01 — 85 pieces
Essays
Long-form arguments on intelligence, consciousness, software, and meaning.
Feb 16, 2025 Consciousness and Entropy Consciousness as entropy-reduction; humanity's cosmic role Dec 28, 2024 agi is overrated AGI is already here as AI employees working while you sleep Dec 28, 2024 stoic negative visualizations vs pessimism Generative Stoic negative visualization vs destructive pessimism Dec 20, 2024 The New Money Making Landscape Shift from bits economy to atoms/manufacturing Dec 19, 2024 on working hard Working hard to reach the longevity-research payoff Aug 4, 2024 real want The difference between wanting and truly wanting Jul 28, 2024 Inner Scorecard for Personal Growth Buffett's inner vs outer scorecard applied to life design Apr 27, 2024 the cpu will die and gpu thrive Sequential CPU → parallel GPU as AI finds rules automatically Apr 14, 2024 on strategy games Games as evolutionary simulation for second-order thinking Mar 14, 2024 why found a startup Make entropy useful; own your destiny Jan 13, 2024 human machine interface evolution Bytecode→LLM as next human-computer interface Dec 13, 2023 On herd mentality Herd thinking is cheap; leaps require leaving the collective Nov 18, 2023 God Is Dead and ChatGPT is the new God Nietzschean meditation on LLMs replacing religion's alignment function Sep 24, 2023 bits and atoms Thiel innovation gap; atoms still has low-hanging fruit Sep 24, 2023 fast iteration - software vs hardware Mutation-testing vs simulation-first (SpaceX) Sep 23, 2023 build a sense of urgency inside and overdeliver outside Impossible internal deadline; deliver early outside Sep 13, 2023 the programmer syndrome Programmers over-index on solutions (availability bias) Sep 9, 2023 problem pool and warfare Problems are Gaussian; software crowded, hardware open Jun 26, 2023 Life Entropy Death Life as temporary entropy reduction Apr 27, 2023 Epistemological simplicity and software abstractions Popper's falsifiability applied to abstraction design (GC case) Apr 13, 2023 The evolutionary need for consciousness Consciousness evolved to simulate the future; will LLMs? Apr 1, 2023 Leveraging LLMs with mental models LLMs to expand and contract your map of the territory Mar 21, 2023 Existential risk and ChatGPT apprehension of Asimov laws ChatGPT embodies Asimov's laws via RLHF; AI safety as law-forging Mar 2, 2023 Embeddings in the human mind Language learning as embeddings: words mapped by co-occurrence Feb 11, 2023 Mesa optimization Learned models become optimizers — second-order alignment risk Feb 7, 2023 Parental Selection in Human Evolution Natural + sexual + parental selection Jan 25, 2023 Consciousness Consciousness as emergent feeling from a Society of Minds Jan 22, 2023 Humans are pretty good at human games Big brains for game-theoretic competition Jan 15, 2023 Compliment Compliment vs criticism across traditions (Taleb/KM/Gupta) Jan 9, 2023 The observer is the observed Krishnamurti observer-observed; self/world interconnection Jan 9, 2023 Try catch is the dark matter of start-ups Startups ship fast using try-catch as de facto QA Jan 4, 2023 Biology and altruism and egoism Dawkins gene's-eye view of egoism vs kin altruism Jan 4, 2023 Intelligence is now about good prompts Prompt engineering as the new intelligence bottleneck Dec 24, 2022 Google Search chances of survival vs large language models LLMs + retrieval make search obsolete Dec 16, 2022 Success Kapil Gupta: obsession with "success" blinds us to its causes
Timeless
— A large part of artificial intelligence is a copy of organic intelligence Does AI innovate or just replicate nature's algorithms? — AI merely learns a blurred map of the territory AI learns human maps, not territory; epistemically handicapped — Anthropology is not scientific Behavioral speculation lacks falsifiability — Beauty from the perspective of old and new brain Genetic vs rational perspectives on beauty — CAPTCHA is an anti concurrency weapon developed by Google CAPTCHA as anti-competitive crawler defense — Disjointed thinking Critique of specialization; Morin; philosophy as integration — Diverging from Epistemic consensus Consensus as cortical-column voting; when it fails to map territory — Eugenics Sexual selection; no convergence on beauty — Extraterrestrial life do not have time to evolve before the end of the simulation Multiverse as genetic algorithm racing the big crunch — Fine tuned Universe Tegmark's trilemma — Genetic diversity is good but genetic diversity is evil Diversity for fitness vs cultural "purity" tension — How much we should delegate to the machines Knowledge atrophy from over-delegation (GPS example) — Humans are in a Red Queen competition with artificial intelligence Red Queen race; humans and AI improve together — If you do not practice philosophy, you are merely a robot Self-reflection/philosophy as essential to consciousness — Inferential distance Yudkowsky's inferential distance; we underestimate gaps — Innovation Innovation (making accessible) vs invention; ergodicity — Is intelligence purposeful computation Does AGI require purposefulness (Kurzweil human-vs-rock) — Language games Conversation as game-theoretic language games with misaligned goals — law vs integrity Law as formal cooperation; integrity as informal abundance layer — LLMs are extending the number of operations we can perform without conscious thought LLMs as the cognitive-era cooking/washing machine — Modern programming is all about low entropy conversation starters Programming as writing minimal prompts for LLMs to complete — Most computer programs are fragile Software lacks biological redundancy; brittle vs antifragile — Not getting fooled by appearance Evaluate people by mind patterns, not form — Philosophaster Against pseudo-intellectuals; clarity over jargon — Philosopher Cicero/Russell/Aristotle on the philosopher and flourishing — Pivot Pivot = change customer or problem; platform pivots — Purpose Purpose as both survival-machine optimization and poetic meaning — Relativity and language Is language broken because built on absolute space in a relative universe — Robosexuality AI relationships as consistent with human sexuality — Silver Rule Inverse golden rule and its cross-intelligence limits — Simulation theory Fine-tuning makes simulation credible; sim happens in perception — Software 2.0 From binary to learned maps to natural-language programming — Sprints are more efficient than marathons Focused sprints reach higher complexity than marathons — The absurdity of Turing machine's local state Against local-state machines; distributed state like nature — The asymmetry of second law of thermodynamics Entropy breaks reversibility; simulation implications — The invisible magic of words Conversation as spell-casting that reshapes others' maps — The dream of Episteme Allegory on knowledge and freedom (WIP) — The Victory Of Man At Nature's Game Memetic transfer drove runaway brain evolution — Time flowing is an illusion Relativity: all moments coexist — Truth is a Pathless Land Krishnamurti/Bruce Lee/Hesse/Einstein on truth's pathlessness — Understanding is freedom, freedom is understanding Understanding as breaking from the monkey brain — Valuation Thiel private-valuation paradox — We are optimized for survival not for understanding physics Quantum physics unintuitive because evolution didn't need it — We are unaware of aliens because they live in the level two unobservable multiverse Fermi paradox via Level-2 multiverse — We have evolved to search for a purpose, not to find one Evolution drives perpetual desire; goalless AI won't act — Why AI does not understand LLMs correlate tokens; lack territorial grounding — Why death exists Death as genetic-algorithm optimization; solvable — Why Discord fails to restrict noise Low-friction switching → information overload — Why women care more for prettiness Ridley on sexual selection signals — Writing Writing as preservation of thought (Franklin)