This is where I save interesting links.
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World War AI
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How to Understand Things
An essay from pandemic times. Which has some uncomfortable realities in it. Mainly, good thinking requires more focus, more curiosity, less concern about what others think, and so on.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-111014900
People who have not experienced the thing are unlikely to be generating truth. More likely, they’re resurfacing cached thoughts and narratives. Reading popular science books or news articles is not a substitute for understanding, and may make you stupider, by filling your mind with narratives and stories that don’t represent your own synthesis.
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Confidently Wrong
Uh oh. This spells trouble for the staunchly, and always, anti-expert crowd. Most of them are on Twitter and host podcasts (of which I listen to).
Most importantly on this issue:
The authors suggest leaning on social norms and respected community figures instead.
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The Monks in the Casino
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The Church Better Start Taking Nazification Seriously
“We have a choice. The Bible will not sit alongside Mein Kampf. The cross will not yield to the swastika. We must ask right now: Jesus or Hitler? We cannot have both.”
What an unfortunate reality the American church, and evangelical movement specifically, will need to be confronting now.
I remember reading a decent amount of Russell Moore in Trump 1 but have since forgotten about him. He’s still fighting the mainstream of his own movement it seems.
I pray this turns around.
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Baby Shoggoth is Listening
This subject is interesting to me. I find I don’t get particularly drawn up in the subject of legacy, but the framing of impacting the AIs by showing it who you are and what you find important is interesting.
I don’t think I’d say that I have to write so that the AIs know me. I’ll be focusing on my kids and Sadie and friends and the Valley knowing me. But, anyone who’s ever written and shared a word has wanted to impact someone or something through it.
And this part of the blog I am drawn to: the only way to influence the Shoggoth is to write to it in a way that steers it and tells it who you are and what ideas are important to you.
There’s some weird metaphysical angle that the author gets at, mainly if you write and the AIs find you could you be brought “back” into consciousness again? The author relates this to resurrection and being a Christian with the belief that there will be a new heaven and a new earth when God redeems the world through Christ’s return, I guess it’s not all that weird.
I think I have a high discount rate on this though.
Right now, I’m writing primarily in order to 1) make sense of all that comes before me and around me in some present period of time and 2) leave my kids a central place to discover that thinking and writing when and if they want to.
I guess along the way I can afford some attention to “writing for the AIs”. For what purpose? I’m not sure. But, a small amount of effort doesn’t feel wasted to me.
This on the “sci-fi form of Pascal’s Wager” makes some sense to me, so perhaps that’s the understanding from which I write a couple of words for the AIs:
“Something similar can help for the question of resurrection. There is, shall we say, a distinct lack of certainty about that, too. If you believe that a human is basically a biological computer, a belief I resisted until recently, then it stands to reason that some supercomputer in the distant future will figure out how to emulate us like a PC now emulates a Super Nintendo. If you don’t believe that, well, laugh away, as I did until I changed my mind. And if you don’t know what you believe, here’s where familiar moral thinking might be further applied. It might even tip things in the “sure, why not” direction, because heard this way, the question sounds much like a sci-fi form of Pascal’s wager. Pascal argued that even if God’s existence is uncertain, belief is rational: The cost of being wrong—wasted piety—is finite, whereas the reward of being right—salvation—is infinite. Here, the calculation looks like this: If digital resurrection exists and you wrote yourself down, you or your near-analog get infinite or near-infinite life; if it doesn’t, you’re dead anyway, and have merely wasted some time. Worst-case scenario? You’ve written something for the here and now that humans can read and appreciate.“
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“The end of our extremely online era”
We will be lucky if this comes true (is what my gut tells me), and it can start now in my own life if I’m willing.
To deny all of the social media and scrolling and “extremely online” behavior is, right now I think, an extremist position.
Some things are worth being an extremist over, until the tide turns are you’re apart of “the middle” again – average.
Uncomfortably numb, but praying the next flick of the thumb will be the one.
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We will look back on these times with a compassionate sadness. Shake our heads at how ignorant and naive we all were, to give up so much for so little.
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Anomie
Back in the days of yore, if you did not manage to get a job at Google in 2005 you could still buy its stock. You had at least the option of gaining from its appreciation assuming you thought it inevitable. Over the last decade and a half there have been multiple generations who succeeded from getting a job at one of these giants and working their way up, and equally and more from people who invested in those giants. That’s what brought about the belief that the arc of history trended upwards.
Today, there exists no such option. There only exists short term manic rises even for the longer term theses.
And:
The claim is not that returns vanished, but that access to the tails shifted.
Full post here on Substack by Rohit Vishnan with a great subtitle, “the vibes they are a-changin”.
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When do you know if it’s over?
Trump threatens withholding federal funding if Zohran Mamdani wins the NYC mayoral election.
Truly insane, though very normal, behavior at this point.
I just don’t see how this sort of Central Planning and authoritarianism doesn’t stop now that it’s started.
When I say over, I do think that this experiment, or this chapter of the American experience, could end soon. But, I also think there’s something on the other side of it.
This is incredibly bad on it’s face.
It’s catastrophic played out at scale because it’s open ended Supreme Leadership that respects no norms, institutions, or laws.
I hope we don’t play this out.
Plus, will “the other side” not do this sort of thing if they win the White House (if) in the 2028 election?
“Gavin Newsom tweets he’ll withhold federal funding for Arkansas after it defies ___ presidential executive order.”
Bad stuff.