Technically Institutions Matter, but Biological Capital Determines What Institutions Promulgate

 Consequently only biological capital matters. Eugenics and dysgenics. 

 Biological capital and spiritual karma, but the latter is also a biology thing.

 You can see that the Russians haven't exactly suffered amazing evolution between 1900 and 2000, but their institutions mattered a lot. See also: Bantu-American criminality. However, the reason the Russian institutions went all Communist was due to past sins. They profaned themselves, and that's biology; personnel is policy. Profaned because a profane people. The profanity caused the Communism, which in turn caused a purge of the most profane families. Now they profane somewhat less. It appears a lot better than it is because they're kinda poor; net worth is a genetic trait, but they're not wasting it all on maximizing their bank accounts.

 Of course eugenics/dysgenics is also a biology thing. Personnel is policy. Revenge is Sour: the condition of being able to found a eusocial institution is having eusocial institutions, and the condition of being able to have eusocial institutions is to have eusocial genetics. 

 Plato was right: the philosopher king refuses to rule. Plato was wrong: that's because ruling is unwise. Plato was  merely a) resentful that he himself wasn't a p-king and b) selfishly petulant that no p-king deigned to self-sacrificially rule him. Basically Plato wanted the Form of the Good ("God") to force him to be virtuous, instead of, you know, having to do it himself. He wasn't even willing to pray for this force to be applied to him, by the way.
 Ruling is unwise because the condition of having a philosopher king is not needing to receive wisdom from on high. If you need a p-king to rule, your society will not allow a p-king to rule. Attempting a restoration is pointless. 

 The only thing you can do is filter and live in a bubble. Extract those unworthy of the unjust society (depriving the society of little, ultimately, as the society has no demand for their services) and collect them in one place. That is: there is no reason Hogwarts is impossible in real life, if by [wizard] you mean [virtuous child]. No reason except that Genesis is correct: you can't find 10 virtuous men in Sodom or Gonorrhea (e.g. Lot isn't virtuous). A real Hogwarts would, it seems, have empty halls.

on frontiers

 "A mere few hundred years ago, the frontiers of human knowledge were a lot closer to everyday experience, and it was feasible for an ordinary man to push them, often as a hobby. "
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-in-xanadu-by-william-dalrymple

 In many ways, my blog exists as a long-form proof that this is still true. 

 This:

 "The trouble is that these days we know so much, in most fields you can’t even begin to do original work without first spending years in dedicated study. Even then, all of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked"

 Is nothing but cope. An excuse softlings use to get away with being soft. 

 I do want to write "The Brain: A User's Manual." It would be a tremendously useful book, with the caveat that nobody would read it, so the usefulness would be purely theoretical. 

 The Brain: a general user's manual.
 The Brain: features of particular use to scholars.
 The Brain: features of particular use to warriors (incomplete).
 The Brain: features of particular use to merchants (probably).

 lol

 This nature, of being extremely useful but experiencing zero* demand, is shared with hundreds of other unwritten books, none of which require much in the way of funding. Or even a team.

  *(Or negative, as with Brain. It would make it harder both to lie and to be lied to, and nobody wants that, now do they?)

 The number of books I could write with a team of help: boy howdy.

 Shit man, just build a house underwater. Write a book on what living underwater is like. The number of folk rich enough to do so easily outnumbers the population of Athens 2400 years ago. And yet...

I Should Have Run Away From Home

 However, I was six at the time and there was no way I could have known that. I might even have done it anyway except I got bamboozled by the [permanent record] scam. Again, I don't fault myself for this, as I was eight. Hopefully nobody expects an eight year old to be able to overpower an entire empire on their lonesome. Of course, Revenge is Sour: the condition of being able to know to run away from home is to have parents that you don't need to run away from. 

 When I was sent to school, I could have simply refused to do the work. If they tried to yell at me, I could have simply got up and left the classroom. If they tried to detain me I could have simply refused to attend. Mindlessly got on the bus and left on it. When they suspended me, if my parents whined about it, I could have run away from home.

 Running away from home would have absolutely been better than attending school. Having no diploma would absolutely have been superior to attending school.

 The thing is, everything about Despotism is like this. They prevent themselves from enforcing their own tyranny. The teachers are forbidden from using corporal punishment, including physically laying a hand on the child, meaning the child can decline to be schooled at any time. Just say no and leave.
 Short of jailing the child, literally chaining them down, the child's consent is indisputably necessary. 

 "But but foster blah blah." Yeah, and they try to send me to school, then I run away from home again. Maybe I discuss it beforehand: "Hey, I'm going to get myself suspended. How will you react?" "Okay then, I guess I'll save everyone the trouble and run now. Bye."
 Revenge is Sour again: the condition of the State being able to force school attendance is that they don't want to force school attendance. Only weak States need or even desire Prussian school.

 American voters are not six years old. 

 Edge cases aside, you can plain decline to be tyrannized. Moreover, if everyone declines to be tyrannized, they stop being able to even attempt it. What happens if every student refuses to do the homework? Will they suspend the whole class, or will they blame the teacher? What if every student refuses to attend school? Recess all day every day? The institution can't maintain funding. What if every worker refuses to take the vaccine? Are they going to fire everyone, lol? 

 It really does depend on the consent of the governed. 

 Socrates was right: evil is merely ignorance. What he failed to notice is that this means ignorance is evil. Stupidity is a crime. America is a criminal country because it's full of idiots. This makes everything non-profane harder and more expensive than it needs to be. I shouldn't have to run away from home to get away from school.

 However, security is cheap. At the end of the day, I can indeed run away from home. I can eat at the soup kitchen. If your whole society is stupid, although this does raise your security expenses, you can afford it. Secure yourself against stupidity. Secure yourself against despotic tyranny.You can just not.

Humanity is Insanity

 The bible, for the most part, is the mutterings and babblings of a raving lunatic. Check: this idiot claims to be infallible. There's no deep Lovecraftian logic to it, he's just nuts. It sounds crazy because it's crazy. Cue midwit meme. 

 For the most part, Plato is the mutterings and babblings of a raving lunatic. As above, I mean that clinically. However, at least his tradition does not overtly claim infallibility.

 The proper Socratic strain indeed embraces fallibility. "I am wrong. Let's go figure out how." This is how you become less wrong. A detailed map of how and why you're wrong is, also, a detailed map of how and why you're not. Upon which you can build.

Does Tinnitus Explain Silence Haters?

 When it's quiet, they don't hear the subtle sound of the wind in the trees or anything. They hear the tinnitus from going to too many concerts or sports games. They don't hear their own breathing. They hear eeeeeeeeee from having too much close exposure to traffic.

Turns Out I Like Hunger

 Satiety is cool and all, but in fact I prefer to be hungry most of the time. Given the option, I will skip that meal. It's weird. 

 I don't really feel hunger anymore. Very easy to ignore. Do regularly go a little too hungry and go whoops, should have eaten something. Still not especially hungry, it's the lack of energy or something like a headache that gets me.

 It feels like health. Like it was supposed to be this way all along. Except the times I push it too far, of course.

Occurs to Me that African Wars are Ceremonial

 The guys hooting at each other like chimps don't seem to be genuinely trying to kill each other because they're not genuinely trying to kill each other. The guy who shoots the odd arrow does so to make the ceremony less ridiculous. He's carefully aiming at where the other guys aren't, and the bow is so weak that it's unlikely to kill anyone even if he misses the empty space.

 Humans are animals, especially tropical Africans. Animals spend lots of effort to avoid fighting. There's a bunch of posturing to try to work out who would win, and outside desperate cases they agree that one would win and the other backs down. In humans, a pack-hunting species, the posturing is a group effort. Humans can also posture purely to inflict the costs of posturing on the other side. Karen wants to lodge a complaint with management, 50,000 BC version - she's not serious enough to sue, though. 

 If a tropical Africans actually wants to kill you they fire a poisoned missile with a full draw from ambush, they don't snap off a half-cocked clean projectile while leaping around like an idiot in full view. Look, even 80 IQ isn't that dumb.

 The problem is these tropical Africans come to modern society and try to have their ceremonial war using modern non-training childhoods and modern weapons. They hold the gun sideways and don't aim because they don't want to hit anything. Unfortunately, they round 'unlikely to hit' to 'impossible to hit' then fire way too many balls to safely not hit anything. Notice how if someone is injured in these rituals, the ones with the guns are the ones who panic. "Oh shit I didn't mean to hit anyone." The side with casualties are happy because they now have an excuse for lethal "retaliation" - it's not like the dead guy was going to live much longer anyway. Short life strategy. 

 Europeans are killers, anomalously. Probably a recent adaptation to technological advantage. 

 Imagine what a British WWI officer with a brace of pistols could do to these prancing African "warriors." He could probably wipe out the tribe without even taking an injury 90% of the time. "Funny thing, snipers." *bam* "Oh dear, seems the sniper is dead." His only real issue would be killing them all before they ran too far and vanished into the brush.

 If you have armour and the other tribe doesn't, it's not time for posturing anymore. You can gain a lot by going in there and simply butchering them. Strong Darwinian pressure.

 Europeans had to evolve more sophisticated versions of ceremonial/posturing warfare, once someone had the bright idea to make weapons for killing instead of for looking scary. Consequently Europeans normally don't try to posture using live ammo. For the European, once weapons are involved it means posturing and negotiation has broken down already and it's a real fight. 

 Children have residual Africanness and that's likely why they think weapons are toys. A Bantu getting into his dad's bow and arrow is not likely to successfully do anything except whap himself in the face with the stave. Even less dangerous than a kitchen drawer, and there's no locks on those. A Euro getting into his dad's rifle cabinet, on the other hand...

Rules of Logicology

 A real, sane school would have a logical times table.

 Once you understand how multiplication works through the 1s and 2s, you don't bother to individually work it out. You just memorize a big table.

 Likewise integration. What's the integral of cosecant? Once you CAN  work it out for yourself, there's no point in doing so. Let someone else do it and look up their answer.

 Likewise, logic is very simple. It's modus ponens and modus tollens. The +1 and -1. However, you don't want to be laboriously proving a multiplication table and the quadratic formula and the integral of Euler series starting from counting each and every time. Much as there are lists of fallacies, there should be lists of common logical isomorphisms.

 E.g. there's a bunch of distinct subtypes of proof by contradiction.

 Logic is in fact geometric. Why isn't there an algebra and geometry and logic class?

 E.g. there's the free_will/determinism shape where the response called for is identical regardless of what your priors are. Convergent logic.