MarkPNeyer (u/MarkPNeyer)

MarkPNeyer commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84

dr_dshiv · 17 days ago

A good place to start is Cornelis Agrippa’s “Three Books on Occult Philosophy.” Agrippa was a lawyer and esoteric feminist (eg, he wrote “on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex”) and defended women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe. His “three books” gave birth to the “occult” nomenclature.

Or my favorite, Marsilio Ficino. There is a statue to Ficino when you walk into the library. Ficino was hired by Cosimo Medici (the Florentine who invented banking and funded much of the Florentine renaissance) to translate Plato and other esoteric books coming from the fall of Constantinople. He published “De Mysteriis” in 1497, which paraphrases neoplatonic understanding of Gods, Demons, Heroes and Soul — arguing that gods and demons don’t feel — indeed, not even the soul (“the lowest of the divines”) has any part that feels.

(Aside: This idea was actually referenced in “K Pop Demon Hunters,” where they debate whether demons can feel — or are “all feelings”)

It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…

In any case, there are many old ideas and nuggets of wisdom that have yet to be mined and discovered— don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books! We might need AI for that…

MarkPNeyer · 16 days ago

If the material world produces ideas, then there is no truth and ideas can’t be wrong: it’s all just, like, your opinion, man.

But if consciousness and ideas come first, the creation of the material world becomes a kind of game. The hard problem of consciousness is then confused, and replaced with a simpler question: why would pure consciousness that could play any game (ie explore any mathematical structure) choose to play within these laws of physics?

MarkPNeyer commented on Why do victims of massacres go to their deaths? benlandautaylor.com/p/why... · Posted by u/jger15

rafram · a month ago

Not really sure what point this is making.

If you’ve spend years struggling to survive, starving and wasting away in a walled ghetto, and now you’re standing by a pit, facing armed soldiers intent on killing you… would you really have the will to run? Would you, weakened by hunger, even feel like you could run? Would you get very far if you tried? Would you want to fight to keep on living if life felt that hopeless?

MarkPNeyer · a month ago

You make a great point. People had no hope. This is why Hope is an essential survival strategy.

MarkPNeyer commented on The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality english.elpais.com/cultur... · Posted by u/geox

ants_everywhere · a month ago

I don't agree with a lot of what you're writing here, but reading through the lines I think maybe there's some common ground.

There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is subjective and that all that matters is making people act. That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western civilization", which is the search for objective truth and objective reality. Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

I think what you're ultimately referring to is the use of ordinal utility functions by economists. It's not clear how to write equations in economics where each person's preferences are accurately expressed in well-behaved value-agnostic units. You could try using money, but not everyone values having a lot of money. And even if they did, which currency? Dollars? Euros? Gold? Bitcoin?

Because utility functions are hard to get right theoretically, Paul Samuelson proposed trying to measure them empirically by revealed preference. There are lots of things wrong with this from an academic perspective and it's reasonable to have concerns about the long-term effects if this is adopted for entire economies. But it didn't start until 1938 and it's certainly not a philosophical bedrock of Western civilization. More like a desperate hack.

> we can't measure feelings

We have several ways of measuring feelings, and we use them regularly. But you can't build a utility theory based literally on current feelings. Otherwise opium would have nearly infinite objective value. You want to use something that integrates over time, like life satisfaction. Or something that measures the current feeling, change in feeling, and integral over feeling like a PID controller. But even if you could get the measurements right, doing all the measurements for all 8.2 billion people in real time would be impossible right now. So it's not clear what the right theory is.

MarkPNeyer · a month ago

> Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.

Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.

The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.

MarkPNeyer commented on The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality english.elpais.com/cultur... · Posted by u/geox

ants_everywhere · a month ago

When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as a significant decline.

The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate.

This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it by making it cheaper to produce. If demand holds up there's no problem from the company's perspective.

From the consumer's perspective, every project is doing this and the entire world is declining in quality but prices aren't going down.

MarkPNeyer · a month ago

You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article:

> ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer.

For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.

In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure, the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some things and not other things", and _any_ action which can reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale." This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action - whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.' Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself, be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating demand for business!

What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a creeping sense that something was deeply wrong.

If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would be better for the economy than convincing everyone that EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?

MarkPNeyer commented on Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed scientificamerican.com/po... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

slg · 7 months ago

Statements like this seem to originate in that environment polluted by propaganda that the previous comment mentions. For example, I genuinely don't know how someone can look at something like the dismantling of USAID as anything but an increase in "large pain". Sure, there are almost certainly individual programs within that organization that are wasteful and aren't the best use of our tax dollars, but there is (or at least was as of a few weeks ago) broad bipartisan support for this type of investment in humanity and stopping it will clearly inflict pain on people and this administration is at best indifferent to that pain.

MarkPNeyer · 7 months ago

> I genuinely don't know how someone can look at something like the dismantling of USAID as anything but an increase in "large pain".

Maybe try asking people why they think it’s bad?

Here’s people arguing it’s doing all kinds of destructive behavior, - like setting up a fake vaccine clinic for the CIA.

https://youtu.be/wtgT_u2rWs0?si=bFX476_JgC81vJuM

I haven’t seen anyone arguing against these claims. They just say “oh but it’s helping poor people” without answering whether or not it’s been doing covert work for the CIA under the pretense that it’s aid.

MarkPNeyer commented on Trump's Federal Funding Freeze and Mean-Field Game Theory mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11391... · Posted by u/bertman

resource_waste · 7 months ago

Given Psychology has invented the word 'Replication Crisis', it makes me quite anti-academia.

I'm not saying we get 0 valuable output from Academia, I know better to say extreme statements like that.

I have seen the people who get PhDs and they are not A or B students... They are the ones that Industry wouldn't accept.

I have read what is deemed 'science', and more time is spent calculating statistics, than understanding their dataset was a terrible. It looks really fancy.

I have read what is published in 'Prestigious' journals like Nature, and there doesnt seem to be a correlation between replicable and predictive science and trendy ideas.

What recently irked me, I was talking to a a tenured/post-doc/professor, and we pulled up some scientific study that seemed like it contradicted the empirical evidence I observed. He looked at the publisher, 'Nature', accepted it, and moved on instantly. I immediately scrolled down to the Data. It seems like Academia is more of an Authority than Science.

MarkPNeyer · 7 months ago

We’re watching the Protestant reformation 2.0 play itself out. The role of the Catholic church is this time being played by the technocratic establishment of NGO’s, academia and mass media.

MarkPNeyer commented on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon twitter.com/Free_Ross/sta... · Posted by u/Ozarkian

diggan · 7 months ago

> That’s also not to mention guns and all kinds of other dangerous & illegal parts of it.

I think it isn't mentioned because Silk Road didn't actually facilitate any selling/buying of weapons or any items "whose purpose was to "harm or defraud."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)#Produc...

> I do not understand why he pardoned this guy when he’s supposedly anti-drug and anti-cartel.

He's the candidate that was preferred by Christians, yet probably he was the least Christian-like candidate. Just today/yesterday he criticized a Bishop for values that are clearly Christian, people seem to swallow it. I'm pretty sure trying to add logic/reasoning to the choices he makes is a lost cause.

MarkPNeyer · 7 months ago

There are many Christians who would happily to get in long arguments over which values are “clearly Christian.”

If you really want to understand, it’s not hard. It just requires making an honest effort to try, without judging. And that’s what stops people who don’t understand it. Try chatting with an LLM sometime about what it looks like from their perspective. Knowing it’s not a human makes it easier to avoid getting upset.

MarkPNeyer commented on The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970) jofreeman.com/joreen/tyra... · Posted by u/rzk

kqr · 7 months ago

It seems like a lot of people do not make it to the end of this essay. Any time it comes up people invariably go, "Yeah, so that is why we should institute a hierarchy" which is not at all what Freeman was saying.

> Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization.

She mentions some concrete ideas:

- Leaders do not select their teams, instead, teams select their spokesperson. A spokesperson does not have authority over the team but can make decisions on their behalf in conversation with other spokespeople.

- Rotating the role of spokesperson among the eligible of the team. Possibly even having multiple spokespeople on the same team for different types of decisions.

- Set up processes to ensure someone does not sit on important information others do not have access to. All data should be public in the group.

- etc.

This is far from instituting an explicit hierarchy!

MarkPNeyer · 7 months ago

“Teams selecting leaders” or “randomly choosing the spokesperson” still gives rise to an explicit hierarchy, but in this case it’s not permanent and there’s a mechanism that prevents it from becoming permanent.

The idea that you can avoid hierarchy is, I think, confusing “social hierarchies with permanent places” - yes, bad, avoid that - with the _concept_ of hierarchy at all.

MarkPNeyer commented on Will browsers be required by law to stop you from visiting infringing sites? techdirt.com/2023/08/04/w... · Posted by u/rntn

Nifty3929 · 2 years ago

Usually corporations are used to side-step 1A protections, because corporations are not subject to the 1A. Corporations were routinely "encouraged" to censor information throughout the last election and covid, at least. It was likely going on before that, and continues today.

MarkPNeyer · 2 years ago

Vivek Ramaswamy argues that these actions are still first amendment violations because the government pushed corporations to do this, under something called “state action in private enterprise.”