April 28th, 2026
- Ben Hoffman's work on depravity is relevant to superdefection, and something that reasoning about supercooperation cluster would do well to account for
- > There is a useful framework for understanding how public discourse degrades, which distinguishes between guilt, shame, and depravity. A guilty person has violated a norm and intends to repair the breach by owning up and making amends. An ashamed person intends to conceal the violation, which means deflecting investigation. A depraved person has generalized the intent to conceal into a coalitional strategy: I will cover for you if you cover for me, and together we will derail any investigation that threatens either of us.
- I've also been reading Attack Upon "Christendom" by Søren Kierkegaard, and I'm struck by a kind of parallel between that and the socrates piece
- the voice that Jesus gave to people encouraging poverty and kindness is repeated regularly by the church
- but the voice of Matthew 23 against the pharisees, that is so clearly applicable to much of the opulence of the church itself...
- and I'm sort of like hmm... socrates was a voice to the ashamed, but didn't work for the depraved
- but it wasn't a method, so much as a living mode of engaging and working to make sense of what someone was saying
- I have a very old note here that I went to post in a slack:
- > I am a third through this amazing interview between Gary Hamel and the Chairman of Haier!