The Metagame #45 - Alex Zhu & Romeo Stevens | Debating the Perennial Philosophy
19 snips
Feb 9, 2026 Romeo Stevens, Qualia Research Institute co-founder and Mealsquares founder who writes on Buddhism and pedagogy, and Alex Zhu, math olympian and AlphaSheets co-founder working at the intersection of rationality, AI alignment, and mysticism. They debate perennialism, contrast top-down transcendence with bottom-up pedagogy, discuss moral realism vs coordination, and probe how religions compress practices into transferable insights.
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Reality As Invariance
- Alex reframes 'real' as 'invariant'—things stable across transformations feel more real.
- He connects moral intuitions to symmetry and compression against experience.
Defend Slack For Exploration
- Protect open, exploratory societies that produce 'slack' for investigation and antidote development.
- Romeo advises defending conditions that let thinkers develop remedies for maladaptive cultural attractors.
Cancer As Communication Failure
- Cancer may result from breakdowns in cooperative signaling among cells, not just rogue growth.
- Alex and Romeo use this biological analogy to explain cultural defection and coordination collapse.
