Algon

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...

A friend asked me, "what's the right amount of self-esteem to have?" Too little, and you're ineffectual. Too much, and you get cocky. So how do you choose the right balance? I replied that this is a trick question. People with low self-esteem have thoughts like "I'm a loser", "my...

-JenniferRM, riffing on norvid_studies. You should know this by now, but you can just do things. That you didn't know this is an indictment of your social environment, which taught you how to act. You Can Just Do Things Yes, you. All the activities you see other people do? You...