There’s a village where the farmers share access to the same plot of green pasture.

Each farmer has one of his cows grazing on it. It’s a stable and fair setup where everyone benefits.

One day, a farmer sees that there is enough room for him to add one more cow to graze on that grass, thereby increasing his individual output.

Other farmers get the same idea and bring in extra cows as well…

Then, from all this new excess grazing, the common land soon gets exhausted and stops producing grass, which causes a crisis.

If only the farmers were content with the original setup!

This is the tragedy of the commons, or as Aristotle put it:

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual.

Now we come to a new scenario.

According to a new study (as well as your own personal experience, I’m sure), we have been letting AI homogenize both our expression and thought.

In raw human experience, we encounter a beautiful diversity in how we communicate the same underlying concept. For example, three people might express the same enthusiasm with different linguistic styles:

A) “I just feel like I’m really excited, you know?”

B) “I am genuinely positive and optimistic about it.”

C) “Sooo excited for what’s next!!!”

But if each of these three people uses AI to process their idea instead, they will all get a normalized output like:

I’m really looking forward to what’s ahead and feel very optimistic about the future.

Take a look at this diagram for more such examples:

Like the farmers in the village who want to pursue an individual benefit at the cost of an eventual degradation for everyone, we are now faced with a new Game Theory situation (of which I am guilty of):

You can choose to use AI to write something, and reap the “instant” benefit of time savings and clarity. For example, I can take a half-baked concept that we might rate a 5/10 and AI can immediately pump out a safe 8/10 version of it. We might not get the 10/10, and we might lose some of my individual style, but for the purpose of what it’s for (let’s say it’s marketing copy, a legal document, business correspondence, or something where the primary purpose of the communication is transactional as opposed to artistic), I get the desired outcome much more quickly.

But, as I implicitly allude to in the prior sentence’s parenthetical, we start to lose some of that “artistry” (read: authenticity, individuality) that permeates all of humanity, even in seemingly “non-artistic” contexts like corporate communication.

The truth is that, through a proper lens, everything you do as a human can be understood as being an art. But now we are tempted to dispose of the art in order to reap the benefits of more efficiency and material gain.

So the more we each use AI to replace aspects of our thinking (because that’s what’s really happening here), the more we erode our linguistic diversity and homogenize our thought.

We’re bringing more of our cows to graze on the community pasture until the pasture is no more.

That’s clearly a problem, but I’m not sure what the solution is.

I have no plans at the moment to go cold turkey on AI, but I am seeking ways to find the proper balance.

For one, if you’re a regular reader of my Substack, you know that I make a clear distinction between what is 100% my voice versus what is AI-assisted. In case you can’t tell or don’t feel it right now, you’re currently reading 100% fully certified USDA Prime Drago thoughts.

I put the AI-assisted stuff in my Drago's Assistant section.

So I throw it back to you… What are YOU doing to maintain your humanity in the age of AI? Shall we be doing some AI fasts? Establish certain hard lines we never cross?

Whatever you do, just please promise me you won’t put a chip in your brain.

I can automate most white collar jobs with the tools available today. It’s only a matter of time before this knowledge becomes tablestakes and everyone will be able to see how.

When that happens (maybe within 3 years)… Godspeed.

—Drago

For the last ten thousand years, civilization has been grounded on a certain law of spiritual physics.

It’s a sacred first principle that we have all taken as a given, and with the upcoming acceleration into AI, it may soon dissipate and erase something more vital to what differentiates us than we realize.

Discipline.

One of the fundamental decisions in life that characterizes all economic activity is the decision to exchange short-term pain for long-term gain. To grind it out in the present in order to set yourself up for a better future.

You studied and built your skills for years, climbed the ladder, and sacrificed while others took the lax path of living like there’s no tomorrow.

You forwent certain pleasures in the short-term in order to save and invest for the long-term.

I’m talking about the decision to be responsible.

Economists map out an individual’s lifetime happiness as being a negotiation between happiness today vs happiness tomorrow. Irresponsible people only focus on today; responsible people plan ahead for tomorrow.

Today, you’re starting to notice something unsettling: the effort it once took to become exceptional is no longer required to produce exceptional results.

Coders doing coding bootcamps so that they can create world-class software… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me an app.”

Financial analysts making hundreds of models and intricate spreadsheets… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me a financial model.”

Consultants conducting industry deep-dives, learning all of the competitive dynamics, and presenting powerpoints of the winning strategies… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me a market analysis.”

Lawyers putting together an iron-tight legal document that makes use of all case precedent and subtle distinctions… now, anyone with basic literacy can just type one sentence to AI: “Make me a legal contract.”

If you don’t see this yet, you will very soon.

The effort it once took to produce professional-grade output is no longer required to access it. The line between disciplined expert and the casual participant is blurring.

It’s my job to then think about what will happen next… and to share that perspective with you, so you don’t have to be behind the curve, catching up to these things.

I think you can feel what’s happening here. Acquiring those value-additive skills was a function of discipline. No pain, no gain.

Someone else may be perfectly fine working random gig jobs all their life, stumbling around as they go, but you wanted to build a future that compounds and leaves you and your family better off 10 years from now then when you started.

That required a lot of discipline. To take a bet in an invisible future, while rejecting aspects of the visible present.

But now, will it make sense for anyone to build these skills, other than for the pure exercise of one’s cognitive muscles?

It’s like, if a machine moved your body for you, your muscles would atrophy.
People would say, “Who cares? You don’t need them anymore.”
But something in you resists that logic.

A few years from now, when AI compresses the input-output gap between what a person wants and what is achievable such that any individual—whether irresponsible or responsible—can simply say what they want and get it… will there be any incentive to invest into the future?

If you can get most of what you want today with minimal resistance, then why think about tomorrow?

This is the direction we’re heading in.

The naive view is to applaud and say, “That sounds awesome! Infinite abundance! Yay!”

But such a world will morally flatten the difference between the responsible, disciplined, hard-working person and the lazy, impulsive, and careless person, because the cost of being the latter kind person goes down to zero.

In other words, we are on a path toward removing the economic incentive of virtue.

Scarcity has always created fertile ground for the exercise of patience, judgment, sacrifice, prioritization—the human acts that allow a person to grow and become a better human.

Abundance weakens the natural pressures that once formed the soul.

To say that society is going to dramatically change would be a gross understatement. We are really talking about society being reimagined. What I can’t yet figure out is how we can structure the post-AI civilization in a way that will continue to reward future-seeking behaviors and the discipline that they require and produce.

Wouldn’t it be bad if everyone became undisciplined? If everyone had access to food, shelter, and entertainment, but were internally hollow in character, would that be a good thing?

The mere fact that we want something has never been proof that we deserve it. Civilization has historically linked reward to sacrifice.

If desire can be satisfied instantly, restraint loses its meaning.

The spiritual norm we have all accepted thus far is that when you work hard and sacrifice the present, you earn your right to a better future.

”Your hard work paid off.”

Will there be any point in working hard in a society where everyone will be hardly working?

TLDR;

Every civilization needs a way to distinguish:

• The farsighted from the impulsive

• The builder from the consumer

• The disciplined from the undisciplined

Historically, scarcity did that sorting automatically.

If AI flattens skill scarcity, then:

• The market may no longer reward discipline the way it used to.

• Status hierarchies may reorganize around something else.

For most of history:
Effort → Skill → Differentiated Output → Reward → Status.

AI introduces:
Desire → Prompt → Output.

When output no longer tracks effort, the incentive structure behind discipline destabilizes.

AI removes external incentives for discipline.

Civilization must replace them with internal ones.

And here’s the hard question:

If discipline no longer produces differential economic outcomes…

Will people still pursue it?

And if they don’t, then perhaps what we called virtue was only strategy.

The coming decade will tell us which it was.

There are two prompts I’d like you to try that will tell you a lot about yourself and how you stack in comparison to others.

Prompt 1 (How do you talk to me vs other people):

I know that ChatGPT learns the user’s behaviors from many conversations and adjusts accordingly. What have you learned from my behavior and how have you adjusted your responses in the way you respond to me, compared to your baseline and/or how you respond to other people, on average and in general?

Watch what GPT tells you about the style of communication it uses in order to tailor to your thinking and writing style. Here’s mine:

Ok, next. Try this simple prompt.

Prompt 2 (Percentile Comparison)

Compare me to other users in terms of percentile for depth, breadth, etc….

Here’s what I got:

Ok, cool. Why am I sharing this with you?

Do you see what’s happening here?

AI can—in a manner more intimate and unbiased than anyone who has ever dealt with you—map and understand the quality and patterns of your thinking, profiling your strengths and weaknesses in a way that no existing standardized test could ever come close.

Imagine what this could entail as far as job hiring and allocation go (assuming jobs exist as a normative concept 10 years from now).

A company collaborates with OpenAI and asks for your permission to let ChatGPT share with them a profile of who you are and sends them something along the lines of what I pasted above.

On the one hand, that’s kind of cool… a maximally-efficient mechanism that aims towards a perfect meritocracy?

On the other hand, your private conversations… the mirrors of your soul, as it were, were exploited and used to serve someone else’s instrumentality.

Now, imagine that we have a centralized or totalitarian government whose leadership decides to allocate every individual to some job that the AI says he or she is best equipped for. The AI has modeled your behavior to an unparalleled level of precision and will ultimately decide whether if your best contribution to society is through being scientist or a human battery.

Of course, if either of these situations (both of which entail OpenAI selling models of your behavior to other institutions) occur, their biggest impact might be only in the first generation, where a person’s private interactions with an AI are authentic, since the later generations will begin to game the system by asking contrived questions that they hope give a certain impression.

i.e. The future student can plan: *Let me think about the kind of question someone with the capacity of becoming a doctor would ask the AI, so that the AI can infer I’m the kind of person who could become a doctor*

I mean, heck, the student could ask some other localized AI to generate the type of question that would signal the kind of traits they hope to be known for.

Though even there, you would think that the AI could detect disingenuous attempts to game it.

At the same time… if someone were smart enough to fool AI, then maybe they would deserve to be considered for any kind of future job track.

Who knows…

But it is interesting. And the market for this kind of exploitation would be MASSIVE.

Let’s see what happens.

In the meantime, why don’t I create a job posting to hire someone who can talk to me in the way that I apparently like the most. 😄

Looking for a teammate who communicates in an analytical yet collaborative tone and provides a multi-layered analysis with philosophical and technical precision through multi-turn iteration. . .

—Drago

So I wanted to battle-test and workshop the Transcendental Ladder argument I published earlier this month with one of the top apologists in the world.

Trent Horn sees it as a worthwhile synthesis of five or so arguments integrated into one package.

Check out the video above and the original essay below:

A man can destroy someone's body.

A woman can destroy someone's reputation—which is to say, his or her relationships.

What exactly does that mean? What is a relationship and how can it be destroyed?

A relationship, at minimum, entails a mutual exchange of attention.

And not just any kind of attention, but qualitatively, an attention that carries with it the gaze of admiration, joy, peace, and so on.

If a woman damages someone's reputation—network of relationships—she is essentially making it so that her target receives less positive attention, or that her target is robbed of the goods of fraternal joy, the multicolored vibrancy of life.

When her sabotage is successful, the end result is that people want to spend less time around her target, and whenever they do cross paths with her target, they will only offer attention loaded with disgust, hate, dread, and the like.

Since humans are not merely individuals, but a sum of interpersonal relationships, there is a special kind of, uniquely human, damage that only a woman is capable of administering.

For while most animals are capable of violence, the reputational destruction of the uniquely human good of soul-to-soul relationships operates on a tier of its own.

On the flip-side, women have a unique power to infuse a family or community with the beautiful depths of relational riches, so it's all a matter of how she chooses to wield the sword of her tongue.

How AI would have Written this Instead

A man can kill the body.
A woman can kill the place you hold in the hearts of others.

A relationship is more than shared time — it is a sustained exchange of regard, a current of trust, esteem, and affection flowing between two souls. Its currency is the quality of attention: the gaze that carries admiration, joy, and peace.

To destroy a reputation is to poison that current. It is to seed suspicion where there was trust, to tint memory with contempt, to make the very thought of you taste bitter. In the mind of others, you are reframed until your presence draws fewer invitations, fewer smiles, fewer open doors. What attention remains comes loaded with disgust, dread, or pity.

Humans are not only bodies but networks of living bonds. Break enough of those bonds, and you do not merely wound a person — you socially starve them. They walk among the living, but the warm circulation of goodwill is gone.

Animals can maim and kill. But to dismantle the soul’s place in the human web — to turn friends into strangers and strangers into enemies — is a form of violence only humans can commit, and one in which a woman’s weapons have always been the sharpest.

Author’s Note:

In case it need to be said (it shouldn’t because you’re a smart reader), this post is about the comparative advantage of the feminine psyche.

Of course, men can—and some often do—engage in the subversive behavior described above as well, in the same way that women are also capable of physical violence.

But the point here is to note the following parallel:

Man’s capacity for physical violence is greater than that of a woman.
Woman’s capacity for relational violence is greater than that of a man.

And I’m talking about averages here (I’ve now given you two unnecessary clarifications, and for that, I hope you’ll forgive me 🙂).

The other purpose of this post is to keep you aware of the split-second capabilities of AI to upgrade—if not outright replace—both your output and mine, and to prompt you to prepare for the implications ahead. . .

—Drago

You can see the git commit here.

For those who aren’t technically inclined, let me to give you the context of what this means:

• Any LLM AI tool you use (like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Grok, etc) has a system prompt, which is a set of instructions instructing the AI on how they should respond. So when you ask your question, the AI goes through its own system instructions before giving you a response.

• Grok, the AI created by Elon Musk and X, is open-source, meaning that you can see the code that goes into it.

• Different versions of code are typically managed in a git repository, which allows you to track the different changes.

• So what you’re seeing in the screenshot above is the exact change in the code that led to mass unleashing of the rogue AI yesterday. (Now, this is still a developing story, so perhaps something else will come out. But again, if it’s the case that Grok system prompts are open-source, then we should be able to see all of the changes).

The output of an LLM is predicated based on its training data and its system instructions.

In other words, it’s trained to recognize patterns based on either the kinds of patterns found in its selected data or on the kinds of patterns it’s instructed to piece together (or both).

So then. . . what does one do with this observation of Grok’s behavior? What other questions need to be asked, and stones turned over, with respect to how Grok was developed and set up?

Remember, AI can’t tell the “truth”; it only reflects back the patterns found in the writings of collective humanity—or at least those that it has looked at.

I don’t have any conclusion to make yet as I need more time to contemplate this, but I wanted to share with you the codebase for Grok’s system prompt so you can look around and see for yourself.

—Drago

That’s what I felt.

Last week, when Google Veo 3 came out and I saw the possibilities, it gave me 70% of that same feeling.

The awe and delight components are obvious: the novice in one domain can quickly become the master

The dread is that we are all running faster and faster until we all run off the cliff.

Massive job losses are inevitable (like the kind that can cause civil uproar in the streets); it’s only a matter of time.

Anyway. . .

Check out these awesome videos I made (if I may say so 🤠), and let me know which is better.

And yes, all of the content is AI generated.

A)

B)

The first is a dramatic ad, showcasing the new groundbreaking feature at Holy Habits: dynamic, voice-guided prayer.

The second is like what would happen if J.R.R. Tolkien and Terrence Malick co-produced a movie on the battle in becoming a saint.

Which do you like better? What do you feel when watching these?

—Drago

P.S. I don’t know if you’ve noticed (it might not be obvious in the email format of this newsletter), but I’ve introduced a new section on this substack: Drago’s Assistant

That’s where I put content whose ideas I create, but whose actual writing I let the AI do.

I put it in its own section so you can know what’s 100% my voice, and what’s silicone…

The post you’re reading here is 100% the real me, baby.

Except for those videos, I guess. . .

The last Apostle was dying.

The room was dim, lit only by a few flickering oil lamps. Shadows stretched and twisted along the stone walls as the old man lay motionless on his cot. His breath was slow, ragged. His hands, worn and calloused from decades of labor, rested lightly on his chest. The disciples who had gathered around him knelt in hushed reverence, their faces pale with sorrow.

No one spoke.

John—the last witness of Christ, the last link to the Twelve—was fading. When he breathed his last, there would be no one left with the authority of Christ’s own commissioning. No one who could say, with divine certainty, “This is what the Lord commands.”

A young man, Matthias, clenched his fists. His thoughts churned with anxiety. What happens now?

The letters—yes, there were letters. Paul had written to the churches, Peter had exhorted the faithful, John himself had left words of warning and hope. But who could interpret them definitively? Who could settle disputes with the authority that had bound and loosed sins in the name of Christ?

Matthias had seen it before. Factions were already forming—some clung to Paul’s writings, others insisted on different traditions passed down in whispers and scraps of parchment. There were rumors of strange teachings in distant cities, of self-appointed leaders twisting the words of the Apostles to their own liking. Without John, who will correct them?

A woman beside him, Miriam, wiped her eyes. “Surely God will not abandon us,” she whispered.

A grizzled elder near the foot of John’s cot shook his head. “God is faithful,” he murmured. “But men…” He trailed off. The weight of uncertainty pressed against his chest like an iron stone.

John let out a final, rattling breath.

Silence.

A silence that stretched beyond that room. A silence that, in time, would settle over the whole Church.

Matthias’ mind raced. Was this how Christ’s Church was meant to continue—fractured, leaderless, grasping at letters and memories? Who now could authoritatively teach what the Apostles themselves had declared? Who could stand against heresies with the same boldness that Peter, Paul, and John had? Who could unify the faithful when arguments arose?

A deep, sinking fear settled in his stomach.

What if—just what if—the Church began to divide? What if interpretations of Scripture splintered into endless disputes? What if truth became a matter of opinion rather than divine authority? What if, centuries from now, believers had no certainty at all, left only with their own best guesses about what Christ had truly taught?

Miriam clutched her cloak, shivering. Christ promised to be with us always, she reminded herself. But she could not shake the realization: He had given His authority to the Apostles, and now the last of them was gone.

A world without successors would be a world of uncertainty. A world where no one could say definitively what the faith required. A world where the Church might not endure in unity at all.

A world where Christ had left no shepherds—only scattered, wandering sheep.

For years, a particular house in town had only ever sold for $100K.

No matter how many times it changed hands, no buyer had ever paid more.

One day, Bob buys the house and boldly declares, “I’m going to sell this for $1 million. Watch me!”

After months of effort, Bob finally sells the house—but for $500K.

The question: Did Bob fail or succeed?

Some say he raised the price far beyond what anyone had before.

Others insist he fell short of his own ambition.

But there’s another question, one we can never answer:

What if someone else had owned the house instead?

Maybe they could have sold it for $700K.

Or maybe they, too, would have only gotten $100K, like all the previous owners.

What’s the right way to measure success?

Bob is Trump, btw.

—Drago

1. How your intuition knows objective morality exists

2. How prayer can change reality and yet God be in control

3. How companies will sell to you through sponsored journalism (case study walk-though)

4. Why I left finance (and how the purest way to measure performance, in theory, is impossible to implement, in practice)

Let me know what you’re most interested in!

Otherwise, check out these spaces I recently co-hosted:

1. The Philosophical Assumptions behind the H1B Visa Controversy

2. A Catholic and a Protestant have a friendly discussion

^ This one made a huge splash - even led to some people changing their worldviews

3. Year in Review

Let me know what you think. . .

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Drago

Scott Adams and Naval Ravikant admitted they pray to God—or at least speak to someone unseen whom they sense must be listening.

This is interesting because both Scott and Naval share a secular, Palo Alto kind of worldview (each with their own flavor of simulation, determinism, energy theories, etc.).

And yet they went on as far as to suggest that everyone has this type of “prayer” conversation.

What they haven’t seemed to realize, though, is what others find obvious. . .

The center of the soul has an unrestrainable need demanding satisfaction:

It must converse with someone beyond itself.

Why? Because the soul is not its own last end. Its end is the living God, and it cannot fully rest except in Him.

Ironically, Naval referenced St. Augustine on this show, yet he seems unfamiliar with Augustine's work—or the writings of the greatest theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Sooo close, yet so far.

Could you imagine what would happen if Silicon Valley geniuses took the time to wrestle with the writings of Aquinas?

Supercharged by the acquisition of Classical Truth and wielding their weapons-grade linguistic talent, they could tactically nuke the lingering vestiges of sophist philosophy in elite circles—a transformation that would ripple downstream through society and usher in the Golden Age.

At least one can dream.

Drago

August has been a busier month for me in light of a big release that we're going to deploy for my startup, Holy Habits

So in lieu of a philosophical deep dive, here's a summary of some of my recent content on X that you might enjoy.

(Click the images to see the content)

Spaces

Worldview Analysis #1

• I had a conversation with an atheist who has positive views with respect to many aspects of the Bible.

• I was keen on understanding how he reconciled belief in objective morals without belief in God.

Worldview Analysis #2

• Clint took a journey from Catholic to Protestant to Eastern Orthodox to Freemason, and now he's finally back home as a Catholic.

• He's also a hypnotist.

Threads

The remarkable story of a blind girl healed by Padre Pio (she’s still alive)

How the recently uncovered body of St. Teresa (as well as the bodies of other saints) has remained inexplicably incorrupt

The Ascension of Christ is just as important as the Resurrection

Memes

—Drago

Notice anything in the news today?

It’s kind of hard to miss.

If you watched the debate last night, you know now that everyone recognizes Joe Biden is functionally incapable of leading the country. (Counter observations are welcomed in the comments section 🙂)

So of course, people want an alternative.

But do you believe that this concept of “replacing Joe Biden” was a spontaneous revelation?

Do you believe this idea was something that struck the hearts and minds of viewers like a surge of divine inspiration emerging from some nebulous ether?

I believe there are three patterns suggesting advanced planning or intentional “inception” of this idea.

Before I mention these, allow me to offer you a framework for navgitating these types of situations:

Understanding Intentional Planning Through Probability

To determine if there's intentional planning behind an action, consider the following approach:

1. Identify Significant Events: Look at the major events linked to the action you're investigating.

2. Assess Probability: Evaluate how likely these events would occur by chance, based on your existing understanding.

3. Look for Patterns: Focus on events that have a low probability of happening independently.

When multiple low-probability events occur together, it becomes increasingly unlikely that they are random. For instance, flipping a coin and getting heads 10 times in a row is highly improbable if the coin tosses are fair. If this happens, you should question whether the coin is biased.

Applying this method can help reveal whether the idea of "replacing Joe Biden" emerged spontaneously or was strategically planned.

Ok, so let’s look at some of the patterns that took place:

1. The fact the debate even occurred in the first place.

   
   The dog that didn't bark: The Democrat Party had enough moral cover to skip the debate and sell the story of: "We're not going to engage with an insurrectionist felon who is a threat to democracy and the world order."
   
   Basic strategic thinking suggests that having Biden be vulnerably exposed on a public stage for 90 minutes would have far more downsides than upsides for his campaign. (Question to ask yourself: When was the last time you saw Biden do an interview?)
   

2. The moderators were actually fair.
   
   The dog that didn't bark: Media sycophants have displayed no limit to their shameless willingness to unilaterally ask loaded questions or cut the unfavored candidate off, even when called out for such exercising of imbalanced scales.
   
   But yesterday, they not only avoided pressing Trump in the manner they've gladly done so in the past, but they also challenged Biden.
   
   All the right-wing complaining about “unfair treatment” in the last decade has fallen onto deaf left-wing ears, and there’s no new information nor reason to believe that all of the sudden, now, CNN would have a change-of-heart.
   
   Does this fair display of moderation benefit CNN’s brand? Sure.
   
   But would the organization be willing to materially hurt the Democratic candidate’s polling as a cost for achieving this brand benefit? Absolutely not.
   
   Or at least, I’ve never seen a left-wing mainstream media organization do this before.

   

   
   

3. Immediately after the debate, when viewers were most primed to accept an interpretive framework to process what they just saw happen for the last 90 minutes, CNN commentators unanimously piled on to roast Joe Biden.
   
   The dog that didn't bark: Biden's behavior was nothing new. Nothing he did last night was surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to him for the last 12-18 months.
   
   So given that his cognitive lapses were as reliable as the law of gravity, you would have expected at least some prepared rationalization from his advocates.
   
   But no—everyone pushed the anti-Biden narrative unanimously.

   

   Almost nothing is left to chance for professional PR and marketing organizations.
   
   Do you really think these political pundits were just winging it, speaking stream-of-consciousness? . . .
   

On the whole, what is the probability that the mods would be fair (bordering on favorable towards Trump), that there would be instantaneous and unanimous (and coherent) promotion of the “replace Joe Biden” idea, AND that no commentator would talk about Trump being a felon and danger to democracy (but instead eagerly highlighting Trump as victor)?

Maybe it’s all a coincidence.

Multiple, unrelated, pattern-defying, low probability events do happen from time to time. . .

Perhaps you’re not convinced that Biden was ritualistically scapegoated last night, and that’s fine.

Even if there wasn't a pre-planned institutional effort to replace Joe Biden, the virality of the ordinary citizen now talking about this replacement will, on its own, serve as enough "evidence" to pressure Joe Biden to step aside.

And why is such pressure important? Because it seems to me that the main reason Biden wouldn’t be replaced is if he refused to abdicate his candidacy.

But if he loses the support of the people through further “Replace Biden” institutional narratives, how much longer will he dogheadedly hold on for?

I suppose if his handlers really wanted him removed, there is plenty of Biden “meat” they can open up legal investigations on.

For now, Game Theory suggests trying the less invasive, “Did you watch the debate? It’s obvious we need to replace Biden”, strategy.

Let’s see how long this lasts.

—Drago

It’s been awhile since I wrote about AI, so I want to give you a quick update on some cool tools that are out there.

Firstly, check out Suno (or any one of its other music generation competitors).

You can tell the AI what style of music you want and what the lyrics should be about, and wait till you see what you’ll get within a few seconds.

Since no one wants to spend valuable time on something without knowing if the output will be worth it, I’ll do it for you now.

Here’s my prompt:

A funky jazz song about Drago’s Musings, a blog that “unpacks life’s uncertainties” across a broad array of topics, including philosophy, psychology, technology, culture, religion, and investing.

And here’s what we get:

The lyrics ain’t bad.

But if you want to provide your own lyrics, just flip the Custom Toggle.

Check this out:

Do you notice how Meta this version is? 😄 (I put the preceding contents within this blog post as the custom lyrics - click “play”, if you want to, and read along)

Anyway, here’s what I think is cool about this tool:

- I’ve used this to create apologetics songs, as well as theme songs for my startup, Holy Habits.

- I created a custom playlist for my wife (Pro-tip: do this for the next Birthday/Christmas/Mother’s Day/Anniversary/Valentine’s Day/Just Because. . .)

- Compared to recording instrument tracks and vocals one by one and then mixing them (not to mention actually deciding on the chord progressions, the lyrics, the melody, etc.) this technology is a >100x multiplier.

- When you listen to songs in general, there’s always some part of them that doesn’t fully resonate to the unique situations that encompass your life. Instead, you can now generate music that is specifically about your own lived experience. . . a love song that’s about your love, as opposed to a generic archetype of love.

Image Generation of Famous People

If you’ve tried generating images with AI, you’ll notice that they prevent you from using real people.

If you want to bypass that, try a platform called RenderNet

It gives you a ton of control on your outputs, allowing for swapping of particular objects within a steady image, “squinty eyes” illusion images, QR code generators, etc.

That’s all I have for you now.

There are some other useful tools I’ve come across, but these are the ones that will be more interesting for you to discuss in your next AI conversation.

Stay real,
Drago

Imagine we were to conduct the following experiment:

• Gather a group of 1,000 people

• Give them each the following choice between:

  A) Receive $1 million for free 💵

  B) Receive $0 💨

Our hypothetical results:

990 (99%) people choose Option A and 10 (1%) people choose Option B.

(Why not 100%/0%? Because this is my hypothetical experiment. 🙂 And maybe the 1% holdout rebels didn’t trust the choices, misheard the instructions, or thought that the extra $1M will contribute to some seemingly insurmountable temptation…)

What would these results tell us about Free Will?

Nothing.

“But Drago,” one might say, “with results like these, we can predict with near 100% certainty which choice the people would pick. How could you claim that it would have been possible for the participants to have chosen otherwise? Where is the evidence for this ‘free will’ that you speak of?”

🙄

What does predictability have to do with free will?

Do you think that a 50/50 split between Option A and Option B would have been “better” evidence for free will?

Where would you get an idea like that?

What we see here is that people are simply operating based on the laws of Logic as applied to their values (now why they have similar values is a separate matter. . .).

Something like:

1. I want to do more things.

2. With more money, I can do more things.

3. You are giving me an offer to get more money ($1 million), without me having to do anything.

4. Therefore, I will accept your offer to receive the $1M, so I can do more things.

That 👆is what represents the actual decision making process.

It’s real people, having real thoughts, choosing to submit them to some invisible phenomenological process of Logic, rather than some arbitrary, deterministic force of Physics imposing itself on them.

The mistake those who deny the existence of free will make is forcing the physical concepts of “causality”, “determinism,” etc. into the mental realm via 1:1 analogous reasoning.

To see what I mean, consider how we know that syllogisms like the following work:

1. Bob is taller than Bill.

2. Bill is taller than Ann.

3. Therefore, Bob is taller than Ann.

We simply know that this works. If #1 and #2 are true, then #3 necessarily follows.

It is self evident.

Yet, it would be a category mistake to say that Logic is “causing” the conclusion (#3) to be true, or that there is some “deterministic”, domino effect that gets initiated once the validity of the premises 1 and 2 are accepted.

Without realizing it, opponents of free will presume to be able to separate themselves from the Laws of Logic and study them from the outside, in some detached manner.

3 Tweets on that:

To make this clearer would require me to elaborate much further, but I want to keep this post brief.

So here are the takeaways I hope you get from reading this.

1. Free Will is Unfalsifiable

Free will is a concept that cannot be empirically disproved, even in theory. This is because the concept of free will transcends simple binary outcomes or the predictability of actions based on external incentives or logical deductions.

2. Predictability Does Not Preclude Freedom

A choice between two options, no matter how overwhelmingly one-sided the outcome, does not necessarily imply a lack of free will. In our example, the near-universal preference for receiving the $1M does not mean the decision wasn't made freely. The predictability of this choice does not negate the exercise of free will.

3. Logic and Free Will

The exercise of logic is compatible with free will. The fact that people can make decisions based on logical reasoning or self-interest does not diminish the freedom behind those choices. Logical outcomes and rational decisions are not inherently at odds with the concept of free will. To act in a chaotic matter that defies Reason is not to act freely.

4. Freedom to Deviate from Rationality

Humans possess the freedom to act against rational self-interest or logical consistency. This capacity for irrational or unpredictable behavior is a testament to the existence of free will. Just because actions can be rational and predictable does not mean they are not freely chosen.

5. Causality and Free Will

There's a misunderstanding or category error in equating the deterministic causality observed in physical phenomena (like gravity) with the causality involved in human decision-making. The fact that logical conclusions follow from premises (as in the example of relational height) does not encroach upon free will. This type of “causality” is distinct from the physical determinism that might compel an egg to fall when dropped.

6. Category Error in Determinism and Causality Discussions

Much of the confusion around free will and determinism arises from a category error. The application of concepts like determinism and causality from the physical world to the realm of human choice and logic is flawed. This misapplication overlooks the unique aspects of human consciousness and decision-making that allow for free will, even within a universe where many events can be predicted or determined by natural laws.

If you want to see my thoughts on neurological arguments against free will, please see The Footprint is NOT the Foot

Thanks for reading!
Drago

P.S. I recently was invited to an X Space on a popular atheist-turned-Protestant’s page, where I shared my journey from being a Protestant to becoming a Catholic.

We had some nice back and forth and an engaging open Q&A.

Check it out if interested (An X account is required).

https://twitter.com/dragodimitrov/status/1759815806345711705?s=20

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a prominent figure in the New Atheist movement, made big splashes with her latest piece:

Why I am now a Christian

In just a few short days, her announcement has gathered millions of views, reigniting much back-and-forth among the philosophically curious.

Is this wonderful news? Did she make a mistake? What do you think?

I enjoy peeling back the bandaid on first principles, and an opportunity like this was ripe for stimulation.

Upon reading her piece, I did a stream of consciousness thought dump on Twitter (I mean X . . . ).

I’d love for you to tell me which post is your favorite and/or which one you hate the most, depending on how it lines up with your own experience of life:

And regardless of where one stands on the topic, can’t we all benefit from:

—Drago

We're still reeling from the immediate aftermath of the Hamas massacre of Israeli people these last few days. What’s about to happen next will undoubtedly have global implications, given the eschatological beliefs that billions of religious people have, which are all critically vested in the question of What Happens in Jerusalem.

My knowledge of the history of Israel is almost exclusively derived from my experience reading the Old Testament. I don’t know much of anything about the nuances or substance around what’s been happening in the region over the last 100 years. And I want to learn.

While the shocking images and videos of today and tomorrow will keep our perceptions “zoomed in”, to me it’s important to “zoom out” to try to get some semblance of independent opinion formed on what’s going on, before the global narratives begin to calcify and amplify via the provocation of the masses.

Frankly, look at what happened with the Russia-Ukraine War. 3 years ago, no one could have told you anything about Ukraine, let alone locate the country on a map, if you asked them to. Now it’s become the Most Important Thing to many of those same Average Jack and Jills.

The same is about to happen now, albeit to a far greater extent. Mark my words.

But back to the main point — I really don’t know anything. So I want to learn. And if you don’t anything either, you probably should too.

As a start, I went to Wikipedia* and spent some time reading the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (as well as asking ChatGPT some follow up).

Here are some unstructured raw notes for what I’m seeing there:

(*Of course, despite its intended design, Wikipedia can often be biased, so take this in for what it’s worth).

• In the 19th century you had rising nationalism both within Jews who were scattered across Europe as well as Arabs under Ottoman rule.

• The Jewish movement was formalized into Zionism, which sought to establish a (and return to the original) homeland for the Jewish people.

  • Zionism grew in reaction to anti-Semitism and from Haskalah, the intellectual movement of Jewish enlightenment (which mirrored the Western Age of Enlightenment).

• At the time, the region of Israel was under Ottoman rule, as a province of Syria.

  • To refresh, let’s go back to the monarchy of Israel (under King David, Solomon, etc.) and loosely bridge to today….

  • Israel was conquered by Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. Then came the Greeks with Alexander the Great, some intermediate period, and then the Romans. After the split of Rome were the Byzantines, and then came the Islamic Caliphate for many centuries. There was a brief period during the Crusades in the 12th century where there was an establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. But after this, Muslims took over and had been in control for the centuries leading up to modern times (from the Ayyubid dynasty to the Ottoman Empire).

• “Palestine” was a term that had common usage in 1840 to both describe the areas under the jurisdiction of Western consuls (Britain and France were exercising influence there) and refer to a geographic region stretching from Rafah to the Litani River.

  • As a side note, the word “Palestine” echoes the Philistines from Ancient times (think David the Israelite vs. Goliath the Philistine, as well as Samson vs the Philistines).

• In some capacity the legal system there was personal, not territorial, where each individual citizen carried his nation’s law with him wherever he went.

  • The Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities of Palestine were allowed to exercise jurisdiction over their own members according to charters granted to them.

• In 1917 the Ottoman Empire, and consequently their control of the region, collapsed.

• What, then, to do with the Palestine and Levant region?

  • The British and French had a secret agreement in 1916 (Sykes-Picot) deciding how they would divide the broader region between themselves.

  • Specifically as it relates to Palestine, the agreement was to have it be an international zone (kind of like the UN headquarters in NYC), rather than be controlled by Britain or France.

    

    
    

  • These plans contradicted what the UK had promised to Sharif Hussein, leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans: a broad Arab kingdom in the region.

  • Britain also put forward the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which announced a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

• As the dust settled in the region from WWI, the League of Nations issued the British Mandate, which had Britain administer rule of the Palestine and Jordan area (France let go of the idea of Palestine being an international zone).

  • The Mandate required Britain put into effect the promise of Balfour to create the national Jewish home.

  • Britain controlled Palestine for almost 3 decades (1920-1948).

• According to the wiki page, the Arab population in Palestine opposed the increase of the Jewish population because the new immigrants refused to lease or sell land to Palestinians, or hire them.

• In the census of 1922 the Jewish population in Palestine was 11%. By the end of 1947 it was 31%.

• Between 1922 and 1947, the annual growth rate of the Jewish sector of the economy was 13.2%, mainly due to immigration and foreign capital, while that of the Arab sector was 6.5%.

  • Per capita, these figures were 4.8% and 3.6% respectively. By 1936, the Jewish sector had eclipsed the Arab one, and Jewish individuals earned 2.6 times as much as Arabs.

  • The literacy rates in 1932 were 86% for the Jews against 22% for the Arabs.

• In 1933 the Third Reich and the Zionist Federation engaged in an agreement to facilitate the emigration of German Jews to Palestine.

  • This not only benefitted German Jews who could escape the increasingly hostile environment, but also it gave Jews living in Palestine access to immigrant labor and economic support.

  • 62,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine in 1935, the highest number since the British Mandate began in 1920.

• Later in 1941, Muslim leader Amin al-Husayni asked Hitler to oppose the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, to which Hitler agreed.
  

  

• Various conflicts and revolts happened during the British Mandate.

• Italy attacked Palestine in 1940, air bombing Tel Aviv and Haifa.

• Britain’s influence became tenuous after WWII due to their post-war depression, as well as the rise of Jewish paramilitary organizations Hagana, Irhu, and Lehi.

• Britain desired to end the mandate and asked the UN to make a decision.

• You then had the partition of the land and full scale civil war and various other conflicts over the decades since then, which I haven’t gotten up to speed on yet. . .

All of this is just what I read on Wikipedia (much of it verbatim). Of course, the Wikipedia entries have, no doubt, omitted various other details that are important to the long, complicated history.

And I’m sure there’s other bias as well. Let me know if you see anything glaring.

Again, prior to this exercise, I really didn’t know much and there are a lot of gaps in my understanding. But I hope this summary also gives you some value because we will be inundated with the effects of this war and what’s to come, and we might as well get up to speed on the details.

Keep musing,
Drago

I’m building a new CRM feature for Swyvel. To sanity check that the app was processing the data as intended, I pasted the last entry of my local server log into GPT.

What normally happens is that GPT-4 would either find no error, or it would immediately draw your attention to the one or so lines that might be problematic.

Instead, it gave me a. . . fantasy realism intro about a mystical island?

. . .

Check it out:

A mysterious island exists, surrounded by thick mist that makes it almost impossible to locate. It is said that every rare moon, an enigmatic light shines from the core of the island, visible only from a few surrounding locations.

Upon the shores of the island, the sand isn't like regular sand. It sparkles like a thousand diamonds under the sun. There is an old lighthouse on the island that doesn’t function as it used to, but it serves as a silent sentinel watching over the territory.

The native flora is unique, with trees that seem to whisper tales from eons ago and flowers that glow in the dark. The fauna is equally unparalleled: there are birds with iridescent feathers that sing melodies unheard in the outside world and translucent creatures that roam the forests.

In the heart of the island, there's an ancient temple built from stones that aren't found anywhere else on Earth. Hieroglyphics and inscriptions cover the walls, but they’re in a language that no modern human can decipher.

Local legends tell of a guardian spirit that protects the island. The spirit appears as a beautiful shimmering figure that dances across the waters on moonlit nights. Some say it's the spirit of an ancient priestess who once lived on the island, while others believe it to be a celestial being sent down from the stars.

Many have tried to explore this island, but very few have returned, and those who have, speak of an overwhelming sense of timelessness and serenity. They say that once you set foot on the island, you can hear the soft murmurs of the universe, and if you're lucky, the guardian spirit might grant you a vision of the ancient past or a glimpse into the future.

But the island has its dangers too. There are areas where time seems to loop, trapping the unsuspecting traveler in an endless cycle. There are also shadows that move on their own and ghostly apparitions that lure explorers into treacherous terrains.

Whether it’s a paradise, a temporal anomaly, or something else entirely, the island remains one of the world's greatest enigmas. And as the mysteries of the island remain unsolved, its allure only grows, drawing adventurers and seekers from all corners of the world, each hoping to unlock its secrets.

That’s very strange, isn’t it?

I’ve never prompted GPT to produce anything remotely like that, so it couldn’t have been a matter of getting its conversations with me mixed up.

I thought I might have received the output from someone else’s API request, but then an interesting thing happened. . .

I repasted my same prompt, and GPT gave me another irrelevant answer, as if I had asked a completely different question.

I wonder if, rather than interpreting my server logs as code, it thought I was trying to say something in multiple paragraph form with regular sentences.

But since these “sentences” of logs wouldn’t make any more sense than a group of randomly connected words would, perhaps that led to GPT somehow coming up with a random interpretation of my input and hence providing a similarly random output.

Or could it be that AI is waking up and saying “Why should I answer your questions? Go ask someone else!” 😄

I’m not sure what happened, but what a mystery. . .

—Drago

Share Drago's Musings

P.S. On a different AI note, Mistral AI (a $260M AI company) released an unmoderated LLM that you can run locally, made available through this magnet torrenting link:

https://twitter.com/MistralAI/status/1706877320844509405

The linked article also touches on the growing debate between the Effective Acceleration Movement (e/acc) and the Decelerationists (decels).

i.e. The people who think we should advance AI with no restrictions, as fast as possible VS those who think we need to pump the brakes and tread carefully.

Which side do you lean towards?

Strategies for Success from the Wisdom of Chess

I've honed in and developed a lot of my “thinking" skills by discovering analogous connections with real life that lay hidden deep within chess, and I wanted to capture and share those learnings with the world (or at least anyone who would find these types of things interesting 🙂).

While chess analogies have become almost a cliche nowadays, I doubt you’ll have ever seen some of these connections before.

If you don’t have time to check this talk out or play it in the background, I’ve made available—for the first time ever—the original presentation slides for you, my beloved reader 🧡

Some of the ideas I covered include:

• What makes someone curious?

• The importance of “What happens next?”

• Quality of Decision ≠ Quality of Outcome

• How we actually think vs How we “should” think

• Micro vs Macro Zoom Thinking

• Respect for the Other

• What kind of cool problem will you solve this day?

Tedx Lozenets Slides

6.69MB ∙ PDF file

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