The Virtue of a Pipe

ByDan March 10, 2025March 10, 2025 March 10, 2025

Three short quotes from Emerson:

The Virtue of a Pipe

We impute deep-laid, far-sighted plans to Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of their power was in nature, not in them.

Men of an extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, ‘Not unto us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye their deed.

Did the wires generate the galvanism? 

It is even true that there was less in them on which they could reflect, than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. 

That which externally seemed will and immovableness was willingness and self-annihilation. 

…

The Heart Appoints

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, Web Site courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto.

Henceforward I am the truth’s.

Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife,–but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions.

I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints.

…

Testify of That Particular Ray

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. 

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

[It should be noted that Emerson has literally dozens of quotes and analogies that reflect this same idea, listing them all would be a 4000-word essay unto itself. Here I’ve just selected a few representative ones.]

I don’t know if Emerson is right about the virtue of a pipe.

Its clear that many people are only successful because they have long-laid plans, and because they have not followed their eye to “a particular ray,” but have instead found what is useful to others, or profitable, or politically convenient, or effective – and that people following this path have achieved much, and doubtless have done much good in the advancement of our human condition. 

But if I’m honest:

My felt experience has been, indeed, that no muse has befriended me, and no genius has accompanied me, and no allies have emerged unprovoked to my aide when I have done anything other than execute on my Cause of discerning and trying to move towards a Worthy Successor.

I regret almost everything I’ve done other than execute directly on the Cause.

At 23 years old finishing grad school at UPENN I was reading Emerson and Bostrom, and the Cause dawned on me. I was running a martial arts gym in my 6000-person hometown in Rhode Island. No computer science background, or business background, or philosophy background, or wealthy or connected friends or relatives. 

No one would pay me to write about an inevitable transition beyond humanity, and the ways we might think about and coordinate around making such a transition net-positive.

For the first 14 years of recording interviews and writing essays and tweeting about these topics, literally no one cared about the posthuman transition or AGI, outside of a fistful of people in the IEET and LessWrong.

Even when I lived in SF (2015-2018ish) literally no one cared about AGI. I interviewed Ilya as OpenAI was getting formed, I interviewed Bostrom when Superintelligence came out, and many others – but no one read or listened to that stuff – it was still mostly sci-fi.

So I figured out how to get paid (i.e. surviving) while getting closer to AI: Primary market research and publishing on enterprise AI.

Writing about enterprise AI actually got some people to visit my website, and actually got some people to download my podcast.

So I grew Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research, with no real business model but merely with a mandate that:

• (a) I must get closer and closer to the decision makers and real impact of AI in the world, and
• (b) I must maintain objectivity in our coverage as a hard rule. Eventually this turned into executive connections, advertising, and research subscriptions. I definitely almost went broke getting Emerj off the ground – but once it was off the ground I could eat, and I could stay close to AI – but most of my time would be spent selling, hiring, firing, managing processes and systems, and customer relationships. 

On some level everything other than writing essays and having discussions about the grand trajectory of posthuman potentia has been annoying at best and soul-crushing at worst.

My eye fell on that particular ray of the Cause, but I didn’t “virtue of a pipe” it with my entire soul.

I needed to survive. Like the screenwriter who busses tables and does their writing on nights and weekends.

If I was smart I would have found a way to financially survive and thrive while focusing on the Cause itself, not some rough proxy for the Cause (enterprise AI). Signaling smarts and competence (earning “credibility”), and trying to survive (get paid) were probably a real fuck-up. Cowardly half measures. 

I lacked faith enough to “pipe in” what I’m here to pipe in.

I console myself with the knowledge that I carry a bit more credibility having been involved in research and trend coverage with sponsors like Microsoft, NVIDIA, IBM, etc — and that I’ve been able to interview and build a rolodex of AI leadership at OpenAI, Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, other Fortune 500s, and whoever else.

Without that work I would have had no involvement in the OECD or INTERPOL, no speaking at United Nations HQ – and without those intergovernmental connections (which came entirely from people in those orgs reading and respecting Emerj’s work), I would never have met some of my most trusted and important allies in the Cause.

In the words of Emerson’s Days poem:

Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

Timelines are short. 

There’s really no telling if there’s value in what I’m “piping in.” I don’t pretend to be a genius, or even particularly smart, but there are ingredients I’m casting into the great swirling cauldron – ingredients of hard discussions of what we’re turning into and how we turn into it – and I do frankly believe that whether my ideas are right, the discussions must happen.

I’m writing this mostly to make sure that I carve out everything from my life that prevents me from exemplifying the virtue of a pipe to the best of my ability.

As I write in March of 2025 I am working to automate operations at Emerj through growing a strong leadership team and extremely reliable systems and procedures. I worry I’m too late.