This post is about laying some groundwork, starting with the obvious:

1. We value some things more than others.

When you care more about something, you prioritize it above something you care less about.

Obvious, right? True by definition.

We do this all the time, without even feeling it. If you decide to heat up leftovers in the microwave instead of going out, it might be because you care less about taste, and care more about convenience or saving money.

Hundreds of times per day, without a second thought, we’re giving up what we care less about, in order to get what we care more about.

2. We value each thing a certain amount.

For everything we value, there is a real line somewhere, dividing the costs we are willing to pay from the costs we are unwilling to pay.

Would you pay $60 for a cheeseburger? Probably not.

Perhaps you’d pay $8, maybe $9 for a cheeseburger.

That’s the edge of your budget for that burger — that’s “the line.” Even though you decide where that line is, and there’s nothing physically preventing you from spending $60 on it, your line is really, actually — objectively — around $8.50.

The act of valuing is a subjective judgment, which we objectively make.

If it costs $9.50 or more, you objectively won’t pay, objectively won’t obtain the burger, and thus objectively prefer to have your money rather than the burger.

I am belaboring this, but if you’ve ever traded crypto or stocks you’re familiar with the objective valuation of an asset. All I’m saying is this is true in recesses of the heart where there are no stock markets.

3. Our actions reveal what that amount is.

There’s often a difference between what our values objectively are, and what we think and say they are. I’ve met many a raving lunatic who says he’s really serious about changing the world, while refusing to even change his socks.

The difference between us and that guy is only one of degree.

Here’s the Point

To recap:

• We value some things more than others.

• We objectively value things a certain amount.

• Our actions tell us how much we value things — and if we don’t value something, we won’t obtain it.

In each of those statements, replace things with truth:

• We value some things more than truth.

• We objectively value truth a certain amount.

• Our actions tell us how much we value truth — and if we don’t value truth, we won’t obtain it.

There is really, actually, objectively a line somewhere, above which the truth costs us more than we can handle.

Above it, we’ll take the lie, thank you very much.

And when it comes to truth-seeking, humans are very bad at being honest with ourselves about where our “line” is.

We tend to overestimate. We valiantly declare, “Truth at any cost, even my very life!” — but then we’re not even willing to embarrass ourselves a little bit!

When the decision comes to either feel like a fool by discovering we’re wrong, or allow ourselves to be deceived, we very often choose the latter.

You probably know this already — so why did I spent 15 minutes of your time belaboring it anew?

Because even though we all understand this, most intellectuals fail to follow this knowledge to its logical conclusion: When it comes to truth-seeking, improving what we “objectively value” is far more important than improving what we “objectively know.”

To be concise: Our knowledge depends on our values.

Doesn’t this sound ridiculous?

After writing 2 of his 9 symphonies and 17 of his 32 piano sonatas, Beethoven started to go deaf — to lose his instrument of instruments, the sense by which he had built his life’s work.

This could have been the end. But despising (i.e., scorning) his disability, he chose to keep composing.

The result was an elevation of his soul; an artistic white martyrdom.

It’s one thing to become a great x.

It’s another to become a great x, completely lose the means by which one became a great x, and then become a great x again. (or a great y.)

You might call it an unconditional triumph; one shown not to be dependent on the conditions by which the original triumph was won (such as being able to hear, in Beethoven’s case).

This seems to be something we all must conquer at some point. We all must learn to metabolize our own destruction — to “overcome death.”

So…

• Do you feel like the very roots your life grew out of have been severed?

• Do you feel subject to a profound cosmic “injustice,” one that seems tailor-made to destroy you?

Then…

• Is there a triumph in your past that God might be inviting you to make unconditional?

• Have you been given an opportunity to metabolize your own destruction?

Take it.

We have an intuitive sense that a mountain is a complete thing, and a volcano is an incomplete thing by comparison.

For most of my adult life, I’ve believed “All spiritual paths lead to the top of the same mountain.” 

But these paths don’t converge on the summit of the mountain. They converge on an event horizon — an altitude somewhere below the summit — and they all claim the summit itself is incommunicable. The mountain is actually a volcano.

Since none reach the summit but only point to it, it logically followed that “all of these paths have equivalent value.”

That was my mistake.

All spiritual paths may eventually reach a mysterious barrier, but propositions about ultimate reality must still be more-true or less-true, and one of them must necessarily be most-true. A slope implies a summit.

While Buddhists and others may have nondual experiences, Catholics have, in addition, the correct propositional truths about them, including that God prefers we approach him through the Catholic church — because it is better for us.

Here are 5 of the reasons I think this is true. They are Risk management, Solution to suffering, Virtue epistemology, Positive theology, and Satsang.

1. Risk Management

Catholicism promises all who believe in Christ and do the will of God will be children of God — deified, completely united to God and therefore happy for eternity. Buddhism teaches that a tiny minority, perhaps 0.0001%, of meditators will have the talent and special privilege to become enlightened and attain eternal bliss.

Given such odds, it does seem more prudent simply to become Catholic. In addition, this arrangement seems far more just. With Christ, Heaven is not reserved only for supremely talented meditators.

2. Solution to suffering

For Buddhists, suffering is either a bad thing to transcend, or neither good nor bad.

For Catholics, suffering is an opportunity to participate in paying the moral debts of others — an opportunity to become like God, to become deified. Suffering can be realized to be a good by any lay Catholic who makes up their mind to do so at any moment. Catholics do not need meditation and total transcendence to begin to view suffering as a Good.

3. Virtue epistemology

The Catholic Church is an epistemic institution unique to human history.

Whereas in every other religion or society, individuals differ on theology and morality, the Catholic Church has defined and maintained an extremely subtle theology with which all of its saints either agree (see for themselves) or submit (trust without seeing). For Catholics, independent thought is a bad thing insofar as it’s prioritized over submission of one’s intellect to the stadium full of saints who agree, down to the finest details, on these matters of theology and morality.

I doubt I have two non-Catholic Twitter followers whose beliefs align as closely as all the saints’ beliefs align. [Ironically, I could prove this if Ideamarket were revived. Hmm….]

The Protestant Reformation introduced “independent thought as a good thing” — in other words, trust in one’s own intellect over that of the collective intellect of over 10,000 masters of Christian virtue.

The modern epistemic crisis that launched my Ideamarket career is a direct result. As everyone has their own opinion, the most important question in the world is “Whose opinion should we trust?”

As we attempt to answer that question, it becomes increasingly clear that plenty of smart, influential people are morally bankrupt. The answer to Who Deserves Trust continues to trend toward the virtuous, because only they are simultaneously brave enough to tell the truth, humble enough to admit when they’re wrong, free enough from personal scandals that they can be honest under all circumstances, etc.

The Catholic saints not only fulfill these virtue criteria to the utmost — they also all agree about theology and morality at a much higher resolution than any two non-Catholic philosophers.

The answer to the modern question is precisely that which the Protestant Reformation “liberated” us from — submission to a virtuous intellectual authority, whom we trust blindly because they deserve it.

Sheep On Purpose.

4. Positive theology

“Out beyond ideas of right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there,” said Rumi. “Of what we cannot speak, we must remain silent,” echoed Wittgenstein. 

I’ve seen it myself, they’re not making it up. Different cultures really have discovered an event horizon, knowledge beyond which it is impossible to put into words, unless God himself were to come down from heaven and speak them to us.

In God’s hilarious extravagance, that’s EXACTLY what he did.

God spent 2,000 years preparing the Jews for his birth as a human being. Then he was born to a desperately poor family among them, used human words, and just told us what mere rationality could never deduce.

Christianity properly understood — i.e., Catholicism — is the true mountain. It includes all the mystical wisdom and virtue found in meditative traditions like Buddhism, yet also goes beyond these, making claims about concrete realities to which Buddhism has no access: God is three persons with one will, there are specific actions that are always contrary to this will (sin), God has taken birth as a man, God has saved us from our sins by allowing himself to be unjustly tortured and killed, God has embedded his own divine efficacy into physical rituals (Sacraments), and suffering is not something to eliminate, but to embrace on behalf of others and thereby become like God, imitating the suffering he himself endured for us.

Anyone who has ever been obsessed with “embodied spirituality” should be paying attention.

Because God, in his hilarious extravagance, takes the positive theology of the incarnation to even further extremes: Jesus commands people to eat his flesh and drink his blood, so that whenever someone worthily receives the Eucharist, he’s uniting God’s incarnation with his own body at a molecular level. Whether you’re a world-class meditator like St Teresa of Avila or an illiterate bricklayer, you’ve got the God of the universe physically flowing through your physical heart, feeding your cells. This is way more extravagant than a subjective mystical experience, because it’s an objective mystical experience. Not a metaphysical, but a physical union with God. And this is what Christ desires to make commonplace for everyone.

Note the difference:

• Buddha: “Those who can climb the mountain, can bask in the sun.” 

• Christ: “I am the sun; everyone come take a bite.”

God, in his hilarious extravagance, not only defies the perennial negative theology by establishing a positive one — he establishes it so positively, so tangibly, that it becomes edible. As if to say, “Behold how low for you I have brought the most exalted mysteries — that what the greatest mind could never digest, the smallest stomach easily can.”

These are the sorts of things those 10,000 saints unanimously agree upon, down to the smallest detail.

5. Satsang

A logical consequence of Jesus taking the form of bread, is that anyone can sit satsang with Jesus — all you need is a priest and some bread.

Unlike Ramana Maharshi, Jesus in the Eucharist:

• Will not die and leave you without a guru

• Can be all over the world simultaneously

• Doesn’t need to sleep

• is literally God, and has all the power and love that God has

For centuries, Catholics have even set up perpetual adoration chapels for anyone — Catholic or not — to come sit in the presence of Jesus in the form of bread. There are plenty of miracles, conversion stories, nondual experiences, etc. to confirm the reality of this.

Conclusion

Catholicism’s superiority over other nondual spiritualities, even in their most mystical and exalted forms, is absolute upon absolute. It surpasses them not only in one way, but in many ways; and not only in many ways, but to an extreme extent in each one; and not only to an extreme extent in each one, but with an extreme humility, mercy, theological clarity, and personal tenderness.

Catholicism satisfies not only the mystic, but also the intellect — even a Buddhist-trained, paradox-soaked, conspiracy-warped intellect like mine. Catholic truth is more rational, more mystical, and more embodied than in any of the other traditions from which I’ve drunk deeply. Its apparent absence of non-doers like Michael Ashcroft and meditators like tasshin is a huge reason the world’s largest religion remains the world’s best-kept secret. The truths of the Catholic Church are hiding behind a language barrier, and all the translators are Buddhist.

Compression seems to be central to how humans communicate both effectively (i.e., in a way that has the desired impact) and efficiently (i.e., with reduced effort).

Poetry as compression

I once took a writing course from Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm.com, and one of the big takeaways for me was that the various parts of a written work can be thought of as "the entirety at different levels of compression."

• Text of an entire book = least compressed

• Chapters = locally compressed

• Book title = most compressed

The art of title-writing is the poetry of compression: how to say the whole thing in the most elegant and compressed way.

Social media as compression

Social media — at least insofar as it relates to spreading information — seems to develop in the direction of increased compression:

• People left Facebook for Twitter when they realized political rants can be compressed into 140 characters.

• People left Twitter for TikTok when they realized a graduate seminar can be compressed into a 30-second video.

The popularity of memes also relates to compression — it’s usually far more effective and efficient to convey a complex mix of emotions and circumstances by sending a hierogif everybody recognizes, than to describe them anew.

Christianity as Compression

Christians believe that God — the Logos, the eternal and infinite essence of Being itself — compressed himself in his Entirety into one man, Jesus Christ.

Catholics (and all Christians for the first 1500 years of Christianity) believe he compressed himself even further — into the Eucharist — making his divinity not merely communicable, but literally digestible, even to illiterate peasants.

Perhaps this is one (of many) reason it’s blasphemous to receive the Eucharist unworthily: because to do so distorts the message, and makes this infinitely efficient and effective communication, itself incommunicable.

If you dull your senses to the ultimate communicator, bearing the ultimate message, through the ultimate medium — how much more must your senses consequently become dulled to lesser communicators, bearing lesser messages, through lesser mediums?

Here’s why: Ideas have a UX problem.

When most people explain their genius idea, the listener thinks “Wait, you want me to 1) Figure out what the hell you’re talking about, and then 2) Be creative and imagine how it might apply to my life someday??”

From a UX perspective, other people’s ideas are a lot of work, and very uncertain reward.

Fortunately, it’s the easiest it’s ever been to solve the Idea-UX Problem. People do it all the time — usually, by building products. 

Idea: “Everyone should be able to have a TV show.”
Product: YouTube

Idea: “Conversations should spread as fast as possible.”
Product: Twitter

Etc.

So — you’ve got an idea.

1) What is the product that INCARNATES your idea?

2) What version of that product can you build, or hire someone to build, right now, and without anyone’s help or approval?

Just solve these problems and get it built, and you’ll never have to explain your idea or persuade people to like it, because using your product is functionally equivalent to ‘agreeing with your idea.’

I’m not saying you should compromise your idea or become a product hack.

I’m saying you don’t actually have an idea until you’ve given people a new ability.

Until then, you only have an idea for an idea. Without the part where it actually impacts people’s lives — the implementation — the incarnation — the Word Made Flesh! — you simply haven’t solved the problem well enough yet.

I was fortunate to have an ex-girlfriend who taught me this many years ago. I thought she was being super annoying at the time, but if it weren’t for her, I never would have gotten anything done. So if you’re mad at me right now, I understand. I was mad the first twelve times I heard this too.

The point is this: If you’re smart enough to have ideas, you’re smart enough to have ideas about launching a proof-of-concept inexpensively.

So, do it!

Forget persuasion; get adoption.

Thousands of people are turning their ideas into products — so many in fact, that anyone who doesn’t, gets immediately tossed into the “unserious about their idea” pile.

The age of the treatise is out. The age of the product is in. Launch or be ignored.

—Mike

Cheers!
—Mike

Comments, questions, objections, etc. are much appreciated because it might spur me to make more videos! 😂

Cheers,
—Mike

(9 mins long)

They teach something called the Debt Snowball. It works like this:

When you have lots of sources of debt, pay off the smallest ones first, and then use the extra money to pay off the next-smallest, and so on, paying off each debt in the order of smallest —> largest.

It seems logical that we could use our psychological resources the same way:

If epistemic debt is the amount of pain I must endure to become able to acknowledge a truth, then there must be an ideal order to endure it in.

For example, pay off some small denials first, and with the free energy no longer occupied by hiding the truth from ourselves, move onto larger ones.

Once you have chipped away at a few denials, overcoming subsequent ones become easier.

Epistemic Debt Snowballing is the art of chipping away at your denial — i.e., suffering — about the right topics, in the right order, so that the gains make the most important subsequent denials that much easier to let go of.

The subject matter involved will be different for each person, as each of us have a unique architecture of emotional wounds and ulterior motives to overcome.

I suppose the main point is this:

Overcoming denial about ANYTHING, will help you overcome denial about EVERYTHING.

(Here’s one way to practice overcoming denial.)

If I pray for you, you can’t do anything about it.

You don’t even know it’s happening.

You can’t distinguish its effects from any good thing that ever happens to you. Maybe my prayer helped bring a certain good thing about — and maybe it didn’t.

Prayer is a way to help anyone, as much as you want, without their permission.

Prayer is an un-refuseable, unstoppable, and permissionless gift.

Imagine sitting in your basement, mischievously plotting to bless the smithereens out of someone, knowing they’re powerless to prevent it.

Whose life would you force to improve?

MUAHAHAHA!!!

I’m fascinated lately with social protocols, which function based only on rules people agree to follow.

One of my favorite examples is Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-step model.

The 12-step model has been hugely successful in helping people recover from “hopeless” addictions and live lives of great virtue. What you may not know is that the 12 steps followed by individuals are supported by the 12 traditions followed by the groups themselves. The 12 traditions have enabled the 12-step model to perpetuate itself very successfully, without centralized governance.

I’ve bolded some parts that seem counterintuitive or unique. Check them out:

1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.

2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.

3. The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.

4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.

5. Each group has but one primary purpose — to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

6. An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance, or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.

7. Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers.

9. A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.

10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.

11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films.

12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.

I’ve hardly heard of any corporation, government, nonprofit that has rules like these.

They’re super weird!

Yet, these groups are outstandingly effective, self-replicating, and long-lived.

I can’t help but wonder what other problems could be solved just by coming up with the right sets of rules for small groups to follow voluntarily.

More on this later.

Unrelated: I’m thinking about “cleaning up” my Substack and removing all posts beneath a certain quality threshold.

Let me know if there are any articles you particularly liked or didn’t like, and I will use a tactic I learned from author Neil Strauss: It takes a few people disliking something to get me to remove it, but if one person really likes something, it stays.

Closeup of the board:

The more a truth requires us to change our lives, the more painful that truth will be to acknowledge.

The amount of pain that hides a truth from you, can be thought of as a debt.

Let’s call this epistemic debt.

When epistemic debt is so high we can’t possibly pay it, we are forced to defend lies to avoid the pain of acknowledging the truth. We can call being forced to defend lies epistemic debt slavery. In the same way that “debt slavery” is when all your work goes toward paying a debt, epistemic debt slavery is when all your intellectual work and thinking goes toward defending a lie.

When you’re in epistemic debt slavery regarding a certain topic, discovering the truth about it is impossible, intellectual honesty is impossible, and admitting all this to yourself tends to be impossible. An intellect in epistemic debt slavery is pure futility, as all its powers are used to defend the lies that protect it from intolerable truths.

Here’s the good news:

• Epistemic debt is predictable — we generally know what creates it

• Epistemic debt is finite — there’s only a limited amount

• Epistemic debt is egalitarian — neither wealth nor intelligence can protect someone from falling into it

• Epistemic debt is entangled — one person’s liberation contributes to everyone’s liberation

• Epistemic debt is economical — you can pay it off like a debt

• Epistemic debt is transferable — you can pay off the debts of others, and others can pay off yours

Will we treat of each of these in turn?

Nobody knows!!

An insane man believes “everyone is secretly out to get me,” and when everyone responds “no we’re not,” he thinks “that’s just what they would say if they were indeed out to get me!”

This is logically consistent! Yet usually wrong, or at least, not very informative.

What’s dysfunctional about the insane man is that his logical circle is very small. Information can’t mean anything, except “They’re after me.”

Therefore, he cannot break out of his circle by receiving new information into it.

He cannot merely “be skeptical” until “evidence” “compels” him to change — he can only LEAP to a new circle. His logic will stay circular — but there’s a chance it will be a bigger circle!

Becoming less insane is an exercise of the will, not of the mind! It’s an action from within, not an input from without.

Virtually all of our belief systems work this way.

Our worldviews feel infinite and all-encompassing because they are, in a sense. They’re logically consistent, but their correctness and usefulness are limited — just like the insane man’s. It’s just a matter of degree.

Like the insane man, we cannot merely “be skeptical” until “evidence” “compels” us to change our minds. We must leap. We must try on new conclusions. Learning involves taking real risks — venturing real pain and loss. And without crossing these gulfs of risk, it’s impossible for us to know what the world looks like from within a bigger circle.

We will stay as insane as we are — and hopelessly so — until we leap.

From within our current circles, anything we don’t yet believe will appear to be “extremely unlikely.”

Of course we think that! If we thought a thing were likely, we’d believe it already. We tell ourselves we doubt because “it’s unlikely,” but it’s the reverse — we think it’s unlikely because we doubt.

The insane man would say, “It’s extremely unlikely that I’m just paranoid.” He can’t judge likelihoods from within his circle. Neither can we.

Imagine you have 5 options for what to believe about a given topic, and you’re biased toward option B:

Most experts would recommend tactics for overcoming your tendency to prefer one belief over another. “You see that bias? Make it go away”

But I don’t think treating bias like an enemy is effective. If it were, people who care a lot about overcoming bias would be better at it. Yet, nobody is less logical and rational than people who go around shouting about how logical and rational they are.

We can’t make our preferences go away by suppressing them.

However, we can reduce them by willing ourselves to favor alternatives, so that we no longer prefer one belief over another.

The exertion is not to doubt ourselves harder, but to believe others harder.

This takes effort — I’m not saying this approach comes automatically or easily.

Just that it’s actually effective.

• [Balaji Srinivasan] will agree with [“UFOs are aliens”] by [August 1]

• [over 50% of people who agreed with x] will also agree with [y] by [date]

That’s what persuasion markets are for.

Persuasion markets are prediction markets, with self-reported opinions as the settlement oracle.

This is important because it expands the scope of prediction markets to include matters of judgment or interpretation rather than only matters of data.

These self-reported opinions can come from a single person (“Balaji Srinivasan”), a general group (“over 50% of active users”), a filtered group (“users who agreed with [x] before [date]”), or combinations thereof.

Persuasion markets establish several things at once:

1. A measure of who the public actually trusts to settle questions of public knowledge. The people trusted by the most users to settle their bets, are those who have earned the most trust in the eyes of the user base.

2. A track record to show how these trusted parties have performed. As oracles settle markets, they establish a track record by which their trustworthiness will be judged in hindsight.

3. A system for quickly iterating our judgments about who deserves trust. Oracles who showed great judgment in hindsight will be asked to settle more markets, and those who showed poor judgment will be asked to settle fewer.

4. A lucrative income stream for people who earn public trust. Whoever gets chosen to settle a market, could receive a cut of all the wagers placed. For example, say someone creates this market:

Balaji Srinivasan will agree with [UFOs are aliens] by [August 1, 2023]

If users crowdsource a total of $48,769 in wagers, then Balaji might get 5% ($2,438) just by taking 5 seconds to answer a single YES-NO question.

The most lucrative bet is a public good

The most lucrative bet is to find:

• an unpopular conclusion

• that has a lot of evidence

and to wager that:

• a highly respected person

• with a genuinely open mind

will soon believe it.

This is lucrative because 1) most people will bet against you (because it’s an unpopular opinion), yet 2) you have a reasonable chance of changing the oracle’s mind, because the oracle you chose is genuinely open-minded and there’s a lot of evidence. (And it’s a public good because it’s helpful to bring attention and credibility to unpopular truths, and because it’s helpful to identify people who can genuinely accept new evidence.)

The risks are, perhaps the person isn’t as open-minded as you thought, or the evidence isn’t as strong as you thought. Users will need to become good at judging not only evidence, but also intellectual character — who will really change their minds when they see new evidence?

If you can evaluate both 1) unpopular ideas and 2) intellectual character well, you ought to be able to make a lot of money. As a side effect, the conversation may change around that topic when — to everyone’s surprise but yours — the oracle comes out in favor.

Demographics as oracles

After enough opinions have been recorded, it will be easy to filter users based on their beliefs, and on the timing of their beliefs.

Holding certain beliefs at certain times is another way to evaluate intellectual character in order to choose trustworthy oracles.

Consider the third example from the beginning of this article — a bet on whether…

• [over 50% of people who agreed with x] will also agree with [y] by [date]

This is an example of using a demographic as an oracle. Instead of resolving based on the judgment of a single person, the “demographic oracle” resolves based on the majority opinion of respondents from a pre-selected group of users, at the closing time.

Aggregating the best evidence

Since the goal is to persuade the oracle, it would be in your best interest to collect the evidence and make it easy to find and understand. This is where the term “persuasion market” finds its most literal expression — it’s literally a market to see whether you can convince someone you trust, of something you think is important.

Therefore, the best evidence for unpopular conclusions may naturally end up in the Comment sections of persuasion markets. These could become a reference point for the majority of online discourse on that topic.

Instant gratification

A simple form of persuasion markets could be implemented pretty much instantly:

• Today, someone could make a market on manifold.markets naming a particular person as the oracle. The downside is, there’s no guarantee they’ll follow through and settle the market for you, and it’s only with “play money” so there’s not much of an incentive.

• An existing prediction market like polymarket.com could launch persuasion markets as a new kind of market, verifying the oracle’s crypto wallet address to make sure the intended person is the one who settles the market.

But also…

I’m building an app!

I have an idea for an app that I believe could accomplish 80% of what Ideamarket aimed for, with 100x easier UX than Ideamarket ever had. So easy your grandma could use it, and fully web2.

Moreover, it could facilitate persuasion markets extremely well. Can’t promise anything will come to fruition at this point, but we’ll see.

Interested in helping build?

• Seeking 2 devs to build the MVP (1 front end, 1 back end)

• Donate here to fund the MVP:

  • ETH & ERC20 — 0x93f9707adb26d98cfc6d73C8840425010AfA968B

I’m using the same printing service I used for Ideamarket’s official T-Shirt, so if you liked those you’ll like these. In my experience, they’re very comfortable and durable — my favorite shirts based on material alone.

Here are the first 3 designs. You can buy them at https://thepearlclutchers.com

1

St. Benedict of Nursia invented Western monasticism around 500 AD. He was a hermit living alone, but became so holy he kept attracting followers, so he set up monasteries and instituted the first monastic “rule of life” to govern them. Demons hate St. Benedict so much that the circular emblems seen on the sleeves and back of this shirt are often pressed into medals and worn for protection.

Thus, this may be as close to a demon-proof shirt as one can get.

Buy it here.

(Credit: Saint Benedict. Engraving by F.L. Schmitner. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark)

2

This scene of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary (blue) is painted on the ceiling of a German church. Buy it here.

(Credit: Simon Benedikt Faistenberger, 1739. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

3

Buonaccorso’s Coronation of the Virgin. The black angels in the back row are seraphim, the “biblically accurate angels” from the meme about how they have a ton of wings and eyes. Buy it here.

(Credit: Niccolò di Buonaccorso, The Coronation of the Virgin. Public Domain.)

Requests welcome

Do you have a favorite saint, or favorite scene from the Bible you’d like me to make into a shirt? Let me know!

Cheers,
—Mike

Instead of thinking about whatever interests us in life, we think “I’m mad at Bob, he really did me wrong and such and such…”

Anger produces angry thoughts, and they continue as long as we’re angry.

When we calm down or get distracted, our thoughts change back to non-angry ones.

The same happens with desire.

When we desire something, that desire creates an endless loop of thoughts about it. If we pray with our words only, we may never run out of words, as long as we still have desire. That desire might simply produce an infinite amount of words to pray, in the same way an angry mood produces an infinite amount of angry thoughts.

But if we offer that desire itself to God, perhaps it’s as if we’d prayed that entire infinity of verbal prayers produced by the desire. By offering the desire as the prayer, it seems we pray an infinity of words in a finite amount of time.

Here’s what “praying the desire” feels like to me:

Instead of fighting the desire or trying to make it go away, refrain from resisting its presence within you. Remain open to the sensation of desiring, holding the intention of offering it to God, and you may feel the desire leave your body — a gently flowing current, like steam rising from a hot dish. If you let the full amount of the desire leave your body in this way, you’ll be left feeling peaceful about it, with an intuition of “completeness,” a sense that you’ve prayed all that you need to about this issue.

Scientists are the world’s professionals when it comes to seeking truth and advancing human knowledge.

So when scientific and para-scientific figures like Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, and James Randi popularized Skepticism in the public mind, it seemed expert and credible.

But there’s one question I just can’t stop thinking about:

Einstein-era Nobel-winning physicist Max Planck famously said “Science advances one funeral at a time.” If scientists are the world’s leading professionals at seeking truth and advancing knowledge, then why are they so SLOW to recognize truth and advance their knowledge?

According to Planck, if scientists lived forever, their mistakes might be eternal.

But so would most people’s!

When it comes to willingness to recognize truth, what advantage do top scientists possess over the general public?

I struggle to see any.

I suspect Skepticism makes us dumber, for a number of reasons.

Here are a few:

No market for skepticism

In theory, science declares “all knowledge is tentative.”

In practice, well… according to Max Planck, most scientists would literally rather die than practice that.

By contrast, investors and risk managers have mastered the practice of tentative knowledge industry-wide, in a single elegant stroke: they stopped talking about “knowledge” altogether, and instead talk about risk and uncertainty. The presumption of fallibility is so sincere among investors that they don’t frame anything in terms of “knowledge” or “facts” like scientists do.

This allows investors to iterate their beliefs very quickly.

A stock chart visualizes confidence over time, reflecting every twitch of doubt and hope:

Imagine if we visualized the scientific community’s confidence over time in a given idea:

Note the difference in iteration rate. How few and cumbersome are the changes in confidence around a major scientific idea in the last century.

How totally desolate the prospects seem to be for today’s proponents of ether — for example, fans of Nikola Tesla:

“Long ago [mankind] recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, of a tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Ākāśa or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena.

—Nikola Tesla

“All things and phenomena,” you say?

Pretty big statement, from a pretty big scientific authority.

Yet instead of probing this uncertainty for overlooked breakthroughs, the entire scientific world simply picks a side and swears lifelong allegiance, in the name of skepticism.

Max Planck pointed this out 100 years ago. True to form, it hasn’t changed.

Markets vs Life

If skepticism were highly effective for discerning truth, stock traders would use it to make money. But they don’t, because stock traders compete against people who take minutes — not decades — to incorporate new information into their worldviews.

Skepticism iterates too slowly to be useful in markets.

Yet, skepticism seems even less useful in life, for a very specific reason:

In markets, you can limit your risk exposure to your area of expertise. You, Ideamarket readers, might have the expertise to invest wisely in web3 social protocols and a couple other niche areas.

But in life, we’re constantly exposed to risk outside our areas of expertise:

• What constitutes a healthy diet?

• What constitutes morality?

• Is the COVID vaccine good or bad?

A skeptical investor can “opt out” of a risky asset class. But a skeptical person cannot opt out of reality. If milk is good for you, it affects your life. If masturbation is morally wrong, it affects your life. If the COVID vaccine causes myocarditis, it affects your life.

If investors value knowledge iteration rate so highly, and they can opt out — how much more should we ordinary people value it, who cannot opt out?

Skepticism is learned

Before we learn about skepticism, we’re just thinking about stuff, and trying to figure it out. Innocently. Like children.

When we’re taught about skepticism, we believe it — after all, we’re still credulous! Thus, skepticism begins with credulity. We cannot adopt a posture of doubt without first being credulous enough to be convinced it’s a good idea.

Then we change.

Skepticism is like the foreigner who immigrates into your mind, then closes the borders to all who try to come after.

When we learn skepticism, we stop letting things in.

Defending ourselves from incursions into our pristine bastions of scientific truth, we dry out intellectually. We can now only improve human knowledge by dying and being replaced.

Thus proceeds science. Is it really the best we can do?

Credulity makes mistakes. Skepticism makes mistakes permanent.

If the goal is to improve our thinking, we should learn how to update our beliefs with ease, not with reluctance.

With apologies to Mark Twain,

The person who is unwilling to believe the truth has no advantage over the person who never hears it.

In the internet age, virtually everyone hears the truth — from a friend, from an enemy, or from a conspiracy theorist. Therefore, the advantage now seems completely concentrated in people who are willing to believe new things — the exact opposite of skepticism.

I’m Jewish by blood, but by faith, I’ve been (in chronological order) —

1. hardcore atheist

2. Buddhist/Daoist

3. Protestant Christian

4. and now, Catholic.

“Mike, that just means you’re a fool getting dragged around by your nose.”

Perhaps!

But at least I won’t be the same fool forever like Max Planck’s colleagues!

Will you?