three masks

doing the wrong thing because you need someone else to tell you what to do and the only ones you have to talk to are exactly as lost as you are

doing the wrong thing even though you know you're not supposed to, because doing the job they gave you the "right" way turned out to be impossible

doing the wrong thing even when you don't benefit from it, because your kin ultimately matter more to you than your own interests or the good

doing the wrong thing because you see yourself as irreversibly contaminated, so you need to hide from judgment at all costs, even when the judgment in question isn't actually there

so, worm is a 1.7 million word long webserial written in 2010. 1.7 million words seems like a lot, but it was also written over a relatively short period of time, which means the writing style is very easy to parse--the ideas aren't without complexity, but the language itself isn't intimidatingly dense. you can get through it at a very decent pace. i agree with your friends that there are vast portions of worm that hit best when you're unspoiled, but the thing is that worm is long enough that giving you the basic plot pitch is in no way spoilers for any of the things that i wouldn't want to see spoiled for someone. i'm actually kind of baffled they're not telling you Any Thing, because it is in my estimation one of the best books i've ever read, but it also Needs a briefing before you get into it for like five different reasons. which i will now provide. i swear to god this is brief by my standards it's just that i am very thorough

worm is a story about superheroes and supervillains, set in a world where superpowers are traumagenic--rather than appearing randomly or innately, some people gain powers after a traumatizing event happens to them. the protagonist is taylor hebert, a 15yo girl who has the power to control insects and desperately wants to be a superhero. and then accidentally finds herself scouted by a team of teenage villains instead. who's to say how she's going to react to all that!

one of the most compelling things about worm is that the superpowers in it serve as visceral, hyper-literal metaphors for the trauma and traumatized coping mechanisms of the characters with those powers. each power is incredibly specific and thematically relevant to the person who has it, and it's incredibly interesting and evocative. it feels so natural and well-done that it comes off like how superpowers are just meant to be written.

the fact that superpowers stem from trauma also means that worm is fundamentally a narrative about trauma. specifically, about traumatized teenagers and the relationships they form as they cling together while struggling through growing up traumatized & mutually coping with an increasingly intriguing, intense, and far-reaching escalating plot. worm's depictions of trauma + mental illness--including unpalatable trauma responses, including traumatized characters who are allowed to be complicated and nuanced and messy while still receiving narrative respect--are deeply real-feeling and impactful, and they're placed in the context of a well-spun + engaging story.

Dolly Parton's Dollywood expansion announces $500M investment, new resort opening 2026 — November 2025

Like, the thing about Dollywood that nobody who hasn't been there gets is that it's not a Disney imitation, it's actually working off a completely different model — Silver Dollar City in Branson, which Pigeon Forge's whole tourist economy is downstream of (the Herschend brothers, who built Silver Dollar City in '60 on top of an actual Ozark cave system that had been a tourist attraction since the 19th century, took over Dolly's struggling Rebel Railroad/Goldrush Junction park in the late '70s and ran it as Silver Dollar City Tennessee until Dolly bought in as a partner in '86 and it became Dollywood) — which means the genealogy here isn't theme-park-as-totalizing-fantasy-world but theme-park-as-regional-handicraft-showcase-with-rides, the actual ancestor being those Depression-era and immediate-postwar craft revival operations, the John C. Campbell Folk School and the Southern Highland Craft Guild and Berea College's whole apparatus, which were themselves a sort of Progressive-era settlement-house response to Appalachian poverty that had decided the way to dignify mountain people was to tell them their basket-weaving was Art — which it kind of was, but the framing was always slightly patronizing in a way the mountain people understood perfectly well and worked anyway because the alternative was the cash economy of the cotton mill or the coal mine.

So Dollywood inherits this — there are still glassblowers and blacksmiths and a working grist mill, which functionally are doing the same thing they did at Silver Dollar City in 1960, which is the same thing they did at the Campbell Folk School in 1925, which is performing Appalachian authenticity for tourists from Cincinnati and Atlanta who want to believe in a pre-modern America that their grandparents fled.

The Dolly genius — and it is genius, I'm not being snarky — is that she understood the racket from the inside (her dad couldn't read, she grew up in the actual conditions the tourists are nostalgic for) and decided rather than resent it she'd own the means of production. The Dixie Stampede thing got renamed in 2018, which everyone framed as Dolly bowing to Yankee pressure, but if you know anything about her career it's the move she's been making since the start — strategic capitulation on cultural-political signifiers in service of the much larger project of being the wealthiest woman in country music and employing a meaningful fraction of Sevier County.

The $500M expansion is interesting because Pigeon Forge as a destination has been on a tear since COVID — drive tourism, no passport required, family-friendly, the kind of place that benefited enormously when international travel got hard and Americans rediscovered that their country contains regional weirdness — and the resort buildout suggests they're trying to capture overnight stays that currently leak to Gatlinburg (older, more established, more Smokies-adjacent) or to the cabin-rental market that's eaten so much of the regional lodging supply over the last fifteen years.

What I find genuinely fascinating is that Dollywood's continued growth is happening in exactly the period when the economic conditions that produced its founding mythology are receding from living memory — Dolly was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin, the LBJ-era War on Poverty's iconic image was a Kentucky holler not far from Sevierville, and the whole "Coat of Many Colors" affect depended on the audience having parents or grandparents who'd actually been poor in that specific way. The grandkids of the original Dollywood tourists don't have that. They have a kind of free-floating Appalachian aesthetic — the Foxfire books, Loretta Lynn on the soundtrack of a prestige film, the murder ballad as TikTok genre — disconnected from the material conditions it described.

I see a lot of comments today about her music, or her massive charitable efforts. But I haven't seen people talking about how she raised a town out of nothing and less than nothing into a regional cultural juggernaut, on nothing but determination and keeping the money at home.

Dylan Matthews' article is about how the Rust brothers invented a cotton-picking machine and had utopian plans to force it to be used for the greatest good which all came to basically nothing. He goes on to make the obvious connection that this will probably happen to Anthropic as well, and that all such plans are probably structurally impossible under capitalism. So far this seems to be probably correct: outside my immediate bubble the vibes around Anthropic seem to be pretty rancid. Observe this HN thread which is basically unanimous hate and disdain, partially around pricing and availability but in large part for the crime of taking their stance on safety seriously.

This article on China which claims that the supposed Chinese optimism around AI as a labor-saving technology, which some accelerationist commentators have been contrasting favorably to the increasingly hostile opinions of the American public, is mostly a mirage, and comes from (at least what I perceive as) something like learned helplessness and resignation in the face of multiple instances of the CCP going "we're doing it this way whether you like it or not, and if that means smashing your way of life to pieces, you're gonna have to deal."

An article about the IT services economy in India and how that's tremendously vulnerable to AI and employment levels probably going to be shredded. The data on AI's effects on employment in the United States are still messy and unclear, but Cognizant and TCS are each laying off around 15,000 people a couple years ago, and graduate hiring at Infosys is down from 85,000 to 12,000 in the last two years. India is still producing 400,000 IT/CS graduates per year.

This article claiming that the "permanent underclass" meme is probably more likely to happen in the field of international relations than in domestic labor markets, and that countries, especially middle-income which don't have frontier AI are probably going to become the permanent playthings of the ones which do.

But just based on this summary - that is not a remotely fair analysis, right?

Those listed groups are not united only by a freedom from work. They are united by trapping their members within very restrictive social milieus that cannot be escaped.

...I mean, let's be honest: whatever we do, there will be a lot of gossip and backbiting and status-politicking. Whether or not people have to work for a living. We know this because people are people, and they are gravitically drawn to gossip and backbiting and status-politicking, whether or not they are working for a living.

If you give them the education and training to do interesting things with themselves, they might also do interesting things with themselves. If you give them cultural models that allow them to conceive of themselves as interesting-thing-doers rather than as pure-strain status-guardians, they are more likely to do interesting things with themselves.

If you also hook them up to the internet and give them the wherewithal too seek out the most congenial friends and companions from the whole wide world, to aggregate into subcultures and interest groups - then you're cooking with gas.

Should this be any consideration for the policies that are trying to materially support the most people, and move us towards a post-material scarcity utopia? Hell no.

Should we treat the project of relieving material scarcity as if it will solve all our problems and end conflict and insecurity? Also no.

(no it isn't)

I think about this a lot but I don't know if it's widely considered or not.

For a lot of nerds, they grew up with fiction that depicted intelligence as the superweapon of stats. That's the wizard, or the guy who invents gunpower or casts a spell that changes the world. That's the books or movies we grew up with. And there's a lot that's good about basing your identity around intelligence.

But if you don't touch grass, it's possible to get stuck in that, and think every battle can be overwhelmingly won with more intelligence. We are all Ender Wiggen or (MOR)HP or Tony Stark.

I think this is why many rationalists are so obsessed with the existential risk of AI. They have an identity-deep belief that more intelligence is destined to win. If the AI is smarter than us, it can immediately recursively upgrade itself until its infinity smart. You're not limited by physical necessities or enough data to learn from. Just pure intelligence.

He uses those examples when discussing the topic because people do not understand or take seriously the more plausible threats.

But the full original Sequences make very clear that none of that is required.

This is obvious from, just off the top of my head:

The bit about a society of regular human intelligences running at a massive speed multiplier.

The various bits about various discoveries having sufficient data available to be theoretically figured out long before they actually were.

The bit about what superhuman persuasion ability means for security (the AI box experiment); he spends less time discussing the impacts on everything else, but the threat there is reasonably clearly implied to me.

The bit about how humans seem to universally stop at three levels of recursion by default when thinking through countermoves.

I don't remember if OODA loops are discussed specifically but the combination of extreme speed and the recursion thing become concerning when viewed from that perspective; now that LLMs are being generated specifically by training them to predict humans, I don't think we should be particularly less alarmed here.

None of this is to predict that a being with pure intelligence and no way to apply any of it is a danger.

But we keep giving agents plenty of ways to apply their intelligence.

The rationalists are the group most obsessed with intelligence, and who think they are most like the AI (no surprise there), and they frequently talk about their skills as they would apply to persuasion and... it is singularly the worst thing they are bad at. They then get very defensive about how other people aren't smart enough to see common sense and clear logic that rationalists do.

People are very stuck to their interests. Arguing them out of following their interests is very hard, and at a certain point, no amount of intelligence has been shown to convince a human otherwise.

The most potent superpersuasion tech our species has produced is cult leaders (which EY does have that skill down, even if he's not intentionally using it.)

If I was making any generalized statement, it's that the side that values intelligence more is always WORSE at winning elections for it. Is there any moment in history you're thinking of where "and then more intelligent people came in and convinced everyone to follow them?" In fact the only time intelligence convinces groups to culturally change, it's by being higher status and causing envy. You wouldn't want to be a flyover country racist who doesn't even know about fancy coffee, would you?

As you pointed out, AI doesn't really need a lot of intelligence to do massive damage to our wackadoodle patchwork security structure. Believe me, I am concerned about how AI will change our civilization. But it's NOT because of pure intelligence, but because of the many flaws already in our civilization that we'll let an outsider do any amount of damage as long as it makes our internal-status secure.

The Europeans didn't win just because they had better technology. They won because the empires thought they could use them against their local enemies.

I don't think EY considers magic or previously unknown principles allowing previously-thought-to-be-impossible effects at all load bearing to his threat analysis. He uses those examples when discussing the topic because people do not understand or take seriously the more plausible threats.

As Scott Alexander said when memorializing Scott Adams:

Obviously politician memiors have never been an accurate guide to their supposed author's inner world, but that is doubly true these days. These books aren't even written to be read; they are written as a monetizable vessel for podcast appearances and viral posts. Books have a patima of legitimacy to them, long serving in a culture as a cohesive, structured repository of truth. It is an illusion though, certainly for political writing. You gotta shed it and not take the bait.

I think my issue with Vance is, okay if you were describing like Marco Rubio you would be right. He absolutely lies all the time, that is a politician's job and it is triply so for a "normal" Republican in the Trump Administration. But alongside the lies are a bunch of very true beliefs he will not lie about unless up against the wall. He really believes in his Latin America policy! All the chips are on the table there. It isn't his job to just endlessly invent personas - the lies are compromises he has to make, defend Trump's insane corruption so he can go to back on the Cuba blockade. With someone like that you can sort the wheat from the chaff, and get a lot of insight.

With JD Vance though, the way he is trying to be the "intellectual leader" of the MAGA movement, which you very correctly identify, is by lying. That is what that job entails, because the MAGA movement is built from incoherent bluster and routine deception (not true for the whole American right, to be clear!) and the right's coalition is trying to ride that dragon. His skill is creating intellectual cover stories that paper over factional issues.

And the other "intellectuals" who are listening to this stuff know that! When he spoke at Marc Andreessen's "American Dynamism Summit" to merge the MAGA & Tech Right, his job was to just kinda make something up because movements don't really align, right? Which the other people in the room knew - they don't respect MAGA. They just need it, and wanted some words to make that happen. When he explained that DOGE's flamethrower assault on USAID was rooted in the theology of ordo amoris, he was bullshitting. He knows that it is fake and that actually the Trump Admin isn't gonna "care about their neighbors" either. But it served as a party line for TradCath types to stay on board, etc.

My critique certainly applies to all political books, but it is also has a specific salience with JD Vance. He is, by dint of the role he has taken on the within the Trump movement, the person whose published words mean the least. Trump says stuff he actually means all the time! It is not at all a waste to study his words - it is a path to madness of course, but that is a different problem. With Vance, though, I can't imagine convincing a supporter of him to question that by pointing out the very thing they want him to do.