This may be my new mantra this week. "The intuition of seriousness is simple: if a system can’t bring in enough energy to manage its complexity, the system falls into progressively worse states before collapse." Thanks, Dan! Awesome stuff.
My favorite part is Seriousness as an "earnest, sustained commitment to creating something excellent."
To borrow a line from Ben's review of Breakout, "What it means to be Great is an aesthetic choice. It’s not something you can put a number on, despite the inclination of engineers (and economists)." To me, I like the idea of Seriousness existing in the in the same vein.
This article made me think of the Japanese. We can learn from their seriousness that produces high quality effects across their society, such almost complete lack of crime and the silly movements the west engages in.
The trading card with signifiers for solving the cancers brought about by human invention...that's a serious one among serious ones. What a great dream to envision using the best of AI tools, rooted in the Dartmouth 1956 conference on AI, to undo some of the worst applications of "Better Living Through Chemistry" into the human diet, right in that era.
I couldn’t help myself; I had to reply to this article. You’ve probably already figured out from our brief, one-sided exchanges that I have a long list of troublesome mental traits: impulsivity, a total disregard for rules & authority, job hopping, and the indomitable power of foresight. Now that I have my beloved peace back, I’m going to rip apart your essay without mercy because what did you say? Oh, yeah…unemployed people have a lot of time on their hands and they can be mean with their words (paraphrasing).
Please tell me clearly if I am not welcome in your neck of the woods and I’ll stop. I'll tell you why I have trouble reading you: You’re fun but boring at the same time, like someone spliced the DNA of Brendon Fraser’s Encino Man with the late Alex Trebek. It’s almost like the old man version of you is choking out the teenage version of you. I’m rooting for the teenager, but the old man keeps giving me those threatening “Get off my lawn” MAGA vibes so I keep my distance. One must ask if you’re inhabiting the present version of yourself or if you’re in a constant battle between the Past & Future. Is that why you are fascinated by time machines? You don’t need it, hun. The past already happened and the future isn’t here yet.
First, I look up to you, a tiny bit, like the tiniest bit of a microbit. You’re science-y and math-y and you’re white too, man; you’ve got it all going on.
* Those motorcycles are ugly. Give me a Ducati any day of the week. Look up the Japanese tradition, Kintsugi. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
* I like your frenetic Seriousness! But it never lasts. How long do you…never mind…You remind me of the Terminator, the one that keeps turning into silver goo and coming back again (not like that; I mean your work ethic, idiot). Well, I’m relatively normal and I can stay serious for two days max.
* Listen, Evil Spock, you’re missing an essential ingredient of Chaos. People don’t accidentally do anything; everything has a purpose, and it’s also why having your behavior analyzed by someone is jarring (I know you do it; don’t lie, you have those beady dark eyes just like I do).
‘Kay, ready? People do bad things on purpose to retain power and influence. Mineral depletion? On purpose. Psychologically intrusive tools and technology that may cause brain damage? On purpose. Manipulation of national debt? On purpose. Why do I keep bothering you? On purpose.
* Damn it, I like your equation. I'll tell you why—I think PTSD is a unique form of energy conservation in the brain. I worked so hard to study it because I told myself if I could cheat the system and shatter the threshold with sheer concentrated effort, I could get my brain back. I don’t want to toot my own horn or start screaming, “I’m so great but no one wants to date me,” but it’s true.
* Activation energy is nonsense. I didn’t activate anything. I started to realize that there is an endlessly complex system of energy exchanges happening every moment of the day for humans. I believe all those tiny reactions and physiological changes are kept in check by the body’s internal clock. Before fancy activations, you need to get that clock back up and running.
* Your seriousness checklist uses big words and I didn’t read it.
* I don’t know what the Anna Karenina principle is, but I read the book, and damn, it’s sad. I guess you can say she missed the train.
* Those are some nice data visualizations, not going to lie.
Conclusion: Look, I admire how you intermingle data, science, technology, and social precepts, but it’s dangerous, and you’re reaching. And I’m not a serious person. I’m a person of grit and determination, and when chaos comes, I grab my balls, in this case my coin purse, and I weather the storm. I think you're looking for something to explain why you do what you do and you don't have to; you're Daniel (I vote Encino Man Dan over Clint Eastwood Dan talking to a chair), but not Daniel J. Lewis—that man is a beacon to the next generation of actors.
And we come full circle. This reply was brought to you by the Spirit of Balto and Jose Cuervo. I keep leveling up; who knows? I might be in charge of a company one day. No one in their right mind is going to marry me, but I might be in a long-term relationship with an oil trader. Evolution is a hell of a thing.
Sure. We definitely have a seriousness gap. We are governed by unserious people, who are doing unserious things.
OTOH, building two motorcycles per year so that abusive actors get new toys to conspicuously consume is not particularly serious. Neither is giving over the government to Elon Musk for no particular reason other than that his support was essential for winning an election and he is the country's largest rent-seeker.
We already have shifted "the elite student’s dream job" to risk-acceptant industrialists sufficiently well to have built the most valuable companies in the world, the leaders of which openly disdain academia and essentially all civil institutions. Academia and politics are dead zones for ambitious people, and that has been true since 2008 (if not longer), most of today's economic elites are almost shockingly uneducated. "Move fast, break stuff" is definitely not under-supplied in America, it is in fact why everything is broken (it is the source of the ultra-financialization you disdain, which serious academics (and labor leaders) warned about for decades, only to be ignored by progress-oriented tech boosters and the politicians who love them).
And what have those industrialists done with the license they've been given? Fall into the K-hole while impregnating a harem? Rent out the city of Venice for the most plastic wedding in history? Give a Schmittian lecture series calling Greta Thunberg the Antichrist? Erect a surveillance state in service to the most deeply unserious president in history?
No, I'm afraid we don't need more of that. We've had enough. Seriousness comes from *accountability,* a concept (completely unmentioned in this essay) that today's industrialists refuse to even countenance.
So this essay does not make a serious argument, and thus does not serve a serious purpose. As was predictable by simply asking: what would the author's own framework suggest about the seriousness level of Substacking?
I agree that accountability is sorely missing in American politics & industry. In fact, I never forget reading a book where the villain goes, "Efficiency is doing whatever I want and tying the consequences to another group, land, or thing."
But the writer is serious, I'm afraid. He's serious about everything, which is his boon & bane exclusively—take a look at his raw data and IsXSerious. His interpretation of the equation is beautiful and well-structured, and his creativity is apparent. As for the medium of delivery, well, the man knows his audience, right? Substack tends toward liberal, well-educated readers.
P.S. I also decry the recent treatment of Ms. Thunberg and thank you for sharing your thoughts.
"His interpretation of the equation is beautiful and well-structured, and his creativity is apparent."
He has taken a field of serious inquiry -- complexity science -- and attempted to reduce it to a simplified model.
Which is anti-serious.
He voted for Trump because he cares about depolarization, which is grounds to consider extensive remedial education and/or psychotherapy.
But again: the presented avatar of seriousness is building two motorcycles per year for famous people. This is not just elitism, it is "let them eat cake"-style condescension, it's disconnected from our present reality.
Which is where the accountability comes from: the elites being ripped down from their goddamn perches and forced to live with the same rules as the rest of us. Until that happens there will be no progress, only increasing chaos.
First off, I like you, stranger. Second, with each reply my bite is going to get a little more aggressive—I was teething in my first response.
This is not complexity science. I mean, he’s good, but he’s not that good.
And, uh, seriousness is… let me check Merriam-Webster… Yeah, it’s an adjective in this context. Let’s give him some leeway; he gave this post 6 months of thought, and I qualify that as sufficiently serious.
Aw, come on, the low blow? He voted for Trump? Of course he did; he’s from Kentucky.
I’ll end on this because I actually enjoy your intensity a little too much: don’t take what the writer is saying as a battle cry even though he did use that vociferous language; please forgive him, he’s just trying to argue for increased degrees of order in a world of chaos, uncertainty, and misunderstanding. That’s my take anyway, and for that, he has my respect. I’m an apathetic intellectual, not a politician.
P.S. I don’t like his featured motorcycles 🏍 either. Check out the Ducati Sport 1000 featured in Tron.
Oh so we're grading seriousness on a curve now? We're giving participation trophies to people who spend 6 months writing Substack articles?
I don't care where he's from. The current gov of KY is a Democrat. I've lived throughout that region and spent a lot of time in KY, as well as other red states.
He is not arguing for order, that's my entire point. You don't get order by reducing complex systems into soundbytes and moral lessons. That's how you produce crises.
The "abundance"/"progress" types need to spend some time reading about what happened to the Futurists of a century ago. The Vorticists, the Wellsian "things to come" optimists. You cannot process-engineer the future and everyone who has tried has met with disaster.
Essay is sick, heuristic is useful. Thanks Dan!
This may be my new mantra this week. "The intuition of seriousness is simple: if a system can’t bring in enough energy to manage its complexity, the system falls into progressively worse states before collapse." Thanks, Dan! Awesome stuff.
Awesome :)) stoked you like it Maria!
Amazing how useful microbiology intuitions are huh?
Thanks for the read (and for the provocation)!
My favorite part is Seriousness as an "earnest, sustained commitment to creating something excellent."
To borrow a line from Ben's review of Breakout, "What it means to be Great is an aesthetic choice. It’s not something you can put a number on, despite the inclination of engineers (and economists)." To me, I like the idea of Seriousness existing in the in the same vein.
:) stoked you like it, thanks for the kind words!
I had missed Ben’s review of Breakout but will check it out. Def agreed there is alignment with that quote
This is so Mudd and I love it. Only question left for me after reading this: why on earth wasn't I already subbed to Dan's Substack!?!
I really appreciate the kind words Josh.
And ha you're not missing much on the sub, this one took me ~6 months and I win no awards for consistency ;)
This article made me think of the Japanese. We can learn from their seriousness that produces high quality effects across their society, such almost complete lack of crime and the silly movements the west engages in.
Well said.
The trading card with signifiers for solving the cancers brought about by human invention...that's a serious one among serious ones. What a great dream to envision using the best of AI tools, rooted in the Dartmouth 1956 conference on AI, to undo some of the worst applications of "Better Living Through Chemistry" into the human diet, right in that era.
I couldn’t help myself; I had to reply to this article. You’ve probably already figured out from our brief, one-sided exchanges that I have a long list of troublesome mental traits: impulsivity, a total disregard for rules & authority, job hopping, and the indomitable power of foresight. Now that I have my beloved peace back, I’m going to rip apart your essay without mercy because what did you say? Oh, yeah…unemployed people have a lot of time on their hands and they can be mean with their words (paraphrasing).
Please tell me clearly if I am not welcome in your neck of the woods and I’ll stop. I'll tell you why I have trouble reading you: You’re fun but boring at the same time, like someone spliced the DNA of Brendon Fraser’s Encino Man with the late Alex Trebek. It’s almost like the old man version of you is choking out the teenage version of you. I’m rooting for the teenager, but the old man keeps giving me those threatening “Get off my lawn” MAGA vibes so I keep my distance. One must ask if you’re inhabiting the present version of yourself or if you’re in a constant battle between the Past & Future. Is that why you are fascinated by time machines? You don’t need it, hun. The past already happened and the future isn’t here yet.
First, I look up to you, a tiny bit, like the tiniest bit of a microbit. You’re science-y and math-y and you’re white too, man; you’ve got it all going on.
* Those motorcycles are ugly. Give me a Ducati any day of the week. Look up the Japanese tradition, Kintsugi. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
* I like your frenetic Seriousness! But it never lasts. How long do you…never mind…You remind me of the Terminator, the one that keeps turning into silver goo and coming back again (not like that; I mean your work ethic, idiot). Well, I’m relatively normal and I can stay serious for two days max.
* Listen, Evil Spock, you’re missing an essential ingredient of Chaos. People don’t accidentally do anything; everything has a purpose, and it’s also why having your behavior analyzed by someone is jarring (I know you do it; don’t lie, you have those beady dark eyes just like I do).
‘Kay, ready? People do bad things on purpose to retain power and influence. Mineral depletion? On purpose. Psychologically intrusive tools and technology that may cause brain damage? On purpose. Manipulation of national debt? On purpose. Why do I keep bothering you? On purpose.
* Damn it, I like your equation. I'll tell you why—I think PTSD is a unique form of energy conservation in the brain. I worked so hard to study it because I told myself if I could cheat the system and shatter the threshold with sheer concentrated effort, I could get my brain back. I don’t want to toot my own horn or start screaming, “I’m so great but no one wants to date me,” but it’s true.
* Activation energy is nonsense. I didn’t activate anything. I started to realize that there is an endlessly complex system of energy exchanges happening every moment of the day for humans. I believe all those tiny reactions and physiological changes are kept in check by the body’s internal clock. Before fancy activations, you need to get that clock back up and running.
* Your seriousness checklist uses big words and I didn’t read it.
* I don’t know what the Anna Karenina principle is, but I read the book, and damn, it’s sad. I guess you can say she missed the train.
* Those are some nice data visualizations, not going to lie.
Conclusion: Look, I admire how you intermingle data, science, technology, and social precepts, but it’s dangerous, and you’re reaching. And I’m not a serious person. I’m a person of grit and determination, and when chaos comes, I grab my balls, in this case my coin purse, and I weather the storm. I think you're looking for something to explain why you do what you do and you don't have to; you're Daniel (I vote Encino Man Dan over Clint Eastwood Dan talking to a chair), but not Daniel J. Lewis—that man is a beacon to the next generation of actors.
And we come full circle. This reply was brought to you by the Spirit of Balto and Jose Cuervo. I keep leveling up; who knows? I might be in charge of a company one day. No one in their right mind is going to marry me, but I might be in a long-term relationship with an oil trader. Evolution is a hell of a thing.
Sure. We definitely have a seriousness gap. We are governed by unserious people, who are doing unserious things.
OTOH, building two motorcycles per year so that abusive actors get new toys to conspicuously consume is not particularly serious. Neither is giving over the government to Elon Musk for no particular reason other than that his support was essential for winning an election and he is the country's largest rent-seeker.
We already have shifted "the elite student’s dream job" to risk-acceptant industrialists sufficiently well to have built the most valuable companies in the world, the leaders of which openly disdain academia and essentially all civil institutions. Academia and politics are dead zones for ambitious people, and that has been true since 2008 (if not longer), most of today's economic elites are almost shockingly uneducated. "Move fast, break stuff" is definitely not under-supplied in America, it is in fact why everything is broken (it is the source of the ultra-financialization you disdain, which serious academics (and labor leaders) warned about for decades, only to be ignored by progress-oriented tech boosters and the politicians who love them).
And what have those industrialists done with the license they've been given? Fall into the K-hole while impregnating a harem? Rent out the city of Venice for the most plastic wedding in history? Give a Schmittian lecture series calling Greta Thunberg the Antichrist? Erect a surveillance state in service to the most deeply unserious president in history?
No, I'm afraid we don't need more of that. We've had enough. Seriousness comes from *accountability,* a concept (completely unmentioned in this essay) that today's industrialists refuse to even countenance.
So this essay does not make a serious argument, and thus does not serve a serious purpose. As was predictable by simply asking: what would the author's own framework suggest about the seriousness level of Substacking?
I agree that accountability is sorely missing in American politics & industry. In fact, I never forget reading a book where the villain goes, "Efficiency is doing whatever I want and tying the consequences to another group, land, or thing."
But the writer is serious, I'm afraid. He's serious about everything, which is his boon & bane exclusively—take a look at his raw data and IsXSerious. His interpretation of the equation is beautiful and well-structured, and his creativity is apparent. As for the medium of delivery, well, the man knows his audience, right? Substack tends toward liberal, well-educated readers.
P.S. I also decry the recent treatment of Ms. Thunberg and thank you for sharing your thoughts.
"His interpretation of the equation is beautiful and well-structured, and his creativity is apparent."
He has taken a field of serious inquiry -- complexity science -- and attempted to reduce it to a simplified model.
Which is anti-serious.
He voted for Trump because he cares about depolarization, which is grounds to consider extensive remedial education and/or psychotherapy.
But again: the presented avatar of seriousness is building two motorcycles per year for famous people. This is not just elitism, it is "let them eat cake"-style condescension, it's disconnected from our present reality.
Which is where the accountability comes from: the elites being ripped down from their goddamn perches and forced to live with the same rules as the rest of us. Until that happens there will be no progress, only increasing chaos.
First off, I like you, stranger. Second, with each reply my bite is going to get a little more aggressive—I was teething in my first response.
This is not complexity science. I mean, he’s good, but he’s not that good.
And, uh, seriousness is… let me check Merriam-Webster… Yeah, it’s an adjective in this context. Let’s give him some leeway; he gave this post 6 months of thought, and I qualify that as sufficiently serious.
Aw, come on, the low blow? He voted for Trump? Of course he did; he’s from Kentucky.
I’ll end on this because I actually enjoy your intensity a little too much: don’t take what the writer is saying as a battle cry even though he did use that vociferous language; please forgive him, he’s just trying to argue for increased degrees of order in a world of chaos, uncertainty, and misunderstanding. That’s my take anyway, and for that, he has my respect. I’m an apathetic intellectual, not a politician.
P.S. I don’t like his featured motorcycles 🏍 either. Check out the Ducati Sport 1000 featured in Tron.
Oh so we're grading seriousness on a curve now? We're giving participation trophies to people who spend 6 months writing Substack articles?
I don't care where he's from. The current gov of KY is a Democrat. I've lived throughout that region and spent a lot of time in KY, as well as other red states.
He is not arguing for order, that's my entire point. You don't get order by reducing complex systems into soundbytes and moral lessons. That's how you produce crises.
The "abundance"/"progress" types need to spend some time reading about what happened to the Futurists of a century ago. The Vorticists, the Wellsian "things to come" optimists. You cannot process-engineer the future and everyone who has tried has met with disaster.