Changes – failed experiments

The logic.
My ideal is that people collectively, in large numbers, will make better choices. The data I collected as the head of Comfac IT, trying to sell the service at 1/5 to 1/10 the price of the competition, did not prove true. ERPS, data analysis, and handling are not something a collective of people will gravitate to. Fewer and fewer things fall under collective intelligence as AI reshapes the information landscape, allowing the creation of astroturf data — and most importantly, killing off institutions that interpret and collect this data.

So making a cheaper, superior product and service is dead. At 47 years old, I learned the lessons of many older people before me about how naive I was and how people were “sheep” and needed to be manipulated. That lesson — that veiled insult and degradation of people and their circumstances — is anger directed at them acting against their self-interest. Only at 47 years old did I have the resources of a company to try this experiment. And in one year, around 2025, I had this experiment, and I made this critical mistake.

My wife is helping me with this, and she gets shocked at how quickly I changed strategy, because our failure — or my failure — was always on my mind. You give me facts, and I pivot so quickly and so certainly it’s scary for some people. Of course, as a gamer, you act on new information, and you always have a disclaimer: we are only so much sure about something, and there exists a possibility.

So we are pricing like the other companies. Not all is abandoned — we will price high upfront, but our total cost of ownership is still low, and we will train and help transition. Although services, which is in nuance lower valued than implementation (which is weird to a human), but this is the market: Moloch and Mammon. It really makes me feel like crap.

Moloch = God of Child Sacrifice. In Scott Alexander’s “Meditations of Moloch,” he equates it as the market. I want to make a distinction that Moloch should be a Cthulhu mythos of shaping our humanity. It should represent what we are sacrificing our children into. If we create an attention-starved world, then the imagery is that we are taking our child’s mind and sacrificing that.

Mammon = God of Greed and the Market. If we heed the call of the market despite the reality of it being unsustainable, creating a negative feedback loop, then we are offering a sacrifice to Mammon.

Shoggoth = the AI — the alien intelligence we feed and sacrifice to, not knowing its cost, and it gives us lies we want to hear mixed in with insight and intelligence.

I don’t want a world where billionaires rule — but that’s the world. As my friends point out, if collective intelligence made people act in their best interest, then there wouldn’t be hoarders who coveted and kept vast wealth. But we don’t live in that — we live in good and bad billionaires — and collecting a lot of resources and capital (both social, fiscal, and physical) is what we are in. But I was in denial about it for so long — that my kids had a chance in a fairer world — and now it means that if not for the wealth of my family, my kids have no chance.

I have to work with greater nuance. It means every decision is not because it’s good, but because it will allow me to have better strategic positioning. Because humanity is so broken, it will not act in its best interests. We see the politics, the evidence, we see what is happening. I live in Pasig, and while Vico is the exception, “realists” still fuel it all. I’m 47, and my friends are mostly older than me at 60, and the younger friends at 53, and people at work are in their 70s — the things that they have experienced and that shaped their influence on me were what I rejected as a Gen Xer.

I wish for the days when we are peers who can argue merit — but then I realize such a society would be so alien and so scary. Imagine such a society: the mediocre and worse would be defanged, as everyone in positions of influence are meritocratically superior, and we are just necessary and protected humans who simply aspire to be these more capable leaders who sacrifice a lot to be kind. We get to keep family, personal lived internal worlds, and loved ones in return; we are not on the front lines arguing, debating, and maneuvering with nuance in the slow machine of collective progress. Collective progress is slow, and any charismatic liar can rally the mediocre to destroy it all and make inept, selfish people be in charge. I can probably replay thousands of simulations of this game with an AI agent — that people who don’t have the capacity and humanity to understand and care for everyone, and the empathy — will always be tricked. And in this game theory model, the ability to leave to forge their own world is the only way uneven and heterogeneous improvement of society can be acceptable.

And it is in these pockets: 9 out of 10 societies will revert back to these exploitative societies.

Here I am — the rich person helping out. There is this group of PUP students — they are computer engineering — they have 400–500 hours of internship WHILE having a capstone project. I don’t know what the school was thinking when they can “part time” their capstone. In our company — Comfac Global Group — we let our students do their capstone as part of their internship because the math doesn’t make sense. Are we teaching students to sacrifice their personal life, to sell their 40 hours a week to a business who doesn’t pay them, while they have to find time in that week to finish a capstone project? Our company allows students to do their capstone project as part of their internship. We give them 3D printers, a 50W carbon fiber laser, our expertise, our ability to source, and funds to have a capstone project comparable to that of a rich student in polish and support (because that’s what we did for my nephews — building a biotech lab and sensor suites so they could get into a prestigious university in the USA — but this helps fund all these other students and the R&D project). Nicco and my other former interns who are freelancers help these people with funding from me.

People keep saying my love for teaching is like some obsession — when I see something broken, I tolerate it until I start suffering under it — and I continuously suffer under a society that acts against its self-interest.
I’m helping the students — but the most strategic help I can do is helping them get their professors to not give a MECHANICAL engineering capstone — which is a dumbwaiter as their capstone made by computer engineers. This is so wrong, but the thing is that I have very little influence in the matter. I would have called out the professor: If you are going to have these students do this, seek mechanical engineering and industrial technology students to help them. That they develop the sourcing skills where they go out and meet these people and look for win-win. I would have guided them and funded them — to just do the footwork of an “adventurer,” chasing leads and understanding groups and seeing how they can network to meet fabricators and students, and looked for win-wins.

Back to the topic — these projects are now going to be consolidated. They do not help with the bottom line of sales we need to grab. The marketing and operations team will focus on supporting the revenue generation — and not these projects. Organizing these projects and optimizing them will be key. These projects are embedded systems and self-hosted AI models for automation.

My passion for fixing things is a bias — because fixing things represents a clear problem statement, even with a lot of budgetary complaints — a bias for someone with ADHD who needs clear focus. The ambiguity of sales and marketing needs my wife and people with normal brains — the ability to work with the constantly changing dimensions. ADHD gets overwhelmed with so much ambiguity — it’s an unclear mental model of an objective that taxes working memory. Regular people with more stable focus and concentration, who are not fragile or brittle in attention, can handle these ambiguous, amorphous goals — which, by the way, is amorphous to us ADHD people. It’s clear to them — even if they cannot give the words or ruminating loops of clarification an ADHD person with hyperfocus needs.

An ADHD person who builds on social relationships can probably do the same and even excel here — but an ADHD person with science and technical skills who has no strong mental model of people and relationships will suffer here. Attention persistence — the ability to ignore distractions — a society is built on risk-taking phenotypes and distractible phenotypes that are able to find alternative strategies, while the population who is able to focus on the current winning strategies doesn’t get distracted by outlier data and information.

My problem is that I’m that outlier, distracted person.That my experiment so obviously failed – and that it was staring at me the whole time, the reason, and I could not accept it. And i tried something many have already tried but like people like me – i needed to tangibly feel the failure and see why it didnt work. I will have to accept this and try again and build toward a society that can act on its best interest and oppose those against their interest – but this experiment will be done countless times and and so difficulty be unable to work together for a common good. Im not giving up – this decades long set back – the ability to train people who will act on their best interest with my tiny amount of resources and influence will be decades long set back that if my children take over from me will hopefully try again and again – and probably 300 years from now will see it work out when humans can escape each other with the incredible capital and power to rebuild worlds in their image and of these millions of colonies create a self sustaining people who will discover that its only in this very ability to Leave and remake humanity will we be able to sustain such higher ideals. the 99.9999 % of humanity who will always succumb to exploitation in degrees and in some form – we just hope they have the means to escape and always start over. That the exploitation is hard wired because our finite human lives will find it difficult to build our own versus taking or working together what can just be taken. and a humanity who will fight exploitation to have it so fully ingrained in their culture and species memory that – it will take thousands of years to undo what we have done for thousands of years.

it will not be in my lifetime or the lifetime of people who i can trace my lineage to. it will be in the humans are so far removed from me and in a case so impossible and improbable. its depressing –

its depressing to look at the Philippines – and look at African culture who has a strong memory of being enslaved and exploited – that so thoroughly we have been exploited and how much we empower our exploiters and give them thrones by which to rule us. and that anyone who believes otherwise is so easily demonized and eliminated. No historical memory exists – i have no hope of this memory persisting in my generation as it passes to my children and they will be forced to forget it or else they be seen as crazy – as more and more of their generation are reprogramed to tow they line. the technology Comfac makes is not just for Fiipinos – filipinos may not be the people who will find its use to free us from bonds. My ethnic bias is something i have to get over – will hope maybe our ideas is just a footnote of some sucessful emancipating civilizations story. Culturally Lobotomized – no part of the brain exists that can reconstruct what was lost. Empathy should have been the tool to remember in the suffering of others what the Philippines has lost – but that too was so thoroughly eliminated. All we can probably do is hold our loved ones close as we end. i wish i was overly dramatic – but as I get older and my anticipation of what terrible thing made each technology of the company relevant – and that future terrible things are in the horizon and that the next generation will steward this technology well to have a chance to change is so overwhelming against the odds – i might as well get lost in my Fiction of philippines that is transformed with empathy and compassion – the values we say we believe in but act differently in reality.