Writing that is possibly about no subject in particular
We can forward as a secondary hypothesis that this seems reasonable to Yudkowsky because it is, broadly speaking, his fetish. I wish I could avoid discussing this entirely because it seems uncouth and ad hominem. Yudkowsky has co-authored, with lintamande, a 1.8 million word collaborative glowfic called Planecrash (also titled Project Lawful ). He says that "[w]hether an intelligence being…
Rich and powerful people read and watch the exact same slop everyone else does. There isn't a better, smarter news that doesn't lie to them or make stuff up or hide the most important thing on the ninth page. There is no TikTok for rich people that hasn't got any brainrot on it. Their YouTube recommendations are full of crazy people. There may have once been a clean separation between the…
The Universal Dividend Act: Policy Rationale Summary The Universal Dividend Act establishes a monthly per capita payment to every citizen and national of the United States, funded as a fixed and escalating percentage of federal outlays. The payment begins at 10% of the five-year moving average of federal spending, rises by 4 percentage points annually, and caps at 50%. At current spending levels,…
The Argument in Brief Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord (2018) showed that the Fermi paradox dissolves once we take our uncertainty about the Drake equation's parameters seriously: the silence of the cosmos is unsurprising given what we actually know. This essay argues that their result is not a contingent fact about our particular universe but a generic prediction. Under a simple multiverse model, most…
seriously, please don't be weird about this
'Respect' means many things, not one or two or three. It is an infinitely flexible word. You can be told to respect your elders, to respect women, to take your hat off to be respectful, to respect someone's boundaries, to respect a weapon, to be respectful by listening quietly, to respect nature, to pay respects the dead, to respect yourself, to respect the law, to respect the game by following…
On one notable occasion there was a group that went semicultish whose rallying cry was “Rationality! Reason! Objective reality!” (More on this later.) Labeling the Great Idea “rationality” won’t protect you any more than putting up a sign over your house that says “Cold!” You still have to run the air conditioner— expend the required energy per unit time to reverse the natural slide into…
Almost never. You should almost never be vague when writing or speaking for a large audience. Approximately everything posted on the internet is for a large audience. Much of it is much more vague than it should be. You are almost certainly vague in many instances when you did not mean to be vague. This is a completely normal way to speak if you are speaking to less than fifty people, where…
So, Scott Alexander sent an email to someone in 2014. In 2021 the person who got that email thought that Scott was not being honest about his relationship to the neoreactionary movement, so they published it. Although this has been widely available, even people who have read it have often missed what the email is saying. There are some cases of genuine ambiguity, where there can be more than one…
Hopefully a permanent home for this one