I think we're witnessing a schism within the vampire community. By the end of the article, the author is less than subtle about being Dracula, and is trying to use the respect his name no doubt commands among vampires to get the unruly youth(relatively speaking) to get their shit together. This article is a warning to Thiel and Johnson. Dracula sees you, and he does not approve of what he sees.
The novels Blindsight & Echopraxis by Peter Watts have a nice vampire sub-plot... basically his world has vampires which have been revived from the fossil record. They are posited to have gone extinct in recent times, but before then were human's key predator, keeping our populations strongly in check and then having to hibernate for decades to allow the breeding to provide new meat!
He's super interested in brain disorders and spins a good story about the trade offs of a terrible reaction to right angles in exchange for savant like powers of perception.
The Darren Shan novels also have a lot of interesting vampire world-building, with in parts a similar dillema of vampires losing their dominant position in the food chain due to humans advancing technology, and different sects in the vampire society having different approaches of how to tackle it.
> He discontinued the blood exchange after data showed “no benefits.” A suspicious person might note that a vampire would say exactly this after the media got too interested.
I don't think it's the media (clearly the younger generations are media friendly), it's probably pressure from the older vamps.
I felt the same way and came to the comments to see if anyone else smelled it. It's either AI-assisted writing or people are genuinely starting to write like how ChatGPT sounds.
First, the structure of this satirical post is headings and bullet points. Fine, whatever, a lot of people write this way.
Then there's the exhausting litany of super short sentence fragments.
> He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.
This is how airport novels and LinkedIn "thought leadership" clickbait is written, so ok, fine, I'll let it pass.
Then I started to notice a lot of: "It's not X. It's Y" or "this isn't just A. It's B."
> Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.
Before LLMs, people weren't writing this way. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon: it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.
When several of these smells pile up, I close the tab immediately and try to forget about it. This one was so egregious that I had to read the whole thing and then come to the comments to rant a bit.
> Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it.
I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
This is actually one of the mechanisms behind "blood swaps" done by the rich and weird. Donating blood frequently also reduces various accumulated "factors" that reduce kidney stress, encourage healthy new blood, and is overall beneficial to health.
Various other mechanisms can improve how effective your body is at recycling cells, encouraging autophagy and filtering things in the blood. There are a whole suite of various supplements and medicines that work in this system.
As undead, though, vampires no longer produce new living blood, so require fresh blood of the living to restore lost function. Or something.
I guess that'd make Bryan Johnson the ultimate thrall?
> I don't think this [ed:periodical dilution] makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong.
It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
The replication process makes worse and worse copies over time. Plus the cleanup crew gets confused and weak. Each bit of aging makes the process of keeping you young work less well, and hence you age more + faster.
Who knew we could coexist with vampires if we give each some kind of dialysis machine? Imagine the kind of cultural works someone with centuries of experience could create. Imagine a vampire historian!
As a member of a prominent Transylvanian family, I am appalled, and profoundly offended, by the idea of someone even as much as suspecting Peter Thiel could be a vampire. He might be an evil bloodsucking parasite, but he lacks the sophistication mortals have come to associate with vampires over the centuries. It's shocking, really, that some people might confuse him with one.
Vampires are parasites. They're only as polite as they need to be to extract resources from potential hosts. The facade of sophistication only lasts as long as it needs to
Which is ironic, given his recent preoccupation with the Antichrist, as the vampire is an antichrist archetype. Christ gives his blood so that others may live; the vampire takes the blood of others so that he may live.
Just donate blood as often as possible. This results in a loss of cholesterol, other bad lipoproteins, excess iron in those who have it, and PFAS toxins. It is frequency-dependently associated with longevity.
Whole blood donation avoids the plastic lining of plasma donations, with the latter undesirably transferring unwanted microplastics into the body.
For those with sufficient spare money, instead of donating blood, just get various blood tests every other week, additively comparable to a donation if the tests are substantial.
Granted, this is antithetical to being a vampire, but you will still have to make up for it by supplementing sufficient healthy nutrients, e.g. electrolytes, ferric pyrophosphate, protein, etc. to allow your body to quickly restore the lost blood.
As a disclaimer, do not ever donate blood if you use narcotics, disallowed drugs, injectable drugs, or have unsafe intimate practices, or might have chagas or TB or even long Covid.
> Stoker, a theatre manager with no medical background, somehow described the basic mechanism of heterochronic parabiosis
Just to pick a nit...
Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.
Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.
It is worthy of note that John Polidori's model for a vampire was, in fact, Lord Byron.
Lord Byron's death was a result of what the medical profession then thought that they knew about blood. Namely that blood-letting was a worthwhile medical treatment.
>They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it. Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.
This seems to be the emerging consensus. When you get older your metabolism creates all kinds of crap that circulates in the blood.
You would like to have boosted kidneys parallel to real ones that can detect and remove all the slightly wrong proteins.
Love this concrete interpretation. The symbolic one is maybe more interesting:
Vampires:
- Consume the life force of the living to sustain themselves
- Are totally isolated and perverted from any kind of human community
- Have no family, no community ties
- Unable to feel love, warmth, connection with any human
- Must avoid spending time in the virtuous natural world (daylight, sunlight) and must instead be cordoned off indoors or in darkness, they do not live as most natural things do.
- Are kind of fallen/perverted; at one point, they were human, but they failed at being human (for instance: unbaptized, excommunicated, murderous, etc) and so were forced into exile often due to their own choice to live sinfully
Billionaires:
- cannot become a billionaire without thousands/millions of regular non-billionaires siphoning money (== time, == life force) upwards
- when they become a billionaire they are forced to be distanced from their community/family of normal people; middle class people are never "regular friends" with billionaires
- either their normal family/friends are 'bitten/infected' (wealth inheritance) or cut-off
- often are profoundly isolated on a personal level (are they talking to me for my money or for me?)
- often the direct cause of or at least complicit in the destruction of the natural world (i.e. cut off from sunlight; unnatural)
- often must make unethical or immoral choices to catapult themselves to wealth/powers (fallen, sinful)
And I don't want to add fuel to a strange fire, but in 1764 when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a letter to Beaumont regarding the absurdity of belief despite evidence, he used this as an example:
"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete."
Completely OT: In the link “what the longevity experts don’t tell you”[1] I found this:
“As a devout Baptist, he couldn’t use playing cards…”
And I’m wondering if I missed something in my Baptist upbringing. I have long since removed myself from any semblance of the Church and manage my own relationship with faith and any related higher beings, so it’s more a curiosity than pertinent.
As a devout Baptist minister, this is likely about one of two things, avoiding the appearance of evil (gambling, 1 Thess 5:22 - Abstain from every form of evil), and giving up something for the sake of others (gambling addictions within the church, Rom 4:21 - or do anything that causes your brother to stumble).
The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address things like gambling more directly, and are perfectly ok with playing cards. FWIW YMMV :-)
I knew plenty of Midwestern Baptists that didn't participate in the triple crown of no-nos: dancing, drinking, and gambling. And cards aren't necessarily gambling, but cards are the bricks that pave the road to such evil. It's guilt-by-association (and some will tell you, wrongly, that playing cards are an outgrowth of tarot cards and the like), but there ya go. Oddly, I knew plenty of Baptists that played Yahtzee, which involves dice, and that seemed acceptable. Never minding that the Roman soldiers cast lots ("dice") for Jesus' clothing. :-)
Consider that Titan was written maybe 100 years removed from the events and you're reading a secondhand telling of it from a blog. Maybe there is more context in the book if you're really curious, or maybe the context was lost from Rockefeller's time to the book, or from the book to the blogpost.
Consider a few more things: If you ask 10 Baptists about something secondary to scripture like this, you may get different answers from different people, especially if they are from different eras, as religion changes over time. As another example, some Catholics grew up hearing the mass in Latin.
It's funny though, Rockefeller appeared devout enough to understand that gambling was a sin. Rockefeller appeared to believe in an omniscient God. Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God? People trying to find such loopholes in Religion is always fascinating to me. Of course, it could have all been a show.
I was hoping he would provide some insight about why they avoid the sun. From observation, thiel looks like he is getting too much sun, or at least his skin has been reengineered like Alucard. While Johnson is just cake [0].
Side note: for once, I'm enjoying a heavily AI assisted article.
[0]: you'll have to find that reference on your own.
Honestly, the surest sign of the existence of vampires to me would be a class of investors with extremely anomalous discount rates, suggesting that they are operating on inhumanly long time horizons, combined with a particular interest in real estate, as first documented in the field's seminal publication (Stoker, 1897).
Oh there are vampires. They are very old. But they are mostly illusions of light. Once the veil is removed the disappointment of hell sets in. Smoke, mirrors, DNA, sound.
The French people didn't invest the most elaborate head chopping off machine for just spectacle…
I repeat, just like clocks, people can be of different makes. No matter how hard a man tries, even if he is put in a glass case, when his time comes the spring runs out. And once the mechanism is dead, no matter how clean and whole it is, no matter how much you try to warm it up, blow on it—if the spiral spring is missing—the man is gone.
Yet I can do something to live longer. Thoughts have a definite length. I can unwind them very fast—then the end comes quickly, or I may unwind them slowly, and the end will come more slowly. When we live as we do we think mechanically and quite unnecessarily. We very seldom think when necessary. So we could be much more economical.
The secret is very simple. If any man really succeeds in understanding and learning to spend only as much as is necessary he will be able to economize a great deal of energy.
Now look inwards at your thinking. You will see that you think all the time, associations flow on unceasingly. Now if you begin to think intentionally, you will find that you think very slowly, whereas when thoughts run on by themselves they flow very fast.
Compare the two states: one, when our thoughts flow fast and the other when they flow slowly. For example, we are impatiently waiting for someone. We are all the time occupied with the thought—when will the person we are waiting for come? What happened to him, why isn’t he here? Has he had an accident? It seems to us we have been waiting an hour at least. We look at the watch and find it has been only five minutes.
Another example. You sit in a comfortable chair. You are resting, nothing worries you. For the moment you do not want to think of anything important. Your thoughts flow slowly. It seems to you that you have been sitting thus for five minutes, whereas you sat for a whole hour.
Time is our thoughts. We can measure time by our thinking. If we spend many thoughts, time seems long to us. If we spend few thoughts—time seems short. Time stands in direct ratio to the flow of associations.
Just as in the thinking center, associations go on in other centers also.
The secret of prolonging life depends on the ability to spend the energy of our centers slowly and only intentionally. Learn to think consciously. This produces economy in the expenditure of energy. Don’t dream.
Premise: Thinking slower makes time appear to pass faster, and thinking faster makes time appear to pass slower. (Per the two paras following "Consider")
Thesis: The secret to living longer is to alter one's perception of time, by thinking slower.
But given the premise, thinking slower would make appear to pass faster. Ergo, it would make life feel shorter, not longer.
In fact, the premise actually supports the exact opposite thesis: that the secret to long life is to think as fast as possible.
The flaw in trying to detect AI by its use of particular idioms is that it would have learned these idioms from its training corpus, which consists of writings from actual human beings.
In other words, some people actually write like this.
Interesting... I first went to the linked recent post What the Longevity Experts Don't Tell You. Sorry to be harsh: it was nonsense. It just lists a few weird, unscientific behaviours of John D Rockefeller and tries to draw lessons (to what end? longevity? is Rockefeller still alive?) from them despite there being no indication those behaviors even had any effect, let alone positive impact on longevity. It also doesn't bring up things "the longevity experts don't tell you," it's just summaries of topics in a single biography.
Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.
Also weird it didn't mention Peter Attia's connection to Epstein outright. It did this weird tongue-in-cheek thing for a few paragraphs referencing Epstein only in the foot notes. I still can't tell whether what I read was actually praising these guys or extremely subtly sardonic.
> Increased sun exposure was associated with an older appearance and accelerated with age (p 0.015), as was a history of outdoor activities and lack of sunscreen use.
Vampire therapy is real. Give an old person an infusion from a closely-matched teenager and they improve by almost every metric. This isnt speculation. It is a noted side effect of any treatment invovling transfusion. (It also helps that older immune systems are less active and react less dramatically to forgien blood.)
Yes, if there's one thing I reproach Mark Zuckerberg, it's not that his company will occasionally enable genocides [0], but his crimes against fashion and good taste.
Fantastic. Several halloweens ago I wore vampire fangs and told a beautiful girl at a concert that I worked at the local blood bank. She said "yeah?" and I followed up with, "would you like to make a donation?"
"But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." (Matthew 24:37)
More and more, you are seeing what occurred in the time of Noah become commonplace to talk about under the guise of technology. In Noah's day, there was a hybridization program to dilute the blood of man to prevent the coming of the Messiah, but Noah was "perfect in his generations", or not part of the hybrid lines branching off of humanity. And now, what is old has become new again.
The article might address the topic in satire, but there is a truth that is being touched on in it that is hard to look at -- the use [devouring of, injection of, swapping out of, ritualization of, etc.] human blood and tissue is happening right under our noses, and it's nothing new. The vampires lore did not just come out of some sort of novel work of fiction or a novelization of a fable, but is rooted in something that is very, very real. Vampire-like beings existed in the pre-flood (antediluvian) days, but now only exist in spirit after their bodies were destroyed by the flood. The spirits, desiring to be embodied, now go about the rituals of what once created them all over again, so that we might have a new generation of their brand of evil come forth.
What you're witnessing on a large scale through global politics is the public-facing humiliation ritual of mankind being carried out by the fallen angels and those under them that long sought our destruction:
1) The epstein file information showing all sorts of satanic/luciferian references, as well as possible cannibalism
2) Xi and Putin discussing organ harvesting benefits (implying an underlying focus on it)
3) Congressional disclosure of inter-dimensional beings existing and being unexplainable.
4) The saturation of things that would have been considered unabased debauchery in generations past being put into every facet of culture as if coordinated
If you even give credence to one of the things I listed, then you're keenly aware that it's nearly impossible to talk to anyone about that topic unless they've self-selected into a social group that already believes that that thing is wrong. Others embrace one or more of the topics as a positive thing, such as welcoming the idea of inter-dimensional beings, or furthering human lifespans through genomic editing, or even just promoting the type of debauchery that would have had entire cities leveled in Old Testament times.
But, this has all been prophesied to happen, and is happening exactly as it is spoken of. The truth is being suppressed, even within ones own mind, because a person of the world of today does not love the truth. There is only one way to enter in to the truth, which is to begin seeking the person whose very name is Faithful and True (Revelation 19:11). According to the following verses, to not do so would lead one into a delusion from which there is no escape:
"The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)
amarant|18 days ago
hoherd|18 days ago
sgt101|18 days ago
He's super interested in brain disorders and spins a good story about the trade offs of a terrible reaction to right angles in exchange for savant like powers of perception.
ceejayoz|18 days ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU
red75prime|18 days ago
vict7|18 days ago
The idea that vampires needed to take “anti-Euclideans” and the way the ship was constructed to avoid generating right angles were some great details.
hobofan|18 days ago
solidasparagus|18 days ago
That's my current AI detector smell.
> He discontinued the blood exchange after data showed “no benefits.” A suspicious person might note that a vampire would say exactly this after the media got too interested.
I don't think it's the media (clearly the younger generations are media friendly), it's probably pressure from the older vamps.
prime_ursid|18 days ago
First, the structure of this satirical post is headings and bullet points. Fine, whatever, a lot of people write this way.
Then there's the exhausting litany of super short sentence fragments.
> He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.
This is how airport novels and LinkedIn "thought leadership" clickbait is written, so ok, fine, I'll let it pass.
Then I started to notice a lot of: "It's not X. It's Y" or "this isn't just A. It's B."
> Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.
Before LLMs, people weren't writing this way. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon: it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.
When several of these smells pile up, I close the tab immediately and try to forget about it. This one was so egregious that I had to read the whole thing and then come to the comments to rant a bit.
sgt|18 days ago
NO CARRIER
avereveard|18 days ago
also this, having done a number of ai conspiracy for funsies, that's always the mid point
however I don't mind ai slop, if it's creative and well thought out (and editorialized, as this seem to be)
keyle|18 days ago
ZoomZoomZoom|18 days ago
Well, hello there!
koakuma-chan|18 days ago
Has anyone tried garlic on him?
> Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it.
I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
observationist|18 days ago
Various other mechanisms can improve how effective your body is at recycling cells, encouraging autophagy and filtering things in the blood. There are a whole suite of various supplements and medicines that work in this system.
As undead, though, vampires no longer produce new living blood, so require fresh blood of the living to restore lost function. Or something.
I guess that'd make Bryan Johnson the ultimate thrall?
groby_b|18 days ago
You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong.
It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
maerF0x0|18 days ago
ASalazarMX|18 days ago
jimnotgym|18 days ago
Or indeed daylight
I was going to suggest some other vampire remedies, but I was worried Palantir will scan this and tell ICE.
glitchc|18 days ago
0x4e|18 days ago
sgt|18 days ago
rbanffy|18 days ago
dmonitor|18 days ago
lo_zamoyski|18 days ago
jhanschoo|18 days ago
glouwbug|18 days ago
reactordev|18 days ago
bloomingeek|18 days ago
irishcoffee|18 days ago
Are all vampires sociopaths or just some of them?
OutOfHere|18 days ago
Just donate blood as often as possible. This results in a loss of cholesterol, other bad lipoproteins, excess iron in those who have it, and PFAS toxins. It is frequency-dependently associated with longevity.
Whole blood donation avoids the plastic lining of plasma donations, with the latter undesirably transferring unwanted microplastics into the body.
For those with sufficient spare money, instead of donating blood, just get various blood tests every other week, additively comparable to a donation if the tests are substantial.
Granted, this is antithetical to being a vampire, but you will still have to make up for it by supplementing sufficient healthy nutrients, e.g. electrolytes, ferric pyrophosphate, protein, etc. to allow your body to quickly restore the lost blood.
As a disclaimer, do not ever donate blood if you use narcotics, disallowed drugs, injectable drugs, or have unsafe intimate practices, or might have chagas or TB or even long Covid.
1970-01-01|18 days ago
Paper where more frequent cycles in women correlate to longer lifetimes? That would have to be true if this were true.
drewg123|18 days ago
koakuma-chan|18 days ago
kadushka|18 days ago
fyrabanks|18 days ago
austinjp|18 days ago
Just to pick a nit...
Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.
Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-...
btilly|18 days ago
Lord Byron's death was a result of what the medical profession then thought that they knew about blood. Namely that blood-letting was a worthwhile medical treatment.
u1hcw9nx|18 days ago
This seems to be the emerging consensus. When you get older your metabolism creates all kinds of crap that circulates in the blood.
You would like to have boosted kidneys parallel to real ones that can detect and remove all the slightly wrong proteins.
glitchc|18 days ago
johnisgood|18 days ago
mlsu|18 days ago
Vampires:
- Consume the life force of the living to sustain themselves
- Are totally isolated and perverted from any kind of human community
- Have no family, no community ties
- Unable to feel love, warmth, connection with any human
- Must avoid spending time in the virtuous natural world (daylight, sunlight) and must instead be cordoned off indoors or in darkness, they do not live as most natural things do.
- Are kind of fallen/perverted; at one point, they were human, but they failed at being human (for instance: unbaptized, excommunicated, murderous, etc) and so were forced into exile often due to their own choice to live sinfully
Billionaires:
- cannot become a billionaire without thousands/millions of regular non-billionaires siphoning money (== time, == life force) upwards
- when they become a billionaire they are forced to be distanced from their community/family of normal people; middle class people are never "regular friends" with billionaires
- either their normal family/friends are 'bitten/infected' (wealth inheritance) or cut-off
- often are profoundly isolated on a personal level (are they talking to me for my money or for me?)
- often the direct cause of or at least complicit in the destruction of the natural world (i.e. cut off from sunlight; unnatural)
- often must make unethical or immoral choices to catapult themselves to wealth/powers (fallen, sinful)
OkayPhysicist|18 days ago
eviks|18 days ago
machielrey|18 days ago
david927|18 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain
david927|18 days ago
"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete."
kmeisthax|18 days ago
jagged-chisel|18 days ago
“As a devout Baptist, he couldn’t use playing cards…”
And I’m wondering if I missed something in my Baptist upbringing. I have long since removed myself from any semblance of the Church and manage my own relationship with faith and any related higher beings, so it’s more a curiosity than pertinent.
1 - https://machielreyneke.com/blog/longevity-lessons/
jvalencia|18 days ago
The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address things like gambling more directly, and are perfectly ok with playing cards. FWIW YMMV :-)
mikestew|18 days ago
dfxm12|18 days ago
Consider that Titan was written maybe 100 years removed from the events and you're reading a secondhand telling of it from a blog. Maybe there is more context in the book if you're really curious, or maybe the context was lost from Rockefeller's time to the book, or from the book to the blogpost.
Consider a few more things: If you ask 10 Baptists about something secondary to scripture like this, you may get different answers from different people, especially if they are from different eras, as religion changes over time. As another example, some Catholics grew up hearing the mass in Latin.
It's funny though, Rockefeller appeared devout enough to understand that gambling was a sin. Rockefeller appeared to believe in an omniscient God. Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God? People trying to find such loopholes in Religion is always fascinating to me. Of course, it could have all been a show.
firefoxd|18 days ago
Side note: for once, I'm enjoying a heavily AI assisted article.
[0]: you'll have to find that reference on your own.
ceayo|18 days ago
larsiusprime|18 days ago
jamilton|18 days ago
Not much of a shift...
kps|18 days ago
an-allen|18 days ago
The French people didn't invest the most elaborate head chopping off machine for just spectacle…
stuaxo|18 days ago
mystraline|18 days ago
Thanks for the recommended chuckle.
givan|18 days ago
Yet I can do something to live longer. Thoughts have a definite length. I can unwind them very fast—then the end comes quickly, or I may unwind them slowly, and the end will come more slowly. When we live as we do we think mechanically and quite unnecessarily. We very seldom think when necessary. So we could be much more economical.
The secret is very simple. If any man really succeeds in understanding and learning to spend only as much as is necessary he will be able to economize a great deal of energy.
Now look inwards at your thinking. You will see that you think all the time, associations flow on unceasingly. Now if you begin to think intentionally, you will find that you think very slowly, whereas when thoughts run on by themselves they flow very fast.
Compare the two states: one, when our thoughts flow fast and the other when they flow slowly. For example, we are impatiently waiting for someone. We are all the time occupied with the thought—when will the person we are waiting for come? What happened to him, why isn’t he here? Has he had an accident? It seems to us we have been waiting an hour at least. We look at the watch and find it has been only five minutes.
Another example. You sit in a comfortable chair. You are resting, nothing worries you. For the moment you do not want to think of anything important. Your thoughts flow slowly. It seems to you that you have been sitting thus for five minutes, whereas you sat for a whole hour.
Time is our thoughts. We can measure time by our thinking. If we spend many thoughts, time seems long to us. If we spend few thoughts—time seems short. Time stands in direct ratio to the flow of associations.
Just as in the thinking center, associations go on in other centers also. The secret of prolonging life depends on the ability to spend the energy of our centers slowly and only intentionally. Learn to think consciously. This produces economy in the expenditure of energy. Don’t dream.
Gurdjieff's Early Talks 1914-1931
troad|18 days ago
Premise: Thinking slower makes time appear to pass faster, and thinking faster makes time appear to pass slower. (Per the two paras following "Consider")
Thesis: The secret to living longer is to alter one's perception of time, by thinking slower.
But given the premise, thinking slower would make appear to pass faster. Ergo, it would make life feel shorter, not longer.
In fact, the premise actually supports the exact opposite thesis: that the secret to long life is to think as fast as possible.
lbrito|18 days ago
"The young blood doesn’t add youth. It removes age."
"Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis."
Etc. Why is LLM so enamored with the "Its not x, its Y" idiom? Its so ridiculously overused its almost comical
doodpants|18 days ago
In other words, some people actually write like this.
downboots|18 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech
machielrey|18 days ago
xutopia|18 days ago
unknown|18 days ago
[deleted]
unknown|18 days ago
[deleted]
soiltype|18 days ago
Still I gave this article a shot. I don't understand what it's doing. Like, one of the points about Thiel is that he destroyed Gawker to cover up his vampirism. He actually destroyed Gawker to cover up his relationship to Epstein, the pedophile and saboteur of US social/economic integrity. Why put a silly spin on that? I guess the entire thing is just a little joke... just doesn't feel like it belongs on the HN front page. I had higher expectations.
FarmerPotato|18 days ago
dgacmu|18 days ago
The Rockefeller one literally points out that the guy did all this weird stuff and then his son, who didn't, outlived him.
JimmyBuckets|18 days ago
_joel|18 days ago
block_dagger|18 days ago
layer8|18 days ago
stared|18 days ago
Bahman Guyuron et al., "Factors Contributing to the Facial Aging of Identical Twins" (2009) https://gwern.net/doc/longevity/2009-guyuron.pdf
prometheus76|18 days ago
FarmerPotato|18 days ago
dylan604|18 days ago
insin|18 days ago
/me snorts
amoss|18 days ago
snvzz|18 days ago
RMR1 done and shows promise, RMR2 started recently.
sandworm101|18 days ago
giraffe_lady|18 days ago
FarmerPotato|18 days ago
bullebak|18 days ago
crmd|18 days ago
achenet|18 days ago
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
fhdkweig|18 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Feud_(The_Simpsons)
TurdF3rguson|18 days ago
nphardon|18 days ago
boutell|18 days ago
I have a spoiler-tastic fan theory about the movie Marty Supreme that is apropos here.
xg15|18 days ago
cushpush|18 days ago
mannanj|18 days ago
koakuma-chan|18 days ago
otikik|18 days ago
satisfice|18 days ago
A: Biomedical startups!
gpderetta|18 days ago
jyscao|18 days ago
winfortheworld|17 days ago
this is so tiring
kcatskcolbdi|18 days ago
kcatskcolbdi|18 days ago
mac3n|18 days ago
https://archive.org/details/HumanResourcesPdf
> Corporate management is the use of humans as resources. So is vampirism.
>Biomethods, Inc. is a struggling biotechnology company whose venture capital group is growing tired of pumping in new blood every quarter.
FarmerPotato|18 days ago
yashasolutions|18 days ago
holografix|18 days ago
If I was a kiwi I would be livid at the government allowing this purchase to go through.
themarbz|18 days ago
uwagar|18 days ago
oxag3n|18 days ago
tonnydourado|18 days ago
darthvaden|18 days ago
bazillion|18 days ago
More and more, you are seeing what occurred in the time of Noah become commonplace to talk about under the guise of technology. In Noah's day, there was a hybridization program to dilute the blood of man to prevent the coming of the Messiah, but Noah was "perfect in his generations", or not part of the hybrid lines branching off of humanity. And now, what is old has become new again.
The article might address the topic in satire, but there is a truth that is being touched on in it that is hard to look at -- the use [devouring of, injection of, swapping out of, ritualization of, etc.] human blood and tissue is happening right under our noses, and it's nothing new. The vampires lore did not just come out of some sort of novel work of fiction or a novelization of a fable, but is rooted in something that is very, very real. Vampire-like beings existed in the pre-flood (antediluvian) days, but now only exist in spirit after their bodies were destroyed by the flood. The spirits, desiring to be embodied, now go about the rituals of what once created them all over again, so that we might have a new generation of their brand of evil come forth.
What you're witnessing on a large scale through global politics is the public-facing humiliation ritual of mankind being carried out by the fallen angels and those under them that long sought our destruction:
If you even give credence to one of the things I listed, then you're keenly aware that it's nearly impossible to talk to anyone about that topic unless they've self-selected into a social group that already believes that that thing is wrong. Others embrace one or more of the topics as a positive thing, such as welcoming the idea of inter-dimensional beings, or furthering human lifespans through genomic editing, or even just promoting the type of debauchery that would have had entire cities leveled in Old Testament times.But, this has all been prophesied to happen, and is happening exactly as it is spoken of. The truth is being suppressed, even within ones own mind, because a person of the world of today does not love the truth. There is only one way to enter in to the truth, which is to begin seeking the person whose very name is Faithful and True (Revelation 19:11). According to the following verses, to not do so would lead one into a delusion from which there is no escape:
"The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)