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Brian Chau
Jul 5, 2022
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If this is your first time here, I would read The Generation of Fraud and The Rule of Midwits.

For listening, I would recommend Samo Burja: Patterns of Destruction and Structures of Rebirth. It’s simply the best one, although it might not be the most approachable. 

Biography:

From the New World
De-Anonymizing
Since the start I’ve written under a pseudonym, with a few exceptions. I’m not doing that anymore. Why? Actually it’s kinda simple, it’s because Richard Hanania said it was a good idea. But mostly because I thought about it and realized I had no reason to be pseudonymous in the first place…
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a year ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

Why I care about politics:

From the New World
The Generation of Fraud
Part 1: A Shared Script “Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption”[1] ~ Ryan Crocker, Fmr Ambassador to Afghanistan, Afghanistan Papers By now, we have all seen the nightmarish photos of violence, panic, and execution coming out of post-withdrawal Afghanistan. Years before, photos of …
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2 years ago · 6 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

Other Biographish information:

From the New World
Everyone’s Brains are Science Fiction — an Anti-Biography
I’m once again at a time when I’m putting ideas out into the world and where people want me to come on podcasts. I’m glad for the invitations. I’m open to more (directed to cactuschu at outlook dot com). But this means I get asked for a lot of oddly specific biographical facts…
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2 years ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
EBASF2 - Impulsiveness is the Greatest Sin
Parts of this series were inspired by Richard Hanania’s self-reflection on his moral instincts. After reading that piece, I thought about my moral instincts. I don’t have any remotely strong ones on the left or right, such as envy of inequality, nativism, etc., which probably explains why my politics are more scattershot. I really only identify two: hat…
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2 years ago · 6 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
EBASF3 - Some Bad Psychoanalysis
So far I've been very careful about creating a character of myself. I don't like parasocial relationships, people have had them with me in the past and it just makes them unable to engage with me in an interesting way. But I think this part is going to be so ultimately alienating and unrelatable that it really isn't going to matter. Nonetheless, the war…
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a year ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

Bureaucracy Series:

From the New World
The Second Party Switch: How Procedure and Safety Installed Conservative Instincts Into Democrats
An age old question precedes this argument: what is conservatism? I’m not going to pretend to have a monopoly over what conservatism is, but I think it’s fair to characterize it in part by a fondness of order, routine and tradition. This is the key trait of conservatism in this argument…
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2 years ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
"The Freer the Bureaucrats, the Freer the People"
The pre-Trump GOP, for thirty or so years, was taken fully by a pathology dictating that “the Freer the Markets, the Freer the People”. Consumed in a post-Soviet vigor, they attacked even moderate restrictions on business and support for unions as “socialist”, all while promising greater-than-imaginable freedom for those who acquiesced to the fickle dem…
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2 years ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
It’s the Midwits, Stupid
I found myself spending Monday morning reading Richard Hanania. And once again it looks like we converged on predictively similar models from strikingly different directions. Both insiders and outsiders had long tried to use political models to predict how parties would behave with varying degrees of accuracy; I myself had proposed at least three. So I …
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2 years ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

Tablet Article (condensed version of the above two articles): https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rule-of-midwits

From the New World
Richard Hanania: Why Activists Control the World, Groomerism as Right-Wing Wokeness, and the Libertarian Machine
Listen now (115 min) | Richard Hananis is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), author of Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy, a visiting fellow at UT Austin, and the writer of richardhanania.substack.com. He is a brilliant analyst and policy thinker of social change, bureaucracy, civil rights law, and political ins…
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2 years ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Samo Burja: Patterns of Destruction and Structures of Rebirth
Listen now (130 min) | Samo Burja is the founder and president of the consulting company Bismarck Analysis, a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation and a Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the Foresight Institute. He is also the writer of the Bismarck Brief newsletter, linked below…
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2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

The Firehose of Bullshit:

From the New World
All Hail the Firehose of Bullshit
You thought I was done with the disinformation articles? Haha, that’s hilarious. But today we’re going to be talking about institutionalized disinformation again, so I don’t have to bother you with obscure math that no normal person knows. That’s for part 3…
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2 years ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Firehose of Bullshit Part 1.5: The Extended Firehose Universe
This is a reference list for the next Monday article, “Firehose of Bullshit 2 - A New Social Action: How Firehoses Form, Split, Merge, Clash, and Die”. It lists the resources I’ve drawn ideas from and others which I’ve read or watched but have not directly incorporated, along with tags describing what insights they provide. Go wild, everyone…
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2 years ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Firehose of Bullshit 2: Permanent Moral Panic
Last Week, I brought you an article about how propaganda and moral panics interact in the form of a Firehose of Bullshit. There, I described their structure and continuation with little outside interference. If you haven’t read it yet, please read it first, because it is essential to understanding the following parts…
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2 years ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

This series is paused for some time, after someone introduced me to the Italian school of politics, which is related and significant. 

From the New World
BJ Campbell: You Have Been Captured By Your Politics
Listen now (4 hr) | BJ Campbell is the author of the Handwaving Freakoutery newsletter. We discuss a variety of topics, including egregores, a term he uses to describe a type of online conformity behaviour, updating moralities, statistics, guns, evolutionary psychology, vaccines, wokeness, war, nationalism, political violence, January 6th, QAnon, coordiantion problems, reli…
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2 years ago · 8 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

UATX Series:

From the New World
UATX Series 1 - Consensus and the Culture War
For the first day of UATX-mas, I’ll discuss revealed preferences. Specifically, I’ll tell a story that can be carefully generalized. It’s a hot Texas day, and 40 of the future’s brightest poasters intellectuals are sat around a debate chamber with none other than Peter Boghossian. He’s going to teach us…
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a year ago · 6 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
UATX Series 2 - Bari Weiss and the Moral Machine
For the second day of UATX-mas, I’ll be talking about social morality. I love writing and thinking about this topic, as my readers will know. This line of inquiry in specific was inspired by Bari Weiss, in her speech and Q&A for UATX. The speech itself was interesting and unexpected. My impression is that Bari has been persuaded by the likes of Mike Sola…
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a year ago · 4 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
UATX Series 3 - Thiel Sounds Like Non-fiction
For the 3rd day of UATX-mas, Founders Fund gave to us, a Q&A with Mike Solana. I feel like I’ve watched in real time my fellow UATXers improve greatly in their selection of questions. Honestly, there were so many bubble-popping ideas I’ve written down that there could be a post-Solana series all on its own. Today brings a short but illustrative article …
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a year ago · 3 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
UATX Series 4 - Why You Should Become a Poaster, in 10 Sentences
This post is aimed directly at my fellow UATXers, at least a quarter of whom I know read this newsletter. Many of you have asked me why or how to become a poster, or online writer, and I have explained in varying degrees of effectiveness. Today, I hope to top that…
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a year ago · 7 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

Mainstream Politics:

From the New World
Against Moral Clarity
Independent media has recently picked up a term from legacy media: Moral Clarity. People typically describe themselves with this term, and it can be a bit unclear to everyone else what they actually mean. Let me give a (hopefully) fair definition. Moral clarity consists of three parts…
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a year ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
In Defense of BLM Corruption
Note to readers: Firehose of Bullshit 3 is still in the works. It’s just been quite a grueling task working on it and I decided to take a break, even during my writing time. So, there’s a few lighter, simpler articles piled up that I may publish. This is one of them…
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2 years ago · 6 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Advertising Your Enemies
An incomplete categorization of guests on The Joe Rogan Experience is currently circulating in an attempt to characterize him as Right-wing. Of course, even if accurately applied, this would be a lacking standard, since it is determined by other factors including whether guests agree to appear on Rogan, what new ideas are most popular, current events, a…
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2 years ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Salience and Political Evolution
How does someone who supports universal healthcare but is staunchly pro-life vote? Voters are complicated. Very few fit the bill of supporting exactly the set of issues on one party’s platform. An underrated factor in elections that has recently been gaining attention is salience: the popularity and primacy of different issues within the public. Take th…
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2 years ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Scientific American Must Begin the Sacking
A few weeks ago, Scientific American proved itself to be both anti-science and anti-American. My words can’t describe the extent of its depravity, but maybe geneticist Razib Khan can: This was why Scientific American’s publication of The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson…
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2 years ago · 3 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
David Shor is Too Good for This World #1
In the past week a new trendy ideology, popularism, has gained traction among areas of the liberal mainstream. It all started with Ezra Klein’s profile of David Shor, a Democratic data scientist. Here’s his backstory, according to Klein: During the protests after the killing of George Floyd, Shor, who had few followers at the time, tweeted, “Post-MLK-ass…
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2 years ago · 5 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Jacob Siegel: A Friendly Quarrel Amidst Postliberal Dystopia
Listen now (110 min) | Jacob is a senior writer for Tablet, writer of the scroll newsletter, and host of the Manifesto! Podcast with novellist Phil Klay. We discuss iconoclasm, curiosity, technology and centralization, Andrew Yang, postliberalism, Curtis Yarvin, bureaucracy, Bidenism, the secular and religious worlds, and the importance of quarrel…
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2 years ago · 2 likes · 3 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Doomberg: Energy is Life and We Are Killing It
Listen now (130 min) | Doomberg the green chicken is the publisher of the Doomberg newsletter, which covers energy, finance, food, and more. They are the second ranked paid newsletter after their first month of premium launch. Their team also runs a small consulting company / think tank, which analyzes similar issues…
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a year ago · 4 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

Boyce Interviews:

From Your Perspectives Series:

From the New World
The Nihilist Trumpist Versus January 6th
I estimate that one eighth of my readership would describe themselves as “pro-Trump conservatives”. This means not just choosing him as the lesser evil compared to Clinton or Biden, but actively endorsing and emotionally resonating with him. It means supporting him over DeSantis and other Republicans in a primary. This is a letter to you guys, although …
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a year ago · 7 likes · 9 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

On Disinformation:

From the New World
The War on Disinformation is Dead
There have always been two types of people who claim to want to reduce disinformation. There are some who are simply partisans. There are others who have proposed and researched truly neutral technological and social solutions. I have long considered myself a member of the latter community and what we did as fundamentally good. Now I think our efforts a…
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2 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
They Hate Him Because They Are Him
Oh, vaccination. I’ve more or less stayed away from this topic for quite awhile, aside from occasionally sharing data points. Last week, I finally gave in and did a deep dive on the topic, trying to understand how this fragmentation happened in the informal online circle of podcasters and writers. After digging for not-too-long, I found that the answer …
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2 years ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)

Misc (mostly podcasts):

From the New World
Robin Hanson: How Global Elites Manufactured Stagnation and How We Escape
Listen now (150 min) | Robin Hanson is a leading research of prediction markets, a professor of economics at George Mason University, author of the Elephant in the Brain and the Age of EM, and the writer of the blog Overcoming Bias. The audio essay of this show discusses the nature and enemies of “common sense” economic progress, as well as the cost-benefit analysis of going a…
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2 years ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Steve Hsu: How We Learned, Then Forgot, About Human Intelligence
Listen now (154 min) | Steve Hsu is a professor of theoretical physics and professor of computational mathematics, science, and engineering at Michigan State University, as well as the former VP of Research. He was the founder of digital security companies Safeweb, acquired by Symantec, and Robot Genius, as well as genomics startups Othram and Genomic Prediction. He writes th…
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2 years ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Roon: The Endgame of Machine Learning, Technology, and Internet Balkanization
Listen now (149 min) | Roon is a machine learning engineer, anonymous writer at roonscape.substack.com, and the inventor of the term “wordcel”. He’s an extremely insightful commentator with a similar technical background to mine - all the better for approaching the questions we’re asking today…
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2 years ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Rob Henderson: The Hidden Scripts Shaping the Next Generation
Listen now (110 min) | Rob is a phD candidate at Cambridge university in moral psychology, the writer of the robkhenderson newsletter and the inventor of the term “luxury beliefs”. Topics include universities, dating markets, analyzing social situations, anxiety in Gen-z, luxury beliefs, signalling, wordcels, and informal networks…
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2 years ago · 8 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Ron Unz: COVID Biowarfare, The Great Forgetting of History, and Why This Show is Wrong
Listen now (4 hr) | Ron Unz is the founder of Wall Street Analytics, former candidate for California governor and the publisher of the Unz Review. Topics include the IDW, neo-reactionaries, Ukraine, the Maidan revolution, the military-industrial complex, the nature of lobbying, over and under generalizations, wokeness, lab leak, U.S. biodefense programs, and the possibilit…
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a year ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
From the New World
Natural Infection Disconnects Communities
A bit of a short post today, inspired by a CSPI article/podcast episode by Philippe Lemoine. His core observation is that a fundamental assumption of pandemic models - that population interaction is uniform - is not only blatantly false, but likely extremely consequential. There are many excellent observations and predictions that stem from this idea, m…
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2 years ago · 2 likes · Brian Chau (Cactus Chu)
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