Pinned Tweet
🛡️Defend the West Conference🛡️

WHEN: 1/13/2027

WHERE: Online

Over 300 people have registered so far.

Speakers include:

@DavidM_Friedman

@sapinker

@SRCHicks

@yaronbrook

@alananewhouse

@johanknorberg

@DeirdreMcClosk

@michaelshermer

@ToKTeacher

@jasoncrawford your spot (link below)
5
15
48
14,343
The laws of thermodynamics were first written with macroscopic steam engines in mind.

Constructor theory rewrites them so they hold at every scale, even for microscopic (quantum) engines.

Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto explains:
3
5
15
493
Replying to @ConjectureInst
1
1
5
66
Meet our newest Fellow, @SaulZimet!

Saul is a writer focused on the growth of knowledge and the self-corrective character of the Enlightenment.

His essays have been published by @Quillette, @HumanProgress, @aier, @feeonline, Libertarianism.org, @amspectator, & @TheObjStd.
1
5
25
2,254
Replying to @ConjectureInst
Saul is currently writing a graphic novel and a book, both of which explore themes of Enlightenment, progress, and epistemology.

Learn more: saulzimet.com
0
0
2
119
Force is the use of violence, or threat of violence, to arbitrarily prioritise one set of ideas over another.

..force predates humanity by millennia.

Indeed, the entire course of biological history can be understood as one great ideological struggle: selfish gene fighting selfish gene using poisons, venoms, talons and fangs to club one another into dank submission.

And long before, all of cosmic evolution—gravitation, collision, destruction—can be viewed in similar, forceful terms.

In people, the ideas are primarily memes (those encoded within one’s mind instead of one’s DNA); yet the use of force as a replication mechanism is no less common.

Persuasion, as we will later explore, is a remarkably modern discovery, both scarce and delicate.

Tyranny is by far the leading tenor of our most traditional progress.

~Conjecture Institute Fellow @tomhyde_ 👇
Libertarians are wrong about romance: it is *not* a form of trade.

tomhyde.substack.com/p/the-economic…
1
4
15
693
“There’s a younger version of the particle and an older version, simultaneously sitting in the same location.”

Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Vlatko Vedral on an experiment no one has done yet, and why he thinks it’s doable.
1
4
22
878
A conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense, is an unproven and speculative hypothesis about a secret and sinister plot hatched by a relatively small group of people.

Typically, the very lack of hard evidence for the conspiracy is taken as proof that the conspirators are fiendishly clever and have covered their tracks.

In my academic work, I have dubbed such self-sealing theories the intellectual equivalent of a black hole: once you’ve dived in, it’s hard to claw your way back out.

The rapprochement between parts of the Left and Islam is none of these things...

The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side.

~Conjecture Institute Senior Philosopher @mboudry
Islamo-Leftism Is Not a Conspiracy Theory
It’s an unrequited love affair

“The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on n is straightforward: leftists coddle Muslims and give them preferential treatment, while Muslims respond by voting for left-wing parties.”

“What makes this love affair tragic is that it is mostly unrequited.”

“There may be ‘Queers for Palestine’, but there are no ‘Queers in Palestine’.”
2
4
23
1,698
Physics often explains the world in terms of laws of motion and initial conditions.

Constructor theory asks a more general question: which transformations are possible, which are impossible, and why?

Conjecture Institute Senior Scientist Chiara Marletto explains👇
1
5
34
1,043
Nothing is certain, not even logic.

The rules of logic are conjectures, which means they can be criticized and improved.

Progress, not certainty.

Conjecture Institute Fellow @PaulRRobichaud 👇
3
6
43
1,142
Merch store coming soon👇
2
2
42
971
"...authoritarian ideologies...can be toppled by argument alone.

All systems of ideas are vulnerable."

~Conjecture Institute Fellow @Ray_S_Percival
1
2
21
655
We do not know the recipe - the algorithm or code - for a human mind.

And so we do not yet have artificial intelligence of the kind that is general - as general possible.

Universal, in other words.

~Conjecture Institute Ambassador @ToKTeacher
2
4
23
1,160
Freedom isn’t incompatible with human nature. It’s incompatible with compulsory school.
3
3
39
958
After the Second World War, Western academic institutions spawned one school after another to denounce or undermine Western civilisation.

Postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida attacked the “logocentrism” of Western rationality and attempted to deconstruct the narrative of scientific and moral progress.

Followers of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory wrote devastating critiques of the European Enlightenment.

Its delusional project to quantify, rationalise, and dominate the world, they claimed, had paved the way for National Socialism and the Holocaust.

Social constructivists exposed modern science as just one mythological narrative among many.

Science, they argued, did not so much reveal reality as construct its own reality—and an oppressive one at that. Postcolonial thinkers denounced Western civilisation for its colonialism and cultural imperialism.

~Conjecture Institute Senior Philosopher @mboudry in @Quillette (The Enlightenment's Gravediggers)
1
8
28
1,826