Slate Star Scratchpad

If you’re in San Francisco and looking for something to do, I recommend the International Art Museum of America on 1023 Market Street.

I went there kind of by accident last weekend, because I was walking by, needed to use a bathroom, saw it had free admission, and figured I could sneak in and out. It totally delivered - admission was genuinely 100% free, and the bathrooms were very nice. In fact, the whole building was very nice - beautiful floors, beautiful walls, an indoor waterfall meditation room. Also, there was literally nobody else there. This whole beautiful free museum was completely empty except for me, my friend, and the employees.

I was sufficiently mystified by this that I started looking more closely at the art. There were lots of different kinds of art there - sculpture, oil paintings, Chinese calligraphy. And of these hundreds, maybe thousands of objects, about 90% of them were by the same guy, a man named “H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III”. The remaining 10% was about half by some Chinese woman, I don’t remember her name, and half by famous European 17th century artists - just this smattering of Renaissance portraits in the middle of stuff by these two Chinese people.

Also, the plaques explaining the art started to get increasingly weird. “Chang is one of the greatest artists of his generation” - okay, everyone has to say that. “There have been several Congressional resolutions praising Chang’s brilliance”…okay, I guess Congress praises artists sometimes. One sculpture is “the first irreproducible art in the human world”…that’s kind of strange. Chang has “more accomplishments than anyone else in the past few thousand years”…okay, now I am officially suspicious.

A look at Google confirmed my hunch - the museum is a vanity project by a cult leader who wants to show off his art. It is 90% his stuff, plus a few real artists whose stuff he bought to make the museum seem a little more legitimate. But the thing is, his art is actually really good! His Wikipedia page says he was an artist first and only became a cult leader later, and he is actually a really multitalented painter and sculptor who would be impressive even if he didn’t have his own cult. Or else he makes his followers create good art and let him take credit for it. One or the other. The point is, it’s good art and you can see it for free, subsidized by the artist’s weird pseudo-Buddhist cult.

Also, his cult is great and he is great. For example, according to Chinese media, he used mystical power to rejuvenate himself and become young again. Here is a before-and-after picture of the process.

Also, some of his more hyperbolic claims - that he was awarded the World Peace Prize by members of Congress, or that a Congressional resolution is pending to recognize him as the true incarnation of the primordial Buddha - are 100% accurate. He must just have really good lobbyists. See eg https://projects.propublica.org/represent/bills/110/hres1423 and https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-112sres614ats/pdf/BILLS-112sres614ats.pdf for details. Some other things he seems to have managed, somehow (source 1, source 2)

- In 2011, the then Mayor of Washington, D.C., Vincent Gray, proclaimed January 19th as “H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III Day.” The mayor called on D.C. residents to join him in saluting “His selfless and exceptional work to spread the word of peace to all those in His presence.” The Unites States Postal Service also issued a commemorative cover in celebration of “His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III Day.”

- 5,612 experts and scholars representing forty-eight countries and regions at the World Poets and Culture Congress unanimously named Master Wan Ko Yee [as the Buddha is also known] as a Distinguished International Master.”

- Unless you are an astute follower of Buddhism, you may not have known that His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III has been recognized as the third incarnation of the original Buddha. His accomplishments clearly transcend religion, healing, art, philosophy, and literature. He continues to devote His time to a wide scope of cultural, religious, and various other domains directed at helping people in communities across the globe. His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III has made the following vow: “I will bear all of the karmic offenses committed by living beings, and I will give everyone all of the good karma and merit that I plant.” His Holiness the Buddha has been executing it exactly as is.

I think Dorje Chang Buddha should be a role model for all cult leaders. Instead of sexually abusing their followers or urging them to commit suicide, they should spend time bribing politicians to give them fake prizes and building art museums with free bathrooms in San Francisco.

Putting this here because it’s not ready for the real blog yet but I don’t want to forget it.

One plausible reason why all therapies (and self-help seminars, and religious experiences, etc) help people through placebo effect is by offering a fresh start. That sounds obvious, but I think it hides a real insight.

In https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/26/mental-mountains/, I described how the brain has to solve a problem of generalizing vs. deciding not to generalize across contexts. If you fail at 11th grade math class, your brain should heavily predict you’ll fail at 12th grade math class, moderately predict that you would fail at a career as a mathematician, not especially predict you will fail 11th grade English, make no update at all about whether you would fail as a basketball player, maybe very slightly decrease your general assessment of your self-esteem and competence, etc.

Some schools of therapy focus heavily on context-switching failures - for example, your mother was cold to you as a child, and so now you expect all women to be cold and unloving and believe any woman who shows you affection is trying to exploit you somehow. Or you had one traumatic experience and now you believe the whole world is dangerous and out to get you. They’re supposed to help you learn that even though your mother was some way, now you’re in a totally different environment, your old priors don’t apply, and you can jettison them.

Self-help provides a natural division of your life into two contexts, “me before I got the self-help” and “me after I got the self-help”. The guru sells the idea that now that you gone through his special transformation process, you’ve overcome your flaws and can do all of the things you couldn’t do before.

Some mental blocks are dysfunctional priors - learned assumptions that certain things are impossible or will go badly. Even depression seems to be something like a global prior on negative outcomes. But self-help says “Those priors were true before, but now you’re in a totally different realm where your previous knowledge doesn’t apply”, letting you ignore those priors and do functional things.

One of the worst things about the 2010s media environment is the way that hot-take culture (“what if good things are actually bad?”) combines with social justice culture (where “but marginalized groups!” trumps any other argument), so that anyone who wants to defend their right to have good things has to train themselves to confabulate social justice talking points on demand.

Somebody is always going to be like “Here’s why anyone who cares about climate change needs to replace their pet dog with a pet crocodile”, and the only acceptable counterargument will be “Here’s why demanding pet crocodiles invalidates the transgender experience”.

Here’s a graph of total coronavirus cases over time (source).

Until about 1/25, it was growing exponentially (hard to see on this graph, but if you’d looked at the site on 1/25 it would have been obvious).

Since then it’s been growing linearly. Here are the number of new cases each day:

1/26: 1.7K
1/27: 1.6K
1/28: 1.7K
1/29: 2K

This seems compatible with the epidemic being (so-far) well-controlled in Wuhan and not spreading anywhere else in a significant way.

I haven’t heard anyone mention this and I’m curious what other people think.

The worst part of being a minor celebrity in an effective-altruism-adjacent space is that when I get emails from the head of a charity starting with “Dear Scott…” and moving on to “I’d like to tell you about what our charity is doing for the upcoming year”, it takes a few seconds’ work to figure out whether it’s a spam email trying to trick me into thinking it’s a personal communication, or an actual charity head trying to get in contact with me.

Taoist temple in Weihai, China.

A British official described the CRB as a “piratical state organized for benevolence.”

If you read my main blog, Slate Star Codex, this is your last chance to take my yearly survey.  https://forms.gle/CiKdxzEPBak6CnZR7 , should take about 30 minutes.