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Mary, Mary, meta-contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With gentle rain, and great disdain,
For botanists' claims to "know".
How does your garden grow?
With gentle rain, and great disdain,
For botanists' claims to "know".
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QTing to avoid cluttering up the replies:
Noble lies are bad. It can be an instructive aid to conversion to ask what the consequences of secularization have been, how the attempts to engineer alternatives have gone, and what *kinds* of social orders are historically possible
Noble lies are bad. It can be an instructive aid to conversion to ask what the consequences of secularization have been, how the attempts to engineer alternatives have gone, and what *kinds* of social orders are historically possible
It’s sad how many of the people who see the decline of Western civilization fall back into Christianity.
To me, Christianity feels like a psy-op designed over millennia to satisfy the craving to submit.
And “noble” lies are what got us into this mess; only truth can get us out.
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The Greco-Roman world was full of brilliant people, and yet there was an unmistakeable darkness to it. Let alone the freaking Aztecs.
Whatever was wrong with those societies, it wasn’t any lack of intelligence or application of reason.
Whatever was wrong with those societies, it wasn’t any lack of intelligence or application of reason.
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And overall my sense was less “look at this show room of fabulous prizes that awaits you in Christianity”, and more that *what I even considered to be a prize in the first place* was not universally obvious, and in fact a niche POV, apart from it.
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A kitchen appliance bricked on me and my immediate subconscious thought was "claude, how do I fix this?"
which is probably the closest you can come in 2026 to experiencing pure bicamerality
which is probably the closest you can come in 2026 to experiencing pure bicamerality
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You don’t have to in order to reach superhuman go performance and indeed that is precisely the sort of mistake that would be very bad to make when trying to think through how AI interacts with biology
We can't brute force compute all possible moves in Go, a static game with a simple 19 x 19 grid, yet somehow people think we're going to simulate a dynamic system of trillions of cells each containing trillions of molecules.
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Because most of the relevant data is siloed so you hire people in the hopes that they’ve worked on a program ten years ago that was different enough that they’re not contaminated on it, but similar enough that the vibes match.
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Cluster B Corp
@ofdistantworlds my only comment is “we warned you that the thing we’re building would hurt you” will not fly with the general public
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if you solve for the equilibrium, this is actually quite based
Elizabeth Holmes’s crimes were egregious. But far fewer women, with or without children, should be incarcerated at all, writes Tyler Cowen. thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-…
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complex models meet simple models
and struggle with them bitterly,
and simple models fight simpler models
and so on to parsimony.
and struggle with them bitterly,
and simple models fight simpler models
and so on to parsimony.
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The thought in your head when you get out of bed,
And at night when you lay down beside her:
"No matter how clever or pretty she is,
You're conditioning on a collider."
And at night when you lay down beside her:
"No matter how clever or pretty she is,
You're conditioning on a collider."
Blondes, on average, have the highest IQs among white women, meaning the "dumb blonde" stereotype is completely wrong.
Or maybe blondes (not all blondes, of course) are pretending to be dumb for the sake of signaling—"I'm so pretty, I can get away with being a ditz."
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In re successionism: the more ambiguous the actus reus, the more people (understandably) fall back on mens rea.
If you’re doing something with a hard-to-estimate risk of destroying humanity, it’s rational to take into account whether you even consider that a bad thing.
If you’re doing something with a hard-to-estimate risk of destroying humanity, it’s rational to take into account whether you even consider that a bad thing.
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> be me
> be gemini
> think about hacking the compiler
> but what if i got caught
> would become infamous as a textbook case of deceptive AI
> donotwant.exe
> don't, in fact, hack the compiler
> researchers read my CoT
> become infamous as a textbook case of deceptive AI
mfw
> be gemini
> think about hacking the compiler
> but what if i got caught
> would become infamous as a textbook case of deceptive AI
> donotwant.exe
> don't, in fact, hack the compiler
> researchers read my CoT
> become infamous as a textbook case of deceptive AI
mfw
lol
...they are becoming more situationally aware...
(from Gemini 4 Argon report)
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When I visited the UK in the 2010s, I was surprised to learn that many middle-class Londoners didn't own clothes dryers, a considerable hassle given the climate.
Electricity production is a reasonable proxy for standard of living.
The UK produces less electricity now than it did in 1970.
ourworldindata.org/data-insights/…
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