https://xitter.cf/t.co/OSI6HD4EF1 Applied Optimism. Co-founded by President @ChipkinLogan and Board Members @DKedmey & @astupple.
Joined December 2024
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🛡️Defend the West Conference🛡️
WHEN: 1/13/2027
WHERE: Online
Over 300 people have registered so far.
Speakers include:
@DavidM_Friedman
@sapinker
@SRCHicks
@yaronbrook
@alananewhouse
@johanknorberg
@DeirdreMcClosk
@michaelshermer
@ToKTeacher
@jasoncrawford
Nadine Strossen
Save your spot (link below)
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.
Saul is currently writing a graphic novel and a book, both of which explore themes of Enlightenment, progress, and epistemology.
Learn more: saulzimet.com/
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_ 👇
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’.”
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 👇
"...authoritarian ideologies...can be toppled by argument alone.
All systems of ideas are vulnerable."
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Ray_S_Percival
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
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)
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 👇
