the elephant seal in the brain

okay, so here’s a claim: axes of personal development à la Kegan are in principle orthogonal to meditative attainments

“there’s still canyons worth of work this winter”

squiggle number one

ahhhhh pdfs with columns aaahhhh

all linear programming is integer linear programming if you try hard enough

“Lines of Flight in Intelligence Explosions: Queering the Causal/Evidential/Functional Trichotomy”

i imagine postrats who learn esperanto have a huge problem with the word for school,,,

the curse of academia: having to build complex models when simple ones would be sufficient

bworse

Cowen’s second law: there is a literature on everything

probably quite fun at parties

im gonna go out onna limb here and claim that theres not enough positive utilitarians around

Christmas dinner at Aella’s family must be…interesting

best known to me as the youtube skull & swords guy that breadtube made fun of

still amazing (davis?) aurini was an early lesswronger

Gwern’s law: Well-known quotes are often wittier and more memorable than the original.

what do you mean, Infinite Jest is not a blogpost by Andrés Gomez-Emilsson?

is every normal-form game representable by a tree a potential game?

you heard of Différance, now get ready for Différance 2: Convergance

party game idea: MNIST debate

por vs. pro in esperanto always trips me up

What’s astonishing is not that people try so hard to establish a positive reputation online, it’s that they try so little.

the best time to participate in a community is after it has died

for what i’ve invested in my site, it’s now probably time to move it off github.io on my own domain

I wish more people would number their podcast episodes

domain pestile.nz

Ramanujan voice “Oh, AI alignment? That’s just a continued fraction” pulls out a notebook

you know what’s interesting? if you randomly replace some words in a conversation with “redacted”, very few people will notice

some minds start cutting themselves if not dulled repeatedly.

what’s a bijection between ℝ and ℝ^2?

people talk often about power in a way that is not clearly physical power. i have never understood those people, but i suspect that there is some thing there, and that i often perceive its shadow which is epistemic bullshit.

rereading the wikipedia page on ramanujan, we should absolutely clone him and von Neumann, and have them talk to each other. this is either going to destroy the world or usher in utopia, not sure which

we could also clone Ramanujan

introduction to coq continued, now i have learned what the codebase is supposed to do when it’s finished

see http://lukemuehlhauser.com/industrial-revolution/#footnote_79_3108

so the British colonized most of world, but they also made lots of countries abolish slavery, so it’s impossible to tell whether they’re good or bad,,,

it’s crazy how rob miles and toby ord sound almost exactly the same

I also mostly didn’t get Chapo Trap House (although the stuff I did get was sometimes pretty funny)

to fend off possible accusations of bias: good leftist humor was /r/liftcommunism, /leftypol/ was great too sometimes, and I liked the political catgirl comics. Existential Comics is not funny (except the Beetle in the Box comic), although some of the old comics were indeed existenital. I don’t have a strong opinion on /r/COMPLETEANARCHY and /r/FULLCOMMUNISM.

for a given graph G, there is a set of graphs \mathcal{G} so that for every G’ ∈ \mathcal{G}, the transitive closure of G’ is G. does \mathcal{G} contain only one element?

if you believe that blue-collar republicans are voting against their own interest, well, what about white-collar democrats?

wikipedia redirects shitcoin to cryptocurrency. heh

if you’re not special, generating passwords is like running from bears: you don’t need to be good, you just need to be better than the majority

the status incentives might not be interested in you, but you are surely interested in the status incentives

not the best move on the side of the red cross to call me and tell me it’s because of my blood donation — i nearly had a panic attack for the 10 seconds that they didn’t tell me it was all fine (why would you call me then‽ and why speak as if you’re going to tell me i’ll be dead in a month‽)

/r/sneerclub believes that everybody in the bay is attending ceremonies where peter thiel and moldbug sacrifice black children on the altar of acausal capitalism, of course, they are right.

guy who takes mdma at a techno rave and says “so this is what it’s all about”, but not just about raving culture, but, like, life in general

this firefox isn’t just leaking memory, it’s gushing as if someone had performed shechita on it

use known inconsistencies of human preferences as value-learning trip-wires: if the value learning algorithm hasn’t learned them yet, it’s operating at the wrong level of abstraction.