when i was young i had this insane view that the world was completely mad and irrational and no one knew what they were talking about and now that i am slightly less young i realize all the thoughts teenage-me had were directionally correct and my primary mistake was not working on solutions rather than just complaining

the default authority figures assigned to many of us growing up were selected by such terrible algorithms that it takes intense epistemic humility to acknowledge that their crowning was simply another mistake moloch made while brewing its morning tea

i remember being punished in school for reading infosec textbooks instead of memorizing the exact dates of various historical events the teacher haphazardly fetishized. i remember being taught we were going to ‘run out of oil’ with 100% confidence and we had to start adapting our lifestyle then and now. i remember a teacher who would physically hurt me because she didn’t like how easily i could get away with skipping over her terribly bespoke and overly verbose methodologies for whatever made up math problems the district’s curriculum entailed. after the misery became unbearable and the color had been fully drained from my eyes i simply refused to do the work and failed the class. this was particularly annoying because administrators had a habit of lying to students by telling them that if they had a poor grade in a class (in middle/high school!), future employers would somehow know about this and would refuse to hire you and you would die alone in a ditch of your own irredeemable digging. luckily i later scored perfect on my math sat which spared me from the apocryphal grade-demons.

it feels “hard” for me to socially acknowledge that plenty of random people i follow on this website are simultaneously multiple months/years as well as multiple stddevs ahead of various talk show hosts, reporters, podcasters, authors, or whatever conduit people have decided to vehemently glue their eyes and soul onto over the last few years. perhaps it’s even good from behind the veil of ignorance; we are taught to be humble not just unto ourselves but also unto our peers. but that many of you on this website indeed match these criteria is true, and it’s likely to remain that way

if this is you, if you watch the video i have unabashedly quote-tweeted and think “huh, i think i could do a better job than this! why is this person on national television instead of me?”, it’s likely because you can do a better job. and because you likely can, you have an ethical responsibility to at least give it a shot, because not everyone is as fortunate as we are and many of our greatest minds burn out and perish before they’re able to discover a single island of sanity let alone a single nit of light within the 混沌の深淵地獄 that they may have spawned in

if you have even the slightest suspicion that you may be above-average at anything, for the love of god, please do something with that suspicion. i don’t care if you fail one hundred times in a row, because the only way I will ever be disappointed in someone is if they never truly try, not even once, in their entire life.