Hey there,
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekly Crystallizations, a weekly newsletter where I highlight tweets (and occasional Telegram messages) from people making sense of what’s going on in the world today!
Personal update
Greetings from the Basel, Switzerland, where winter is finally settling in. My girlfriend and I are about to travel to Portugal for two months to side-step the Swiss winter. Last week I had the pleasure and privilege of participating in a group discussion with some of the folks I met at the Rebel Wisdom: Last Campfire 👋 on the topic of Daniel Schmachtenberger’s “In Search of the Third Attractor” and whether psychedelics could play a role there. The discussion only scratched the surface, but it seemed that most people intuited that psychedelics could play a role in staving off the two other attractors as laid out by Daniel: Dystopias and Catastrophes. The challenge, it seems, is figuring out what shape or format that would take.
What I’ve been reading
Will Twitter Be Deplatformed by Google and Apple?
“Now, influential Democratic operatives like Taylor Lorenz and Alejandra Caraballo are calling on Google and Apple to remove Twitter from app stores.”
Protopia and the Future of Heterodoxy
“[…] religion gives us ways to go beyond our own masks. To move past the game to something real, permanent and certain. To a reality that isn’t changed by the pronouns we use or the colour of our skin, but is universal and solid and real.”
“One of the most powerful aspects of Christianity, according to Rene Girard, is that it interrupts the social dynamics of blame and retribution that drive culture wars.”
“[…] progressivism has a [Jungian] shadow around traditionalism, and is often allergic to the idea that there are fixed truths and immutable realities. Conversely, traditional liberals and conservatives have shadows around social constructivism in general, and are allergic to arguments that appeal to lived experience rather than propositions and what they perceive to be immutable facts.”
“Working with Palestinian peace activist Sami Awad and a team of Brasilian facilitators, Roseman recently observed Isralis and Palestinians who drink Ayahuasca together in order to ask what role these ceremonies could play in conflict resolution. The first part of the study, “Relational Processes in Ayahuasca Groups of Palestinians and Israelis,” was published in 2021.”
“By all accounts it was wild, chaotic, beautiful, healing and sometimes dissatisfying. Listening to Roseman, I had the sense that maybe that’s what this work truly has to be.”
How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks of Birds
Murmurations are the wave-like patterns one observes in a flock of birds. This is an emergent property at the group-level which arises from the simple criteria that each individual birds sees only the 7 birds closest to it and will mimic their behaviour.
Groups of people on social media behave in an analogous way. Patterns emerge at the network-level from simple criteria at the individual’s social media feed level.
“the Trending Topics feature not only surfaces trends, it shapes them.”
“We tend to think of what we see cascading across the network — the substance, the specific claims — as the problem. Much of it is old phenomena manifesting in new ways: rumors, harassment mobs, disinformation, propaganda. But it carries new consequences, in large part because of the size and speed of networks across which it moves.”
“A single re-tweet or share or like is individually inconsequential, but the murmuration may be collectively disastrous as it shapes the behavior of the network, which shapes the structure of the network, which shapes the behavior.”
“In truth, the overwhelming majority of platform content moderation is mostly dedicated to unobjectionable things like protecting children from porn or eliminating fraud and spam. However, since curation organizes and then directs the attention of the flock, the argument is of great political importance because of its potential downstream impact on real-world power. And so, we have reached a point in which the conversation about what to do about disinformation, rumors, hate speech and harassment mobs is, itself, intractably polarized.”
Issue #1283: Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes
“This ongoing slow-motion train wreck [FTX collapse and others following] provides anyone who is able to look away the opportunity to internalize a very important lesson; trusted third parties are security holes. Anyone who has been around bitcoin long enough has had this lesson explained to them in great detail. It is the reason bitcoin exist in the first place. The trust problem is the first problem Satoshi explains after sharing a link to v0.1 of the Bitcoin software in the email he wrote to the P2P Foundation mailing list when he launched the project in 2009.”
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.” — Satoshi Nakamoto
It's incredible that a whole industry based on trust has been erected around a tool that was created to completely remove it from the equation.
Protests in China
There's a range of people reporting on protests in China. I'm taking these events and their injection into the news cycle with a grain of salt. I would not put it past the CIA that they have some hand in instigating this unrest. Much like the unrest we've seen in Iran.
Musk & Twitter
I struggle to truly comprehend the viewpoint below. I share it here because it seems quite widespread among (what appears to be) American liberals. According to this perspective Musk is trying to destroy Twitter, or at least get rid of the "good people" and he’s in cahoots with the far right.
I think Musk is fairly straightforward with his motives. You can basically trust that what he says he wants to achieve is what he wants to achieve.
COVID
Prospective Vitamin-D study published in nature showing up to a 28% reduction in mortality for Vitamin-D supplementation. Vitamin-D has been oddly absent from the mainstream discourse on COVID19, but one reason was that the studies done were retrospective (less reliable) or low quality.
Interpreting country-level or population-level correlations is not straight forward. The problem is that the data is deeply confounded. Here Igor Chudov shows a strong correlation between Booster Uptake and Excess Mortality. If the booster campaigns were unambiguously a boon for saving lives — this is obviously not what you would expect. But it also doesn’t necessarily mean the boosters are killing people en masse. If the boosters were 0% effective, but countries with more vulnerable populations were boosting at higher degrees, this correlation would be in line with what you would expect. I expect the truth to lie somewhere in between, which is worth sharing because it’s hard to spin this as a win for the booster campaigns. Which is worth pointing out.
Dutch journalist @mkeulemans brings to our attention the apparent fact that the long, eery blood clots that are featured in the “Died Suddenly” documentary (as a supposed consequence of COVID vaccines) were being pulled out of arteries before COVID vaccines. The follow up question, of course, is to what extent?
Didn't realize this, but yes, no vaccine mandates in China.
Russo-Ukrainian War
Another gruesome video surfaces allegedly featuring Ukrainian soldiers killing Russian prisoners of war lying on the forest floor. I don’t recommend watching it. My sense is this kind of stuff is happening on both sides. I choose to amplify @JulianRoepcke’s signal because in my estimation Ukrainian atrocities are disproportionately attenuated (I presume because they go against the Western narrative).
Implications for the winter.
I'm detecting two incompatible descriptions of the current balance of power in the conflict. One essentially states that Russia is on its last legs.
The other holds that it is Ukraine that is on its last legs.
Endgame Ukraine; Putin's Battleplan
“There are now 540,000 Russian troops stationed around the outskirts of Ukraine preparing to launch a major offensive that I think will probably end the war in Ukraine. 540,000 Russian troops, 1,000 rocket artillery systems, 5000 armored fighting vehicles including at least 1,5000 tanks, hundreds and hundreds of tactical ballistic missiles. Ukraine is now going to experience war on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945.” —Colonel Douglas MacGregor
“In my assessment, Ukraine’s unquestioned strategic center of gravity is its western corridors to the Polish border where the vast majority of its war support enters the country. Their operational center of gravity is their resupply lines emanating eastwards from Kyiv to Ukraine’s various frontline positions. Without those two corridors, it would be nearly impossible for Kyiv to sustain wartime operations for more than a few weeks.”
“Putin, therefore, may calculate the best use of those 218,000 additional troops will be to launch a three-pronged axis to cut both of those supply routes: the priority effort in the west out of Belarus with the objective of Lviv, a supporting effort to the northeast in the Sumy direction, and supporting axis from the east to reinforce the current offensive in the Donbas.”
My sense is that the truth is probably somewhere in between but more in favor of the Russians at this point. I’m expecting Russia continues to take out key Ukrainian infrastructure leading up into the winter and follows up with an offensive using the fresh troops, perhaps indeed taking out the supply lines from Poland and from Kyiv.
Censorship & Moderation
Crypto
@JasonPLowery argues that assets in the current monetary system, such as real estate, gold, oil and equities are upheld by the rule of law and the threat of force. This means that people die to defend the concept of ownership over these assets. With Bitcoin you have a digital synthetic commodity which is protected not by human lives, but with electricity and code.
Tech
Finance
Misc
Morocco beat Belgium 20, yet "Moroccan flagwaving crowds" still rioted in Belgium and the Netherlands. Having grown up in Belgium, I remember that one of the lessons I learnt growing up (for better or for worse) was that one should watch out for Moroccans/Belgian-Moroccans. They seemed to be disproportionately involved with crime, violence and trouble in general. Sadly, the only thing that surprises me when hearing this news is that there were riots even though Morocco won.