Algon

Walking, I listen for sensations of physical necessity. It is surprisingly hard. Imagining myself jumping huge distances feels like imagining a normal step. Odd, that. Shouldn’t possible acts feel vivid, alive & real in a way fantasy isn’t? I make some progress by tracking what I feel are obstacles, like...

Inventing evolution was hard. No one but the ancient Greeks and a scant few of their intellectual descendants made any progress on explaining where life came from till Darwin. Before that, the closest we really got to a modern understanding of evolution was Epicurus, and it took nearly two thousand...

Or: Lying To Yourself About Changing Your Mind Someone writes a hot take on Twitter, and you see red. “These morons don’t know what they’re talking about!” you think as you rain down keystrokes forming a reply that will sweep them away. Leaning back, you’re glad of a job well...

TL;DR Is a coherence theorem anything that says "if you aren't coherent in some way you predictably have to forgo some sort of resource or be exploitable in some way" and a representation theorem anything that says "rational cognitive structures can be represented by some variant of expected utility maximization?"...

In Rubber Souls, Bjartus Tomas argues that we can have cruely-free status games by creating underpeople without moral worth, perhaps because they are non-conscious, worth to serve as our permanent underclass. This removes the current problem where some poor bugger has to be at the bottom of the barrel, or...

Or: Mind the Cliff Suppose you are a clumsy fellow, liable to knock things over. You've got to write up your thoughts on AI grant today for a job application. Suddenly, there's a knock at the door. You get up, and bump into your side table on the way out,...

Certified funny man @Tomás B. claims that Opus 4.5 is funny. Is he right? Yes. Yes he is. I asked Opus to generate a lot of jokes, after using the standard word-association warm-up soup to give it my psychological fingerprints. And sure enough, it made me smile, snort, and even...