The Portal Community

We are friends and collaborators of Eric Weinstein. Our community is a self-selected group of high-agency misfit mutants who are interested in diversifying humanity beyond this planet.

We Prioritize

• Truth, Meaning, Fitness, Grace
• Head, Heart, Loins
• Regulated Expression of the above

Our Core Traits

We endeavor to be

• Self-aware
• Metacognitive
• Meta-honest
• Agentic
• Self-teaching
• Self-critiquing
• Self-credentialed
• Earnest
• Collegial
• Imperfect
• Of good humor
• Tolerant
• Curmudgeonly
• Loyal to friends
• Loyal to opposition
• Kind & compassionate toward others
• Flexible of Mind
• Generous of Spirit
• Tasteful
• Curious
• Radically Creative
• Radically Conservative
• Project-driven
• Ambitious
• Courageous
• Imposters
• Responsibly Heretical
• Asch, Milgram, and Stanford negative
• long heroism, short martyrdom
• long good, short nice

Harmonizing Tensions

We recognize the following natural, necessary Superpositions/Trade-offs/Tensions/Dialectics:

• arrogance | humility
• analytic approaches | intuitive approaches
• inclusion | exclusion
• diversity | commonality/interoperability
• pluralism | leadership
• centralization | decentralization
• transparency | opacity
• depth | breadth
• excellence | genius
• shunning/cancellation | redemption
• institutions | disintermediation
• egalitarianism | recognition of differential contribution
• listening | ignoring
• senior leadership and wisdom | removal of those who stopped renewing
• authoritative sources | heterodoxy
• welcoming strangers | prioritizing family and old friends
• ridicule | civility and comity
• modernity | tradition
• individualism | collectivism
• romanticism | realism
• tribalism | cosmopolitanism

We Value

• Our Time
• Abstraction
• Giving credit and attribution where due
• Correcting misallocation of credit
• Balancing Type I & Type II Error
• Camping and Decamping
• Healthy competition and rivalry (e.g. RNA Tie Club)
• Ideas over instantiations
• Ideological Dining a la Carte
• Evolutionary thinking
• Adaptive Valley Crossing
• Independent thinking
• Critical thinking
• Critical feeling
• Constructive Criticism & Dialogue
• Genius-level, Pro-social Trolling (e.g. Tom Lehrer, Gilbert and Sullivan)
• Radical compression with minimal distortion
• High signal with minimal noise
• Technical language and reserved terms, where appropriate
• The Double Island Rules
• Estufagem processes
• First Principles thinking

We Allow Ourselves

• Hypocrisy budget
• Injustice budget

We Downregulate

• Cynicism
• Trolling
• Chaos
• Snark
• Sanctimony
• Specialization
• Expertise
• Consensus
• Groupthink
• Groupfeel
• Lossy compression
• Oversimplification
• Conversation involving Opening Chess Moves

We Exclude

• Anti-collegiality
• Cheap, Uncharitable Criticism
• Self-extinguishing strategies
• Utopianism
• Coercion
• Purity
• Vindictiveness
• Nihilism
• Duplicitousness
• Psychopathy
• Uncharitable Roasting
• Dunking and Dragging
• Destructive/Anti-social Gamer Culture
• Stalking
• Physical threats
• Misogyny
• Anti-semitism
• Impersonation
• Doxxing
• Harassment for sport
• Absolutist and totalizing positions