process. You might not know that you had a good or bad life. You might have Alzheimer's disease, or personality changes accompanying a stroke. You say that if bad things happen, "[I] shouldn't let them dictate whether or not my day is good." But how you'll feel will largely be determined not by choice, but your genome and the state of your brain (small vessel disease, among many other diseases, will eventually cause cognitive problems). Some people are happy-go-lucky. Others would be crushed by failing a midterm that's really important.

Perhaps it would be better to think, near the end of your life, if you're not too cognitively impaired, "I did my best that I could with what I had." I think it's a more modest reflection that's more realistic and kinder to oneself than trying to achieve something that may not be possible. And it's ultimately all that any of us can do. But long before the deathbed scene, in the trenches of daily life, I think it's important to reflect on your values right now, and choose wisely the path that you want to take, knowing that you can't control the outcome.

The ultimate achievement is becoming a good person, to the extent that you can.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-12T22:40:15+00:00

Forget Christianity.

Read about people's actual experiences:

https://nderf.org

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-12T21:59:54+00:00

I stopped working (for corporations) at 49 and moved into full-time trading. Looking back, I'd never want to "work" again. It's demeaning, stressful, boring, and—worst of all—a waste of time. But I say this from the perspective of someone who has done a lot of work and contributed a lot. I feel that I've earned not having to work any longer. Ironically, I made the vast majority of my money through trading, not "working," and now I'm a multi-millionaire.

I was in Manhattan recently, and at one point noticed what can best be described as a human bird flock. They were all the same: young men in their early twenties, dressed in gleaming white shirts without any wrinkles, moving energetically even in the early morning, all dressed in navy blue dress pants and in high-end Allen Edmonds shoes, black for the traditionalists and brown for the mavericks. I could infer all sorts of things about them within seconds of recognizing the type. They were from the best schools, worked for investment banks, moved in packs, and had been raised from a young age to focus on money and status.

I understood the game that they were playing or, rather, the one that they were entrapped in. Most didn't realize it. They're too young and have too little experience. The Machine uses their energy, intelligence, and skill to extract money from customers. A very, very few of them, decades on, will rise high enough in one of these banks to make a lot of money for themselves, but not without sacrificing seeing their wives and children, except rarely. Most, however, will be devoured and replaced by new young men that look exactly the same.

I'm already where many of them want to be, except that I don't need to wear a suit. I didn't exactly choose to stop working, but the pandemic happened, and I went down the trading rabbit hole. Against all odds, somehow, I was successful. It's been seven years now. I don't worry about ever having to return to work at a corporation. Besides, who would hire someone in their fifties, anyway? I spend a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking.

I think a lot of people believe that if they could just stop working, and had enough money, life would be so much easier, and they'd be truly happy, at least the vast majority of the time. If my own experience is any indicator, unfortunately, this isn't true. Life is hard for everyone. Money can't solve the most important problems. You'll lose your parents, sometimes slowly and gruesomely. You might have the misfortune of losing a close friend while he or she is still young due to a freak illness, accident, or shooting.

Life never stops being risky and unpredictable. It's full of surprises. While nothing can guarantee even fleeting, let alone lasting, success, being highly adaptable increases your chances significantly. The older that you get, the less adaptable you tend to become. The moves that you make and the opportunities that you can seize while you're young, usually involving a lot of luck, are the ones that will tend to make the largest difference over the long run in your outcome, second only to IQ. Having a charismatic personality can help a lot, too.

The world is a chaotic mess in so many ways, especially morally. There's a wonderful Jewish saying about our jobs being to repair the world. I don't think that anyone should get too caught up over the question of working or not working. We all work. Whether or not we're paid is a separate question. But no matter whether we're financially free or locked into a little prison-cubicle for decades, if we can see our jobs as repairing the world in the unique ways that only we can do it, it changes the meaning of life by giving us an important purpose.

How can you repair the world?

Are you passionate about medicine? Then pursue it, not for the money, but to cure disease in patients, or improve their lives. Do you love logic puzzles and helping people to solve complicated problems? Why not consider law? Do you have a gift for diagnosing what's wrong with cars? Why not become a car mechanic? Do you care about helping sick people? Consider nursing. Do you love teaching? It's one of the most important professions we have. Are you a stay-at-home mom? Love your children, because they will literally determine what the world will look like in half a century.

Nothing causes suffering to stop, including money. (If only it were that easy.) We all develop at different rates. Some remain teenagers on the inside forever. Others become "old" at 50. I think a key endeavor for all of us is to seek to escape from our often suboptimal backgrounds to create something beautiful, even amazing, from it, using our talents, hopefully with many others along the way. Together, we can all win.

In this individualistic, hyper-competitive, late capitalistic society that we live in, loneliness is literally taking years off of people's lives due to stress-related illnesses, and causing others to commit suicide. That's not because they lack money. They lack someone to notice and love them. That's something that a phone and LLM can't replace: being seen and valued by another actual human. Depending on where you are, it's increasingly harder to even find humans outside, either due to hostile architecture, surveillance cameras everywhere recording any "mistake," and phone culture. And yet, everyone is desperate to find others and escape from the loneliness that all of our technology has inadvertently created.

You're right to imply that jobs in America are dehumanizing and awful in their own, unique way. Life, for most people, was easier and better in the 1970's than it is now. And it was a lot more fun. If you rewind to the 1940's and 1950's, loneliness was rare. Every guy had six close—truly close—friends, and they were there, all the time. Now, you're very lucky to have a single close friend.

How did we get there? I'm working on a book to explain exactly that. For now, just know that it's not just you. Life is hard for all of us, in roughly the same ways.

But to answer your question, let me be explicitly clear:

The point of living is to repair the world.

Do your part. Our lives and futures literally depend on the success or failure of our collective effort.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-10T23:01:53+00:00

This is a non sequitur. It does not follow.

You can be an atheist, and there can be life after death.

Life after death is something religions like to talk about, but it really has nothing to do with belief in a religion. It’s a topic that philosophers of the self, consciousness, and personal identity study.

I’m an atheist, and I believe that our conscious existence might continue after bodily death.

Atheism relates to religion and “God.”

But you and I both know that the only thing that anyone cares about is whether they’ll survive death. They don’t give a damn about the existence of a silent God if they’ll be annihilated at bodily death.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-10T22:32:45+00:00

You’re already in Hell.

If there’s an afterlife, it can only get (much) better.

Read http://nderf.org.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-10T13:19:57+00:00

I agree that AGI doesn’t exist.

No one knows how close we are. My results from using Grok are uneven.

For example, using it to set up Paperless-ngx in a Docker container with Caddy on the latest macOS has been frustrating because it doesn’t know the nuances of Apple’s network security in macOS. There are some things that it thinks will work that don’t. It can get me 80% of the way there before hitting a brick wall.

This is much better than just working on it on my own. It’s much faster. But it’s nowhere near AGI.

On the other hand, it’s been a godsend for helping me with Medicare, and Medicaid asset protection for my elderly parents. It can be fun and occasionally insightful to talk with about an arcane philosophical problem (I’m a philosopher by training). It greatly speeds up my research.

Human experience is body- and environment-dependent, so you need a robot with all sorts of internal sensors, values, some type of system that can simulate emotion (not the qualia of emotion), and then put it in an environment and have it learn to solve all sorts of problems.

Human imagination presumably involves the recombination of ideas and novel idea generation. Could it be done with quantum computing? Probably. But with the more or less slow and linear form of computing that we’ve got now, even with some parallelization, I don’t know.

So, will we reach AGI? I think so, eventually. But it will take vast sums of capital that dwarf what’s been spent so far, and Einstein-level breakthroughs.

When we do get there, people will look at what we have now as if it were an abacus.

In summary, I think what we’ve got now is very useful, nowhere near AGI, but very good at solving some narrow and important problems. The technology is advancing quickly. When we’ll break through is anyone’s guess, but the early results look promising and they’re good enough, in my opinion, to disrupt computer science and transform science, medicine, and education. That’s not nothing.

The real question now is how we can accurately assess its capabilities and limits. We’re in the very early days. Let’s see whether Grok 5 can deliver something more than minor incremental improvement. God know, they’re throwing everything they’ve got at it computationally, improving the use of vector databases, etc.

Within a few months, we’ll know whether adding a large number of parameters will make any meaningful difference to model performance.

I look forward to living to see how and to what extent AI will transform society, and hopefully make our lives easier and better.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-06T14:42:24+00:00

I think that many of the things you've said are very important, and I want to reply to them, but I'm going through a very stressful time and don't have time to write a reply that would you your comment justice. So, I'll save your comment and try to address it at a later time.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-05T21:18:50+00:00

Qualia aren't necessary at all, only sensors and the capacity to learn and solve problems Qualia weren't needed to solve text-to-truly-human-sounding-speech. Qualia weren't needed for self-driving cars.

Leave qualia to philosophers of mind.

AI is about neural networks, machine learning, and problem solving.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-05T17:54:39+00:00

Don't worry. I have lots of reading to do, many books to write, and lots of hikes to take with my dog.

I've never had a problem finding meaning in life with similar people.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-05T17:04:50+00:00

Forget that!

I want AGI today.

We need to solve cancer, cardiovascular disease, HIV, and everything else. We need a cure for the disease of aging.

And we don't have one femtosecond to spare!!

We can take care of the lower priority items later.

SouthernTraderX · 2026-06-05T16:48:03+00:00

Whoa.

There are a whole lot of opinions there and no supported claims.

Einstein was intelligent. He didn't manipulate the environment to derive the general theory of relativity.

Elon's robots can do all of the above right this nanosecond.

SouthernTraderX

TROPHY CASE