Hegel argues against 'abstract thinking.' Really, he makes the claim that his reader is already against abstract thinking and attempts to make the identity of the practitioners of it legible to the reader. Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated, not the educated. Good society does not think abstractly because it is too easy, because it is too lowly (not referring to the external status) — not from…
This memo was generated for a nascent political theory group, on 19 Feb 2026. Discussion on Google Docs is omitted. It was written in response to Logan Graves’ “Speaking of Liberalism and Post-liberalism,” his “Speaking of Liberalism and Post-liberalism (Addendum),” and my “Desiderata for a Futurist Political Plan.” This memo concerns itself with Landian critiques of liberalism, much more than…
This document was generated for a nascent political theory group, on 18 Feb 2026. Discussion on Google Docs is omitted. Desiderata for an AI-functional futurist political theory plan: The plan should have a basis in fundamental laws of economics & physics. Notably: Iron law of wages. Cf. Robin Hanson on Dreamtime. One must choose between population and status/above-subsistence life. (And one…
For this blog: Reorganize notes/blog posts according to a nicer scheme. Add my recent essays on the future. Make an Atom feed. Make a mailing list. Add many more notes & lists from Obsidian. Add tagging / lists of posts by topic.
if your problem is interesting, you’ll be helped. if your disarray would be interesting, you will be thrown into chaos. either way, if it’s interesting, something will be changed loss functions and training setups >>> techniques and rules do it either right now or probably never. you see what you aim at; you aim at what you see. programming is easy u just open up the magic computer box & make a…
I usually assume that my audience has approximately all the context that I have. I'll structure things like lists of links or otherwise not explain relevant background. I think having a take on the background is often the most interesting thing, though! Approximately nobody has read exactly what I've read, or thinks in exactly the way I do, so it makes little sense to only keep the most absolutely…
(Minor spoilers for specific events and people, mostly if you are either actively reading or are liable to remember details. Some very small spoilers for the overall structure of the story.) “I worry about you. You throw yourself into these situations like you don’t care if you die, like you’ve got nothing to stick around for except for those people you insist on protecting. Dinah, the people from…
Солярис - Дядя Женя Net of Gleams Tangle - Scythe of Luna Graduation, full album - Kanye West Эдуард Хиль "Сережка ольховая" Ace Combat 4 Ost - Megalith Agnus Dei Земляне - Трава у Дома A Better Tomorrow 英雄本色 OST (especially e.g. 09 Mark's Theme) Nothing Is Safe - clipping. Башня из слоновой кости - oxxxymiron Pruit Igoe - Philip Glass Three Note Oddity - The Conet Project The Girl That Love Made…
I think Vassar may be right. Quote from Freire: The teachers thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality , does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only…
Very often I read things on the internet, and very often it's in the rough format you're reading right now—a small personal website with essay-length thoughts on anything and everything. Here are my favorites, in no particular order. Natural Hazard (especially his Ben/Jess/Sarah Starter Pack ) Alexey Guzey Yudhister Kumar Yuxi Liu isopropyletherperoxide (Aryl) Alice Maz The Last Rationalist and…
Spent a long time as middle/high-schooler trying to figure out how to create very natural [[evolution]]/DNA in a simulated environment. I.e. an environment where the agents' genetic codes and inner workings are relatively mundane parts of the environment, but still can undergo substantial speciation and evolution. Like those old [[carykh]] videos, etc. but 'real'. No one has managed to do it…
The current iteration of this blog is approximately the minimum possible that feels "real" to publish — a collection of Markdown files compiled with Zola into a static site for Cloudflare Pages. It should evolve with time, but this approximately fully meets my needs, albeit inflexibly. For ease of reading by both humans and language models, I would like to have: A single HTML page which contains…
Ensemble everything everywhere: Multi-scale aggregation for adversarial robustness shows: Adversarial inputs in image generation are typically specialized to only the last layer of the model, so you can ~entirely defeat them by having the model predict classifications at each layer, and checking if they agree. This holds even under optimization pressure - you can't fool all layers at once. I.e.…
U.S.-China Rivalry in a Neomedieval World the future of the U.S.-China rivalry will bear little resemblance to the titanic struggles of the past two centuries. U.S.-China peacetime competition appears headed to unfold under conditions featuring a high degree of international disorder, diminishing state legitimacy and capacity, pervasive and acute domestic challenges, and severe constraints imposed…
On this video by Phanimations , keeping my own experience in mind but not referring to it directly. There is a crucial difference between problems that behave like homework and those that behave like research. A homework problem has a precise setup and well-specified conditions for success and failure which leak many bits about the solution space. Even if the setup isn't entirely precise or…
The principle is this: Maximize the amount of information you gain, and minimize the amount of information your opponent does. Actions bring information. Speeding up your actions also speeds up your information gain, and vice versa for your opponent. Disrupt your opponent's information-processing systems. Specifically: confuse them with contradictions, overwhelm them, divide them, and move faster…
There's been a bit of recent criticism of 'TESCREAL' from a degrowth perspective, particularly by Emile Torres. I'm less interested in Emile in particular's thoughts on the matter, but they recommended a graphic novel called Who's Afraid of Degrowth? which I read part of and found interesting. It has the sort of reasoning that looks sound if you squint: the sort you put in an essay you don’t…
I'm realizing that the thing happening to this blog is exactly what DRMacIver described : The easiest way to have this is by writing too many good posts! It’s very easy to let your standards creep too high, and you won’t be able to sustain that indefinitely. It’s good to write good posts from time to time, but you’re not going to be able to do it every day. My recommendation is that to counteract…
I've found it very helpful to use writing as a tool for thought. Writing forces you to actually think instead of one-shot evaluating, augments your working memory, and lets you evaluate your thoughts as a whole. When you're using an LLM, the best way to get intelligent output is some sort of chain-of-thought tree search. See Tree of Thoughts , AutoLoom/Jacquard, MiniHF , and the recent math…
About a year ago I realized that I had deeply misunderstood how I was best motivated to do things. From Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile : My idea was to be rigorous in the open market. This made me focus on what an intelligent antistudent needed to be: an autodidact—or a person of knowledge compared to the students called “swallowers” in Lebanese dialect, those who “swallow school material”…
I don't have a good excerpt at hand, but I've been reading Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov 's What was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task . Fedorov is one of the earliest transhumanist / futurist / cosmist authors, and I find his ideas compelling as early examples of patterns of thought similar to mine. One of his most out-of-consensus ideas is that we can and should resurrect the dead…
EVE Online is one of the only MMOs in existence which has high-quality economic systems, such that free trade is left unimpeded by the game's logic (and the system is well-designed enough that this doesn't break everything). The player-driven economy that emerges from it is fascinating . Read about it if you'd like. I'd like to build a game that focuses almost entirely on this sort of economic…
Today I talked to a friend who regularly uses Anki about the potential for using spaced repetition to learn good mental motions / thought patterns. This is especially appealing to me because I constantly feel like I have too little space in my head, that things are always falling out of my awareness. This happens on multiple levels: hour by hour, day by day, and week by week. (Maybe this is…
Given the effectiveness of LLMs in generalizing past the training data, one might expect that all the ideas we might care to look for are in the latent space implied by existing ones. If we analogized this to a high-dimensional space, this could mean that all useful ideas are within a convex hull produced by existing ones. This is obviously not quite true, since the ideas which make up the corners…
Inspired by JD Pressman . About a year ago, researchers were able to apply deep learning models to EEG data to decode imagined speech with 60% accuracy. They accomplished this with only 22 study participants, contributing 1000 datapoints each. Research in using deep learning with EEG is relatively early and not very powerful, but this paper presents an early version of what is essentially…