*The Psychotic Topology of Home Value
This is not a market correction. It is a mass psychotic break with reality, where the metaprograms of human cognition have become the delusional architecture of the market itself.
· The Global ↔ Specific Psychosis: The Global mind clings to the axiom (remember, an axiom does not have to be proven, yes): "A home's value never falls."*
*the reason you will eventually grow out of forums is that they are search queries written by other people. LessWrong was summoned into existence by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson writing a sequence of exceptionally powerful search queries (on Overcoming bias), blog posts so strong that the networks they created survived the exodus of the original nodes.
This is what online writing is at its limit—the summoning of a new culture.
If we squint a little, we could even say that this is how the internet itself came into existence. In 1963, J. C. R. Licklider wrote a memo about an “intergalactic computer network”, and that search query was so powerful it summoned the aliens.
We’re all living inside his search query now.*
*you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the responses you garner, you steer your development. You become more agentic.*
*The way the machine seemed to work was:
The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others.
The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. For my writing to find its way in this netherworld, I needed to have a rough sense of how information flowed down there. The pattern was this: words flowed from the periphery to the centers. This was a surprisingly rapid stream. Then the words cascaded from the center down in a broader but slower stream to the periphery again.*
*who's going to invest the substantial sums required to manufacturing opensource chips at economical scale?
National security states won't make it easy even if there were groups with enough resources to do it... a lot of people will fall out of windows or at least find themselves indicted over a parking ticket if they try undermining the ability to track everyone everywhere all the time*
*In the 19th century, China clung to silver while the rest of the world moved to gold. It wasn’t ideology — it was inertia. As silver lost value, imports became expensive, modernization stalled, and the empire’s currency quietly decayed*
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