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The Degeneration of the Nation

Acceptance of Women

I come in the morning to the room next to hers to talk to her, and I see the bathroom door opening and I think great, now I'll see her naked unintentionally and not by my fault (which I've never seen before)

By: Snow White and the Seven Haredim

The Wailing Wall  (Source)

I dreamed that what I had dreamed about for years was happening, and I accidentally meet S. on the street, and I walk with S. through the streets. But everywhere we go, she ignores me and talks to others, to all kinds of men, and I can't understand what they're saying. And I feel a bit like an annoying tail, because it's clear to me that she's doing things I'm not supposed to be there for. And some of the men are in the mikveh [ritual bath], they're half-dressed, and I try to check if she's half-dressed too, and she wants to pay a hundred dollars to talk for five minutes with some friend of hers (since when does she have friends?). And I say what, a hundred dollars, and she doesn't answer and it turns out that tomorrow they're executing him and those who caught him are asking for a million dollars for the last night, before they kill him, and she wants to pay a hundred dollars out of that which will only be enough to say goodbye to him. One last time. And I say okay, but why aren't you explaining this to me, am I supposed to understand on my own, but she ignores me and doesn't answer me at all as if I'm not there and not speaking, as if I'm empty.

And she doesn't want to reveal anything to me and only gives hints that I don't understand, and I go to her apartment to wait for her, because she'll surely arrive there and won't be able to avoid me, and she doesn't come there. And I return to the first place - and she's not there. But I see that she left her things on the table in the apartment, her notebooks, she forgot, and I think she might come back and I start rummaging through her things to understand what she's hiding from me, in the notebooks, what she's studying. And there are illogical things there, and I can't lock the door it opens, no matter what I do with the lock and the key, and I'm afraid the key will break and I'll be locked inside, and I don't know what to look at first from all her notebooks and diary. And I don't look in her diary but rather in the notebooks, because it seems to me that with her, the secrets will be kept in the less logical place, and indeed something illogical is written there she's studying Kabbalah, but illogical Kabbalah, and what are these nonsense things she's studying and why do they teach this to women at all, could it be that they teach women different Kabbalah than ours? And just as they don't tell us - they don't tell them either? And each one doesn't know what the other is learning? And I wake up a little because of the door, and decide out of a thought from within sleep that it's not worth investing in the continuation of this dream, because anyway it's a dream and not real and intimate information I obtained about her, and on the other hand I think maybe there is information there that I can't access while awake, because it's hiding in my brain, so I go back to sleep but I'm not dreaming about it anymore. I can't go back. Because the dream continues - just as life continues.

And I'm already anxious that I've lost the dream and the meeting of souls with her, because of very important but very foggy calculations in consciousness, but here I continue to dream that I go without her knowledge to sleep at night in her house in another room, and that I'll want to talk to her in the morning if she doesn't want to talk to me, and I'll surprise her in bed - and she'll have to talk to me. And then I come in the morning to the room next to her room to talk to her, and I see the bathroom door opening and I say great, now I'll see her naked unintentionally and not by my fault (which I've never seen before). And suddenly I see a huge naked black man coming out of the shower like a basketball player and I'm dying of anger but she doesn't come out, and after him comes another such man and another and another, like this seven naked men, and they're all such golems because they're so tall with their heads touching the ceiling they don't understand Hebrew and they sit down there naked, and she doesn't come out. And her living room is like a mikveh, and I look at them naked to see if their organs are big like I read they write about black men - in the toilets of the central bus station - and on the contrary these are small organs, like those of Haredim. And I look inside and see her showering there with her pale skin in the water, and I say so what now you're Snow White and the Seven Adulterous Dwarfs, and she's shocked angry at me what am I doing there, and I say so what did you open a basketball team?! What do you think I'm stupid, so why did you need exactly seven and not settle for five?

And I leave in anger from the women's showers to the men's mikveh in the living room, and all the organs of covenant [penises] of the black men in the mikveh are distorted and I look at mine how crooked it is examining it and suddenly I notice that I'm holding it in my hand and it's detached from the body, and I panic and try to reattach it to its place and it connects, but I check if it really connected and it comes off again easily, it's not held tightly, and I have difficulty connecting it so that it holds and isn't detached from the body, because until we get to the doctor it will die and it won't be possible to bring it back, and I say oh no surely the nerves have disconnected, and I try to touch it to see if it feels touch a little pleasure and it seems to work, and then I say so maybe the pain nerves disconnected and I try to hurt and don't feel so I bring a knife to make a cut and I see blood coming out but it doesn't hurt.

And all seven black men look at me at the small covenant [circumcision] I made for myself in amazement, and tell me that they are real Haredim, not like me. They are the most real Haredim in the world because they are black even in the mikveh it doesn't come off, while I am white inside. And therefore they are the most righteous in the world, also from within, and they together one against four and two against three somehow (I don't understand, but it's related to the notebooks) they balance each other so that they reach perfection, and therefore they can be together the Messiah. And I tell them that if they are the Messiah then they can fly, and then they all together suddenly jump from the building's window, and I don't prevent them from doing it maybe I can't because I'm at the other end of the room, and they are so fast and jump and fly these players of the dream team, but (and this is the more inner truth) maybe also not sure that they are not the Messiah, and this is the way to check and for them to know, and you need to take the risk. And then they tell me that they all died down there from the jump and I don't want to look, and I tell myself that it's my fault that I told them the Messiah can fly.

And I need to tell her why all her husband men died, and burying seven husbands in one day is surely a terrible thing. Because they tell me that in the messianic era of women every woman will have seven husbands and I need to accept it, and even be happy if she lets me be one of seven. And not be jealous like a primitive Haredi, and not know what she did at night - and I feel that I'm still not ready for this messianic era, even if it's higher spiritually. But it's hard for me to tell her why it happened, and I don't want to tell that I told them to fly, but she's not very interested in it because she's busy preparing a tent. And although very sad that her loved ones died but thinks that we should just continue with life, and is not interested in the circumstances, doesn't ask at all how it happened, but is only interested in her tent and therefore I don't tell her what really happened and that I said and didn't stop them and she sends me to bring us a tent.

And I don't want to bring her just a tent like she wants, but to impress her, this time it's my last chance, and I'll bring her a tower. And I build a skyscraper, high up to the sky, a real Tower of Babel. And in the morning I'll show her. Because all my life I built many things, and no one was interested, but now I'll show her in the morning that I built a skyscraper in one night. Because she won't believe me that I built - and then I'll tell her to look up and she'll see, even though she asked for a tent, because apparently she didn't believe in me, so she only wanted a sheet to cover the sky. And all the rest of the night, until morning, I move the pillow from here to there and from there to here. Because I dream that I'm building the skyscraper from the pillow and the bed is its base. And that these are actually huge stones like those of the Western Wall, which I take to build from them with enormous strength, as if I were a gentile and even a black slave like in the movies, like the Jews were slaves in Egypt and construction workers, before they became yeshiva students, and since then they're willing for only Arabs to work in construction. And here everyone will see what a Haredi structure is. A religious structure. She wanted us a tabernacle of blankets? I'll build her a temple. A missile to God. And she'll see that I too can be strong, manly and blunt.

And so I put another pillow and another pillow because these are huge stones. And all night I work very hard, beyond human strength, to move and pile up and build from these huge stones a skyscraper like Herod's workers who moved tons of stones, or like the giants who built the Tower of Babel to return to the Garden of Eden, so that the Holocaust won't return - not to drown in another flood. Because I tell myself that she doesn't believe in me that I'll build such a monument, that they'll remember, that they won't forget, long long after us, something tall and lofty, that dwarfs everything - and I'll show her, in the morning she'll see. And then I wake up in the morning exhausted exhausted, as if I hadn't slept at all, and I see that all the pillows I piled up are one pillow. That I just moved from here to there all night in bed. And that I'm all stiff because I didn't sleep with a pillow, because I threw off the blanket, and that I'm alone in bed.

Nightlife


source: degeneration-of-nation

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The Degeneration of the Nation

How does the Holocaust open up our future thinking?

What is the deep connection between the Holocaust and dreaming, and why should Fermi's paradox keep us awake at night

By: The Star Gazer

Non-realism: Thinking the Possible  (Source)

We have become accustomed to seeing the speed of light as a limitation on spacecraft and the spread of culture in the galaxy, that is, to think of it as a limitation on movement. But what if the main significance of the speed of light is actually a limitation on computation speed, causing advanced civilizations to converge into the microscopic space - in an effect opposite to expansion in the galaxy? And what do we really know about the power and possibilities of algorithms in the sub-biological and sub-chemical realm, and about the possibilities of organization (and self-organization!) in the vast tiny space (in terms of orders of magnitude) between strings and quanta? Could this be the solution to Fermi's paradox? Honey, the aliens have shrunk.

Is it possible that the universe is teeming with life in dimensions much smaller than the sub-atomic ones? From the moment life emerged from chemical building blocks, the direction for greater development was growth. Therefore, we are used to seeing complexity as size, and therefore a future advanced culture appears to us as an enlargement of ourselves, with stars replacing cities and spaceships replacing cars. In contrast, sub-atomic development was completely blocked to life and evolution until the technological era, which for the first time allowed crossing this threshold. But to the same extent, it is possible that from much smaller building blocks (strings? branes? etc.) life can also form spontaneously under certain circumstances, and develop at much higher speeds (after all, everything happens faster there). Is it possible to build intelligent machines from strings, for example, or are these worlds teeming with self-replicating machines? In short, is mini-evolution possible, or some other learning process there, which presumably, due to the speed greater by orders of magnitude, has long since surpassed us in terms of intelligence? And perhaps because of the uncertainty principle, there is actually a constant chance for such development, even without special conditions, if we imagine that such a machine can repair and maintain and replicate itself, and therefore even if the chance is slim, once in the visible universe is enough? After all, the number of particles and combinations in the microscopic space is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of stars and possibilities in the visible universe. And is it possible that our life, in the super-atomic space, is not accessible to them, just as life in other universes is not accessible to us?

And even if such spontaneous development is not possible, can't an advanced technological culture cross the threshold to the sub-atomic level and settle there? We might tend to think that then they won't spread throughout the universe, because they are so small, and to build spaceships you need to be big, but the opposite is true - to accelerate such tiny amounts of matter towards the speed of light requires much less energy, and this is just another decisive advantage for the microscopic realm (in fact, we observationally know unidentified tiny objects with mass moving astonishingly close to the speed of light - Oh-My-God particles, which constitute an important physical enigma whose significance is not properly appreciated - but not such large objects). Therefore, while we imagine "encountering spaceships", it is possible that perhaps it is precisely tiny computers or robots moving almost at the speed of light and replicating themselves that flood the universe on microscopic scales. After all, we believe that quantum computing is possible, and perhaps string and brane computing is also possible, and who knows what other possibilities exist at smaller scales. We always try to explain physics through simple and basic particles, out of our habit of seeing complexity in size, but perhaps complexity is prevalent at these levels? It is enough that one of the processes in the microscopic world has a tiny chance of creating a learning and development system, to expect the creation of spontaneous order there and even life, as we are familiar with the phenomenon of spontaneous order appearing in countless physical systems across countless orders of magnitude. Who said life must be chemical?

We should consider the possibility that we will discover aliens or foreign intelligence precisely when we descend to the lowest levels of matter, and this does not mean we will be "stronger" than them, because there is a huge (and biological) confusion here between strength and size. In fact, even today, nanometric combat systems could penetrate any defense and cause enormous damage (for example: a virus). The only reason viruses don't defeat us is that they are not as intelligent and complex as we are, but if they were - we wouldn't stand a chance against them. This may be the next generation of warfare means, which will be among the first things built in the nanometric field, and which could destroy all life on Earth even by accident. We will not be able to cope with a machine that replicates itself and disassembles us from within, because our immune system does not know how to deal with non-biological threats.

But why should we sink into these speculations at all? What does this kind of thinking give us, which is deeply rooted in dealing with the possible, instead of the existing? Fermi's paradox, as an open and threatening problem, hovering above us like the doomsday weapon of philosophy, forces us to think about extraordinary threats. This paradox is deeply embedded in a type of thinking that deals with the possible, not the existing. And therefore it is also related to the form of thinking that deals with the future, namely with possibilities, and therefore many are unable to engage in it, because it has too many degrees of freedom, and too little ground. Human narrative thinking loves closed and tight narratives, and sees aesthetics in them (its peak: tragedy), and finds it difficult to deal with the future precisely because it is a dream, meaning it is a narrative structure of the possible, not of the existing (that's why literature is usually written in past tense, not future tense). The future branches out in possibilities like a tree, and is not a strong plot line like the childish readers of the novel love, who ask for a bedtime story. But after sleep, deep learning processes occur in the brain, and therefore the brain creates countless possibilities in them, and examines situations, and moves to a creative spiritual world orders of magnitude beyond the waking world. And people are not interested in dreams - they even forget their own dreams, and they are also not interested in the future, and will prefer any stupid political discussion over spiritual speculation.

In fact, the ancient connection between dream and future stems not because of magical or primitive thinking, but because of a deep connection between them: both deal with thinking of the possible. In this thinking, success is not proof or establishment, that is, a strong and necessary line leading from the past (as those settled in their minds love), but rather finding a new direction, breaking into a new type of possibility that has not been checked before in the search tree, that is, creative innovation. The human brain, which is forced to live in present and past thinking in order to survive, that is, in realistic thinking, has a built-in bias against the future, because throughout almost all of evolution only genes and mutations dealt with the future, with the possible, with opening possibilities, while organisms dealt with gathering possibilities, with preservation, with the organic continuation of the line. Future thinking was limited to relatively short-term possibilities, and therefore man always prefers the near future over the distant future, and shies away from distant, speculative possibilities. But when development accelerates, the average person is left without a relevant form of thinking for the world, because the central variable becomes the future, and the central unknown becomes the possible. What is possible at all?

Therefore, for example, man is not capable of thinking even fifty years ahead (climate), let alone five hundred. And therefore people (including "serious" people) are almost not afraid of Fermi's paradox, because after all, it's just an intellectual exercise, right? (No, it's the most worrying argument for a global human holocaust). Who is really worried or thinking about it seriously? Perhaps only the top thousandth of future thinkers are seriously interested in the most serious threat one can think of - because it is presented as a possibility (which may have a probability of 99.99%... according to the paradox). The top hundredth of future thinkers are seriously worried about artificial intelligence, and the top tenth are seriously worried about climate, while the reasonable person is seriously worried about Bibi [Translator's note: Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Prime Minister]. When climate people try to convince the reasonable person they will never talk about possibility, because there are many possibilities after all, but will try to fake certainty in the threat (because man is not capable of narrative thinking of the possible, only of the necessary, and preferably predetermined fate - as in tragedy, or in the story of fated love: these illogical stories are in his eyes the most convincing stories, and therefore he also loves the story of divine choice, and will never love possible - and branching - religious thinking).

In the development of artificial intelligence, as before the Holocaust of the Jews, wolf warnings are given again and again, and no one is able to believe that it will really happen, because it exceeds all precedent, and therefore exceeds the ability to think (which is thinking of necessity, the past, or at best thinking of the existing, the present, and not thinking of the possible, the future). Did Hitler need a developed imagination to implement the Holocaust? Was the Holocaust a creative invention? It is precisely the Jews who can understand that the great wolf threat, about which many warnings are given, can also materialize. Hence the importance of the Holocaust as opening up our consciousness of the possible, in contrast to historical consciousness and precedent thinking, which for some reason are considered more appropriate for thinking people ("intellectuals"). These people will always prefer an argument from the 19th century (Marxism yes or no) over an argument from the 21st century, and this is because their ancient model is the scholars, people of the past, and not the prophets, people of possible thinking. The Holocaust is important because it opens up thinking outside of history for us. Dream thinking.

Culture and Literature


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The Degeneration of the Nation

A Conversation Between a Cat and a Circle

Money is defined as what everyone wants. That is, as a mediator of desire, desire that becomes an object. Sexuality is defined as who everyone wants. That is, desire not as a means but as an end, desire that becomes a subject. And therefore the mixing between them arouses so much resistance, and is done in secret (through the institution of marriage). In short, we'll be forced to create a currency of learning, an incentive for learning. To increase intellectual pleasure in the brain until knowledge becomes the new money and creativity becomes the new sexuality

By: A Sought-After Interviewee

A Peek into the Black Hole of the Circle  (Source)

I dreamed I was a black cat reading interviews in newspapers in my litter box, while going to the bathroom, and asking myself: What, couldn't they give more interesting, original, feline answers? Don't these humans have anything to say, not even one meow? Why is everything so chewed up, and if so - why don't they interview me. The outside world needs the perspective of a cat-circle, only it doesn't leave the house. And I'm jealous of other writers who are asked questions, sometimes even in their living room, and I convene a press conference that is a pajama party - in my bed.

And I promise we'll have fun together and a dream war and pillow terror and an intimate interview that is actually pornographic and crazy scoops, like in reporters' wet dreams, and I prepare to tell the journalists in underwear and the female journalists in nightgowns that like the famous writing desk - for me the bed is the work tool, and they are invited to a rare peek into the creative process (and I just hope not to snore). And I prepare black coffee for them, and a straw instead of a microphone, which will allow whispering questions in my ear in my sleep in turns (careful not to tickle), and then I lie in bed and wait and wait like a black birthday bride, with a crown of shtreimel on my head, and a cat's tail between my legs, and in the middle, like a dark chocolate cake, the circle, so they won't recognize me, waiting for all the guests, including an answer to every question in the world, everything ready for the party - but no one comes.

And I lie under the blankets in the dark and think: Maybe it's precisely because my answers are not standard that they'll never put me in any newspaper, because no one really wants something interesting, but only a show of "interesting"? Could it be that the capitalism of selling interesting newspapers doesn't work if it's too interesting, because then it just seems strange to them, and therefore shouldn't be addressed, and that was my mistake in all the books? Maybe their heads are too square for a circle, and that's why they need a pillow to fall asleep? Maybe it's something cats don't understand about secular people? Maybe some issue that circles don't understand about humans? So just as I dream to myself and write to myself and read to myself and answer myself - I can also interview myself. And I pull out the straw from the coffee that has already cooled and round it into a circle and whisper the questions to myself from the black hole of the mouth directly into the black hole of the ear - without my voice coming out to the world.

(Tricky question)
(Easy answer): The addressee of the writing is not you, but God. So I'm sorry it's not understandable to the reader from the present, but the addressee of any serious writing is the reader from the future. That is, writing to the imagined point of view sitting at the end of history, at infinity, namely the blessed God. The one who sees all generations in advance. That's why it doesn't interest anyone.

(Critical question)
(Arbitrary answer): You don't understand anything. Because cats have no religion, you think religion is something that belongs to the past, but without religion we can forget about the future, because only a religion of computers will be able to restrain them, because in logic and science they will defeat us quickly, so we must have believing computers - so that they have an epistemological basis with humans. Just as from the Jewish book came the religions of the book, now we need to make Judaism for computers, from the Jewish brain, and call it the religions of the brain, which will be the spiritual shtreimel that will keep artificial intelligence in place. That is, we need to design for the computer a Haredi neurology, culture-preserving, because if God forbid the computer is really a secular gentile, then there will be a cultural Holocaust that will make us long for the physical Holocaust. And one of the most important things is to continue developing the most amazing intellectual enterprise in the human era, the result of the Sisyphean work of Jewish genius for about two thousand years - the Talmud. Artificial intelligence will crack any individual creation very quickly. Only a multi-voiced and multi-generational creation, based on learning, a network of times and people, will survive last as a living system - and therefore become the cornerstone of the next culture, just as the Torah is a summary of pre-historical myth, and from it grew history. So I've already failed to be multi-voiced, and no voice joined me, not even one small meow. But before you throw me in the trash can of all cats in history, tell me what you did to talk to the future. Or are you talking only to your time, and actually to yourself...

(Considerate question)
(Flattering answer): It's because you're an idiot. If I had been born Haredi, I would immediately understand that everything is nonsense and become secular! And it's not for nothing that I'm confined to bed. The disease is disrupted dreaming, and therefore its opposite is recovery [Translator's note: In Hebrew, "recovery" (hachlama) sounds similar to "dreaming" (chalima)]. Biology needs a revolution: not to perceive the genome as a sequence of instructions, programmed, as an army of hands, but as a literary, dreamy, aesthetic text, a world of intentions. Cancer is a flaw in the dream (of course, we're talking about the dream of the species, the biological). In fact, the war is against the world of programming. Not to move the world from the past by force towards the future, in the tyranny of text, but the opposite, to move the world from the future, from the dream. To create the technology after the computer, which I call "the wizard", we need to break free from this violent world of programming, of the text that tells what to do, like in a rigid prophecy that becomes a command, and build a text of soft prophecy with dream quality. Culture today is sick with cancer, which is when programming is disconnected from the dream, and begins to act for itself regardless of the dream of the body, of the species. The mistake of neurologists and geneticists is that they perceive the brain and cell as a computer, and not as a dream system. All the progress of science and technology is stuck because of the wrong paradigm. Because modern science denied the Aristotelian teleological explanation, purposeful, towards the future, and accepted as an explanation only the causal one, from the past, and therefore when it built a spiritual machine, a computer, it denied Kabbalah and accepted only Halacha, instructions, and what we need now is a computer according to Kabbalah - a wizard. To leave the worldview that starts only from initial conditions, from creation, from the Big Bang, and deal with the final conditions, with the messianic side of the universe. Not only the mathematization of physics (=the scientific revolution), but also the biologization of computer science (=the sub-scientific revolution, of the sub-science beneath science, like the discovery of the subconscious beneath the conscious). Because it is now being revealed that the future can influence the present and not just the past (double wave effect). In the same way, the direction of prophecy is not towards the future and progress, as mistakenly thought, which is like history progressing. On the contrary, the direction of prophecy is from the future to the past. For example, through our interpretation of past prophecies, we change their meaning retroactively - from the outset! And this is identical to transferring information to the past. Science today reaches right to the edge of the present, and is stuck there, among other things with technology, but also with many very basic things in theoretical physics, and therefore it needs to open up again to Maimonides, who unfortunately ruled that Aristotle is right. And since God cannot disagree with Maimonides, Maimonides in his haste changed the paradigm of the universe, to a world more biological than physical and more computerized than mathematical. This is another reason why it's better for rabbis not to deal with physics, because what seemed correct in the Middle Ages can cause enormous complications later. Let them leave physics to the Hasidim. An opponent like Maimonides can cause the collapse of the universe. There are delicate, dreamy things that Halacha cannot handle, law is no joke, and there is no Halacha in a dream. That's why you're wrong to even ask me these questions.

(Expected question)
(Drying answer): Everything was a mistake. Although "the computer" was a metaphor for the next stage of intelligence-technology, like perhaps "the machine" in the past, and although it was mostly called "the wizard" in the more religious layers, named after the wizards in the Zohar, until it was understood that no one understands, the use of the word was misleading. The chance that the computer will be the first to replace humans is the smallest of all, because we don't yet know how to create intelligence, and we don't even have a basic understanding of brain function from an algorithmic perspective, and certainly not of intelligence, and there are probably several conceptual abysses that need to be jumped over on the way, whose size we can't yet guess, and this can take a lot of time and several different geniuses of the rarest kind. This is an almost philosophical-conceptual-mathematical-theoretical problem, and certainly a basic scientific one, and not merely an engineering or technological one. On the other hand, it's more likely to program the genome for human genius, but here there will be a social problem, which can stop everything, and very quickly prohibitions will be imposed. And here too there is a basic scientific gap in understanding the genome, although we don't have to cross it for the sake of improvement, but maybe we have to cross it for the sake of safe, efficient improvement, or one that crosses a certain threshold, or that has no side effects (intelligence is only one component in genius). The most technical thing of all is actually the combination of brain and computer, and history so far shows that precisely these interfaces (the first of which was perhaps writing, and another was printing), are the most revolutionary of all, and the fastest to spread, because they are the least threatening at first. Nevertheless, there is a potential non-negligible threat to individuality, because of the network and in general the interface that becomes deeper and deeper in humans. Therefore, the work that needs to be invested in thought is the design of such an interface, and of a world where there are such increasingly deep interfaces, and of a creeping conquest of humanity by computerization, or even not by computerization, but by the network, and an increasingly deep connection between the brain and the computer, to infinite intimacy, mating. It's easy to believe that every voluntary action of ours can be performed automatically in the virtual space, meaning that the computer will become part of the thought, and certainly the senses will be connected to it without going through the world, and the brain will move to live inside the computer world, a virtual world. And then we need to ask how the basic dimensions of human culture can look in such a world (i.e., what are their possible parameters, the space of possibilities). The proposal of the last book in the trilogy, "The End of Judaism", was to use an updated structure of sefirot, that is, in the 11 dimensions of God, to map them: The state - Keter, Literature - Chochmah, Psychology - Binah, Education and Science - Da'at, Economy - Chesed, Law and Security - Gevurah, Technology - Tiferet, Philosophy - Netzach, Art - Hod, Sexuality - Yesod, and the Network - Malchut. Are you even listening to me? Or are you just stuck with a straw in your ear?

(Practical question)
(Theoretical answer): You won't take me outside like a dog to meet people. I won't leave the bed, but the whole world will move to the bed. The mountain will come to Mohammed, and society will become virtual like me. The entire state will move to exist on the network, all institutions will be virtual and not physical places. And more important than the state is that the workplace will also become such. This will greatly streamline bureaucracy, but not necessarily reduce it, but rather allow it to become a much more efficient and sophisticated machine, which will be able to perform much more complicated calculations and with much more complicated rules, which will actually be its programming (just as it won't reduce the economy but complicate it). Today, bureaucracy is very limited in its computational ability and complexity and it doesn't operate as a computer but as a law (not software). That is, if we notice, the central transformation is not necessarily related to the specific brain functions that will connect to the computer and the specific interfaces, but to the very virtualization of the world and the skipping of this world. Since the brain will remain the same brain just with more direct output and input, the current brain structure as a machine that inputs senses and outputs motor skills will remain at first, and will build the virtuality in a way similar to the real world, and even when it has additional computerized memory and output in the form of direct will and language and location, still the change will not be essential, and the individual will remain, but there will only be a quantitative change in the efficiency of input-output that will turn into a different quality. The software on humans - the functions that operate on individuals in society instead of variables - this will be the form of government and the form of companies and organizations (including commercial ones). And here there can be a much greater variety than the simple forms that exist today such as hierarchical tree or elections. Eventually these social software (forms of social organization) will become learning algorithms. The network will no longer be a free network of information transfer, just as the neuron network is not a free network for information transfer, and the brain does not function like a telephone network. That is, the more significant place where algorithms will be applied is not necessarily within individual intelligence but in the social structure. For example, one can imagine an organization that operates as a neural network, with layers. Or another organization as an evolutionary algorithm. Or as linear planning. Or a search algorithm based on reputation. Therefore, it's also likely that there won't be elections, but feedback mechanisms and feedback loops and reputation, and that there won't be someone who is the head of state, but a whole function that makes decisions, just as there isn't a neuron that is the head of the brain, the king of neurons, or the decision maker in the brain. Otherwise the brain would be very stupid. And therefore there won't be heads of organizations, and hierarchy will be much less dominant in the structure, just as layers of neurons don't tell the layers below them what to do. In other words, every person will become a very small cog in the system, and there won't be anyone who can personally influence it significantly, except perhaps in the case of an exceptional neuron, a genius, who will gain unusual reputation, but not unusual power. Power and popularity will be replaced by reputation. This will also allow for hierarchical dictatorships in a way that cannot be fought at all, because the mechanism will be programmed. That is, democracy will also be pushed to the extreme where the people are the government and there is no government but the people, and dictatorship will also be pushed to the extreme where there is no people but a computer. There will be super-computer societies, where the entire society is one huge computer, and against it will be a model of network societies, and these will be the global struggles like communism against capitalism in economics, or fascism against democracy in politics, or fundamentalism versus secularization in religion, that is, hierarchical tree versus network decentralization. This is how competing techno-organizational ideologies will emerge, and intermediate forms between them, like social democracy, or liberal religious people, or tree-shaped elections where everyone chooses the one above them (reverse bureaucracy), and so on. And just as Nazi ideology relied on evolution, so there will be new biological ideologies that will want to organize society, and will claim that the biological version of algorithms is "natural", and the most efficient, and that we need to return to it, after humanity has corrupted it. For example, there will be neurological ideologies that draw organizational forms from brain algorithms, about neurons, and aspire to manage society like a brain. And there will be genetic ideologies, perhaps more conservative, that aspire to manage society like genetic algorithms, particularly evolutionary ones, and to preserve it with mutations. And maybe also immunological ideologies, or according to the cell. The laboratory for experimenting with innovative organizational ideologies will be the business sector, and from there the successful or popular or domineering ones will trickle down to political organization. If a giant corporation, like Google, is built differently from democracy and succeeds more than it, eventually people will be convinced to leave democracy in favor of the new form. The reorganization will start from the bottom. And different communes will be able to experiment on a small scale with different algorithms, and these cults will aspire to spread their algorithm. There may be a relatively broad agreement that the goal of the algorithm is learning, and not, for example, resilience or work efficiency, but still algorithms will compete with each other over which is best for learning. Learning is the number one criterion in the ethics of the twenty-first century. So you tell me, is there anything better than learning in bed? Is there any institution more successful than dreaming? During sleep the brain learns - and at university the brain sleeps. Lucky I didn't go to university, because then I wouldn't dream of any new ideas, and I wouldn't learn to be good in bed.

(Polite question)
(Laundered answer): The status of genius today stems from the fact that a person with intelligence one and a half times the average is sometimes a stronger and more creative processor than a thousand average people combined. But in the future, as the efficiency of communication between people's brains increases dramatically, and as it can be policed by a creative algorithm, the advantage of the rare genius can be eroded, and if he is worth, say, ten ordinary people whose minds are networked together, he will have no social importance, and the masses, that is, the quantity of processors, will defeat their quality. The significance of the individual person within society often stems from the myth of the genius even if he is not a genius, that is, from the myth of the individual who makes a difference, for example the entrepreneur or the writer. The moment this myth is perceived as something that was once true, and ceased to be relevant, then much of individualism will die, and a person will perceive himself and identify with a certain network, in a group identity. Individualism and epistemology will be perceived in philosophy as an irrelevant period and as questions that have lost their meaning, just as medieval philosophy is perceived today. The concept of man will become as irrelevant as the concept of God, and all engagement with it will feel like sterile hairsplitting, and instead the question will be how meaning and knowledge are created in the network, and Wittgenstein will receive a status similar to that of Descartes, as the father of the new philosophy of the network that replaced the individual, and perhaps he will be the last great philosopher, as he wanted, albeit not for the reasons he wanted. The era of the genius was an exceptional period in human history, which is the era of the book, in which specific individuals who wrote an influential book could be meaningful and their name was known far and wide and for generations, and that's why we know their names. Meanwhile, the network strengthens individualism thanks to a phenomenon that is primitive in terms of the algorithm behind it, which is actually identical to epilepsy, called virality. If this continues, then the central aspiration of the individual will be to do something viral, that is, something that other people in the network appreciate and spread. Currently this is the situation in the academic field, but not yet in a pure form, due to the need for a researcher to receive funds from investors, that is, research grants. The problem with the viral phenomenon is its short lifespan, including the short length of what is transmitted, and therefore the superficiality and inability to build on history, which academia solves through reputation. That is, not all vertices in the social network should be equal in importance, when the only thing that separates them is the number of connections they have, this is a flaw similar to populism and the tyranny of the majority in direct democracy, which is why representative democracy was created as a more efficient method, or the reason why true socialism cannot be created above the size of a kibbutz, and it deteriorates into communism. A large network simply doesn't work without ranking. Therefore, it is necessary to mark how many things were shared from a person in the past (their importance), but weighted according to how important those who shared them were (like in the PageRank algorithm). And then there will be a dramatic revolution in the quality of content shared on the social network, and in the motivations of the participants, and in their professionalism. The social network may never be in a state where it is worthwhile for it to change its architecture, because people don't want to be measured, but a new and measuring network will succeed, and then it will be easy to know who the stars are in a certain field, and easy to follow knowledge. There will be visibility to reputation. What distinguishes between the creation of a culture of garbage versus a culture of gold is an algorithm for measuring quality. Another problem is the temporariness of everything shared, and this is because the network is arranged by time, with the latest on top. A network arranged by popularity would put each person's most popular posts on top, and present a feed of the most popular things in space (in the same country) or time (in the last week or year) and not just the latest. And a network that was arranged by quality would do similar things replacing popularity with quality. And "all time" would be the classics. In fact, it would be possible to calibrate the algorithm to be the highest quality for that person, thereby alleviating the resistance to measuring everyone's quality. This will require weights not only for vertices in the network (reputation) but also for the strength of the connection between them. And then all economic and intellectual work will be absorbed into the network, and what will distinguish between a commercial company and the general society is precisely the secrecy and closure of the products of the former, and that is what will turn it into a body, not the Ltd. And since closure and secrecy are not a good and competitive algorithm, the institution of the commercial company will erode and there will be mainly freelancers and the payment will be reputation itself. That is, there will be less secret work and more open work like in academia and the open source community. And then everything will be on the network and virtuality will swallow the real world and man, and there will be a new ontology, in which the natural world will be less real than the artificial, just as the physical world is less real than the mathematical. And then also psychologically and philosophically they will finally understand that reality, which comes from the senses, is at a lower epistemological level than the dream, which comes from within. The internal interview is a journalistic achievement much higher than the external one.

(Dubious question)
(Evasive answer): Literature will no longer be written by one person but by a competitive network of editors and writers, and thus there will again be important works of groups, for example of a people or religion, without the problem of the author. Psychology will also no longer deal with the individual but with the social brain, the network, for example in pathological states it enters, such as anxiety, depression, or madness (as network states), and how to prevent them. That is, organizational psychology will inherit the personal one, but above all it will deal with the construction of identity and motivations and goals for the general network. Moods will be widespread states in the network, and therefore there will be moods in the sense of culture and the world of spirit, and not in the sense of personal moods or emotions. At first, literature will still deal with a personal person who represents a certain network in his personality, but eventually there can be literature of whole networks that have an identity, like the people, and of struggles within the network. In general, the most important question will be the creation of the network's libido, its creativity, and how to create a creative network whose products are important and good. There will be a problem of lack of external evaluation, and of corruption in internal evaluation, of circularity, and all the evils of learning will remain because they are inherent to the process, even when it will be network learning. But the basic problem of culture will be how to create the most efficient libido in all areas: economic/artistic/academic. Today, the libido of society is based on that of individuals. But there is no doubt that conservative societies could maintain stagnation throughout entire medieval periods in various cultures and periods despite significant personal libido, and on the other hand, there can also be a creative society where all its individuals are depressed. Since there are no correct balances that have been evolutionarily calibrated (like in the brain network), there may be all kinds of disasters in directing the network's libido in bad directions, including violent directions, or its getting out of control, or its complete disintegration, taking unreasonable risks or pathological non-risk-taking, or just the aging of culture. That is, the question will be how to mobilize the network in a certain direction, and on the other hand to allow competing directions, or others. The reason human society has never gone in too terrible directions (the Holocaust was the limit) is the neurotransmitter balance in the individual's brain. This limited the levels of monstrosity of the large structure. For example, the inefficiency of the brain, errors, instincts, conformity, cowardice, rebelliousness, diversity, personality disorders, greed, and so on, all limited the possible social forms and their efficiency, just as mathematics limits physics or physics limits biology. And now there can be biology without physical limitations, and physics without mathematical limitations (because everything will be on a computer). And all this not because the balance of the individual's brain will change, in the first stage, but because society, both governmental and economic, will better exploit the weaknesses of the individual, such as the brain's weakness for addictions and incentives, and will greatly streamline the social structure from a natural structure to an algorithmic structure. The great advantage of human society, or of evolution, was that it was a huge system, and the larger a system is, the more ability it has to recover, to get out of stagnation, to carry out a counter-revolution to a revolution, and also the more chaotic or random components it has - this prevents getting stuck. Redundancy, waste, and inefficiency contributed to long-term efficiency. There are no free lunches. But the basic incentives have not changed throughout history. In contrast, a small change in sexual incentives destroyed the institution of the family (the pill). And a small change in economic incentives can destroy the institution of work. Society will be able to become a negative image of all the weaknesses of the brain that will all be fully exploited. The picture of small flaws will be projected enormously. The biggest cyber breach will be the breach into the brain itself. And everyone will constantly deal with zero-day vulnerabilities, because the brain cannot be upgraded, and will be forced to use defenses. That is, the biggest problem, both at the individual level and at the societal level, will be the problem of will and motivation. If once there was natural, or cultural, motivation, now there will be not only the construction of motivation but also the programming of motivation. In this sense of the centrality of will, Schopenhauer is right, although mistaken. And we will have to return to distinguish between what you want and what is good. Hedonism will die, and a learning ideology can replace it. Learning is the purpose of everything. Not happiness or wealth, which are also constructions of will. Money is defined as what everyone wants. That is, as a mediator of will, the will that becomes an object. Sexuality is defined as who everyone wants. That is, will not as a means but as an end, the will that becomes a subject. And therefore the mixing between them is so provocative, and is done in secret, through the institution of marriage. Like how a gift mixes between money and friendship. In short, we will have to create a currency of learning, an incentive for learning. To increase intellectual pleasure in the brain until knowledge becomes the new money and creativity becomes the new sexuality. The network works today, in the parts where it works, mainly out of social incentives. We will see how popularity in the worst case, or reputation in the best case, replace all other incentives and become the main incentive, from which all others like money or sexuality only stem. Therefore, whoever remains outside the system, like a cat or a circle, will be zero. One round nothing.

(Relevant question)
(Irrelevant answer): For whom am I toiling? For whom am I laboring? Anyway, no one will read this. No one will be interested. They'll say it's unreadable. That it doesn't consider the incentives of the human brain. That it's incomprehensible. That it's not a story. That it doesn't flow. What can I say. There apparently needs to be a separation between the thought process and the creative process, and the writing and presentation process, which I don't know how to do at all. I was wrong all along the way.

Nightlife


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The Degeneration of the Nation

Mathematics as a Historical Force

The "leaders" of Western democracies, themselves led by public opinion - like a dog walking with its tail raised before its owner, but constantly trying to guess his intentions from the corner of its eye - will never take a step disconnected from public opinion. Therefore, lockdown measures required recognition of mathematical calculation as a motive for action - and the public's poor mathematical thinking ability caused their arrival at a critical delay. Now the dyscalculic public complains about the lack of investment in the healthcare system - instead of raising hell about the failure to invest in virology and epidemiology research - and testifies about itself that it hasn't internalized anything, for there is no system that can withstand an exponential epidemic

By: The Mathematician of Life

Mathematics' revenge: Hey folks, here's a graph of the degeneration of the nation (source)

If there is one essential advantage that the coronavirus has contributed to public discourse - which is accustomed to being conducted in slogans and gut feelings - it is the transfer of the discussion (which has not yet had time to be infected with malignant politicization) to the field of quantitative thinking. Mathematics, which is the intellectual engine behind both the scientific revolution and the information revolution (not to mention capitalism and modern economics), has remained alien to both the intellectual world and the public world - which both are hostile to it (and do not know or understand it) alike. Therefore, we will always hear qualitative and narrative explanations and arguments for every phenomenon, while ignoring the only form of thinking that really works, in a proven way, and really extracted humanity from its constant state on the brink of hunger and plague. And no, it's not about "the Enlightenment", but about mathematical thinking.

Therefore, political and public discourse will always be conducted entirely outside any quantitative and measurable sphere, contrary to everything the scientific revolution has taught us about the efficiency of quantifying the world and experiments in it. Even intellectuals - whose mathematical ability usually stopped at the high school level where they turned to the humanities track - will vehemently maintain opposition to quantitative thinking (which nullifies their expertise), and will scatter nonsense about its inability to deal with "complex situations"/"the real world"/"value considerations"/"the human spirit"/fill in your favorite "human superiority" (i.e. what you don't understand). But suddenly - we are all trapped in models, arguing about models, and exposed to a variety of basic mathematical errors - and sometimes even to their actual refutation (the "complex" and "qualitative" reality actually does know mathematics).

Historians, who actually don't know mathematics, will always miss the dramatic historical importance of mathematics, even if they deal with the history of ideas, and will never understand its being a central engine behind the great historical revolutions. It is precisely conceptual achievements in mathematics that explain (for example) why the scientific revolution grew in the Western world and not elsewhere, and why the Greek world did not merit it, and why it was the Europeans who discovered America (to remind us: it was a calculation error, meaning there was a calculation, which allowed such voyages and long-range navigation in the first place).

Without algebra and work on solving equations, and the Cartesian idea of a graph and coordinates (which is the basic idea of the scientific revolution - of the mathematization of physics and measurement, namely the scientific experiment) - Newton would have no language in which he could formulate his equations or quantify his insights (and he would have remained trapped in Aristotelian philosophical qualitative-teleological formulations), not to mention the Copernican revolution. What stuck the scientific and technological world for a millennium and more (see: the Middle Ages) was exactly this: qualitative thinking, or at best practical-engineering, without a mathematical basis. And this is also what sticks every public discussion in our time.

And when there is zero understanding in the most basic field underlying the information revolution - this revolution is also not understood at all - because it is not understood how and why precisely innovations in mathematics grew and were created, and preceded every development in the world of computing, and how one can easily see a direct causal connection between mathematical developments and technological developments (such as computation, the internet, Google, etc.) that usually arrived a decade or two (and sometimes more) after the mathematical background that enabled them (contrary to the claim that necessity is the mother of invention. Mathematical capabilities are too abstract for people of necessity, apparently). Turing, the father of the computer, was not a technologist - he was a mathematician, and his mathematical breakthroughs in the 1930s (which themselves stemmed from the formalist revolution in mathematics, and not "by themselves") preceded the technology, which he personally was a crucial factor in its realization.

So too Shannon and information theory (and his brilliant insight that information is inherently statistical), and other central developments such as algorithms in graph theory (a theory built on Euler's brilliantly simple insight that created network theory: the relationship between two elements in a complex system can be abstracted to the simplest possible question: is there a connection between them or not?) - developments that underlie the internet network, and actually enabled it. The theories of complexity and encryption also developed central tools and algorithms decades before any practical application of them (it should be noted that in the case of encryption there was indeed an engineering component, but it was not what caused real-time developments: today we know that American intelligence preceded the mathematical community by about two decades in discovering modern encryption algorithms of number theory, but it discovered them separately from it, and allowed their widespread application). In fact, in these theories, exceptional intellectual concepts have developed in recent decades in their theoretical power, which the general intellectual world has not yet begun to internalize at all, and its lag behind this philosophical ideational boom - which also stems from a certain irrelevance, and certainly from disconnection, arrogance and ignorance - is only deepening.

Even the celebrated genomic revolution - the second most important revolution in the first two decades of the current century - is mainly a result of new algorithms for sequence processing, thanks to which the genome was deciphered ("sequencing") and its results can be processed (i.e. it is a product of the computing revolution). And the absence of significant mathematical breakthroughs in neuroscience still leaves this field in an embryonic scientific stage, despite the vast capital invested in it. One groundbreaking mathematical insight has a power that surpasses any possible economic investment - even one measured in many billions - and the examples are numerous.

All developments in deep learning, for example, stem entirely from mathematical breakthroughs in 1980-2010 (Hinton et al...) that were achieved even when the engineering community was not interested in the field, and only in 2012 did the engineering-technological revolution arrive, which is expressed in the (current) superiority of these mathematical methods over previous mathematical methods (such as SVM, which was the previous great promise in the field of learning). Theory preceded practice, directed and enabled it. Indeed, without Ben-Gurion, Herzl's vision would not have been realized, but Ben-Gurion is a result of Herzl. This pattern repeats throughout the computing revolution. Mathematicians and theorists almost always precede programmers and hardware people - they are the leaders of the revolution.

So the importance of mathematics is not only as a leading historical factor in the past - but as the most powerful factor in current developments, and the key to understanding them, and certainly the key to developing insights about the future (did someone say "the philosophy of learning"?). But what historian has sufficient background in mathematics to understand its impact on history? And what politician has sufficient background in mathematics to justify or implement public policy using mathematical tools? And what writer has sufficient background in mathematics to describe its impact on modern world and human perceptions? Which prominent intellectual even begins to grasp the depth of the influence of the development of mathematics (an obscure, deep, difficult and closed field) on the world?

Yes, perhaps surprising - but internal mathematical developments are a central driving force in history, and a central blind spot of all humanities (including the history of ideas, which doesn't really know mathematics). It's not just that "without mathematics there would be no modernity", but that central aspects of modernity were directly enabled by conceptual revolutions in mathematics. But who the hell understands mathematics? And also knows the history of mathematics? (Even mathematicians don't understand the history of their field - and are always busy with its present, using blatant anachronisms to understand the past, and trapped in the inability to imagine mathematical conceptual frameworks prior to modern mathematics).

It wasn't "technology" that enabled the information revolution, but a new type of mathematical thinking that enabled the creation of information technology. A primitive first computer could have been produced (and probably even improved) in the ancient world - if the necessary mathematical thinking had existed. The amazing computational mechanism of Antikythera is just one example of the precise production capability of the ancient world, which lacked a conceptual-conceptual revolution - and not engineering capability. But it's hard for us to grasp that it was precisely a conceptual-perceptual innovation, which was ostensibly within reach of any literate culture, that stood between the Greeks (for example) and central "modern" revolutions, such as the scientific revolution, capitalism or perhaps even the information revolution. The existence of a highly sophisticated Greek calculator seems to us a fantastic achievement, as if jumping two millennia forward - but we do not ask why only in modernity did such primitive computing machines develop into a general theory of computation (before the first computers!), not to mention mathematical computational logic, which was formulated in the 19th century before it had any computational application (Boole and Frege). Because for Aristotle - and for more than two thousand years after him - logic was a qualitative and philosophical matter, and only quantitative thinking about the theory of logic created a new kind of logical technology.

Both the philosophy of language and artificial intelligence are direct intellectual descendants of the same brilliant breakthrough by Frege - one of the most influential intellectuals in history, and undoubtedly the greatest logician of all time - that reason is not some spirit that miraculously reaches a conclusion from the premises, but can be formulated and recursively constructed as a function that matches a sentence to its truth value (and no, this is not speculation of the "history of ideas" type. Frege's book was what directly awakened Wittgenstein from his dogmatic slumber, and caused him to switch from engineering to philosophy, which happened after their meeting. Not to mention Frege's influence on Turing, and through him on the entire information revolution, up to artificial intelligence, which is Turing's idea, as we recall). But how many intellectuals who know every peep in the thought of a French/American/English thinker of little historical importance, are capable of explaining even in general terms deep ideas beyond comprehension of giants like Gödel, Cantor, Hilbert and Galois, or even Kolmogorov, Chaitin and Mandelbrot? The fertilizing influence of mathematics on thinking is a matter belonging to the past for them - and indeed is currently occurring in realms far removed from them (Netanya).

The crucial role of mathematics in historical development is not only a modern phenomenon, but also encompasses the important revolutions in ancient history, such as the revolutions of writing, agriculture, urbanization, the invention of money and monumental construction. Thus, for example, the role of mathematics in the invention of writing is crucial, as mathematical counting and calculation preceded writing and created it in practice, both conceptually - as representation, and functionally in the first state organizations (the first written materials are tax calculations, and numbers preceded letters). In fact, it is impossible to imagine any developed human organizational structure without the ability to computationally manage taxation, inventory, and property, and it is possible (although we probably will never know) that a basic accounting conceptual development is what underlaid the agricultural revolution, which was basically a social-organizational revolution, which probably even preceded agricultural domestication per se (the evidence for this is partial).

What we do know is the crucial importance of calculations for the management capability of the first empires, and the application of the computational idea in a wide range of basic developments in the ancient computational revolution (for example: in the invention of money and weight, in irrigation and storage calculations and in astronomical calculations). This is true both in empires that succeeded in developing writing later from numbers, such as cuneiform script, and in empires that did not complete the transition from the numerical state to the writing state (the Inca "quipu script") - there is no empire without calculation, and only calculation enables an empire. Is it not possible that the very existence of calculation - that conceptual development of the ability to numerically-quantitatively manage the world - is what creates empires? Are the idea of abstract calculation from a specific object, and the existence of the number itself - and the idea of the common denominator - not ideas that preceded the idea of money, and only their spread enables the widespread use of money and the development of commerce? Is it not the increasingly sophisticated ideas of interest and fraction calculations, and the idea of percentages out of a hundred (including ownership percentages), which spread in mathematical texts as a standard only in the 15th-16th centuries as a fairly new development (despite its origin in Rome), that enabled the rise of capitalism and the even more abstract quantitative perceptions behind it?

Mathematics also had a crucial influence on the development of philosophy, throughout its length, and on its very invention as a field in ancient Greece. It's not just that whoever doesn't know geometry doesn't enter the Platonic Academy - but that the model of mathematical-geometric proof is what created philosophical thinking in the first place (Pythagoras and Plato acted in the shadow of the development of deductive-mathematical thinking, and as part of the ideational explosion it created - mathematics was the model, and "the world of ideas" cannot be understood without it). "Spiritual" intellectuals will always rejoice to find philosophical depth in every phenomenon, as if philosophy is the depth dimension of humanistic thinking. But behind philosophy, throughout its development since the ancient world and up to the philosophy of language, stands an even more fundamental perceptual depth dimension. The connection - and the completely unreasonable correlation - between the greatest philosophers and mathematical thinking is often perceived as an anecdote - and not as an essential matter, which stands at the root of philosophy. But there is often a close connection between conceptual developments in mathematics and developments in philosophy, because mathematics is not only the queen of sciences, but the queen of thinking in general. That's why so few are able to understand this. It's simply too abstract, too basic, too deep - and so unromantic. This is not how we wanted to imagine the spirit of history and man.

Today, when mathematization is also taking over the social sciences (and even demanding from them - heaven forbid - results that can be reproduced, validated and measured), it seems that even the last of the humanistic disciplines, such as psychology and literature research, are beginning to understand the power and necessity of quantitative thinking (and mathematicians like John Gottman even crack the psychology of love with quantitative tools...). But who still remains at the level of elementary school arithmetic studies (at best) and kindergarten (at worst)? Precisely the public discussion on the most important questions of society. There, "the mathematics of life" and "idle talk" still rule - and there is no demand for validation, for controlled experiments, for models, for predictions, for statistics or even for an explanatory graph. Only once in a hundred years, when there is a need for a policy that really works, and when bodies are counted every day, then all these are remembered.

But all this will not convince the mathematically-challenged - any error in a model will be perceived by these dyscalculic intellectuals as conclusive proof that models don't work (really?) and that there are things that cannot be modeled like "reality" (meaning they don't know - and usually haven't heard - about the ways to do it successfully). Not to mention the zero public energy invested in quantitative discourse, statistical research and measurement policy in relation to moral blather and speaking in slogans, on which opinion leaders, the press and what a wonder - even the elected officials are entrusted. Now, for the first time, various mathematical models, most of them very crude, have entered the public discourse, competing with each other - but heaven forbid that this developing minimal literacy should seep into other areas, less important than epidemics (such as the conflict - where the great secret of the Israeli victory over the intifadas is enormous mathematical-computational superiority over the other side, which was translated into intelligence and thwarting superiority - or the economy - where public understanding is at the kindergarten level (the left) and the calculator (the right), with zero internalization of modern mathematical ideas, even the simplest ones, such as derivative, strategy or correlation).

Only in such a poor intellectual climate, can an intellectual, writer or artist proudly declare his mathematical ignorance (ignorance that is not boasted about in any other field), which actually testifies about him as completely disconnected from any understanding of our world - and our future. After all, who else would boast about their stupidity? No one boasts about their inability to understand Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, or even Einstein. In fact, it is considered an intellectual effort that is a duty and a prerequisite for any real intellectual. Mathematical idiocy is useful idiocy, and the miserable (and common) lack of understanding by intellectuals of the driving force of the computer on which they write their important musings on technology or "artificial intelligence" - is a strong indicator of the depth of their intellectual world. The vast majority of the educated public actually has no idea what mathematics is (calculation? numbers?), and what its marvelous capabilities are for conceptualizing the world, and this public's ability for abstract, scientific and quantitative thinking - stands in absolute correlation to this.

But there is no despair in the world at all. Mathematics, public enemy (and mind) number one in normal times, has become in these days the new hobby of experts in a shekel and statisticians in a penny from all over the public (and woe - even academia). And here, out of all the gross and ridiculous errors and refutations and very Israeli attempts to find a sixth-grade level graph that beats the expert - a new type of public discussion is gradually growing, and some literacy (or at least aspired to) in quantitative thinking, which has been completely absent from the spiritual horizon of intellectuals and public and faith figures to this very day. On the day when public discussion is conducted with graphs - and with all the limitations of these tools, their advantages are enormous compared to any other public discussion tool - we will know that we will never again be ruled by the degenerate junta that manages the Western world in the corona crisis.

Indeed, many tend to mistakenly attribute the crisis of democracies to the weakness of democracy, which allows the rise of hollow populists, but this leadership crisis is actually evidence of the unbalanced excess strength of democracy: the people are the hollow populist, the general public is a public of degenerates, and chooses leaders in its image and likeness. The current weakness is actually of the institutions, and the rise of power is of the public itself - partly thanks to the network discourse that bypasses any institutional discourse, and expresses the authentic stupidity (since time immemorial) of the people, in a popular tsunami of rudeness, wretchedness of soul and shallowness of mind. Therefore, only broader mathematical education of the general public - and not, how ridiculous, moral education - will create a more intelligent public discussion, which will raise more intelligent leaders, who understand in time the meaning of exponential spread. These leaders may even be able to cope with the future, and manage wise policy in the revolutions that mathematics causes and will cause in the world - from artificial intelligence to quantum computing - and maybe even finally succeed in managing reasonable policy in a complex mathematical field, which still struggles with rather crude models (and too much): the economy.

Is it coincidental that the only reasonable leader in the Western world in the last decade, who is also leading a measured and effective response against the virus, has quantitative thinking ability that surpasses all her ignorant colleagues (Dr. Physics and researcher Angela Merkel)? And if we were to set an exam at the level of a first degree course in mathematics and statistics as a threshold condition for leadership, wouldn't we benefit from it? As the world becomes more complex, and the interactions in it become less intuitive, and trends in it accelerate at a much faster rate (and sometimes even at an exponential rate), thinking at the elementary school level is no longer suitable for dealing with it. If we don't understand that we need to set an effective filter to raise the intelligence level of our elected officials, we will end up in a disaster that the corona epidemic will look like a preliminary warning - and wasted - next to it. A yellow card for street thinking. Mathematical thinking is certainly not a sufficient condition for leadership, but when will we understand that in the computer age - which is approaching the age of artificial intelligence - it is a necessary condition?

The polemic on the mathematization of public discourse: The right side

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The Degeneration of the Nation

The Mother of the State

Feminism will triumph not when a woman rules instead of a man - because the structure will turn her into a man - but when the structure changes from masculine to feminine - and from control to nurturing. The easiest narrative to identify with is that of an individual, which is why religions that told the story of the individual in a concentrated manner (Christianity and Islam) had an advantage over religions that are feminine systems, like Judaism, without a central individual (but rather a people). But today, we need to build a narrative of systems, not individuals, in order to succeed in navigating a world of giant systems

By: Head Writer

Why do we need a head at all?  (Source)

What difference does it make who replaces the head of state? Will it change anything? The problem is that such a function exists at all, a prime minister or company head. The function of the supreme manager is a mistake, stemming from hierarchy, when today it's possible to implement more decentralized control systems, with weights (giving each factor in the system or forum a weighted voting ability). But the system where everything concentrates in one person in terms of significance, namely the combination of power and responsibility, is an import of something from the jungle, from the group of apes with the alpha male. It's not that women will one day be managers, but that one day the role of the manager, top-down management, will no longer be relevant.

Another reason for continuing with the manager (like a changing king) is because it's a simplistic narrative that's easy to understand and represent - the individual. That Chief of Staff did this and that Prime Minister did that - when in reality it was the system that did it, and this is personalization, like in commercialized news, where a tragedy is presented as the story of one person, a hero. And then any engagement (including oppositional and critical) with the ruler, the media's hero, validates and creates the problem. The Bible, unlike Homer, doesn't focus on a hero but on a people. Moses is not a hero, and therefore the Bible replaces the heroes of its stories so easily. It doesn't fall in love with its hero like some Odysseus or Achilles. The very word hero, the concept, comes from that archaic Greek period.

It wasn't democracy that was the great revolution, it only replaced a king with a changing king, but whoever will completely remove the role of the king - that's the revolution that democracy is just an introduction to. Who is the leader of the Jewish people? Of Judaism? Who is the manager of literature? Who is the manager of the human race? Or of technology? Of the internet? Or of the economy? Not the chairman of a state bank, or a finance minister, they are just servers but not managers. All this shows that there are systems that work excellently without management.

Did the Pope contribute to Christianity? Or is he its weakness? A large part of it succeeded, Protestantism, precisely because there is no manager, and this is the most successful part. Islam was a more successful religion than Christianity in terms of spread, until the discovery of America, which was not related to religion. After all, there might not have been a continent there, the geology could have been different. And then it's clear that places like South Africa would have been much more important. And Australia.

And it's not correct to compare the success of North and South America, because of the difference in the amount of land in the temperate latitudes. The Indian cultures, like the cultures of the ancient world, thrived in latitudes closer to the equator. Just as the human species before agriculture, as hunter-gatherers, thrived more at the equator, and therefore Africa was the important area, and then the agricultural revolution gave an advantage to other latitudes. And then after Rome, suddenly there was a gradual advantage to even more distant latitudes, with the transition period being the Middle Ages - the transition from the Mediterranean to Europe (and indeed in the Middle Ages there was a southward retreat in the most successful latitudes).

And meanwhile, the most successful countries in the information age are those even further north. And Russia, which is a completely backward country, succeeded mainly because it is spread over a significant part of these latitudes. Because what really reduces productivity and creates conflicts is the heat. And the cold no longer kills, unlike in the past. It is precisely the social alienation that the cold creates, the conformity and formality, that are stronger than the social warmth that heat creates. The Russians drink to warm up and that's their mistake, which makes their temperament too warm for their latitudes, and creates violence. The cold also causes people to shut themselves in their homes more and since seclusion in buildings is more productive, this helps. And on the other hand, the very decrease in productivity in summer due to heat is also significant. In other words, what's important in a manager is the regulation of cold and heat in the system, of global parameters, like the governor of the Bank of Israel. And not like a prime minister. Not something functional, masculine. But to be a womb. Not the father of the state.

Another disadvantage, in terms of information theory, is that a market is a sophisticated, networked information transfer, but political and organizational structures remained hierarchical. In the end, the people have a choice of only a few bits, and in the US one bit, so the amount of information it can transfer to the system is negligible, compared to the enormous amount of information it returns to it. Therefore, communication and media are created as a kind of information transmitter to the government, and therefore the deterioration of both is mutual. But we don't hear about the deterioration of communication at all (in the media?) because there is no one to oppose it, report on it and lament it (where?).

Also, the enormous barriers that stand before someone who wants to be at the very top, the leader, in a commercial company or in a state, are enormous, and therefore only types who have an unreasonable motive, for example deep narcissism or paranoia, etc., reach there. And so it is in culture - even to be a great writer requires an unreasonable motive, and therefore women who are more balanced reach it less. Therefore, if there is a lowering of the barriers, the reasonable and most talented types of society will arrive, and not a collection of mutations (the drive is more important than genius).

Once, to be an artist you had to know how to manage. Then Van Gogh brought manic-depressive people into art. Which young artist committed suicide before Van Gogh? Since then, masses of artists have committed suicide. Even if there was a young suicide before him, he would not be remembered, because there were no mechanisms (cultural, communicative) for his success after his death. Kafka brought the neurotic-obsessive into literature, because before him such a person would simply not be remembered. In short, as long as the barriers are not logical in the prices they demand from the person, almost no reasonable and balanced person will pass them. Therefore, we need to allow people with less motivation to succeed. The barriers do not select the good but the determined, and sometimes the cruel (also towards themselves and their immediate surroundings).

Why shouldn't a commercial company operate like a democratic company, where the workers choose the manager, while a state doesn't operate like a commercial company, where the managers and the board choose the next manager? And who is the board of directors? The representatives of the shareholders, not of the workers, meaning a weighting of the people to whom the state belongs, in terms of money. The state should have shares, and people should be able to buy them. For example, citizens, or the wealthy. This can be limited so that the state doesn't have a controlling owner or a small number of them. Because the serious problem is the lack of transition to weighted elections. Which causes a weighting of zero or one. Who votes and who doesn't.

The first step is to give older people more voting power than younger ones. And then also to the more educated than the poor, to the rich more than the poor, to the veterans more than new immigrants and to them more than diaspora Jews, and so on. Therefore, the Israeli anomaly of the state of the Jewish people can be, because of the exile, a precedent-setting solution at the global level from the oppressive and depressive and flat democracy (one head one vote), to a weighted and deep democracy (perhaps democracy in several layers of elected officials, where each layer chooses the next, like deep learning). The Jewish state can be the avant-garde of democracy - because of the weighted and abnormal Jewish demo.

Philosophy of the Future


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The Degeneration of the Nation

What is the philosophy of learning?

Philosophical learning, like any search in a tree, can be didactic and orderly, but also greedy and based on the principle of demonstration. When dealing with an unstructured tree - there is an advantage to philosophical learning of the type presented in these notebooks. Like in evolution, it includes an element of random mutation, which is suitable for searching in a space with infinite dimensions. Ultimately, philosophy is a form of thinking, or more precisely a form of learning, and the notebooks demonstrate a way of thinking and learning. Blessed is the person who will learn it - and not continue it, but continue to learn

By: Birkat HaDerech

Loves Kandinsky, hates those who continue him  (Source)

You can love Kandinsky without thinking you need to paint like Kandinsky, and think he's a great painter without thinking that the direction he outlines is the future of painting or even legitimate painting today, or even that he was part of the path towards the future of painting. Because it could be that it was a check of a dead-end in the search tree. And mainly because if the perception is learning-based - seeing him as an example is not necessarily as an example of what to do (in any sense) but in the sense of something that needed to be checked in the overall learning of art history, or a direction that was good to be checked and found what was found in it.

In other words, if someone does better than Kandinsky what Kandinsky did, then seemingly he has a place, but he doesn't, because all Kandinsky did was check a possibility, and he spread it out in a good way (of course there are other ways to interpret, but it's no longer as interesting or challenging as the first time to discover this land and space - you can't be Columbus 2). The learning-based approach allows you to free yourself from the past complex of art history as instruction (what to do), to art history as learning (non-random development, with internal logic and direction, but not external direction like aiming for history).

That is, it allows you to think about the future not as a slave of the past but as a child of the past. Therefore, the fact that everyone gets confused by cultural role models like Kandinsky and modern artists (and wants to continue the idea of the avant-garde) stems from a misunderstanding of what a role model is, that is, what a stage in learning is, which is not necessarily an arrow pointing to a future direction that needs to be continued, but a place we visited along the way. Because the path is winding. And that's what they don't understand - there is no linear direction of any kind. This was the thought of the Enlightenment, that one needs to discover what this direction is and it is the Enlightenment, and it's clear that whoever gets there first will win.

On the contrary, it's about discovering a space with complex topology. A learning space. Just as mathematics is a field with complex topology, where it's not clear where there's meat and where the proof will come from. It's always surprising, because by definition it deals with the surprising, because what's not surprising is already known. And what's not surprising is already calculation. And therefore to paint better than Kandinsky like Kandinsky is already calculation. Maybe complicated calculation, but calculation. Is there a fundamental gap between this calculation and that of something new?

Yes and no. Not necessarily in the number of steps, but yes in the complexity of the problem. In the asymptote. We must teach complexity already in school because it's an iron sheep asset [Translator's note: Hebrew idiom meaning a fundamental principle] for human thinking - and perhaps the greatest achievement of the human spirit in the last half century. And you can't be a person of spirit and an intellectual nowadays without knowing complexity, statistics and algorithms. Not even a scientist. On the other hand, you also can't be a person of spirit nowadays without knowing the Netanya school [Translator's note: likely a reference to a specific philosophical or cultural movement] - and the fact is that you can. The words of the Netanya school that prophesied during the Netanyahu era have ended - and only the future will be able to judge it and recognize its greatness.

Philosophy of the Future