Men base their whole personal philosophy based on a book they read between 16 and 21. We can experience successive *redpills* but they always end somewhere, and are not fully digested. Most often there are still little pills and tablets, blocking the epistemic tract with unexplained questions, but we get on with our lives. We, the young men, quickly sketch a broad picture. We are led by bias towards what we care about the most at a time, and then leave the smaller bits unfinished. Economically or thermodynamically, it's a reinforcement learning problem of finding the stable equilibrium. The marginal costs of going down (deepening knowledge) increase, and there are other dimensions that keep pressing you to find the most stable place. ## leap of faith %% todo add midjourney art %% How does this start? This is often prompted by yearning, by dissatisfaction with the personal status position, and looking for tricks to subvert the local status hierarhy through a pincer manouver. This is often a Descartesque exercise in 'let's get rid of all beliefs for a moment and start fresh'. It is a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in the investigation, and the fall is largely random. Some book falls into a young man's hand, often by a suggestion from an esteemed older man, and it creates his future reading list in a path-dependent manner. Imagine a video game character doing a leap into a haystack from a tall tower. That's the process we're talking about. Icarus fell from even higher. The height of the fall is the complexity of the previous belief system. A son of a rabbi would work with a more inherited complex belief-edifice than a winery worker. If someone falls to the normie level complexity and flavor, that's sea level. But there are deeper things, more unexamined assumptions with odd conclusions. You are Icarus and I don't want you to fall down just to the sea level, I want you to fall deeper, into the wine-colored sea, past the diving penguins and killer whales. I want you to fall down until R'yleh, where C'thulhu lies waiting. The assumptions will be examined until the language exhausts itself. ## Barriers to completeness Is the examination fully complete most of the time? Not really, and this makes me sad. As I sad, redpills are rarely fully digested. Rarely can a person honestly reply that they answered all of the questions. I see five main reasons for this. First, often the reading falls behind social responsibilties and / or grindset. Secondly, through adopting one system, a sweeping heuristic is adopted cutting away whole swathes of books as unseful, especially as there is more and more of the important ones in your chosen specialty. Why read 20th century philosophers if the Eleatics already answered everything? Why read the Frankfurt School if 1800s anarchist already answered the crucial points, etc, etc. That fits the economics of scale and effort that are present in careers, so there is no surprise. The third one is the social angle - as you get socially entangled into a status hierarchy of fellow nerds, your proclivity to read something outside of it drastically diminishes. Getting laid after discussing Kropotkin with a socialist girl nearly guarantees motivation for reading something like Spengler going to zero. %% todo art of a revolutionary paramour %% The fourth one is the autistic focus on the details - I've seen many men fall for this. Some become deep Christians, some are grindmaxxing, some fall into nihilism, some Marxism or environmentalism. It is easy to fall into a system and autistically focus on it. Ignoring the wider picture, the unanswered questions. And you need to learn and read a lot to have even this one system. And going multi-system risks understanding them only superficially. Lookup autism and low central cohernce theorem too. Number five is psychedelics - quasi-empirical answers, which are ultimately vague 'oneness', etc. I am skeptical of the usefullness of this, will cover this more later. It is a difficult problem and it's accepted as normal to have a fizzled out exploratory phase. Does it rise later? Do people wake up one day having realized living an unexamined life? That does happen. I think this happens often enough and is normalized as 'growing up'. ## the self-indulgent part I think I am the first one to call it 'epistemic haystack.' Leave a comment if you know this under a different name. I noticed it as a general phenomenon, that makes me different. I noticed it happen to myself to some extent, and taken steps to counteract this. I want to do this right, for the sake of that time in my life, but also to make it easy for others. Halfway through I realized I need software skills for that and have been building those ever since. The solution to the epistemic haystack problem is in large part software. I am out of that time, and only that allows me to have distanced perspective to this and present this in a meaningful form. I started first notes on this in 2020. It has all been in flux up until recently. Let's without self-doxxing examine my biopic in the light of those five points. 1. social responsibilities and grindset - I experienced mutliple geographical relocations disrupting the continuity of my social network, leaving few intersparsed close souls but not an ambient sphere. My grindset is software and steadily growing skills. I only have enough time for writing this as I haven't found an exponential takeoff curve worth my time, seeing the Epistemic Haystack problem set as my life mission. 2. cutting away stuf - that's the most debatable one. Some selection is inevitable. Even if my reading list is balanced, the actually read entries are biased. I'll put a link to my review of [[The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin]] as a token, but honestly ask my twitter moots if I am capable of balance 3. social status circles - my circles are about building cool stuff, not vacuous intellectuallism, so here the doer bias helps me. I also benefitted from a forced exposure to various points of view. A republic of letters of our time. Arguably TPOT's prime time was one of the best moments for that. 4. autistic focus on details - I have software to help me with central coherence, and also I have a certain perfectionism about this verging on OCD to get ALL POINTS right. 5. psychedelics - not my thing really. ## goals of the project The goal of the Epistemic Haystack project is to arrive at less path-dependent way to have stable beliefs when you are 27. Prime Hajnal line child-rearing age. Kids want their parents to have a solid grasp on things and they deserve better than they do now. I met too many relativist and weak willed boomers and genx. Epistemic Haystack as a problem is a complex thing, therefore the answer is also complex. Hopefully not complicated. Reading lists, podcast, blog and various bits of software are necessary for this to be successful. The task necessarily will touch the list of questions in life, like in ths tweet. https://twitter.com/zafarmirzo/status/1695000019194040674 An outcome to avoid here is falling into this particular alley of a *system book*. https://twitter.com/tobyshooters/status/1588194155511046146 ## constituent parts of the project Those stem necessarily from the broad scope. I was into those topics to various degrees at various points in time. At this point I can give you an overview of the sections of the project. The *epistemic haystack* effect is sometimes focused at one sphere of life in particular. Some feel lost only in religion but feel their beliefs about reality and politics to be stable. Others keep firm in their religion but are disappointed and lose their political ideals. I will address the three main spheres the effect occcurs: beliefs about reality, about politics and finally religion. It would perhaps make sense to work on them in an order, but for now I intend to work on all three in parallel. I endeavor to deliver a weekly content schedule, that way covering something from all four topics each month. Some weeks there might be a book review or a current thing post, I will figure this out. I will reveal the names of those three blog post series with the first post of each. Finally the blog is not the only place for this project. I will deliver software to accomplish various tasks. This might become a startup of a kind... Furthermore the relationship between those parts is not arborescent (tree-like). It is rhizomatic and unpredictable a priori. And I am locked in. ## cta Now everything is to grab attention of existing and potential frens Who are they? If you're reading this you're most likely one of them. %% todo find the image for this %% ("And those frens, are they in the room with us now?") If you need to know labels, "techno-optimist centrists with reactionary tendencies" seem to be the main cluster of my audience so far, but I do not wish to be parochial. Most people who I'd like to follow along as 'core readers' for this journey are already my mutuals. Now it's more about refining the flavor and increasing visibility on my end. Therefore I want to write posts that the frens will connect to, rather than posts than go viral. Of course those two things are not orthogonal.