Top postsTop post
Epistemic status: pure speculation, generated by taking a dubious scientific theory and an uncertainly historical story and knocking them together. I believe that simply stating in plain words the idea that I want to communicate here cannot succeed. Consider the following hypothetical utterance: "Everyone is enlightened already. Enlightenment is no...
A book is like a map. It describes a certain terrain. Even fictional books may describe a real-world terrain, sometimes unwittingly, but I mainly have non-fiction in mind, and metaphorical maps. When I consult a map, there is a vital piece of information I must obtain, before the map will...
1. I linked this in a small comment yesterday, but I think it deserves greater prominence. It's an article by Sam Kriss, "Born in the wrong generation". It starts from an image that someone tweeted of an idyllic scene of paradise: 1950's small-town America. The tweeter's comment was, "Can we...
Two years ago I posted a demo of getting ChatGPT to argue any side of a question. Time to update it. I have just repeated the experiment with ChatGPT 4.5. The first prompt is identical to the one I used the previous time, but as ChatGPT 4.5 did not put...
I've recently seen several articles here that were clearly generated or heavily assisted by AI. They are all dreadful. They are verbose, they are full of "on the one hand" and "on the other", they never make any assertion without also making room for the opposite, and end with "conclusions"...
By "reflexive decision theory", hereafter RDT, I mean any decision theory that can incorporate information about one's own future decisions into the process of making those decisions. RDT is not itself a decision theory, but a class of decision theories, or a property of decision theories. Some say it is...
Here are some variations on the original red-pill-blue-pill question, recently discussed here and here. In all cases, everyone makes their decision in ignorance of everyone else's. For the first four, who dies and who lives is the same function of the actions. That is, the problems are the same in...