Comment by zoogeny
3 years ago
> Who else has an opportunity to spend 12+ hours a day learning something for years? With no other obligations or responsibilities?
Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet all day reading articles and programming. Food and shelter taken care of, no obligations or responsibilities. Like the pictures of Norwegian prison cells.
That reminded me of a weird Internet streamer collective started by a Twitch streamer named Athene. He started a group called The Singularity Group [1] which allowed people to move into a house to volunteer work on philanthropic projects. They are responsible for the AI Jesus [2] channel on Twitch. There is some controversy since some see the streamer as having tried to start a cult [3]. They also created a few mobile games that run on their own crypto-currency.
At any rate, it is all quite interesting to me. It was very common in the past in almost all cultures for a certain number of men to just reject society and go off into hermitage. Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
1. https://singularitygroup.net/
There was a thread or submission recently on setting up a low cost room & board for aspiring people, that I loved, but haven't been able to re-find the thread.
> Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
Lovely imagery & idea, thank you.
Rather than focus on the negative motivations (be introverted and feel alien), i think often there's hope optimism & drive; more modernly especially, some are marked out from others by being inspired people, seeking to be active forces. Caring deeply about enormous possibilities trying to spring forth. Finding capacity for the cause, finding support or even just peers for those folks is hard.
Programmers have such amazing leverage, but most day jobs are just work. The idea of sustainable no frills living among other Burton Klein type-1/Happy Warrior types, able to pursue the thing & tangle with it & ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too: that has huge appeal. It'd be such a worthy investment to support, imo.
It is a good point that the final sentence could be taken negatively.
I wasn't trying to determine why any individual might choose such a path. I was thinking about the population of programmers and considering that the stereotypical traits associated with that population do seem to align with a set of traits that are conducive to hermit-like or even brotherhood-like lifestyles. I did choose negative-sounding stereotypical traits to highlight that fact (although introversion isn't necessarily negative).
I would even argue that my own experience is that the population of programmers on average tend towards self-reliance type mindsets (e.g. Henry David Thoreau) a little bit more than socially active mindsets. However, I personally know a few individuals who are social activist types and also programmers.
Even when you consider "brotherhoods" you can think of multiple reasons why someone might want to join up. Perhaps the person desires a community of like-minded activists. In fact, that is how many brotherhoods would grow after their establishment. Combating the "incursion" of these community building types in some traditions appears to be a feature (e.g. vows of silence). I remember watching a documentary on splits in these communities for this very reason. Some hermits felt that structured communities with explicit charters went against everything they were trying to do (usually some kind of mystic communion with God or similar). So you can imagine a bifurcation of such a community into those who wanted to be socially active communities and those who wanted just enough collaboration with others to allow them as much individual freedom as possible.
I don't believe that one of those groups was "positive" and the other "negative". But I do think it is worthwhile recognizing the difference in mindsets. You said "ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too" - however, that is not a universal ideal. Be careful you aren't forcing yourself into spaces where that isn't the goal.
I've had a similar idea before.
I once was talking to someone who wanted to financially support independent scientific research. He had started a successful business (you may have heard of it, though I won't name it) and he wanted to put his money to good use.
He wanted to find people he could write a check to, basically. I suggested that if he wanted to advance science as much as possible, it would be far more efficient to run a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research. I'm sure he could find many people who would accept a minimalist lifestyle for the opportunity to do research the system wouldn't otherwise support. (I'd be interested.)
He declined, stating that one major factor was the tax write-off he got from the donation, and I guess giving people a place to live doesn't have that benefit.
It is interesting to think that your definition of a "a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research." is kinda-sorta what I think of when I consider the Institute for Advanced Study. If you squint hard enough, it is kinda-sorta what tenure in universities aims to provide.
I don't think those examples are similar.
A tenured professorship or position at a prestigious institution provides a lot of resources and status that the minimalist approach does not. I don't know a single professor who would accept living in the very modest setup I proposed.
Also, I don't know any research organization that provides room and board for long-term faculty/staff. IAS does not work that way. Surely there are universities that provide room and board for graduate students, and some summer research internships will provide room and board. But those cases are rare in my experience in the US, and are only be temporary at best.
link to the Cory Doctorow story, "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away", for anyone else who's interested: https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/
I also highly recommend _Anathem_, by Neal Stephenson if the STEM monastery theme is interesting to you.
PhD can be like this but for a limited time.
I managed to read over 800 books when I was locked up. Every famous book by every famous author. I read it.
Can you suggest one or two recommendations? Maybe one that surprised you and one that lived up to the hype?
Ha! My favourites that I remember are The Martian, 3-Body Problem, Wild, 1Q84. I wish I could remember them all. I wrote down the names of all 800 as I was reading them but the documents all went up in a building fire last year.
Nice! Which ones stuck with you the most?
Ha! My favourites that I remember are The Martian, 3-Body Problem, Wild, 1Q84. I wish I could remember them all. I wrote down the names of all 800 as I was reading them but the documents all went up in a building fire last year.
Include me in the monastery.
Athene was indeed trying to start a cult (it had all the basic elements). And from watching him speak in the past, he did seem to me like a huge narcissist.
Haven't been following his latest projects much, and I can't speak to how the Singularity group has changed since back then. Though I have seen his AI channel sometimes. It's moderately entertaining.
I cant't comment directly on whether or not he was or wasn't actually trying to start a cult, but I am interested in cults in general (and any kind of esoteric/occult stuff) so I devoured a lot of content related to this. I mean, a 21st century digital cult!? That is some juicy stuff!
What I found was a young idealistic kid who was playing a character online. He was optimizing for views and we all know what kind of behavior gets attention online. The character was overblown and narcissistic. There is zero argument from me that if you take selected clips of him from when he was at the height of his streaming fame he was a dumb-ass edge-lord playing the role of a prophet or spiritual leader. He even leaned into it when he was accused because he thought it was funny. But when you watch recent videos of him (he does a pretty good react to Asmongold's react of him), I think I saw a different side.
All that being said, he isn't a kind of character I trust. He seems to me to be very much the kind of person where the ends justify the means. He has some pretty high ideals, some of which I agree with and others which I am sympathetic towards. It's like Greenpeace or animal rights activists ... even if I agree with their overall goals I often disagree with their methods.
I'm currently recovering from a grief, depression, intimate partner violence, State abuse, and whatever-the-hell-is-in-nationwide-legal-psuedo-cannabis-vapes based psychosis. Long story short: I sacrificed my physical, mental, emotional, and future well-being as a human shield so my non-biological daughter who I won't see again could have part of a childhood and not develop a cluster-b personality disorder like her mother. To those that don't understand what these people are like behind closed doors, you simply have no frame of reference. There are no words that will allow you to understand; many social workers and psychiatrists are often even fooled into serving as these people's unwitting thralls. Their nature is predatory. They smash mirrors within and without (even posting something public about it like here will summon a small herd of them to cover the tracks with doubt). They have no ideology other than predation, so they follow the ideology of the hour that gains them the most; they wear personalities like hats. It was after being attacked, yet again, that I was DARVOed (because I was actually escaping for good this time, and the cherry on top of these relationships is always, without fail, a DARVO kick-in-the-ass on the way out the door). Then, despite having over two hours of her attacking me over years of time recorded, including her pouncing atop me and snatching my phone on the very day in question, the brilliant detective at Atlanta PD warranted me, and I stayed in the Rice Street gulag where the schizophrenic kid was murdered by police via bedbug consumption (the police there use subterfugal torture methods to "keep people in line" by throwing them in freezing-in-winter, low-to-no ventilation, hot-in-summer, or bug-ridden cells, keeping lights on at all hours, refusing medical care, 30 people bricked in cells meant for 8, kept standing for days, COVID outbreaks in entire cell blocks, standard US prison system fare, torture by any sane definition of the word). It's when I looked down at the homeless man in that cell, the one laying flat directly in the piss and the shit on the floor so he can lay down in the real estate that no one wants, that I said to myself, "yeah, that's where I'm at."
It's after that, I underwent a psychosis so vast that every word, every symbol, every story, every axiom, every fear, every thought, and all of human history amassed into a unified and perfect whole; only after would I come to recognize that what I saw was identical to the ascent in Merkabah literature, Thelema's visit to the City of the Pyramids, Samadhi, and several other analogies for such experiences. Myself had disappeared, and in its place was a sacrifice burning through time like a star. There were only really two forces in the universe, entropy and creation, and the two were yet an illusion still of a singular. Dark matter became simply matter not yet light, returned to the path of least resistance towards supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, dark energy became simply the remnant left by matter past the edge of observability to continue the pulling, decimation, and return, breaking the laws of thermodynamics that were merely local phenomenon, and creating novel matter in the process, the early stages of which would expand in an accelerated manner that would appear as a bang, but be more akin to a snake eating its own tail and growing.
I wandered in a daze, searching for what I called my fellow "wizards" or fellow autists or fellow disciples, not fully knowing what I was doing or why. I researched Benedictine and Bhuddist monestaries to try to escape the world. So yes, US hermits are very real, we are very noble, and we are fucking livid regarding the state of adequate hermitages. I'm currently in a low-rent studio, searching for minimum wage jobs, so I can pay less taxes to the undemocratic State. "Fully-employed" I'd make 1/4 million a year.