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KZ Buchenwald five times and it had a profound influence on me; we East Germans inoculated ourselves very thoroughly against fascism), and the general public will not be willing to consider it. I rather like the treatment Fascism gets in the Amazon Series "The Man in the High Castle", which explores what would have happened if the Germans and Japanese had won the war: A society that tries to function as a brutal and ruthlessly efficient machine, eliminating all social and evolutionary slack. It is very dark, but not a flat caricature of pointless evil for its own sake. Heinlein's late book "Starship Troopers" explores fascism, too, but unlike Philipp K Dick he does not see it as a form of insanity, but as the most desirable order. I find your "political incorrectness" very fascinating. In the beginning, I thought it is a form of costly signaling, but now I think you are simply entirely unconstrained in your thoughts. How did you manage in your youth? Did you get in trouble, or did you keep your thoughts to yourself? I wonder what kind of person you want to transform into. It was interesting to notice that at the Forbidden Research conference, nobody managed to say anything remotely out-of line. One large discussion group wanted to address the question of whether "democracy still works", and mostly expressed their disagreement with Trump. Ideology is like halitosis: easy to see in others, hard in oneself. A speaker felt that the media "stifle all criticism of Trump", another wanted to remove "men and Elon Musk from government", and everybody strongly agreed that we need more diversity everywhere. I noticed some time ago that Joi has remarkable public communication skills. He picks controversial, insight- laden topics, but sanitizes them by carefully replacing the parts of content that would divide his audience with symbolic messages that everybody can fill with their own content in a way that resonates with them. The non- controversial parts will still be insightful. He manages to come across as very subversive, while rarely offending anyone (except the hard scientists, that miss hard substance). He also asks influential people and smart students or faculty to write parts of his essays and speeches for him. This invests them in his success, especially because he is going to reward and acknowledge them. Very few of his ideas are original, instead he is good at identifying and testing thoughts he reads or hears from others. I am still beset by the ruinous instinct that the goal of communication ought to be mutual understanding. Joi is right. Public communication is about reaching one's goals. Bests, Joscha On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 12:42 AM, Joscha Bach <> wrote: Dear Jeffrey, thank you for your support and encouragement, even where I fail. Sorry for being such an embarrassment today. I will spell out today's argument a bit better and cohesive when I get to it. Also, I should have recognized that the main point I tried to make would trigger Noam (who was as always very generous, patient, kind and humble on the personal level, even though he did not feel like conceding anything on the conceptual one). Almost all of Noam's work focused on the idea that humans have very specific circuits or modules (even when most people in his field began to have other ideas), and his frustration is that it is so hard to find or explain them. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026395