said (5mo ago #2134 ):
Road Trip: Missing Weeks Through Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota.
As you may or may not have noticed, I have not been posting weekly road trip reports, and sofiechan has been rather neglected overall. These are related: driving and camping with a family is actually fairly time intensive. I wanted to give some kind of update though so you don't feel abandoned.
Utah: Utah is beautiful and the people are noticeably higher quality than rural Nevada. Maybe it's the Mormon lifestyle and values, or a working society that keeps the good blood engaged. But it was far too sunny and hot for our liking. We stayed with various friends. My big reflection is that the Mormons are screwed. They do not have enough cognitive sovereignty with respect to the insanity pumped out by the Cathedral, so they may not survive as a distinct culture. It's tragic because they are great people and much better than the Cathedral mainstream. Imagine a highly functional society like them that could also think independently. This must be our goal.
Wyoming: The Jackson-Teton-Yellowstone area is of course beautiful. Jackson itself is a very nice town with beautiful people if a bit tourist, but I understand real estate is expensive there. The Baptists we visited on Sunday there are doing well. They know they are at war with the world, and maintain a healthy human community. Their Christian theology isn't perfect, but you go to war and life with the theology you've got, not the ideal. It's only we philosophers who insist on constantly improving our theology even at the expense of practical social vitality. We saw geysers and so on in Yellowstone. We actually dipped up into Montana briefly as well to visit someone. Paradise valley (home of the fictional Yellowstone ranch) is extremely nice.
Black Hills (Wyoming/South Dakota): The greater Black Hills area (everything from Devil's tower to Buffalo Gap) is great and underrated. Plenty of national forest for dispersed camping, great mountains and geology for endless adventure, and the people seem nice. Again the baptists even in random rural towns are sharp and on point (with their particular concerns at least). If you wanted a secret underground base, you could buy land in the limestone area and dig into the endless caves. I saw multiple houses that I guessed had done this. Mount Rushmore is a travesty, but the back side is real impressive. Devil's Tower was very cool.
As for Sofie Channel, work continues but very slowly. I'm only getting in a few hours a week really. We're back in the research phase as we continue to work out how to make a good advisory voting algorithm. The current attempt is crude, very slow, and has big instabilities. You can consider it on semi-hiatus while I travel, but it's not at all abandoned so you'll see something pushed out occasionally. Some time in the next few months may see a bigger change in the algorithm once I run a few more research iterations internally. Then we'll have a return to more active front-end work and eventually community building.
On the community and philosophy end, I have a project brewing that may see me write quite a lot of short-form posts both here and elsewhere to systematically lay out the worldview I see us developing. But that's still a ways off for various reasons.
Utah: Utah is beautiful and the people are noticeably higher quality than rural Nevada. Maybe it's the Mormon lifestyle and values, or a working society that keeps the good blood engaged. But it was far too sunny and hot for our liking. We stayed with various friends. My big reflection is that the Mormons are screwed. They do not have enough cognitive sovereignty with respect to the insanity pumped out by the Cathedral, so they may not survive as a distinct culture. It's tragic because they are great people and much better than the Cathedral mainstream. Imagine a highly functional society like them that could also think independently. This must be our goal.
Wyoming: The Jackson-Teton-Yellowstone area is of course beautiful. Jackson itself is a very nice town with beautiful people if a bit tourist, but I understand real estate is expensive there. The Baptists we visited on Sunday there are doing well. They know they are at war with the world, and maintain a healthy human community. Their Christian theology isn't perfect, but you go to war and life with the theology you've got, not the ideal. It's only we philosophers who insist on constantly improving our theology even at the expense of practical social vitality. We saw geysers and so on in Yellowstone. We actually dipped up into Montana briefly as well to visit someone. Paradise valley (home of the fictional Yellowstone ranch) is extremely nice.
Black Hills (Wyoming/South Dakota): The greater Black Hills area (everything from Devil's tower to Buffalo Gap) is great and underrated. Plenty of national forest for dispersed camping, great mountains and geology for endless adventure, and the people seem nice. Again the baptists even in random rural towns are sharp and on point (with their particular concerns at least). If you wanted a secret underground base, you could buy land in the limestone area and dig into the endless caves. I saw multiple houses that I guessed had done this. Mount Rushmore is a travesty, but the back side is real impressive. Devil's Tower was very cool.
As for Sofie Channel, work continues but very slowly. I'm only getting in a few hours a week really. We're back in the research phase as we continue to work out how to make a good advisory voting algorithm. The current attempt is crude, very slow, and has big instabilities. You can consider it on semi-hiatus while I travel, but it's not at all abandoned so you'll see something pushed out occasionally. Some time in the next few months may see a bigger change in the algorithm once I run a few more research iterations internally. Then we'll have a return to more active front-end work and eventually community building.
On the community and philosophy end, I have a project brewing that may see me write quite a lot of short-form posts both here and elsewhere to systematically lay out the worldview I see us developing. But that's still a ways off for various reasons.