President & Co-Founder of Conjecture Institute. https://xitter.cf/t.co/jFLNOweJjF Books: Windfall, The Sovereign Child, Lords of the Cosmos

Philadelphia, PA
Joined December 2017
Individualism & Egalitarianism: It is the individual—not the tribe, not the family, not the society—who has the capacity to explain the world, to understand it, to suffer, to be happy, to make choices, to create explanatory knowledge. This kind of individualism is a devastating criticism of every collectivistic idea past and present—collective justice, guilt by blood, racism, classism, and policies intended to help a ‘community’ as defined by the set of all individuals with a particular characteristic. Moreover, there is only one kind of individual—any person is as capable of making progress, experiencing any physically possible qualia, and generating knowledge as any other. It is in this sense that egalitarianism is true. People are not equal in terms of skill, interest, genes, phenotype, wealth, opportunity, nor life experience. But people are equal with respect to their ability to generate new knowledge and continuously solve the endless stream of problems that defines their lives. Indeed, knowledge creation is the most egalitarian enterprise in existence.
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Meet our newest Fellow, @SaulZimet! Saul is a writer focused on the growth of knowledge and the self-corrective character of the Enlightenment. His essays have been published by @Quillette, @HumanProgress, @aier, @feeonline, Libertarianism.org, @amspectator, & @TheObjStd.
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Force is the use of violence, or threat of violence, to arbitrarily prioritise one set of ideas over another. ..force predates humanity by millennia. Indeed, the entire course of biological history can be understood as one great ideological struggle: selfish gene fighting selfish gene using poisons, venoms, talons and fangs to club one another into dank submission. And long before, all of cosmic evolution—gravitation, collision, destruction—can be viewed in similar, forceful terms. In people, the ideas are primarily memes (those encoded within one’s mind instead of one’s DNA); yet the use of force as a replication mechanism is no less common. Persuasion, as we will later explore, is a remarkably modern discovery, both scarce and delicate. Tyranny is by far the leading tenor of our most traditional progress. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_ 👇
Libertarians are wrong about romance: it is *not* a form of trade. tomhyde.substack.com/p/the-e…
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“There’s a younger version of the particle and an older version, simultaneously sitting in the same location.” Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Vlatko Vedral on an experiment no one has done yet, and why he thinks it’s doable.
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A conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense, is an unproven and speculative hypothesis about a secret and sinister plot hatched by a relatively small group of people. Typically, the very lack of hard evidence for the conspiracy is taken as proof that the conspirators are fiendishly clever and have covered their tracks. In my academic work, I have dubbed such self-sealing theories the intellectual equivalent of a black hole: once you’ve dived in, it’s hard to claw your way back out. The rapprochement between parts of the Left and Islam is none of these things... The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side. ~Conjecture Institute Senior Philosopher @mboudry
Islamo-Leftism Is Not a Conspiracy Theory It’s an unrequited love affair “The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side.” “The bargain is straightforward: leftists coddle Muslims and give them preferential treatment, while Muslims respond by voting for left-wing parties.” “What makes this love affair tragic is that it is mostly unrequited.” “There may be ‘Queers for Palestine’, but there are no ‘Queers in Palestine’.”
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Physics often explains the world in terms of laws of motion and initial conditions. Constructor theory asks a more general question: which transformations are possible, which are impossible, and why? Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto explains👇
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Nothing is certain, not even logic. The rules of logic are conjectures, which means they can be criticized and improved. Progress, not certainty. Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud 👇
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Merch store coming soon👇
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"...authoritarian ideologies...can be toppled by argument alone. All systems of ideas are vulnerable." ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Ray_S_Percival
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We do not know the recipe - the algorithm or code - for a human mind. And so we do not yet have artificial intelligence of the kind that is general - as general possible. Universal, in other words. ~Conjecture Institute Ambassador @ToKTeacher
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Freedom isn’t incompatible with human nature. It’s incompatible with compulsory school.
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After the Second World War, Western academic institutions spawned one school after another to denounce or undermine Western civilisation. Postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida attacked the “logocentrism” of Western rationality and attempted to deconstruct the narrative of scientific and moral progress. Followers of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory wrote devastating critiques of the European Enlightenment. Its delusional project to quantify, rationalise, and dominate the world, they claimed, had paved the way for National Socialism and the Holocaust. Social constructivists exposed modern science as just one mythological narrative among many. Science, they argued, did not so much reveal reality as construct its own reality—and an oppressive one at that. Postcolonial thinkers denounced Western civilisation for its colonialism and cultural imperialism. ~Conjecture Institute Senior Philosopher @mboudry in @Quillette (The Enlightenment's Gravediggers)
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The laws of physics are deterministic, and time doesn't flow. And yet we have free will. Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp explains with Fellow @maxdesalle 👇
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Conjecture Institute is honored to announce our newest Advisor, Julian Barbour! Barbour is a theoretical physicist whose work on the foundations of dynamics, quantum gravity, and the nature of time has challenged core assumptions in physics. Best known for arguing that time is not fundamental but an emergent illusion arising from change, he developed a relational approach to classical and quantum physics in which the universe is described solely in terms of relative configurations of matter without an external time parameter. Barbour is the author of The End of Time, which presents a timeless account of the universe consistent with quantum cosmology; The Discovery of Dynamics (on the history of absolute versus relative motion); and The Janus Point, which proposes a two-directional origin of time from a low-entropy “Janus Point.”
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The history of everything, as seen through the growth of knowledge. Graphic inspired by Conjecture Institute Fellow @arjunkhemani & President @ChipkinLogan's Lords of the Cosmos👇
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Universality. Problem-solving. Explanatory knowledge. Conjecture Institute Fellow @dela3499 noticed that nobody had taken all three seriously as the foundation for creating artificial general intelligence. So he decided to run with them.
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🛡️Defend the West Conference🛡️ When: 1/13/27 Where: online (free) Speaker spotlight: @alananewhouse Talk title: Zionism for Everyone Alana Newhouse is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of @tabletmag, the magazine of Jewish news, ideas and culture, which she launched in 2009 and has edited since.
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With enormous gratitude, Conjecture Institute is pleased to welcome our first Platinum Donor! Their anonymous gift has already helped us bring on @mboudry as our first Senior Philosopher and taken us past halfway to our 2027 budget. Our plans for 2027 below👇
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Love, trade, force. These really are the only ways we can know, be known, move, and be moved by other people in modern society. All of interaction summarised in three words. I want to explore these systems in greater detail to reveal their individual logics, and, in the process, justify their applications on varying social scales. ~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_
"The lesson to be drawn from the uninterested nature of trade is its complete separation from the interested nurture of love." New essay about love, trade, and force, linked below 👇
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Poverty is not what needs to be explained - that was all of human history. It's this unprecedented level of wealth starting in the 19th century that needs to be explained. And it's not a zero sum game. ~CI Senior Philosopher @mboudry w/ @chellivia for @HumanProgress
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