Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 34

Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he is more compassionate than average.

He feels that this manifests itself notably through his desire/ability to create amazing documentation content and notably for free.

Also related is Ciro's worry about social inequality and how to reduce it.

In school, especially before university, Ciro felt that he always treated "the ugly/unpopular" (it is horrifying that such perception of a person exists! but true) girls really well, which led some of them to like him romantically. In part this was de to Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality and enter through the narrow gate approach to life. But was also partly Ciro's fault, he should have been clearer that he was not truly interested, but he was also lonely, curious about how it was like having girlfriend, and it feels good to have someone like you. This was a sin.

He also feels like he treated working class employees (and don't forget, this is Brazil, e.g. his building janitors in São Paulo lived in the nearby favela!) with extreme equality, sometimes even better, than other richer people.

One thing Ciro does not do however is give money to beggars on the street. Those beggars do make Ciro feel extremely bad for not giving, but he feels that they must be drug addicts to be out on the street like that, and that this money would be better invested in OurBigBook.com. But maybe this is just wrong. How fucked up the world is, how far away are we from unconditional basic income???

Once Ciro was hanging out with one of his father's on a group tourist, and she was a lesbian borderline/actually activist social reform person, and she promptly gave to a beggar without batting an eye, and that made a big impression on Ciro, making him feel even worse about himself.

It must be said that at times this compassion can be a weakness see Ciro's trip to the Municipal Market of São Paulo.

Trump's election was an act of protest by the people, because they felt, and rightly so, that the promises by the democrats to decrease social inequality were just full of shit.

So instead, the old voice of nationalism spoke louder.

Ciro agrees with analysis of Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021) that this is largely because government is losing all power to do anything meaningful. So the only thing left to do is to speak empty words to calm, or exacerbate, people's fears and hopes.

Ciro believes it is important not hate Trump and his believers, no matter how disgusting Trump might seem, a large part of which is likely theater. We have to try and understand them instead.

Trump's election shows clearly how the democrats let down the poor. This understanding is a good thing. It shows that we all have to make greater efforts to help the poor. Just voting for some random democrat candidate who doesn't really care every four years is not enough.

Another positive point of Trump's election is that it further highlighted the power of social media even further: it now feels more likely than ever before that anyone can run for office, since a president without any previous political office was elected (of course, being filthy reach helps a lot still, which is a problem). And this further highlights the need for regulate social media, to prevent events such as the deplatforming of Donald Trump

We should calmly analyze and understand how someone that tries their best to appear disgusting managed to win. Some interesting analyses of Trump's character:

Falun Gong's support for Trump is described at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/flg-trump at github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship.

Most damning moments:

While Ciro Santilli is a big fan of having "one global country" (and language), which is somewhat approximated by globalization, he has come to believe that there is one serious downside to globalization as it stands in 2020: it allows companies to pressure governments to reduce taxes, and thus reduces the power of government, which in turn increases social inequality. This idea is very well highlighted in Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021).

The only solution seems to be for governments to get together, and make deals to have fair taxation across each other. Which might never happen.

Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so it is mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!

If computers are bicycles for the mind, Ciro wants this website to be the Ferrari of the mind.

Since Ciro Santilli was young, he has been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics due to his bad memory.

The beauty of those subjects has always felt like intense sunlight in a fresh morning to Ciro. Sometimes it gets covered by clouds and obscured by less important things, but it always comes back again and again, weaker or stronger with its warmth, guiding Ciro's life path.

As a result, he has always suffered a lot at school: his grades were good, but he wasn't really learning those beautiful things that he wanted to learn!

School, instead of helping him, was just wasting his time with superficial knowledge.

First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.

Ciro once asked a chemistry teacher some "deeper question" after course was over, related to the superficial vision of the topic they were learning to get grades in university entry exams. The teacher replied something like:Ciro feels that this was one of the greatest compliments he has ever received in his life. This teacher, understood him. Funny how some things stick, while all the rest fades.

Another interesting anecdote is how Ciro Santilli's mother recalls that she always found out about exams in the same way: when the phone started ringing as Ciro's friends started asking for help with the subjects just before the exam. Sometimes it was already too hopelessly late, but Ciro almost always tried. Nothing shows how much better you are than someone than teaching them.

Then, after entering university, although things got way better because were are able to learn things that are borderline useful.

Ciro still felt a strong emotion of nostalgia when after university his mother asked if she could throw away his high school books, and Ciro started tearing them all down for recycling. Such is life.

University teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn't want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty, some good relate articles:

The very fact that you had very little choice of what to learn so that a large group can get a "Diploma", makes it impossible for people to deeply learn what the really want.

This is especially true because Ciro was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.

Also extremely frustrating is how you might have to wait for years to get to the subject you really want. For example, on a physics course, quantum mechanics is normally only taught on the third year! While there is value to knowing the pre-requisites, holding people back for years is just too sad, and Ciro much prefers backward design. And just like the university entry exams, this creates an entry barrier situation where you might in the end find that "hey, that's not what I wanted to learn after all", see also: students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.

We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want. They wait through school to get into university. They wait through university to get to masters. They wait through masters to get to PhD. They wait through PhD to become a PI. And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers. And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great. So you just become software engineer or a consultant. Is this the society that we really want?

And all of this is considering that he was very lucky to not be in a poor family, and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers, without which he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't had such advantages in the first place.

But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken. Without technological innovation that is.

The key problem all along the way is the Society's/Government's belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.

Ciro believes however, that exams are useless, and that there are only two meaningful metrics:

Even if you wanted to really learn natural sciences and had the time available, it is just too hard to find good resources to properly learn it. Even attending university courses are hit and miss between amazing and mediocre teachers.

If you go into a large book shop, the science section is tiny, and useless popular science books dominate it without precise experiment descriptions. And then, the only few "serious" books are a huge list of formulas without any experimental motivation.

And if you are lucky to have access to an university library that has open doors, most books are likely to be old and boring as well. Googling for PDFs from university courses is the best bet.

Around 2012 however, he finally saw the light, and started his path to Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment. University was not needed anymore. He could learn whatever he wanted. A vision was born.

To make things worse, for a long time he was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it. He thought:which like everything else is likely derived subconsciously from something else, here Schindler's list possibly adapted quote from the Talmud:

So, by the time he left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as he had once considered, he had new plans.

We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.

And he found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so he might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)

So he started Booktree in 2014, a GitLab fork, worked on it for an year, noticed the approach was dumb, and a few years later started building this new version. The repo github.com/booktree/booktree is a small snapshot of Ciro's 2014 brain on the area, there were quite a few similar projects at the time, and most have died.

Ciro is basically a librarian at heart, and wants to be the next:

While in Brazil, Ciro Santilli used to walk through the outskirts of a small favela to get to university every day, the Favela de São Remo.

See the street view for: R. Catumbi - Vila Butantã Vila Butantã, São Paulo - State of São Paulo, Brazil, e.g. with this link.

To the left, the outer walls of a large police station, with concertina wire on top and all.

To the right, dudes selling drugs on the entry of a small corridor street, presumably to which they could easily escape to in case of need.

The cops could have identified the dealers with binoculars if they actually wanted to!!!

The drug sellers did keep the peace in their business area, and Ciro never got robbed, and would come back from university parties on foot late through the favela.

But Ciro's friends did say that things got much worse after Ciro left, for example a flash kidnapping was reported in 2015.

Wikipedia says that this favela started in the 60s and 70s as settlements of the builders of the University, and that many of the people there still work for the University.

This is consistent with the terribly old buildings Ciro saw when he was at university. They even had the building skills to build their own homes.

The state just has to either legalize those people, or give them houses somewhere else nearby. A world class University is the most important thing a poor country can have, and its image cannot be jeopardized like that.

The existence of that favela, right next to one of the most important universities in Latin America, puts Brazil's surreal social inequality into perspective. Especially considering that before extremely heavy university entry quotas were added, basically all students of the university (or at least of the courses that lead to high paying jobs) had attended private schools, and therefore were not of the poorer classes (see passage about 10 out 500 passage from Section "Free gifted education").

The janitors of the apartment block Ciro lived all lived in the favela. Yes, in poor countries lives are worth nothing, and some poorer people work by watching the entrance of buildings of less poor people 24/7 to guard it from other even more desperate poor people who might want to rob the not so poor inhabitants. They also do janitor jobs like cleaning common areas in parallel.

They were incredibly nice hard-working people, and Ciro spoke often with them. If only given the opportunity, those people could be amazing engineers or scientists obviously. Ciro was also glad to be their friends, and sat down with them quite a few times for several minutes after coming back from University parties, partly because he felt bad about them having to work at that time, but also partly because he just liked them. And they were always up to date on who had come back with a girl to the apartment or not. Ciro imagines that if it had been him, it would have been a perfect bragging opportunity ;)

They had "nothing" but were still happy. This is true wisdom, and a good reminder that all our non-transhumanist technical goals are nothing.

We must destroy social inequality.