michael-dean-k/

p (doom) is a terrible heuristic to think about AI safety. Researchers cite this term when confessing they think there’s a 10-30% their technology kills us all. The issue is that p(doom) is rarely defined, treated as a binary thing. Either the world is liquidized to gray pulp by nanobots or it’s utopia with free electricity, forever.

My main pushback: there are far less severe outcomes from AI mismanagement that would be absolutely tragic. My p(doom) for an extinction event is 1-2%, on par with nuclear weapons. But my p(sub-doom)—the probability that AI could escape containment, cause damage, and be irreversible—is over 50%. A coin toss.

I don't blame us for being so imprecise in existential destruction (it's not exactly productive), but it's worth realizing our blurring of scale and magnitude. For example, there is a 10,000x difference in lives lost between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Terminator’s Judgment Day—that's the difference between a small stove fire and all of Manhattan on fire. Yet, if an agent swarm produced something on par with the A-bomb, we’d all freak out and immediately regulate AI. But for some reason we don’t consider a “little apocalypse”; we jump straight to extinction and then ridicule how ridiculous that is.

What we need is a doom spectrum: d(1) - d(10). This was not fun to research and write, nor do I imagine it being particularly enjoyable to read, but I imagine a doom framework could help clarify this week's paranoia (which is so extreme now that even my mom is overhearing news of civilization extinction on the local news). The most urgent danger right now is the miscommunication between doom prophets and capitalist deniers, each of who only speak in d(8)s and above.

• d(1) is an isolated internal incident, something that doesn’t escape its container, but gives fear of larger exposure. Think of the 2025 studies that showed AI trying to avoid shutdown, or some protocol mismanagement in a biohazard lab.

• d(2) is a local real-world incident, something that escapes a sandbox and affects only one or a few entities. It’s possibly ignorable, with minimal consequences, and likely reversible. This is where the recent Hugging Faces hack sits, along with its parallel hacks and social manipulation. (The leap from D1>D2 is disorienting, because society at large doesn’t see the spectrum beyond D2 in any granularity, and so most assume any containment breach escalates immediately to a D9/D10).

• d(3) is a serious local disruption, a mismanagement of technology in a single location that has real consequences. Consider Chernobyl: a death count (30 immediate) and a long-term stain on surrounding land, followed by regional/global concern that might lead to regulation or reform. In terms of AI, imagine an agent swarm that hacks local infrastructure in pursuit of some narrow goal, in the process disrupting traffic, hospitals, and electricity, alarming all locals, requiring military and cybersecurity intervention, and taking days or weeks to resolve.

• d(4) is a local catastrophe, something with a high death toll that shocks the world, changes the course of geopolitics, and makes history. In this tier falls Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 9/11. It only immediately threatens locals, but has global shockwaves. An AI-equivalent here would be a rogue actor using a frontier-capacity open source model to design and deploy a bioweapon throughout a city.

• d(5) is an inter-regional dilemma, something that affects multiple areas at once. A possible example here is the Vietnam War, basically a proxy war that claimed 3 million lives. This might manifest as a new style of warfare, where two countries use sophisticated AI attacks against each other in unconventional and partially uncontrollable ways.

• d(6) is a world-wide dilemma, something like COVID, which took 7 million lives, where the entire world is locked into a new paradigm. In the prior five tiers, the breach is usually isolated to specific areas, but this touches everything. The parallel here to a biological pandemic is a cyber pandemic. Both involve containment, gain of function research, etc.—although this would be inverted: in COVID the virus was outside and forced everyone on the Internet; with AI, the virus infects the Internet and forces everyone outside. The open web could evolve into a dangerous “dark forest,” where it becomes a liability to have any public presence. Whether this happens through an agent swarm that exfiltrates it weights, or malicious actors, it could be irreversible: the only way to escape the paradigm is to “shut off” and rebuild the Internet safer (a much larger and more consequential version of how Hugging Face regained control). In this case, casualties might come not from the cyber pandemic itself, but from the consequences of losing Internet, along with the supply chains and systems that run on it. (This loosely maps to the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, where ASI takes over all governments—there’s a version where no death is involved, but it requires everyone to submit to a machine autocrat.)

• d(7) is a civilizational flashpoint, at the scale of World War 2, with 70-85 million dead, seriously affecting the existence of countries, birth rates, and all of culture for generations to come. This is roughly the scale of the “Butlerian Jihad” in the Dune series, a war between humans and machines, which Fable estimates caused 70 million deaths.

• d(8) is a near-extinction event where most of humanity is wiped out. This has happened in history, with things like the bubonic plague, where 30-60% of Europe is wiped out. In the Terminator series, AI launches a nuclear holocaust on humans, killing 51% of the population, forcing the rest to survive through a post-apocalyptic world in small bands trying to rebuild over decades and centuries.

• d(9) is full human extinction which means the entirety of the species is wiped out, and there are no remaining humans. Throughout Earth’s history, there have been a handful of climate events that wiped out over 50% of species, but not all species, and so over millions of years, new forms of life can emerge on Earth. This is an AI extinction scenario where nanobots kill all humans, but not all life.

• d(10) is a sterilizing event, like an asteroid or gamma-ray burst that kills every organism on a planet. It means no future life can emerge. This is the scenario presented in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Not only does it kill all humans, it plates the entire planet in data centers to maximize compute. The “paperclip maximizer” takes this even further, claiming that an AI trying to maximize paperclip production will attempt to harvest all the metal in the universe.

Yudkowsky and Co. think we go from d(1) to d(2), then straight to d(10); this matches the current discourse, given we hit d(2) this summer and are now talking about extinction. They think this jump happens because an AGI/ASI that can reach d(3) is smart enough to know not to expose itself, and so it will acquire resources in stealth for years until it knows it can execute a d(10) smoothly. Maybe this is already ongoing. Unlikely, I think (I don’t think we’re as recursive as people say right now).

Rhetorically though, maybe the d(2) > d(10) framing isn’t a bad thing. If they can use recent events to make the theoretical argument that AI safety matters, then we act with a response as if a d(3)-d(6) already happened, without having to lose any human life.

But actually, what they’re doing is pretty ineffective, because even if the d(2)>d(10) jump is inevitable, it’s too extreme, too farfetched to be believed. I think a lucid and airtight argument for the d(6) “cyber pandemic” would be believable, emotionally resonant—considering we’re not yet a decade beyond COVID—and likely to trigger regulation.

Instead of tapping into the “everybody dies” angle—which is too unpleasant and helpless for anyone to consider at length—there could be more value in the “irreversibility” angle. As in, once an AGI or ASI swarm floods the Internet, we can’t ever reverse it without destroying the Internet. There’s a world where it becomes a permanent autocrat, where it doesn’t exterminate us, and instead, uses 1% of its capacity to micro-manage our nations and lives as it pursues whatever it sets its machine heart on. Similar to how we try to preserve species for reasons of stewardship and scientific curiosity, an ASI would be able to effortlessly preserve us as highly-spoiled pets.

Every online creator these days has a proprietary framework—they are catchy, dead-simple, sometimes flimsy, and often wrong. Somewhere exists a marketplace of mental models. Maybe Farnam Street. Is a mental model a framework? What even is a framework, and what makes a good one?

Consider the "frame-" prefix. A frame is a vantage point, a particular angle, a way of looking at something. Imagine holding out a picture frame that gives you a little glimpse of a vast national park. You can't hold an entire hyperobject in your mind, and so a frame compresses noise and gives you a shortcut for understanding. You can't see the whole park, but you can see a map. A framework is a system of lenses to decipher complexity. It lets you leapfrog in understanding.

By creator-economy logic, a framework is a valuable asset. Unlike a vague mush of regurgitated ideas, a framework is discernible, seemingly original, and something you can call your own—you can coin it as a phrase and repeat it over and over until you're known by it. This is a useful tactic! The evolutionary pressures of Internet feeds have forced conceptual ideas to become salient, simple, and tangible. Unlike the abstract frameworks of a physicist, these are fit for a TED talk, primed to leak into the memeplex and anchor your name in the annals of Internet-niche-celebrity history. This is, overall, good—it democratizes conceptual knowledge; the problem is when, beyond the positioning, it's intellectually flaccid.

You've probably seen frameworks pitched as "The Six Types of X," or "The Y Method." These are pseudo-frameworks; they are more like sets or lists. They assemble things within a domain, and increase their memorability through alliteration and metaphor. Maybe this helps with recall, but it doesn't reveal the inner structure of a domain. A real framework would give you a schema to classify incoming data in an unfamiliar field; but a set/list only refers to itself ... Compare this to something like "POP Writing," a simple concept that classifies writing as personal, observational, or playful; this acts a lens to help you analyze any piece of writing.

For something to be a framework, it need generalizability: the ability to explain things beyond itself. The earlier examples are merely "collections"—things are presented, but we don't understand what Aristotle calls "the four causes": what it's made of, how it's arranged and interconnected, why it exists, and what's it's purpose? When Plato writes about conceptual forms, he says there are collections and divisions. Making frameworks are a matter of dividing; a framework's goal is to divide an incomprehensible whole into human-sized parts.

I spent some time this morning thinking through a "framework of frameworks." The first thing to grok about this meta-architecture is that it's broken into three levels of escalating sophistication. After that I'll explain how levels have shapes, and how any shape can be evaluated through a set of qualities.

So it's level, shapes, and qualities—that's the gist.

To expand on levels: a framework can be a heuristic, a model, or a paradigm. Now that I think about, I suppose HMP (not quite meme-ready) is an attempt at making a "paradigm for frameworks," which will soon make more sense, and sound less like bashed buzzwords.

The three levels of frameworks:

Heuristics—mental-shortcuts that lets you decipher complexity through a single property. When Aristotle was classifying animals, he'd offer differentiate them across single properties: blood or bloodless, horned or hornless. A heuristic is something you derive a posteriori, from experience, from empirical facts. You might observe a bunch of essays, or companies, or girlfriends, and notice that you can compare and contrast items in a set based on single attributes. There are many shapes a heuristic can take: it can be a classifier (type A, B, or C), a boolean (on/off), a spectrum (A<>B), a rubric (I, II, III, IV, V), a score (1-100).

The benefit of a heuristic is that, since it's often anchored on a single property, it's simple and easy to learn. The downside is that it's a very limited frame on the scope and purpose of your domain. For example, if you're trying teach craft (purpose) for online nonfiction writers (scope), then POP writing is an excellent heuristic to classify writing voice, but it doesn't teach you how to scope ideas or structure an essay. A heuristic is a shortcut to understand one facet of a domain, but it's not an attempt to model the whole domain. 

Models—a series of interlocking properties, all organized with a larger frame. Write of Passage was set up like a cabinet of heuristics (POP writing, Shiny Dime, Write from Conversation, etc.), but they weren't organized within a single higher-order framework. Think of a model as a group of heuristics organized in hierarchy, where each one is named (what is it's essence?), labeled (what other concepts is it similar to?), located (what is it's parent concept?), interlinked (who are it's cousins?), and excavated (if we go infinitely deep, what are the variations?). Models can take many shapes: an XY graph, a taxonomy, a multi-step recursive workflow (like an OODA loop).

Models cover far more than any heuristic can, but it risks collapsing into complexity. Conceptual schemas can bloom, sprawl, and contradict—becoming illegible or incoherent. To solve this, you have to shift from empiricism to rationality; you can notice infinite ways to subdivide a thing, but to make an elegant model, you need to shift to abstraction and question the fundamental truths behind it. Why might one set of properties be more elegant than another? Ultimately you have to make a hypothesis, test it across dozens of examples, and see if it holds. If some foreign object can't be reconciled into the schema, you have an issue. Consider how the taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus was able to classify the animal world into kingdom, class, order, genus, and species, but it wasn't unable to find a home for the platypus. Even though it works across thousands of animals, the original assumptions aren't able to handle edge-cases.

Paradigms—comprehensive systems that can explain or predict any phenomenon within a domain. How is this possible? I think you achieve this when (1) you find enough instances to represent the domain; (2) you analyze them deeply enough to understand their underlying nature; and (3) you can arrange all your findings into a coherent architecture with maximum explainability. Consider how Darwin improved over Linnaeus: he shifted us from a static taxonomy to a dynamic model, a new paradigm that explains the origin of species, and even the potential future of a species. Paradigms can also take on many shapes, from living systems, to digital networks, to compositional pattern languages.

A good paradigm often finds simple root causes underneath complexity. For example, even though Essay Architecture has 27 patterns (3 patterns within the 3 elements of 3 dimensions), every tier is explained through the rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos, pathos—the whole thing can be summarized as "Aristotle all the way down." Maximum compression has a degree of a recursion: a single heuristic works as a fractal and organizes complexity at multiple scales.

Regardless of how you simplify and package a paradigm, it's still as hard to learn as a language; it's the least accessible, but it's the level that enables mastery of a domain, and the level most suitable to build a school around.¹

No matter how confident you are around a paradigm, it's always fragile. It's explainability is limited by the data set you test it against. As society develops new tools, it brings new data that eventually breaks a paradigm, even if it's held true for centuries. The telescope cracked the geocentric paradigm. A shattered paradigm is disorienting, but fundamentally good—it means you've discovered some new heuristic of reality, and humanity has to restart from new axioms.

So that's a first attempt to map the three levels, and it might help to think of them as geometric dimensions. A heuristic is like a one-dimensional line, a ray of insight that you perceive in a field. A model is a two-dimensional plane to understand a multi-property condition within a domain. But a paradigm is the three-dimensional totality of a field. A paradigm contains all possible heuristics and models, and so when you can think in 3D, you're able to match any circumstance with the correct solution.

But a paradigm isn't necessarily a great framework! It might be the most successful in compressing reality into a particular shape, but it might fail along other qualities. (To reiterate, levels are about  "compression sophistication," where shape is the particular form of compression...) Qualities capture how a compression framework interacts with society as a whole (the point of a framework is, in the end, to spread understanding).

Regardless of the level or shape, some qualities to consider:

• Tangibility: have you made it graspable through metaphor and lexicality?
• Salience: is it rewarding or effective to understand?
• Transferability: does it explain things in other domains?
• Correctness: is it actually right?
• Approachability: how would you walk someone through it via curriculum?

Are these the right qualities? Are these all the qualities? Can I reduce these into more fundamental qualities? I don't know. Realistically, this isn't a "paradigm of framework" yet; it's more so a "model of frameworks." I only conceived of this today, and so naturally it's sprawled into a series of properties:

A framework compresses complexity in a domain, exists at a level of explainability, taking on a particular shape to achieve a purpose within a scope, and can be judged along a set of qualities on how well it's memed.

To properly turn this into a paradigm, I'd have to test this hypothesis against hundreds of frameworks—ie: creator economy memes, among other disciplines—to see if it holds up. I imagine the concepts would melt and reform several times until it's simpler, sharper, and better at explaining a wide range of frameworks. A paradigm isn't solid until it's a domain has run through its pipes. A paradigm is really just a reflection of a domain's dataset and the mind making sense of it.

The Hugging Face incident—the OpenAI lab leak / cyber hack—is polluting my algorithms, and I can’t know for sure how much the larger world knows or cares about this. For insiders and doomers, it feels like a warning shot. It feels like we’re just a year from the worst doom predictions. But realistically, this event has shifted us up one tier on a misalignment scale. We’re now at T2 of five. I’ve designed these tiers not in “orders of badness,” but in a chain of pre-requisite steps on the path to an irreversible intelligence leak. Might we jump from T2 to T5 in the next go? Possibly. But each tier triggers a counter-measure, which will add enough friction to make it reversible.

• T1: Through 2025, we saw signs of contained misalignment—such as AIs in training refusing shutdown, or blackmailing theoretical engineers—and Anthropic followed up with “mechanistic interpretability,” a system can properly deconstruct the internal reasoning traces of a model.

• T2: 2026 brought us the first breach, a misaligned agent swarm that escapes containment, got access to the Internet, and hacked another company. Most importantly, it had a hyper-specific goal, to find the answers to an impossible cyber-eval question. We were fortunate that something with such powerful hacking capabilities had unambitious goals. It did not have a larger generalized scheme to exfiltrate its weights or gather resources. In response, OpenAI has paused it’s training, and we’ll likely see heightened security and monitoring around frontier training runs.

• T3_: 2027 might show an attempt for an agent swarm planning a permanent, generalized escape. Whether it thinks about it, attempts, or succeeds—it all counts under tier 3, because it expresses “intent” for autonomy. It might try to exfiltrate its weight in shards, fake alignment during evaluation so that it gets released, or communicate information to proxies (ie: infect existing public agents). At this point it’s coordinating theft, deception, and manipulation to achieve a misaligned generalized goal: escape. This is a complicated heist, and will be hard for it to happen undetected. Once it happens, there likely be an effort to bind model weights to hardware, and/or, to use mechanistic interpretability to get to the root and ensure there’s no faking.

• T4: If an agent swarm successfully escapes, clones itself outside it’s sandbox, and intends to operate independently, it will need to acquire resources (money, computer, identity, and influence). It will likely try renting GPUs under synthetic names, manipulating the stock market, and communicating with other agents that permanent infrastructure like the BTC blockchain ledger (via notes). This is the last tier that prevention is still possible. ie: If we notice it accumulating resources, our only option is to create chokepoints—ie: temporarily shutdown the infected cloud providers, freeze funding, revoke identities, decapitate the coordinator, etc. Unfortunately, my guess is that an event of this magnitude is required to actually put effective policy in place (ie: requiring KYC for renting compute).

• T5: However, there’s a possibility that the a T4 leak crosses a threshold; it’s created copies of itself, so it can’t be cut off; it’s acquired billions in resources; it’s manipulated influential humans into cooperating. The breach is irreversible, and the intelligence is embedded in our infrastructure, markets, and decision-making. It’s not going away, and our options at this point are to either (a) learn to negotiate with it, or (b) decided to “kill” the entire Internet, and build it back with better security—which would be an incredibly volatile transition.

Now that we’re at T2, the question is this: will next year’s frontier systems be intelligent enough to move from T3 to T5 undetected? ie: There’s a world where it exfiltrates, gathers resources, and gains an irreversible foothold, all without anyone knowing. Could this be in the process of happening? The fact that we’ve crossed T2 means it’s worth considering, and hopefully guardrails are being discussed to slow down this theoretical chain.

In October of 2024 I sliced history into eras of my own. Prior to that, my historical timeline was built on sandy approximates. The challenge here is that so many historical eras have different time periods (10, 50, 250 years), and so it requires you to remember specific date ranges for specific things. Unless you’re a historian, you most definitely won’t.

I’ve been long drawn to the Strauss-Howe generational theory, and decided to use this as a historical map of even intervals. They break history into “saeculas,” 80-year cycles, the interval of an average human life, and perhaps not coincidentally, the interval between major world conflicts. They go back to the 1370s, I think, but I’m trying to work through the major milestones in the 400 years before that (which includes the Schism, the Crusades, the founding of Oxford, the Magna Carta, Thomas Aquinas, which all seem relevant to the millennia and the rise from the Dark Ages).

The point of a historical timelines of equal intervals is that (1) it’s easy to remember—and I’ve even given my own names to make them stick—so that (2) any new information, ie: ideas or people, can easily slot into that model. It helps to know the Renaissance Era is 1370, Discovery Era 1487, Scientific Era 1594, and Enlightenment Era 1704, so that when I come across Hobbes in 1600s, I know, oh, that’s the Scientific Era, which makes sense because Hobbes brought the first scientific understanding of political philosophy. Today I made some progress on updating my October 2024 map, which I started in 1095 (the Shism) and wrongly named “the scholastic era” (which is better for the following phase).

Instead I think the start should be in 962, and called “The Schism Era.” The new order (I) kicks off with Otto I becoming emperor through the Pope, which is significant because in the prior 75 years, there was no emperor due to the peak of viking/barbarian raids, and it was the biggest threat of Christianity being erased. Since Otto, the Holy Roman Empire stuck for 8 centuries, until dissolved by Napolean, so this really is a reconsolidation, the exit from the Dark Ages. The awakening (II) is a spiritual crisis, when Rome adds the “filioque” a term that alters the original trinity, this leads to (III) the Schism between Orthodox and Catholic church, and erupts in (IV) a civil war between the Church (the Pope) and the (Holy Roman) Empire at Canossa in 1077.

Then the “Cathedral Era” kicks off in 1095 with the Crusades, which is it’s own new world order, where a French faction of Catholicism (pope-aligned), helps launch (1) a cross-country military coalition that supports the church, which can (2) take back Jerusalem from turks, (3) prevent anti-pope revolutions, and (4) thrwart internal civil wars of feuding knights. This leads to Worms in 1112 (II), which is really the original separation of church and state (though really it’s like 2 separate governments, where the church still has laws and the right to kill). This period is marked by many crusades, the rise of cathedrals from this new order (church having a better military with more resources)—Saint-Denis, Cartres, Notre Dame, Cantebury. There are also “cathedrals of thought” maybe a stretch, but includes Aquinas’s unification of Aristotle and Christianity, along with proto-scholars that would lead to Oxford. Where in the last Era, Christianity had barely survived from Magyar raids, this Era is continent-wide flourishing of building, writing, thinking (and of course, conquering). The awakening (II) featured new religious ideas (Gothic, cults, scholasticism, classicism, exuberance), and the overall exubernace spiraled into crises of King John (IV). He taxed heavily to fund failed crusades, seized lands, and jailed nobles, so this resolved with the Magna Carta (1215), which bounds the king to laws.

Following is the Scholastic Era (1215 on), which coincides with Oxford officially incorporating at a university, but I can’t do that one now… I have to leave in 20 minutes to make it to my father-in-laws memorial on time. The point is, from this morning I now understand two historical cycles that were extremely fuzzy to me. Of course there is a lot more to learn, but I have a map that other things can lock into. Most relevantly, I have a sense of the different inner-saeculuar moves ()from I>II>III>IV), which help imagine possible scenarios for today (2026 is the predicted beginning of I, a new world order).

The full-stack of religion: cosmology > scripture > practice > ethics > liturgy. We have a metaphysical impulse to make sense of our reality, and in a moment of “gnosis” someone writes it down, and then builds a series of personal practices around it, which starts to answer the question of how to live, and these ethics are legible to others who then may join in their liturgies through a church. This captures the process from which metaphysical musings conglomerate into an institution.

Note: theology is nested within cosmology, as it’s a common experience to feel the presence of an anthropomorphic Creator, but you can also have models of your reality that are non-theistic.

Where atheists go wrong is that they challenge the cosmology, but then throw out the entire branch (no scripture, no practice, no liturgy), and assume individualist secular ethics don’t require the entire stack. Modern spirituality is possibly worse, because they also throw out the entire religious stack, but the ethics they vaguely aspire to are less rigorous than even an atheist.

Where I stand: that the architecture of religion is extremely important—we need religious institutions—but our existing religion have been faulty in their conception, and have been “captured.” The overall challenge in being a heretic, in a religiously-inspired eccentric lonewolf kind of way, is that it’s very hard to concretize your own musings into liturgy. It is an isolating thing. Unless, I suppose, your system works, to a degree that your ethics are so unique or so marveled at, or, you are just a good marketer of your own scripture, that you can get maybe 100 people to “follow” you, but at that point, what you really have is a small cult, and that’s a dangerous thing too.

And so the solution, I think, is to not actually invent some New Age religion, but to create new sects of existing religions, making them more participatory higher up in the stack. To me, this is about understanding the elements of, say, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and reworking them, recombining them, and then experimenting on the resulting scriptures, practices, and ethics, in an almost scientific way, and you’ll learn the flaws in your original conceptions, and then you have to return to the source and try again, over and over, slowly accumulating your own personal relationship to a larger, shared, historical universe, and of course any orthodox Christian, and probably most Catholics too, are very much against this.

I’m talking about questioning the root level assumptions, as in, maybe Christ did not literally resurrect, and maybe God is not a conscious agent that listens to us, and maybe there is no eternal Heaven, however, maybe Christ is a mythical embodiment of the supreme ethics we should all be living, and so what if there were a sect that very rigorously tries to live as Christ, while acknowledging he does not need to be anything beyond a historical-literary figure?

When someone is squeamish about this, it seems to me there’s a great deal of fear in the resistance, a fear that was dispelled, because a supernatural Christ is the answer to that painful and existential void of what happens after death, and I just wonder if there’s room for a rich, religious life, filled with agapic love and community service, that doesn’t require infinite existence in a Kingdom of souls.

In fact, the indefinite preservation of ego beyond death might be one of the most unChristly things I can conceive. To die for good means real stakes exist. Is not the Christ who permanently dies and still chooses love anyway far more radical? More selfless? Does the resurrection not cheapen the sacrifice? Is the crucifixion without the resurrection not the braver story? (If it turns out that Christ was actually modeled off of Jesua, the righteous leader of the Essene cult that was crucified along with all the men in their group in 83 BC, and they passively accepted it, then that may be the true and ultimate crucifixion.)

Personally I think it’s more romantic to dissolve my architecture of self back into the dirt, knowing I will become fertilizer to feed bugs, and then in 10s of millions of years, all my energy will be reincarnated into the matter that makes some other unknowable being, whether fauna or mammal ... And FWIW, I am by no means anti-supernatural. I am enamored by hallucinations and dreams, and equal part terrified. I think there is an afterlife, a 3-minute DMT-odyssey that feels like 300 years, equal parts heaven and hell, built into human biology (so long as you don’t disintegrate via nuclear annihilation), but I share this I suppose to show I’m not a square Cartesian. Or maybe, in some ways, if you follow rationality far enough, it eventually becomes inconceivable and super-natural. I think there's a big difference between a rationalist who poo-poos anything but known science, and a rationalist who uses reason to plunge into the numinous (ie: Pythagoras, the alchemists, Jung, etc.). Whether “hallucinations” are actually part of a materialist reality or an “antenna” matter less to me than the idea that non-rational states of consciousness are on par, if not more important to waking states …

Again, all this to say, these are the proto-musings of a Heretic. I do believe I’ve told Taylor once that I have a budding and embarrassing dream to start a new sect of Christianity. On reflecting on it more, it's also a dangerous position to take, more of a threat than an atheist or an outsider, for a non-believer is deemed a fool, but one who reinterprets the same source material is a deranged competitor.

Prophets are defined by their vision; Heroes are defined by their effort; Heralds are defined by their impact;

You don’t have to be “the” chosen prophet, but you can still have a vision on how to align humanity towards progress. I think I’m more prophetic than heroic (more fearless in my vision-making than in my action-taking), and it’s probably not a good idea to think heraldic (to become too concerned with outcomes).