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when you convert all your money into assets stored on the blockchain while you go into cryopreservation in an underground bunker—literally crypt-o-currency

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some blogs have a “start here” page that is not the default landing page: why? most people visiting your site will be there for the first time, but they have to perform an additional click to go to the “start here” page, unnecessarily.

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people liked the old SSC more than ACX because substack is chickenshit minimalism, and it’s slow. you have to wait for the fucking text & comments to appear, while the old site loaded pretty much instantaneously. people have learned to associate chickenshit minimalism aesthetic with slow loading times, and subconsciously detest it bc of that.

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looking from afar, the quality of science there looks quite abysmal, while the field is very important (finding out how to make humans learn things better! come on!)

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humans have invented mathematics surprisingly early (while the status of the number zero was still being debated in ancient greece), and programming surprisingly late (although algorithms were around for a long time, they didn’t catch on until later, even though they seem like an at least equally intuitive concept?)

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to diversify its lingo, the rationality community should adopt the evidentials smṛti (“I read this in a blogpost”) and śruti (“someone told this to me in a one-on-one”).

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Maybe it’s true that intelligence depends on the environment, but consider: the environments where policy iteration performs better than RL with temporal difference learning are kind of dumb.

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which doesn’t have to be this way! blue tribe & anti-agi risk people have mostly orthogonal concerns (i really don’t see the overlap of algorithmic fairness & agent foundations, tbqhwy), and probably ample opportunities for trade (which blue-triber actually cares about compute governance etc.?) but i think zero-sum anti-trade genre affiliation thinking from blue-tribes side will prevent most of that mutually beneficial governance from happening.

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from now on whenever the word “spirituality” or “consciousness” comes up in a discussion i will look slightly quizzical and ask “yeah, sure, but can you feel your toes right now?”

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i don’t know of any Gentle Introduction to Why Prediction Markets are Awesome, à la Wait But Why, with stick figures and just going slow in on the topic, answering objections along the way. i consider it a collective action failure that no such text exists, and also that i don’t know of any book that does this (other than superforecasting)

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