President & Co-Founder of Conjecture Institute. https://nitter.cf/t.co/jFLNOweJjF Books: Windfall, The Sovereign Child, Lords of the Cosmos
Philadelphia, PA
Joined December 2017
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Individualism & Egalitarianism:
It is the individual—not the tribe, not the family, not the society—who has the capacity to explain the world, to understand it, to suffer, to be happy, to make choices, to create explanatory knowledge. This kind of individualism is a devastating criticism of every collectivistic idea past and present—collective justice, guilt by blood, racism, classism, and policies intended to help a ‘community’ as defined by the set of all individuals with a particular characteristic.
Moreover, there is only one kind of individual—any person is as capable of making progress, experiencing any physically possible qualia, and generating knowledge as any other. It is in this sense that egalitarianism is true. People are not equal in terms of skill, interest, genes, phenotype, wealth, opportunity, nor life experience. But people are equal with respect to their ability to generate new knowledge and continuously solve the endless stream of problems that defines their lives. Indeed, knowledge creation is the most egalitarian enterprise in existence.
Logan retweeted
The “Defend the West” online conference by @ConjectureInst and @ChipkinLogan, January 13th, 2027, is stacked with brilliant speakers: @johanknorberg, @sapinker, Deirdre McCloskey, @michaelshermer, @nickgillespie, @yaronbrook and more. Register here: conjectureinstitute.org/even…
Logan retweeted
We've added dozens of essays by our affiliates to our Articles page.
A few highlights below 🧵
Logan retweeted
This ability to explain anything that can be explained, to understand anything that can be understood, is more significant than a star's titanic gravitational pull.
~Conjecture Institute Ambassador @ToKTeacher 👇
Logan retweeted
The separation of money and State is important, but the true separation of money and State is making that money private.
If the government can surveil it, then you haven't fully achieved that separation.
~@tyler w/ @cameron & Conjecture Institute Fellow @maxdesalle
Logan retweeted
⚛️🪐Is gravity quantum? Testing it directly would take a particle collider far beyond anything we can build.
Conjecture Institute Senior Scientists Marletto and Vedral co-proposed a test that fits on a lab bench: if gravity can entangle two masses, gravity must be quantum👇
Logan retweeted
Over 400 people have registered for our Defend the West conference!
WHEN: 1/13/2027
WHERE: Online (free)
Speakers include:
@DavidDFriedman
@sapinker
@SRCHicks
@yaronbrook
@alananewhouse
@johanknorberg
@DeirdreMcClosk
@michaelshermer
@ToKTeacher
@jasoncrawford
Nadine Strossen
Save your spot (link below)
Logan retweeted
...our civilization, the civilization of the West, of liberal democracy and capitalism and so on, is within itself by far the most peaceful as well as the most rapidly progressing civilization that’s ever existed.
But I think that apart from having to improve it further in order to allow it to survive, there’s another thing we have to do.
We have to continue to make rapid progress.
And it’s not just for its own sake, but in this political context, it’s because rapid progress is the basic means by which the good guys can defend themselves against the bad guys.
~@DavidDeutschOxf, Bold Conjectures, Volume I: Select Interviews of David Deutsch
Logan retweeted
The great achievement of AI isn’t that it can prove theorems, but that it can do so efficiently.
Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud on automated proofs, from Leibniz’s dream to today’s AI👇
Logan retweeted
Progress always requires four things: novelty, taste, control, and memory.
Lose any one and it stops, whether you’re a giraffe, an AI, an organization, or a scientist.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @dela3499
Logan retweeted
“Truth isn’t manifest. We can all be wrong and make mistakes, but we also have the capacity to detect errors, correct them, and make progress.”
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Jaber_Hassoun on how this idea serves as a bulwark against interpersonal and political tyranny👇
Logan retweeted
Imagine the universe freezes in place for years. Then it unfreezes and continues to run its course.
Could we ever notice that those years had passed?
Conjecture Institute Fellow @Sam_kuyp on why physics doesn’t need a clock outside the universe👇
Logan retweeted
...annual natural disaster deaths have declined from 1.27 million in 1900 (the earliest year for which reliable global estimates exist) to just 86,500 in 2023.
This includes all climate-related events, such as droughts, wildfires, storms, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and flooding.
The enormous downward trend is especially amazing because it has taken place while the global human population has exploded from about 1.55 billion in 1900 to more than 8 billion in 2023.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @SaulZimet in @feeonline
Logan retweeted
The laws of thermodynamics were first written with macroscopic steam engines in mind.
Constructor theory rewrites them so they hold at every scale, even for microscopic (quantum) engines.
Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto explains:
Logan retweeted
Meet our newest Fellow, @SaulZimet!
Saul is a writer focused on the growth of knowledge and the self-corrective character of the Enlightenment.
His essays have been published by @Quillette, @HumanProgress, @aier, @feeonline, Libertarianism.org, @amspectator, & @TheObjStd.
Logan retweeted
Force is the use of violence, or threat of violence, to arbitrarily prioritise one set of ideas over another.
..force predates humanity by millennia.
Indeed, the entire course of biological history can be understood as one great ideological struggle: selfish gene fighting selfish gene using poisons, venoms, talons and fangs to club one another into dank submission.
And long before, all of cosmic evolution—gravitation, collision, destruction—can be viewed in similar, forceful terms.
In people, the ideas are primarily memes (those encoded within one’s mind instead of one’s DNA); yet the use of force as a replication mechanism is no less common.
Persuasion, as we will later explore, is a remarkably modern discovery, both scarce and delicate.
Tyranny is by far the leading tenor of our most traditional progress.
~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_ 👇
Logan retweeted
“There’s a younger version of the particle and an older version, simultaneously sitting in the same location.”
Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Vlatko Vedral on an experiment no one has done yet, and why he thinks it’s doable.
Logan retweeted
A conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense, is an unproven and speculative hypothesis about a secret and sinister plot hatched by a relatively small group of people.
Typically, the very lack of hard evidence for the conspiracy is taken as proof that the conspirators are fiendishly clever and have covered their tracks.
In my academic work, I have dubbed such self-sealing theories the intellectual equivalent of a black hole: once you’ve dived in, it’s hard to claw your way back out.
The rapprochement between parts of the Left and Islam is none of these things...
The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side.
~Conjecture Institute Senior Philosopher @mboudry
Islamo-Leftism Is Not a Conspiracy Theory
It’s an unrequited love affair
“The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side.”
“The bargain is straightforward: leftists coddle Muslims and give them preferential treatment, while Muslims respond by voting for left-wing parties.”
“What makes this love affair tragic is that it is mostly unrequited.”
“There may be ‘Queers for Palestine’, but there are no ‘Queers in Palestine’.”
