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 solar system via new physics. In the spirit of The Portal, we are always looking for a way out of our perennial problems.

We Prioritize

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

Our Core Traits

We endeavor to be

• Self-aware
• Metacognitive
• Meta-honest
• Agentic
• Hopeful
• Self-teaching
• Self-critiquing
• Self-credentialed
• Earnest
• Collegial
• Imperfect
• Of Good Humor
• 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 that reality presents many natural, necessary tensions. While much of the world fights mindlessly over permanent positions that lack all contextual awareness, we see Superpositions and trade-offs. As it is said in Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger's song, "To Everything There Is a Season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." We do not accept the middlebrow binaries, dilemmas, and trilemmas foisted upon us by activists and politicians. Instead, we strive to find efficient frontiers that balance these tensions through ongoing internal dialectic. Here are some areas that we believe would benefit the most from an emphasis on harmonization and Regulated Expression:

• arrogance | humility
• analysis | intuition
• excellence | genius
• inclusion | exclusion
• diversity | commonality/interoperability
• pluralism | leadership
• 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
• centralization | distribution
• transparency | opacity
• depth | breadth
• individualism | collectivism
• romanticism | realism
• tribalism | cosmopolitanism
• levity | gravity
• dreaming | doing
• tolerance | prejudice

For a short list of current societal dilemmas that would benefit from this approach, see Societal Superpositions.

We Value

• Our Time
• Abstraction
• Giving credit and attribution where due
• Correcting misallocation of credit
• Balancing Type I & Type II Error
• Camping and Decamping
• Creative competition and rivalry (e.g. RNA Tie Club, The Dozens, Cutting Contests, Guitar Battles, Poetry Slams)
• Ideas over instantiations
• Ideological Dining a la Carte
• Evolutionary thinking
• Adaptive Valley Crossing
• Independent thinking
• Critical thinking
• Critical feeling
• Constructive Criticism & Dialogue
• Pro-social Elitism
• Pro-social Freedom of Expression
• Bespoke, High-level Curation
• 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
• Chaos
• Snark
• Sanctimony
• Specialization
• Expertise
• Consensus
• Groupthink
• Groupfeel
• Lossy compression
• Oversimplification
• Chess-Opening Problems

We Exclude

• Anti-collegiality
• Cheap, Uncharitable Criticism
• Cheap, Uncharitable Trolling
• Meretricious Arguments and Framings
• Self-extinguishing strategies
• Utopianism
• Coercion
• Purity
• Vindictiveness
• Nihilism
• Duplicitousness and Insincerity
• 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 ideologies