A Look Back and a Look Forward!
An assortment of thoughts on the past year and what's coming in 2024
As I’m sure many do, the last few days of the year are helpful to reflect on the past year and think about what is to come in the following year. I do this thoroughly for my own life (link below if you are curious about the process):
But as I try to keep that personal betterment content over on The Human Optimization Project, I want to cover here more of the social and political considerations for the new year on the trends that I closely follow.
Covid and the Vaccines
There are a few inarguable facts: Covid is still persisting and excess deaths are still substantially elevated when compared to a 2019 baseline. Even as we sit here at the end of 2023, we are seeing more death than we should each week.
As we’ve covered, I am fairly certain that the culprit for the continued excess death is the Covid vaccines (particularly the mRNA ones from Pfizer and Moderna). While saying this is still verboten in polite conversation, the stock market seems to reflect the (mostly) unspoken reality:
Pfizer and Moderna’s stocks are both down over 40% in a year when the market was up 20%. This 60% gap reflects the reality: if mRNA tech was really this miracle cure-all platform, these stocks would be doing a lot better. While Moderna was a child of the pandemic, Pfizer has a long track record, but is now trading below it’s pre-pandemic value.
All that to say, even if we’re in a place where people won’t trash the vaccines publicly, they will with their feet (by not going to get the latest “booster”) and with their wallets.
While I wish we could have the desperately needed reckoning over all of Covid, I don’t think it’ll happen. The world is too distracted via omni-present social media to demand accountability on much of anything. That said, we must never forget:
The U.S. Government funded the Gain-of-Function research at Wuhan that led to Covid in the first place.
Pretty much every government in the world and the U.S. locked down their citizens for over a year (and up to 3 years in some places) which had absolutely no justification based on the real world data and did tremendous harm to individuals and communities around the world.
These same governments forced and coerced ineffective (masks) and dangerous (“vaccines”) interventions on the population.
In concert with the media and tech, the government then leveraged the fear to further polarize and divide citizens along these lines, enabling massive discrimination against free-thinking individuals, all while coordinating a massive censorship campaign with obliging big tech companies.
And I could go on, of course, but that’s enough of a rant for this topic. Sadly, I think if we were to see another pandemic in a few years, we’d see the exact same response in a lot of places.
As it is, we’re already seeing a crowd of people trying to blame the current excess death on Covid-created complications, rather than the jabs. This line will be pushed by any establishment institution in order to protect those in power from suffering the fate that should await them.
But moving on…
Politics
I guess we’re moving from one depressing topic to the next. While I’m still holding out hope that saner heads will prevail and nominate Ron DeSantis on the Republican side, the odds don’t look great. We seem almost resigned as a country to have a third battle of senior citizens to decide who leads this country, now featuring literal octogenarians.
As much as we can, and should, shit on the Republican Party for sticking with Trump, Democrats are running a mentally compromised pathological liar who was deemed unfit for the Presidency back in 1980 and has only gone downhill since. Add that to the Democrat’s attacks on Trump via lawfare and now attempting to remove him from the ballot, and they are playing a tremendously dangerous game.
From where I sit, there are at least three areas where Biden and the Democratic Party machine are guilty of no less than treason:
The vaccine coercion and mandates in 2021.
The total lack of prevention and even welcoming of an open southern border that has enabled an invasion into the country.
The lawfare attacks on Donald Trump through various conduits to charge him with trumped up charges and attempt to remove him from the ballot in 2024.
As I keep needing to reiterate, I am no fan of Trump. But if Democrats insist on attempting to jail a political opponent, then they need to be prepared for when shit comes back around to them.
The next Republican administration absolutely should bring any Democrat involved in these three attacks on our sovereignty on charges up to and including treason.
That may sound radical, but we’re in unprecedented times. While these charges should be brought with full due process and following the law as laid out in the constitution, I believe it is a case that has to at least be attempted.
Now, will this happen? It’s highly unlikely. Despite talking a big game, Trump acts more like controlled opposition than anyone else in the Republican field, and Nikki Haley is not much better. DeSantis and Vivek are the two potential hopes to actually push this way, but even then I don’t have too much hope that they’d be able to provide a meaningful fight against the leviathan that is the state.
But enough on that, let’s move on to greener pastures?
Culture
Believe it or not, we actually have seen some shift in the culture. We seem to have survived the era of peak woke scold in 2020, and tiresome wokeness is in retreat culturally.
That said, we can’t be complacent. Wokeness may be in retreat culturally, but it is still embedded in institutions where it thrives. Large companies may be scaling back their DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) departments, but you’ll still be sitting through nonsense trainings. These companies will still preferentially hire and promote “underrepresented minorities” because diversity is still seen as good for business.
To really win the culture, we need a full and relentless push for merit. Merit was the basis for the founding and ascent of our culture. To preserve it we must return to it.
A return to merit will happen if we truly enter the hard times. But we should prefer and strive for achieving this without having to endure a painful correction.
Tech & AI
As an avid user of ChatGPT, I am an advocate for the capabilities of GPT4 and the promise the technology holds. The shorthand thesis is that LLMs have given humans and machines a shared language to communicate with.
Broadly, this means:
More people will be able to accomplish a lot more with computers
Computers are on a path toward general intelligence which will blur the lines in who is doing most of the thinking
The effects of this will take time, but can’t be overstated. It will likely be similar to the internet. Engaging with the internet in 1995 felt slow and primitive. Looking back, it feels nostalgic. But now the internet is omnipresent and involved in almost everything we do. While AI is here, it’s disruptions are still 5, 10, and 15 years down the road.
Along these lines, the quest for controlling what words models are trained as well as their alignment and instructions are critical. The best hope here is that open source approaches will prevail, as concentrating this power in the hands of only a couple companies is dangerous.
Meanwhile, if you don’t see what the hype is about, I’d encourage you to try using GPT4, and spend some time understanding how to interact with it. While it does understand English, conversations are only fruitful insofar as you provide the right information. Similar to engaging with a human, the more context you give it, the better the help you’ll receive. Read more about how to prompt GPTs here:
Economy
Last but not least, what does all that mean for the economy?
A general model for the economy in modern times that I find helpful is that our economy is a highly manipulated system. Entities like the Federal Reserve are highly focused on manipulating the economy toward slow and steady growth. With general inertia on their side, this presents a formidable force that does keep the economy stable longer than one tends to imagine.
So the odds on bet is that this will continue. Interest rates are expected to drop somewhat, but may end up in a delicate dance that can sustain us for longer than you may think.
Still though, eventually spending $1T on military and $1T on interest payments on our debt will eventually catch up with us, along with the burgeoning costs of already unsustainable programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. The crash should be spectacular, but it is quite unlikely to be this year.
To end on a high(er) note, we’re still the strongest and most dynamic economy in the world, and it’s not particularly close. Despite all of our flaws and messiness here, there isn’t one major economy in the world that I’d trade for.
No matter what 2024 holds for the world as a whole, I hope you find happiness and success throughout the year!
For good luck, let us know what you think awaits us in 2024!