The Game Theoretical Knowledge of Good and Evil

The Game Theoretical Knowledge of Good and Evil

The Fall from the Garden

The Garden of Eden was said to have two important trees: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which the forbidden fruit grew and which Eve ate, under the temptation of the serpent, propelling mankind out of the Garden. There is one aspect we should not take for granted however, which is the name of the second tree, because evidently the Old Testament wasn't written in English. Translations are inherently lossy, especially when they try to convey the meaning of a text from thousands of years in the past, whose context is so different from ours it's even hard to imagine how people at that time experienced Reality and their own society.

The interpretation I tend to subscribe to however is that "good and evil" is simply a way to refer to everything, but crucially, through the lens of duality. It is not Absolute knowledge of the Whole of Reality, but rather complete knowledge through the parts. This is supported by the fact that eating the forbidden fruit signifies death, which in this context would mean breaking out of the realm of the Eternal provided by God, and experiencing mortality, as well as all of the pain associated with being finite.

Another interpretation of the book of Genesis is given in the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The idea expanded in that book is that the Old Testament, by and large, is an attempt by hunter-gatherers (in the book, called "leavers") to make sense of the psychology, morality and God of the "civilized" agriculturalists ("takers"), who came to seize land, plunder resources, and kill people if it was needed to survive. This is why the God of the Old Testament is so, so cruel, because the hunter-gatherers could only make sense of the brutality they were witnessing if the God that the takers were serving was in some way just as cruel as them.

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is then interpreted as the knowledge of who gets to live, and who gets to die, namely the fact that (certain) human beings are favored under all circumstances, according to them of course, and the rest of the ecological web has to accommodate, and be reshaped if needed, for our survival. Seen in this way, it is not very hard to see why eating the fruit of that tree would lead to death, because evidently human beings are embedded in the ecological web (symbolized by the Tree of Life), and rearranging it for our short-term benefits can only lead to unsustainability, and eventually death.

The fact that the Fall from the Garden led to the beginning of human civilization also makes sense in Quinn's interpretation, because civilization is by and large a top-down way to organize society, where the powerful have most of the say of who thrives or not, and even who lives or who dies.
But what about the modern world? Are we still under the influence of the violent and ever-expanding empires, the ignorance imposed by organized religions, the preponderance of slavery and the tyranny of kings? Not exactly. But I wouldn't say that we are free either. The manifestation of the Knowledge of Good and Evil has become far more subtle, but in many ways, far more widespread and destructive.

Adversarial game theory rules everything around me

Arms races are one of the defining aspects of the world after the industrial revolution. Once a technology becomes too powerful, it forces every major side to adopt it, because otherwise they would fall behind and risk getting wiped out by the others. We see this happen with warfare technology of course, the most notable example I am aware of being the WW1 naval arms race, and of course, the arms race for nuclear weapons, but they are many other examples in other settings, namely in our times, economic competition, where companies need to adopt cutting edge technologies, and increase their efficiency as much as possible in order to remain in the game.

The problem with these dynamics is that they steer the playing field in a direction that none of the people involved consciously want to take. I don't think anyone wants to live in a world where nuclear annihilation is a looming threat, yet it is the world that we live in. Likewise, I don't think anyone consciously wants the destruction of the environment upon which we depend on, yet it is one of the many externalities that results from companies pursuing their own interests, and prioritizing profits above all else.
We can point the finger at them and call them "evil", and in a sense it is true that those environments are notoriously higher in psychopatic traits than others, but it is also worth understanding the entire game theoretical dynamic that leads to those races to the bottom in the first place: if they didn't do it, they would lose and be replaced by someone or some group which doesn't care about the values.

Externalities can be more subtle than the ones I have mentioned though. We can think for instance of how the capture of people's attention has been a social and psychological externality in the quest of platforms and companies competing over finite attention, in order to sell their services and maintain themselves. This has led to, again, a sort of "arms" race where short-form content dominates over everything else, because it is the best at grabbing people's attention, which is now so atrophied that they can hardly focus on any difficult task, such as reading a book, or committing to longer but more fulfilling projects, or even stepping away from the screen and doing things in real life. Again, I don't think anyone wants to live in a world where most people are essentially addicted to whatever is on their screen, but this is the world we live in.

Parasitic memes

Another subtle externality is what we could call parasitic memes. The ideas that reach us are a subset of a much bigger pool of ideas, and the main filter that decides which ideas reach us is simply ... what is good at spreading. This is almost a tautology: what reaches the most people is what is good at spreading itself, but the non-obvious consequence to that is that Truth is at best secondary to this entire process, and far from being primary.

The main example of that is religion, which is likely what inspired the father of memetics, Richard Dawkins, to examine why certain ideas are better at spreading than others. Dawkins wanted to draw an analogy between genes spreading themselves through organisms, and what he called memes, spreading themselves through human minds and cultures. Memes are, roughly speaking, ideas and patterns of human behavior, and link up with other memes to form entire clusters of how human beings live, called memeplexes.

Religion in that lens is the more memetically successful version, which is to say better at spreading through human minds and human culture, of the teachings of spiritual masters. Religion is a literal bastardization of ineffable insights. Literal means that you have to put some thing above your experience of Reality, such as an idea, a myth (seen as literally true, i.e. the Fall from the Garden factually happened in time), or an authority.

Usually this involves dogma, blind faith in beliefs which cannot be verified, because they make literal claims about a Reality which is fundamentally non-literal, and on a social level, shame and ostracization in the case that people do not comply. It's easy to look back at the Middle Ages and think that they were stupid for being so blinded by the dogma of religion, and the clear abuses of the clergy, but seeing a memeplex from the outside is totally different from being on the inside.
Cults for instance are notoriously difficult to describe to people who have never been involved in one, because the main response from outsiders is to view the people who fell for it as being incredibly stupid and credulous. But it is the same with any set of beliefs which come with social power, whether it is the ability to make a living within society, or have people who will do as you say in a cult, or find people you love being around with in a fringe community. People are very good at rationalizing things as soon as they get social benefits from it, hence the quote that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" 1, especially if they were born into the set of beliefs. Fish do not understand water, and we do not understand the cultural assumptions we are born with.

Shame and dogma are worth zooming onto, because they are strategies which are good at perpetuating themselves, not because they provide any inherent value to people, but because they make their recipients bad at perceiving Reality clearly. They are what I call here parasitic memes. 2

Someone who is bound by shame doesn't merely feel the emotion of shame, they also have an entire set of ideas about themselves, and the world, namely that there is something inherently wrong about them, that they cannot trust themselves to find the way out, that they need to change in order to not be a worthless person who takes up resources and space for nothing, etc.
Even more subtly, shame is not just an emotion, or a set of ideas, it is also a pattern of attention. It's about focusing on you and how you are inadequate compared to everyone else (or at least, your ideas of other people). It's difficult to talk with someone who is bound by shame, because they always find a way to circle the conversation back to themselves.
People with a lot of shame do not merely feel that they have problems that they can solve, they feel like they are the problem. There is a fusion between situation and personhood, that problems are because of them, and not just circumstances they happen to be within in, and that they can change.

Thus, the way to undo shame is not just to address the emotions which are being avoided, and to dismantle the ideas which are not true and not useful, but it is also to find a way to not overly focus on yourself, and to see that every situation is a lot more than just about you—even if your own experience matters of course, the way out of the self-focus caused by shame is not swinging to the extreme of utter self-abnegation.
Shame has this "parasitic" influence on your mind and your attention, where it prevents you from seeing yourself and the situation you are in clearly. The main purpose of this pattern, and this strategy, is to maintain itself. People bound by shame come to think that their shame helps them be more "realistic" about themselves, but it is really an illusion that prevents them from seeing the shame clearly.

This is how parasitic memes operate in general. They induce a series of states that prevent their host from seeing themselves clearly, which allows the parasitic meme to work in the background. Dogma is another one that I have mentioned, and its defense mechanism forbids against examination, for a variety of reasons, most notably, the idea that examination signals doubt, which puts you against God, or whatever authority is in charge—dogma is not just religious of course, see the dogma in "scientific" establishments during the covid lockdowns.

Here are some more examples of parasitic memes:
§1. The outrage and fear you get from social media is very good at grabbing your attention, and making you feel that it is the single most important thing happening right now. "Why is no one discussing this? Has the world gone mad??"
This then pushes you to find other people who also feels that it is the single most important thing happening in the world, who will validate your outrage and fear, and confront you with people who feel differently about it—because people are just different in outlooks in general, and also because social media has an incentive for polarization, because it drives engagement upwards—who will trigger you and drive you even more mad.
Even very intelligent (in the usual sense) people get captured by those outrage and anxiety-driven memes. Presence of mind and body is not about the ability to debate about ideas, it's about recognizing what efforts are meaningful, and which ones aren't. This form of parasitic memes has a tendency to make people see everything in terms of "intelligence": those who don't agree with me are stupid, and selfish, etc. Which drives the person deeper and deeper in the rabbit hole.

§2. One of the sub-type of the shame parasitic meme is the general culture that surrounds productivity, and this obsessive need to be constantly doing something. This is one of the many memes that can be traced back to a religious meme, namely the Protestant work ethic that sprung from Luther's Reformation, especially the branch of Calvinism that sprung from it. 3 This leads to all this stuff about self-help, the discussion surrounding "agency", obsessively tracking one's time, productivity authors who read productivity books so that they can make productivity courses more efficiently, etc.
Again, there is a form of narrowing attention that happens, where a good intention originally springs, something like: "I want to use my time better, I have let my attention and focus drift away lately", which then gets captured and morphs over time into an obsessive drive to use every single minute for something "productive", missing the value that the work is supposed to provide to begin with.

§3. Basically everything that touches upon the gender discourse, and further drives apart men and women from loving one another. Seeing the other gender as inherently selfish is guaranteed to make your relationships with them terrible. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one that provides an easy scapegoat for one's problems: the reason why my life is so fucked up is because women have created the MeToo movement and now reject every man that doesn't fulfill their unrealistic list of criteria, which is why I am going to go my own way and be my own man. Likewise with women who think that all men are disgusting sex-obsessed monsters who have led to the continuation of the patriarchy and all the abuse that stems from it. These memes prevent people from interacting with one another in good faith.

There are many more of course. At every juncture point of the culture war you can probably find parasitic memes competing for hosts. One thing to track about how parasitic memes "possess" their host is when you can notice people go from making observations about people and the world, to judging them (or themselves). Judgement is one of the clearest manifestation of a parasitic meme: when someone's discernment has been overridden by a set of beliefs, or a set of strategies to turn one's attention away from the situation at hand—through shame for instance, or through distraction, or through a terrible evil that needs to be destroyed at all costs.

This is one way that we can relate all of the discussion so far with the initial subject: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is something tragic about the certainty behind a judgement, because it makes us stop look at the person in front of us, and instead makes us apply our inert knowledge to reach conclusions ahead of time. Even when the judgement is correct, there is something depressing about the idea of reducing an entire human being to a predictable set of responses, or a mere strategy to maximize one's utility. Which brings me back to game theory.

The 2 roots of adversarial game theory

I went on a whole digression with parasitic memes to make the point that adversarial game theory is much more prevalent in our lives than simply the arms races that steer the direction of technology, or that constrain the economy to be a certain way, because it is something that affects everything in our society, down to culture, human behavior, beliefs which are held, and even how people describe things—literal and crude descriptions outcompete more nuanced and subtle descriptions, short and eye-catching titles outcompete more sober but accurate titles.

It is not just human beings who are in game theoretical relationships with one another, but the memes that we harbor too. So what gives? Are we doomed to compete with our fellows until the end of time? Is existence necessarily selfish, due to needing to maintain itself in the face of environmental pressures to exist in the first place? Is nature just a massive killing factory whose sole purpose is to find which organisms stand at the top of the food chain? And is Reality as a whole just a nihilistic affair of perpetual competition and extermination for its own sake? The will fighting against the will, forever, to see what comes out on top?

Some people would say yes to all of that. It is not just human beings in the modern world who are selfish, pursuing their own self-interests as rational actors in the economy, but in fact, all human beings across all time periods, and even all organisms in nature, every thing that exists, in this lens, is because it is good at maintaining itself and outcompeting other things, and that modern human beings have simply refined this natural law to its most efficient and rational point.

I however do not find this view very satisfactory. Let's go back to what game theory even is in the first place. The root of all of these dynamics is that people and structures enter in game theoretical dynamics with one another. By "game theory", I mean more specifically adversarial, short-term game theory. Game theory can study cooperative games, and can study iterated versions of the same game, and in either case the ideal strategies vastly differ, but the world we live in is about winning the next war, no matter the costs, because not winning it might mean getting wiped out.

Thus we enter the realm of adversarial game theory, with the most famous example being the prisoner's dilemma. The setup is that you and your partner in crime have been caught in the act, and must now serve some time in jail. You can decide to defect on your partner, which is to say testify against them in front of the police, in which case they will be punished more harshly, and you will get away with less jail time.
The whole conundrum of the situation is that the numbers are such that defecting is always preferable to you as an individual, but that if both people defect, then both people are worse off than if they both stayed silent. Thus, a dilemma: do you do the thing that is better for you no matter what the other person does, which is often considered the "rational" strategy, or do you hope that your partner in crime cares enough about you that you both stay silent, and both get away with, in total, less jail time?

You can imagine how this type of thinking, finding out the best possible strategy for you, and this tension, what is good for me versus what is good for the whole, apply to many other contexts, which is why people often use this example to make a broader point about the economy, about geopolitics, and even about the fundamental nature of relationships as mentioned above—that everyone and everything is a separate, utility-maximizing agent, that type of thing.

But here is the thing. Anyone who views mathematics, and in general the tools of the mind, critically, knows that there is no such thing as a neutral frame, or a neutral hypothetical situation. Everything has assumptions and biases to them, and surely, (adversarial) game theory is no exception. It has taken me a long time to see the core assumptions that underlie game theory, but now that I see them, they are first of all very obvious, making the claim that "game theory is inherent to all relationships" quite silly, and second of all, it is very clear why human civilization (anything after the invention of agriculture) and game theoretical relationships are so intertwined with one another.

The two fundamentals roots of adversarial game theory are, firstly, the sense of separation, and secondly, the quantitative interface through which we interact with Reality, which gives us the idea of "utility", but also money, and in general, scarcity.

Separation is obviously central to adversarial game theory, but it has to be noted because the origin of separation is profound and non-obvious. Evidently, the prisoner's dilemma instantly falls apart the moment that you have a personal connection with the other side, because in that case, you do care about what happens to them, which means that your actions are not just measured by how good they are for you. This is why so many tales of love feature characters who would literally go to the Underworld in order to get back their lover, or in general risk their life just to make sure that their lover is safe, because love is beyond game theory.

Economic theories are far more superstitious, and dare I say, religious, than they make themselves appear to be. They start from the seemingly innocent premise that people are "inherently self-interested, rational utility-maximizers", but even if you ignore the part that people aren't rational for a variety of reasons—some of which are totally valid, because rationality itself has a cost to it, it takes time to get all the info and knowledge you need to make good decisions—the idea that people are necessarily self-interested is already part of the mythos of the modern world, the idea of the individual who only cares about their own (quantifiable) well-being, only caring about others to the extent that it is beneficial for them, or because it extends their own influence—the idea that people care about their family because it is just an offshoot of their own self.

At its worst, individualism basically turns you into a tourist of the world at large, making lots of money so that you can travel between places, none of which you feel particularly attached to, which therefore makes it very easy to treat them with total disregard of the human realities which are involved. Why care about the exploitation of the third world if you can simply live in the nice places of the world, where you'll never have to interact with any exploitation to begin with?
If you maximally lean into game theory and economic-based ways of thinking, there are no reasons to take into account morality of any kind, yet our intuitions and gut response is to reflexively flinch away from that, because there is obviously something deeply important about morality, even if we cannot literally convey what it is. There is more to relationships than simply the utility we get from there, is something inherently valuable about spending time with others, or about beautiful things, again, even if we cannot reduce them down to literal ideas.

The literal and quantified self

Literality and its limitations are central to this whole ordeal. There is a fantastic book that covers that, and much, much more, titled Self and Unself, by Darren Allen, which really clarifies the whole thing about civilization, the self that builds it, how it interacts, more specifically interfaces, with Reality, and all of the problems that come from that, but I prefer it to keep it short and focused on the discussion at hand.

Literality is about reducing Reality to mind-graspable, non-mysterious things, separate from one another, and which interact causally with one another. Think for instance of a car engine, which is certainly complicated, but which can be understood through focusing on parts, which then interact with other parts in a causal manner, the whole thing producing the mechanical power that allows wheels on a car to spin, and much more.

Literality is useful to understand Reality, but the illusion that we have in the modern world is that it is True. It is not, the same way that the map is not the Territory, but spend your entire life in mediated environments, man-made contexts which present you with representations of Reality, rather than Reality itself, and you start to think that what the mind presents of Reality is Reality itself, because we as a species have become so successful at manipulating it, through literal ways of thinking, namely science.

One of the offshoots of literality is quantification, the process of turning unique qualities in your direct experience, into fungible and abstract quantities. The only way you can say that one apple plus one apple equals two apples is by ignoring everything that is different about the two apples in front of you, and considering them as abstract forms. They might have very distinct smells, colors, shines, tastes, shapes, they might even have different quantitative properties, such as weight or volume, but the usefulness of the interface of quantification is that it ignores properties which are irrelevant to the situation at hand. Abstraction is about using specific ways to ignore parts of the context to extract more general insights.

This is useful if this ability to ignore the context doesn't get out of hand. It would be foolish to say that mathematics and science are inherently bad, because when they are within reach, they can serve their purpose. The problem is that, as always, there is a point where a tool becomes used in every situation whatsoever, the figurative hammer bashing everything in sight, in which case we no longer have a tool that we use, but a tool that uses us.

Money for instance is very convenient, but the way that money has shaped our society over the past decades goes beyond mere "convenience", it has largely become a vehicle for powerful people to remain in power, coast off of the back of the labor of other people—and the extraction of natural resources—and contributed to a system where human values are very low on the list of priorities. The system becomes this massive social contraption that hyper-optimizes for numbers which become more and more vaporous as time goes by, thereby becoming the kind of thing that human beings do not control, but rather controls us.

This is what literality becomes when it is untethered from the non-literal ground of Reality from which it emerges, a parallel simulacrum that people end up upholding over anything tangible in our own lives. We do not speak of virtues anymore, or of beauty, or freedom, or love, but instead we speak of GDP, inflation rate, government deficit, company revenues, and so on.

This blindness to Reality in favor of abstract figures is the second root of adversarial game theory, because decisions in game theory are always about maximizing something, which can only make sense if the notion of "utility", or something similar to it, has been defined in the first place. Those fundamental notions are rarely questioned because numbers are so often portrayed as being "objective", and thus more reliable, than so-called "subjective" aspects of our lives, such as meaning or love. But quantification is not "objective" in the sense that it is absolutely True, because it comes from an unconscious self which interfaces with Reality in a specific manner.

They say that money is the root of all evil, but it would be more useful to look at the self that brings about money in the first place, and is unable to distinguish between real, conscious value, and the proxy of value that money represents. It is this blindness of the literal self that is problematic, not money in and of itself.

Closed-heartedness

Another major blind spot that I see again and again in this obsessive need to quantify things, is that rationality by and large is fundamentally close-hearted. There is a lack of trust, in people and you could even say Reality at large, in the rationalist.

I would say that rationalists perceive Reality fairly well within their frames and their limitations—the two main ones being those that I have mentioned here: the fact that they take for granted the sense of separation from others, and the central focus on the literal self which gives rise to quantification to begin with—but that those limitations are never acknowledged, much less remedied.

The problem is that there is no rational reason for going beyond rationality, which means that it isn't possible to convince a rationalist to give up their stance with the type of arguments that appeals to them. 4 This doesn't mean that what is beyond it is insane, stupid or wrong, but that it fundamentally comes from a different place, a different relationship with people and Reality at large, than the rationalist is used to.

I think what appeals to rationally-minded people is that the mind is very good at controlling situations. It can step away from what it is experiencing, look at it from the outside, focus on a few key variables, and tweak them to go the desired results. This is why science is so successful in domains where we can do that to begin with. But not every aspect of Reality is malleable in that manner! Human psychology for instance is riddled with hundreds, if not thousands of subtle variables which are all related with one another, which makes the usual scientific process that people love to defend quite ineffective.
For instance, imagine trying to make a list of the major factors that influence how good someone is at memorizing something. How would you even make a list that is both comprehensive, that accounts for enough factors, but also short enough to be useful enough for a human being to understand and use in their life? There would be so many variables at play that influence how good someone's memory is: their energy levels—how do you even measure that?—how interested they are in the subject, how relaxed or tense they are, how familiar they are with the language, how much they use their memory in day-to-day life, the specific sequence of words to memorize, even something as seemingly trivial as the vibe of the room they have to take their test in would influence their performance, because human beings act and feel differently from context to context. We are embodied creatures, meaning that any change to the environment has consequences on us.

All of that to say that the mind is good controlling situations in certain narrow fields, such as Physics, but that Reality at large couldn't possibly be so easy to approach. Human psychology, which implies human relationships, involve hundreds, if not thousands of variables, and most of them cannot even be neatly quantified: how do you quantify "feeling relaxed", or "being interested in someone else", or "loving one another's presence"?

The mind is limited, and what a healthy, reasonable person does is neither reject the ability of the mind to analyze Reality, nor try to do everything through the mind—the way that for instance some people try to intellectualize their emotions, in fear of feeling them—but instead use it when it's appropriate, and let go of it when it isn't.

I think using the mind when it comes to our relationships with one another leads to a form of Hell, especially at a large scale. The whole point of love is to be as direct and open with one another, the intimacy of experiencing a direct contact with someone else. The mind, in contrast, mediates its interactions with Reality. Instead of seeing someone for who they are, a totality which I can experience by simply being with them, the mind fragments experience into bits that it can analyze, under the filter of "like" or "don't like", or "useful" or "useless", or "funny" or "boring", that type of stuff, which is useful in certain contexts, but feels very cold in human relationships.

This doesn't mean we should "never" think about our relationships, analysis does have its purposes even there, but if it is the only thing that informs them, then they stop being relationships, they start becoming games that we try to solve, like in the case of adversarial game theory, where I try to predict your moves given your incentives and resources, and I try to find the best move for myself in response, so that I can get the best result for myself.
It feels awful to partake in those interactions, not just because they're incredibly tedious and complicated, but because there is a defensiveness to it, a sense that if I simply do what I'm spontaneously called to do and say, that something wrong will happen to me, and that the other side will take advantage of me.

Perhaps more important than the accuracy of a worldview is how open-hearted it feels: does it approach people and situations from a place of honesty, compassion and playfulness? Or is every situation seen under the lens of scarcity, identifying Reality as an inherent threat, and trying to steer behavior to secure pockets of security within the enemy territory?

One last interpretation we could give for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, in light of everything that has been said, is that it represents the mediating effect of the (dualistic) mind, itself a result of the process of interfacing of the literal self, which prevents us from simply ... experiencing life, preferring abstraction, control, and planning instead. Mediation is death, because it gets in the way of intimacy, direct experience of the other and of the situation.
We can see this in the life of people who only live through their mind, who only have ideas about life, but who do not really live. They can be very intelligent, and very successful as a result, in the way that society means those terms, but there is still something so important which is missing from their life, they are unable to truly love anyone or anything, which is why there is always a primal existential fear underneath their looks of intellectual confidence.

The unrooted mind thinks that it can figure out all of Reality, or at least the parts that matter to its survival, and perpetuate itself forever, but such an attempt is first of all driven by the same scarcity that leads it to see everything as an enemy, and second those attempts are ultimately futile, because mind works with representations of Reality, not Reality itself. This means that the mind is forced to content with its own mortality when its immortality projects fail, but it is also unable to meaningfully accept it, because death is not an idea, it is the Reality of all finite forms.

On the other hand, the people who know how to let go of the controlling, analyzing needs of the mind when it is appropriate to do so, who can delight in the presence of others, and live for someone other than themselves, find that time is no longer the spectre that would habitually haunt their life, with its gloomy reminders of death that keep people up at night. Instead, time sort of fades away in the background, the same way that the sense of 'I' and 'you' dissolves when two people are in close love with one another. And what do we call such an experience, when fears melt away, when time seems to slow down, and when all that remains is connection? We call that Eternity. The eternal union of Love.

Footnotes

1 Quote by Upton Sinclair.

2 A term I got from Michael Smith (also known as 'Morphenius', or 'Valentine'). Unfortunately he doesn't write much about his ideas, but he describes them on this podcast episode

3 See Michael Smith's video on the 'Modern Curse of productivity'

4 This is true for every worldview. There is no X-shaped argument that allows you to go beyond X, because if there was, it would be included into X in the first place. The boundary between X and beyond-X is fundamentally different than X itself.


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Gametheory     Gardeneden     Parasiticmemes     Memetics     Competition     Scarcity     Externalities     Love     Literality     Quantification     Interface     Eternity

2026-05-31