The Gap Between Notebook and Notebook

Why does the rise of computers cause the rise of the right? How to build an economic system that transfers resources from engineering to science and from practice to research? What should the internet learn from the Greeks and the Jews, and why will state empires weaken in it compared to culture? What will save the intellectual elite when the intellectual middle class goes bankrupt? And which woman will desire the philosopher?

Minute differences in mental acceleration create enormous gaps in thought development between fools and philosophers  (source)

What's happening in the world isn't caused by globalization or capitalism or various worn-out human ideologies of lazy neo-thinkers, but by computers. There will be no value to what can be done in polynomial computation, meaning efficiently, meaning a problem that we know how to solve (even if not the solution), and there will be no point in human work that performs such computation, like factory work, but only non-polynomial computation, and therefore we are in a process where the work of ordinary people will increasingly tend to be worth zero. Mathematicians, on the other hand, are the people whose work will always have the highest value, because mathematically their work is computationally the hardest. But already at the current stage, production will continue to decrease in cost and value, and therefore it will not be possible for humans to live from it. It constantly descends to the lower deciles of the world (currently it's in China but will later aspire to India and from there to Africa), but it won't stop there (and might even skip Africa). This means that already now the elite's perception is changing so that work is worthless and an unsustainable institution (and therefore, for example, there's no point in setting up a factory with workers or training professional workers) and therefore its value decreases even before the advancement of technology, because value is determined largely by social convention. For example, the moment a robot knows how to produce and be a farmer, that won't be the revolution, but even before that, the value of this work will be almost zero. But the fact that people's work will be worthless doesn't mean people will be worthless, because what will still be valuable is capital. Therefore, the revolution will be that ordinary people won't work, but will live off capital, and they will need to learn to be capitalists. Today people have capital, say a million shekels per person, but because they don't know how to live with risk, they invest it in what seems to them the safest, like land and stones and walls. But eventually the value of this will be zeroed out - including the value of location, as the world becomes more virtual - and this will be the severe economic crisis of the next century, the housing crisis, which we've already had a taste of. A house is a technology that in the next fifty years will become trivial, and its cost will become virtual (location). Managing capital is not polynomial work, and therefore ordinary humans will be able to do it, because it's essentially the question of where to invest, and this is the most open question, in principle, because one needs to invest in what will develop in the future. And therefore, in principle, this is not a polynomial question, and people will be able to live from it until artificial intelligence surpasses them. Therefore, the world will move to the right, because right is capital, and left is labor. People may not yet perceive themselves this way but the only thing left to them is capital, and the middle class and lower class in the first world are still capital owners relative to the third world, and the world's elite is deeply invested in non-polynomial thinking, like start-ups and research - thinking that takes risk. People are also less and less willing and wanting to work, on the other hand, they are more and more willing to take risks. Therefore, if socialism wants to survive, it needs to insure the person with capital and give them a safety net that will allow them to take risks, for example in investments. And on the other hand, a long process of education is needed, so that humans don't lose their capital in gambling, or in the part of the market that is gambling (this is the part where a computer is better than a human, and therefore the human will lose and the investment has a negative expected value). The moment all classes perceive themselves as capital there will be a tremendous economic boom, and economic colonialism at the individual level, not just at the corporate level. A poor person from Israel will be able to be a capital owner in Kenya, and invest in the Kenyan economy, for example in a chain of stores in Kenya, which a rich person from Israel would never invest in. And it's not true that people don't finish the month, but that poor people don't save and don't invest and therefore don't earn. Almost every person can have some capital. To invest, one needs to reach a certain threshold, which all deciles cross, where there is beyond the most basic needs. The problem is the constant expansion of the definition of basic needs, and that what was good for a king in ancient times is not enough for a poor person in the modern era. And in general, one of the best ways a poor person can earn is by investing in children and their education so that they can solve non-polynomial problems.



It's better to increase them as much as possible so that the top one percent (which is the large firms) can invest in high technology that very quickly trickles down gradually to the whole society (there is no technology that remained only for the top one percent and everything trickled down to the bottom decile). The economic system needs to be as greedy as possible, because in the long run this is what helps everyone (technology requires a concentration of enormous investments that only an enormous concentration of money can lead, and the state does this poorly). This doesn't mean we shouldn't help the poor but we must not touch the high part of the economic system. One might argue that science worked not much worse in "soft" socialist economies, but this is no longer true today (when science requires a lot of money, which wasn't the case in the past), and it's certainly not true regarding technology (which requires much more greed than science). Sweden lives off the technological developments of the USA and in this sense it is a parasitic economy on the greedy economy - the Scandinavian model is a parasitic model. So is China a giant parasite, which can kill the host. The Chinese model without American innovation would collapse. It's built on stealing ideas, technologies or factories from the USA. If there's no one to steal from, it won't hold up. In the end, the goal of the economy and the tax system should be to transfer money to research, meaning transfer from the short term to the long term. This is also the only justification for the existence of state intervention - investment in science, as opposed to technology.



Jewish culture and Greek culture were basically network cultures, trade hubs, with the exiles and expansion it became even more so, and in contrast the empires were hierarchical cultures. The tension between network and hierarchy (tree structure) is the most important tension in human culture, in the human brain, and in evolution, because it's the basis of learning systems. The deep reason why despite Zionism being a surprising success externally it was a huge failure internally - is that Zionism turned Judaism from a network into a hierarchy, and therefore it's a cultural holocaust. The tree structure in Kabbalah was balanced by the network structure of the writing-group (a unified entity called the Zohar), and the more the tree became more tree-like and structural, like in Lurianic Kabbalah, the more the writing and group needed to be more network-like, like in Hasidism. Today Judaism is very tree-like, and the writing needs to be very network-like (the group will come later). The combination of the network with the hierarchy is prestige, reputation, PageRank. This is a hierarchy that is not hard but soft, like in the brain. There are simply neurons with greater prestige. Neurons don't tell others what to do. But there are neurons that are more worth listening to. Just like in culture. So hierarchy does create gaps, and one might think that in a hierarchical culture there would be bigger gaps than in a flat network culture - but the situation is the opposite. Because how many levels can there be in a tree - how many levels of hierarchy? And even if the hierarchy is high, its meaning is only artificial and external and therefore passing. But in a culture where they listen to a neuron instead of obeying it as a command - the hierarchy can be enormous, like the gap between the Bible and a grocery list or between Homer and a banana. Homer can really be a genius incomparably greater than the person on the street and so can Moses. A neuron can really cause an entire network to listen to it willingly, unlike a ruler. Therefore Jewish and Greek culture left us cultural creations that we willingly listen to to this day, and that reached enormous distances on the globe, and in contrast the most hierarchical cultures like Egypt are archaeology. They never had to make others listen to them - they didn't convince. The Romans too were mighty in their power, but were culturally infatuated with the Greeks. And Christians still listen to one Jewish neuron named Jesus.



There is no spiritual elite in this country, wrote David Avidan, but he was wrong. There is a growing gap between the one percent and the 99, not only economically, but intellectually and culturally, as part of the widening of gaps, and an average person can less and less understand the peak of academic research, science, or the high literary/artistic world. Also technologically the gap is growing, despite technologies trickling down to the user, but the ability to shape technology, for example to program or genetically engineer is becoming more and more distant from them, except for a thin layer, and there is already less and less gradual continuity from it downwards. It's becoming more of a phase transition, because precisely the layer close to the elite beneath it is the one that betrayed. The meaning is that politics no longer changes anything, the masses no longer change anything, the democratic logic - which is the logic of capitalist and sexual consumerism and of the media, where the masses and the wisdom of the crowds have meaning - is becoming irrelevant to reality. Only the techno-cultural elite, like the journalist/screenwriter/entrepreneur/professor, has the relevance and power to change at the level of the rules of the game, as opposed to countless players who just play the game. This is the gap between Facebook/Google/Apple and their users - an enormous gap from any government - since users are no longer even aware of the manipulations, or not active in changing the platforms, and certainly don't dream of alternatives. They have no direct/organized interface with power, only indirect/soft which is not forceful on their part, but simply the amount of their usage. Just as they have no opinion on academic research directions or directions in literature. It's way over their heads. Democracy is losing more and more trust from the elite, the masses have been completely corrupted, a shame to humanity, enslaved to their urges and neurological weaknesses, more exposed than ever as such. Everything subjected to the masses turns into pornography (for example politics), and the whole problem is the perception of flattery that still remains from the consumerist/democratic era towards the "wisdom" of the masses that has been proven as stupidity, and towards its economic power, which is also becoming a myth. Ordinary people are worth less and less than special people, than creative geniuses. There is no value to a bad song, it's less than zero, negative value. The same goes for all the cultural and intellectual and emotional garbage that occupies the masses. Individualism is a state of aggregation of society like a transition from solid to liquid, a phase transition. It wasn't true ("truth") in the Middle Ages because individual opinion really didn't matter, meaning it wasn't objectively true, because no one cared what you thought, but what the elite thought. The moment a phase transition occurred then again no one cares what the elite thinks, and individualism became objectively true, because the system changed configuration, and now it can change again, and the evaluators in the elite will again determine, and this is very much related to the self-confidence of the elite and the return of shame, which is the way to know. For example: that a professor of mathematics who doesn't read high literature should be ashamed, and that a writer who doesn't understand science should be ashamed, and so on, meaning to strengthen the organization of the elite within itself and create a center. And this is something that can certainly happen on the network, it just needs an appropriate social network or application or website. Alienation from the barbaric masses is the key, like with the Greeks. And here plastic art is in a much more connected state to the elite, because it depends on the money of few, rich people, and the masses just come to admire it in its museum temple, and this is in contrast to arts that don't work in an economic model of patronage, like literature or music, which are becoming more and more pornographic, and going bankrupt economically and culturally. Therefore literature needs to move to a pre-capitalist economic model of sponsor, donor, patron, Medici, and release its products on the network. Perhaps the object that the rich buyer can receive (similar to plastic art) will be the manuscript (which will be worth as a collectible item), and perhaps the dedication. But distribute the product for free on the network. The collapse of quality elites and belief in quality stems a lot from consumer capitalism, as opposed to productive and capital capitalism. Because nothing succeeds like success, and this becomes true if the system becomes one where it is true. To the same extent one could imagine that a new anti-masses ideology sweeps the elite, which instead of trying to flatter the audience, turns its back on it, and the audience that wants to feel elite starts to flatter it, and the rest of the audience feels inferior. The closed club can again replace the open club, and become a center of attraction, especially today after the peak of openness has already become tiresome. Democracy has deteriorated into populism, so it's time to replace it: not to return to single rule (like in China and Russia), but to the rule of a cultural and technological oligarchy, to the rule of a creative intellectual elite. In other words, what the elite lacks is confidence and arrogance. Because it's hard to part with the promise of the masses that no one will look down on you, and it's scary. The most serious problem is the low philosophical level of girls in consumer society, who are interested only in material bodily emotional hedonism, and are degrading the young elite men, the nerds, to a feeling of lack of self-worth, or to forming value based only on external parameters like money (or in the opposite case beauty). And it's precisely here that philosophical confidence, and intellectual dream, will change the patterns of desire in society. We need to instill in the masses that the simple person will be worth less and less as algorithms replace them and on the other hand the person outside the range of algorithms, the intelligent person, will be more and more expensive, and the 99 percent that should be opposed will be left behind, and that this is what is happening and will happen. There will be no intellectual middle class, because it is in spiritual impoverishment. Just as in the Romantic period girls preferred romantic boys, so we need an ideology that will make them prefer boys from the intellectual-creative elite. And this ideology is that only such boys will create the future.