I'm suspicious of predictions about the coming of AGI which are based on the, often impressive, performance of current chatbots? Why? Because that performances is always evaluated against specific tasks. Not all thinking is like that and I suspect that quite a bit of creative thinking isn't like that at all. Rather, it starts with an open-ended exploration.
I have a longish post in which I report the process I went through a couple of years ago to produce an interpretation of Spielberg's "Jaws" using Girard's ideas about mimetic desire and sacrifice. The process started when I watched the film on Netflix without any intention writing about it. I watch a lot of streaming video and never write about most of it. Once I'd seen the film I checked its Wikipedia entry, something I do quite often as a way of 'calibrating' my own impressions. The entry was extensive, and included a comparison with the three sequels, which is said were inferior.
So, out of curiosity, I set out to watch them I found the 3rd and 4th sequels unwatchable, but enjoyed the 2nd. Yes, it was inferior. But why? Too diffuse. Watched the original again. Noticed that it fell into two parts, the first 3/5 taking place in the village and involving lots of players. The last 2/5 took place at sea and involved three men and the shark. I then asked ever more specific questions about that last part until finally it hit me: "Sacrifice! Girard!" Only then did I decided to write a post.
Then I began a much more focused and specific process to gather evidence for my post. I read about Girard (my library, alas, is in storage), interviews with him, some of his articles, I consulted with a grad school buddy who'd studied with Girard, made lots of nots and drafts, etc.
My overall suspicion is the SOA chatbots can do that second process fairly well, but that first exploratory process, that requires agency, autonomy, and curiosity. Chatbots don't have those characteristics and we're all but clueless on how to create them that way. But most post isn't about that part of the argument. It's just a description of my thought process. Here's the link: Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI: Part 2, Interpreting Jaws https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/08/intellectual-creativity-humans-in-loop.html
Tracker ecosystem keeps a lot of obscure, but still not-entirely-out-of-copyright media alive, catalogued, quality controlled, and available, but common software stacks are very hacky and don't scale (10k active torrents can already be a problem). Most of that ecosystem is very xkcd 2347 too (god bless Arvid Norberg).
My substack about agency is going to include an autobiographical series, part my own attempt to get better at writing, part accountability, part therapy I suppose. It's got a trigger warning, I'm not sure it's super valuable reading, but I'm putting myself out there:
I consider these beliefs absolute and don't think it possible that I ever stop believing in them (unless I get mad or otherwise mentally impaired). Despite this high bar, it seems like this set of beliefs is more or less complete, i.e. it's enough to form a relatively full picture of the world.
I'd be interested in feedback of two types: 1. Are these beliefs actually as fundamental as I think? 2. Are there any other beliefs that don't directly follow from what I described, that I should still hold as absolute truths?
Doesn't the C in ZFC stand for "Axiom of Choice"? Sorry to only give feedback you didn't ask for!
Okay let me try to give feedback relating to (1):
I think your third point, "My Feelings are Real" is actually even more fundamental than anything else. Like, all the other beliefs are beliefs _about_ an external world, or about something else, but your experience of qualia just _is_. You could try to disentangle this by rephrasing to something like: I believe my memories of having had past qualia are real; but personally I don't at all feel fundamentally sure about this. I can check a memory by recalling it, and while I can be fundamentally certain that I am having the experience of remembering right now, I can't at all feel certain that it corresponds to a previous instance of actual experience. So the current moment of experience fundamentally just "is", in such a fundamental way that I don't even know if it can be even called a belief.
Regarding your point about the reality of memories, I don't think I would necessarily say that I believe that. As you say, for all we know, memories might be generated during the process of remembering them (I think at least sometimes it actually happens that way). That's why I'm talking about the reality of "thoughts and feelings", which would include the feeling of remembering something.
I agree with you that it's possible to consider belief 3 as more fundamental than belief 2 and belief 1 (though I think Math would still be valid even if nothing existed). As I wrote in the post, I see belief 3 as more of a definition of what "real" is, than a statement of something being real. I think the only reason why I put it after the belief 2 is because I wanted to show that the belief that you are real implies the reality of the world and other people, and for that I needed to already have stated belief 2.
Maybe I would refer to it as "perceptions", more than thoughts and feelings. Most of the time, thoughts and feelings are remembered (especially thoughts too complex to fit in working memory, or long chains of reasoning), so at the fundamental place I would put "current perception", which can be sights, sounds, physical sensations, as well as the perception of a current thought.
I haven't considered that precise interplay between perception (3) and basic induction (2), to infer the existence of the world and other beings. Solipsism has always been pretty disturbing to me.
I think using induction to infer the existence of the world is a pretty important part of my beliefs. Technically you could be a Boltzmann brain just imagining things, but if it were the case, it would be so incredibly unlikely that you imagine such a consistent world, that seemingly operated independently from you.
I don't like eating vegetables. I still try, but I'm probably taking nowhere near the ideal amount.
Is there an easier way to get the health benefits? Are stuff like vitamins and vegetable drinks actually good for you?
Also, where do you all get your health-related advice? I feel skeptical for most things on TV, Google search gives me some combination of ads, random blogs, professional advices that contradict each other.
You should include why you don't like eating them. For the taste or texture, are you worried about what it signals to the people around you, do they cost too much compared to other foods, are they inconvenient to prepare?
Why not create a data point of one, and study yourself? You will need to record metrics like how you feel, hair quality, weight and energy levels, and other things using blood tests. What metrics, how often - ask your doctor. They won't want yiur insurance to pay for it though.
I have become expert in making tasty salads and dressings.
I'd focus on trying to cook things you enjoy. Think new spices, textures, and not just flavors.
Smoothies by Rhonda Patrick (PhD in a biology area) on FoundMyFitness youtube channel are very good. Do look up one of her smoothie recipes for ideas. A Vitamix blender pulverizes greens.
Other than eating healthy, I try to focus on sleep and exercise (yoga, walk, weights). Everything is impacted by nutrition. I'd call the diet I eat vegetarian with eggs and a whole foods diet. One healthy item glaringly missing is fish but I grew up vegetarian and even eating eggs was a challenge.
If you eat a variety of meats including liver than you have a superior source of vitamins and minerals compared to plants. You can get enough fiber from oatmeal.
Veggies are definitely an excellent source of a bunch of stuff, but putting them all in one bag feels like disservice. E.g: some people will happily munch on raw celery and carrot sticks, others will find this repellent and conclude they hate vegetables. But you have options that might not be apparent to you: oven roasted bell peppers + dried tomatoes + garlic + eggplant kept in olive oil will make a great topping to add to sandwiches and burgers; add a few bits of butternut or other sweet squash to your roasted potatoes, add a few bits of cauliflower to mash, get some eggplant dips, drink a glass of gaspacho... You can get a bunch of the good stuff that way, but you might need to ask around / read a bunch of recipe books to get ideas.
Vitamin supplements tend to be useful in case of real deficit in one thing or other. anything else is kind of up in the air, for what I know. And for dietary news, just use o3 :)
Not answering your question, but: are you eating vegetables cooked and flavoured well? Have you experimented with ways of preparing them, e.g. heavy on soy sauce, roasted until soft, raw? Vegetables is a broad category and there are many ways to prepare them, so I'm sceptical you couldn't find a subset you enjoy.
Seconding this. I mostly didn't like the cooked veggies of my childhood. And even as an adult, it took me 10-15 years to really figure out that "grilled" veggies is the way to go. And it took me *another* few years to figure out that my standard (european-type) electric oven has a grill function, that is actually very decent. I grill my veggies for 5-8 minutes - it's both the fastest and by far tastiest way of eating veggies in any way. Season with some oil, salt, pepper, chilli afterwards. Add some feta cheese or meats in the oven for extra deliciousness.
It has become my personal "fast food" at home.. which is ironic, because it is also the most healthy food I eat.
An office mate of mine used to take inulin supplements. Cheap, colorful, crunchy pills the size of my thumb that purportedly help with your fiber needs.
I've tried before to articulate some of the main issues I have with rationalism. (E.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44751417). I think I obscured them a bit by also ranting about how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept). The other thing that happened was that some people kept telling me I was wrong when I accused rationalists of doing x, or demanding evidence that rationalists did x, which I thought was a bit of a distraction even though I invited it by arguing along the lines of "x is bad, rationalism does x, therefore rationalism is bad".
So here, I'm going to be clear that my argument is not that the following things are bad, rationalists do them, therefore rationalists are bad. It is, rather: insofar as rationalists do the following things, they are bad. If they in fact never do these things, then great, I'm wrong and there's nothing wrong with rationalism (well, not on these topics). And if they sometimes don't do them, then in the contexts and to the extent that they don't, they're fine in those contexts and to that extent.
(...deep breath)
There are a lot of things that could be objected to in rationalism, but I'm focusing on things to do with fundamental truth. This is PART I of my critique.
***
The first thing rationalism seems to often do (again if you think some don't then I'm not objecting to them) is approach fundamental questions about reality *not* by reasoning from first principles, but by sort of tentatively assuming a metaphysical framework and then reasoning from within that. So instead of starting from the Cartesian position of radical doubt and seeing what if anything you can come to certainty of, *or* simply taking some initial premises on dogma or faith and accepting that that's unavoidable, they instead seem to do something like: "let's assume materialist empiricism and start from there, then see what we can do with that, including reflecting on the paradoxes and problems with materialism and empiricism". But these are huge, huge assumptions to even *start with*. They involve assuming that there is an external world to us, that we perceive it accurately, that it has a regularity and that its future will resemble its past. Among many other things.
Making an assumption of such a framework, even if you then go on to examine the problems with it (and I'm not sure how often that's done anyway) isn't any more rational than starting with a basic Christian assumption, or a basic Hindu assumption, and then addressing objections to this framework from within the framework itself. A medieval European scholar could reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Christian framework, and see if we can address the objections to Christianity within that framework" (many Christians in fact still do this, it's called "presuppositional apologetics"). An Indian in Gupta times could reason thus "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Hindu framework, and see if we can address the objections to Hinduism within that framework" (realistically it would be something more specific than "Hindu" because Hinduism is several different things). And a pop intellectual in the modern US can reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic materialist/empiricist/humanist framework, and see if we can address the objections to materialism/etc within that framework" (again I'm not really sure I've even seen much of the last part being seriously attempted by rationalists, but I may have just missed it; I'll assume that the small amount of it I've seen has in fact been done a lot, for the sake of argument).
Now, all these three approaches do exactly the same thing: assume the "obvious position" which is really just "the intellectual orthodoxy of our time". (Notice how the last of the three is a clunky three-part description; that's a clue it's the current orthodoxy, lacking a succinct term that isn't very positively biased, like "the scientific worldview"; the same would have been true for the Hindu and Catholic Christian forms at their times). Now the problem is that if you assume a philosophical worldview and reason *from* instead of *towards* it, you have basically crippled your ability to actually question it, or to even properly comprehend the objections to it. You may think you're assuming very little; actually you're assuming an entire dogmatic framework and your "reasoning" will be extremely limited and superficial from then on. How can the Christian take seriously the objections to Christianity when he has already decided to take its foundational claims as assumptions? By his own stipulation, he has declared the dogmas of Christianity *more basic* than the tools of reasoning itself (i.e. he hasn't actually assumed that "arguments of a certain form are always valid" the way he has assumed "the Christian framework"). So if an argument (of a form that would usually be recognised as valid) is presented against the Christian framework, he will sooner take it as proving that arguments of such form must not always be valid, than that the Christian framework is unjustified. Ditto for the Hindu and the rationalist.
Relatedly but additionally, it's important to notice that assuming such frameworks may feel like assuming very little; this is an illusion. The rationalist thinks he's only assuming some really basic premises about the external world and the laws of induction--in fact he's assuming that several absolutely foundational millenia-old philosophical problems are just "somehow solved, we'll figure out how later". And he's also implicitly assuming all of the innumerable further metaphysical, epistemological etc claims that are implied by the assumptions he's explicitly making. If he tried to reason from first principles, he'd realise all of this implicit metaphysical baggage that comes from even the smallest assumption; skipping that approach obscures almost all of it.
And furthermore, the rationalist should be able to see very clearly the pitfalls of this approach when *others* do it. The Christian also thinks he's making some very basic assumptions--that God exists, that He is somehow three persons, and so on. The rationalist will immediately see how many extremely broad metaphysical and epistemological claims are implied by these assumptions, how much unimaginable philosophical baggage has just been taken as given without any positive argument for it at all. When he does the same himself, especially when he's surrounded by a group of people who share the same premises and thus don't challenge them, he's blind to it.
To take your first objection, I think you sorta kinda do have to assume there's a "there" out there, else the "tools of reasoning" aren't any use at all. Since, if we have no idea if reality is external to us and our sense-organ reports are any kind of accurate to fact, or if there is even such a thing as 'reality' at all objective or otherwise, then we can't even reason about that since we can't even trust that the tools are indeed "this is a hammer" when in fact it's a sponge made out of chocolate.
If I start from a "Cartesian position of radical doubt", there's nothing to stop me coming to the conclusion that I doubt Descartes even existed at all.
This isn't to say I accept the (what you describe as) rationalist assumption of materialist empiricism, but before we can even begin to discuss "is A or B or maybe even W more correct?"., we have to agree on some ground rules. If I assume the sun will rise in the morning because laws of nature, and you assume the sun can dance the libertango with Orion because there are no laws, there is no nature, stuff just happens!, how on earth can we begin to even approach "what is real, what is true?"
"how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept)"
Depends what the piece of writing is. Some of the little anecdotes in the Sequences* are actually funny, especially when the obvious authorial self-insert of the Wise Old Sage** is lecturing the class of budding Super Sekrit Wisdom Initiates about tips'n'tricks to be hyper-successful in solving complex problems in five seconds flat by thinking (1) really hard (2) really quick. Just so long as you don't take it seriously as any kind of recommendation about "let's emulate the alchemists to foster future generations of smart, rational people" training.
The "Three Worlds Collide" story is good, much to my surprise. I do want to slap our future descendants around a bit, but that's because they're so drippy. However, that's because I'm one of the unregenerate from the bad old days before everyone became instantly enlightened, and now "rape" apparently means "if you flirt with someone you better follow through or else they can take you up on that offer of free sex, because if you're flirting with someone it is understood by all parties that you are offering free sex".
HPMOR makes me want to commit bloody murder. I hate and loathe Harry Three-Names with a burning passion that would make the most fanatical Inquisitors out of the deepest fever dreams of the Black Legend go "hold on there a minute", and there are some out there who agree with me! As many as several! I've seen them!
* No, of course I haven't read them in order, or much at all, but I have followed the links to "this is what we're talking about when we're talking about X, Y or Z".
** Being fair, this is done in a tongue-in-cheek, nod and a wink, style where we know what's going on, he knows we know, and everyone is in on the joke so he's not taking himself 100% seriously. 70-85% maybe, depending on the little snippet, but not all the way.
Sorry, the first criticism you can think of of rationalism is that rationalists assume an external world exists? Err... why pick on rationalists here? Basically everyone but the most abstruse philosophers do that.
First, not my first criticism but one of the most foundational, and one the clearest examples of where largely refusing to engage with and situate yourself within academic philosophy will lead to bad places.
And second, no I don't think most actual philosophers assume an external world the way rationalists do. They generally either (a) regard it as an unsolved problem, with the implicit understanding that the coherence of a large amount of what work they have done is conditional on certain unproven truth claims, (b) have an argument from first principles that they defend (if rationalists have done this I haven't seen it; I don't know if most of them defend Moore's argument or Nozick's or Armstrong's or if most of them even know or care who these people are; if I *did* know that, it would be vastly easier to engage with them), or (c) take it as a foundational dogma that ultimately can't be justified, and acknowledge that).
Basically, I think most philosophers have VASTLY more intellectual humility than Yudkowsky and his followers, though I'm sure there are a few exceptions.
I'm not laughing at you, I'm just very amused by the notion of a philosopher getting up from his desk after writing a long piece about how there is no evidence for an external world, then going to have his lunch because his stomach is rumbling and he's hungry and his wife bought that nice fresh loaf of crusty bread and some good ham this morning so he'll make a cheese and ham sandwich with that sharp Cheddar in the fridge 😀
External reality may be an unsolved problem, but they're still living in it the same way as us rubes.
And I'm not laughing at you, but I'm amused at the number of people who think experiencing something means they understand it (it reminds of the woke discourse on how being black makes you an expert on the sociology of racism, actually).
More relevantly, the archetypal philosopher will write along the lines of "Suppose I say 'I know for certain that I am [eating a ham and cheese sandwich], it is absolutely certain that I am...[y]ou are wrong, you do not know that you are [eating the sandwich], it is not absolutely certain that you are...[y]ou do not know for certain that you are not dreaming...'" (reworking G.E Moore in "Certainty" here), so I think you're presuming a bit to suggest they haven't noticed this...
Oh, I'm not saying they haven't noticed it. But they still go and eat the sandwich as if it's really there and they're really eating and hunger is a real thing and not eating will have real consequences in a real world.
Which is not to condemn them, for all we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, even if we believe as perfectly as is possible for us.
And let's look at postmodernism, for a particularly striking example. People love to dunk on postmodernists, rationalists especially. It seems so obvious how incoherent their philosophy is, right? Every truth is relative, but *that* truth is somehow objective? Resist totalising discourses and metanarratives, but do so from within the totalising metanarrative of structural oppression and identity politics? Everything can be deconstructed, well then deconstruct the gun I'm pointing at your head, punk! And so on, and so on.
Wrong. They're not incoherent at all, not within their own framework. "Yes", they'll say, "the truth that every truth is relative is itself relative. So what? If you claim that this admission implies something about our philosophy, well that claim is also relative." It never ends, you won't trap them. They'll admit that every deconstruction can itself be deconstructed (though this admission can also be deconstructed). But they'll continue deconstructing from a very explicit Marxist or feminist perspective. And if you tell them that's a metanarrative they'll sort of agree, but keep doing it. After all, all perspectives are valid so no one can tell them what perspectives they're allowed to write from. Telling them they have to avoid metanarratives because they criticise metanarratives? What an oppressive metanarrative! Telling them they can't condemn other people's metanarratives if they're going to use one themselves? Another oppressive metanarrative! And as for the gun, they'll happily deconstruct your statement that you have a gun pointed at their head. "No," you say, "deconstruct the actual gun". And they'll proceed to further deconstruct the statement "deconstruct the actual gun". And so on in perpetuity. You'll never prove they're inconsistent, as long as they're speaking from *within their own framework*. And if you somehow *do*, so what? The idea that inconsistency is bad is just another metanarrative.
If you want to defeat this circular insanity, the *only* way is to deny them the right to take their own framework as a starting point. "No," you say, "I'll not accept your philosophy unless you argue it from first principles". And they can splutter all they like about how they've never seen such an oppressive metanarrative in their life, but you will remain unmoved. "No, prove it to me, or I don't accept it". And there'll be nothing they can do. Unless they agree to reason from first principles, they will be entirely unable to make you accept any of their claims. Which means that in the most basic objective sense of there being another existent being who refuses to accept their philosophy, the philosophy remains unproven.
It's the same with the Christian, the same with the Hindu, and the same with the rationalist. Whether it's the One Triune God, the transmigration of the soul in Samsara, or the mechanistic external world, the foundations of reality, and knowledge of reality, are not something you can shortcut. Not something you can just assume, or "start with", are a certain way. Not even if it's the orthodoxy of your culture and time.
And note that although rationalists are appealing to the intellectual orthodoxy of the modern West, empirical materialism, by reasoning in the presumptive way described above they are behaving much less rigorously than the average intellectual who shares that orthodoxy. Most scientists will acknowledge they take materialism as a kind of dogmatic foundation for the purpose of doing science, and leave the proper justification for it to the philosophers. Most philosophers will engage with the objections to empiricism in a foundational way that attempts to argue from either first principles or from (actually) very minimal premises. (And they will accept the limitations of the worldview, e.g. by adopting coherentism or contextualism, when they don't.) Similarly, most Christian thinkers have taken the Aquinas approach that God's existence and nature can be proven from first principles. Both such attempts (Christian and scientific) to justify the foundations of knowledge and reality have been widely acknowledged to have great limitations, but at least they were attempted and the acknlowledgement was made. This can't be said for the approach above.
In "When Recursive Justification Hits Bottom", which is linked and discussed at length in the thread linked at the beginning, Yudkowsky says of "using my current brain" (i.e. the metaphysical and epistemological starting points I discussed above) to reflect on those starting points, "[w]hat else could I possibly use?" I hope my answer in this essay is clear now. You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt, but don't expect this to be easy. Or you could simply accept that the foundations of your worldview are not justified, that they are taken as starting dogmas and your philosophy is no more rational than any other built on different starting dogmas, but don't expect this to be satisfying to your pride.
Or, of course, you could write some blog posts declaring that it's actually easy and satisfying, all you need to do is "forget about the problem of philosophical justifications, and ask yourself whether it's really truly true" (same post). But don't expect to be taken seriously.
(Further parts to this critique coming either immediately, at a later time, or not at all, depending on my time and the response to this one.)
What are the first principles? You appeal to them, but don't describe them. So, for example, in your view of how to proceed, what is the first principle from which you are starting and from which you derive the next step?
"First principles" is a great term, but it also is a metaphysical framework. "You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt" - and where does deductive logic and Cartesian doubt get their standpoints? What are their roots? What are the assumptions they, too, start off with? Doubt in what? If you are doubting something, there has to be something there to doubt. If it "doubt in everything", then that doubt itself must be doubted, and all the way down, the same as the post-modernists you decry (and aren't we on post-post-modernism now? I can never keep the layers straight).
It helps, but can you expand on Cartesian doubt? I just read something in Oleg's post about " Following Descartes and Locke, the absolute basic things about the existence of which we can be sure are our own thoughts and feelings" and it immediately struck me that there's a layer of doubt even below that, call it Buddhist doubt, about maya and illusion and the non-existence of the self. We can't be sure of our own thoughts and feelings because even the "I" is an illusion. So that step of the ladder is broken off at the very start.
What makes your preferred starting point, "the very foundations of deductive [l]ogic and Cartesian doubt", not just another metaphysical framework, just another place to start from? And where do you get to from it?
Even deductive logic is questionable, as Descarte himself noted. Honestly I'm lowering the bar beneath where it really should be, although deductive logic IS unique in that it is literally impossible to think outside of, unlike the other assumptions.
"Cartesian doubt" is not a starting point, it's the name for when you accept no starting point.
Your last sentence, that is the question isn't it? Not very far in most cases, because fundamental truth (what we call "philosophy") is *hard*. I'm sure there are some self-described rationalists who admit this and admit that most of what we know isn't really justified and that wisdom consists in realising how ignorant you are. This essay isn't directed at them.
So what is your point? That we can know nothing, we cannot even know that we know nothing, there is nowhere on which to stand, we are all plummeting into a bottomless void, all supposed knowledge is but the ignorance of Wile E. Coyote three feet past the edge of the precipice, etc.? It reminds me of Eliezer's description of the Ashamnu ritual (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger) of reciting one's faults, and feeling repentance for them, but with no plan to ever do better, and it's against the rules to claim to actually have done better.
As Deiseach points out, the sceptical philosopher still has lunch.
ETA: Deductive logic first began to be properly formulated in the 19th century. On the scale of that achievement, Aristotle and the mediaevals barely count.
Just learned that Cremieux has a post explaining in great detail how if someone wanted to save on GLP-1 drugs they would be able to source the peptides and prepare injectable solutions safely.
the hardest will be quality control / checking on sourced peptide purity, isn't it? in my experience, you often need to repurify sourced compounds and not take specifications to face value. So if you have access to an HPLC / GC setup and a column for chromatographic purification + a bunch of solvent + a fume hood, completely possible.
He recommends sending one vial in your batch to a particular lab he names for testing. Many have done that now with peptides from various sources, so there is a shared knowledge base of which sources send peptides that are consistently found to be high purity
Just shared a new essay: The Key to Love is Understanding
This one’s a bit of a divergence from the usual SSC-adjacent epistemic deep dives—it’s about love, but not in the abstract or game-theoretic sense. More like: how do we actually come to understand another person, and why might that be the central act of love? It’s an attempt to think clearly about something that resists clean modelling, messy, emotional, full of perceptual nuance. This was inspired by the famous Nietzsche quote placing conversation as the most important part of marriage + my take on why friends to lovers arcs are the best.
It’s earnest, but hopefully not saccharine. If you’ve ever wanted a LessWrong-adjacent take on love that still believes in magic, this might be up your alley :)
What is your opinion on the breakup, then? I'm hearing a lot of songs about "we're just strangers now, we're not even friends anymore" about relationships that ended.
So what happens when you do come to know that other person, and then you decide, or they decide, or you both decide "okay, we've come to the end of the road"? Friends to lovers sounds great, but what happens when it's friends to lovers to strangers?
Is it because they don't start out as friends, so once desire has burned itself out there's nothing remaining to maintain a relationship, even if it's a different one to the romantic relationship? Can the romance burn up the friendship so that it's impossible to remain friends, or so that what you liked as a friend is now outweighed by the faults as a lover?
So, whats 'good communication', anyway? And how do you go about learning it? In the context of close personal relationships, everybody says its 'key', but to me it seems like most people are decent at it at best.
For example, many choices and judgements are guided by feelings, and then the reasoning, the part thats communicated, seems to be 'discovered' afterwards. This is especially bad if you're hungry/tired/stressed/distracted. Would be nice if people could just say(communicate!): "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work. How to approach this? Is the best way just to get good at recognising other peoples moods, and give them som slack? Say I wanted to train hard so I myself was never hangry (only hungry) again, could I do this?
Let's assume we are talking about close relationships only. Communication, like the rest of your interactions, is going in a tacit ledger of who is most invested. Good communication, in my experience, is being aware of this, and take care to invest in a mindful way. Your example with the moods: you do communicate these, if only through nonverbal cues, and someone making an investment to communicate with you will pick up on it. someone not investing in communication will not -e.g: someone just stating stuff / filling the space-.
This theory of the tacit ledger is actually salient in my thinking these days about one critical aspect of conversation in a couple: persuasion. Your spouse is the one you most likely will need to persuade on a number of things over time (where to go to dinner, whether to have kids, where to live, how to spend your money, political povs, etc), but as with any human abilities, there will be differences in individual powers of persuasion: did one of you do debate for fun? did one of you have a much better memory for on the spot examples? Was one of you just a bit more introverted, or needs more time to format arguments? Then you will definitely "overinvest" in this ledger in some ways, the best persuader leaving the room vindicated often but the other party feels put upon and still is not convinced. So take care to recognize this imbalance in a relationship and purposefully rein in the competitive arguing.
In all interactions repeated over time, balance the ledger according to what relationship you want.
<: Would be nice if people could just say "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work
You can do that! It's fine. I do it a lot. "If you talk to me while I'm trying to squeeze into this parking space I'm going to be cranky, I can't help it. Just don't talk." "Wait to tell me about your trip til we sit down and have some wine. I'm too frazzled right now to appreciate it." "This is a good time to brainstorm if you want to do it because I'm feeling relaxed and optimistic."
I agree here, I also do this sometimes, and it works well. I was probably too vague, my point is that it doesn't *always* work like that, and it does require a good dose of feeling-mood-communication awareness. Is that awareness trainable?
Nonstandard subnational flag emoji! (Well, subnational flag emoji that are not recommended for general Interchange, as they say.) Some computer systems support some. For instance, if your system is like mine, this will display the flag of New Mexico: 🏴
(Apologies to the Unicode Consortium for using one of these in general interchange, I suppose. :P )
I'm really curious about these. Like, what systems support them and which ones do they support? What components are responsible for this? Is there any way I can enumerate which ones my computer supports? How widespread is this? (Do you see the New Mexican flag?) Is any of this documented anywhere??
For the unfamiliar (most of you I'm guessing), Unicode has a mechanism for national flags, and then later they added a separate mechanism for subnational flags, but they decreed that the only subnational flags that are recommended for general interchange are those of England, Scotland, and Wales, I think because they realized things would get out of hand otherwise. So for other subnational flags, even though it's clear how they *would* work (hence how I was able to generate the New Mexico flag above; that part's well-documented), they're essentially nonstandard and definitely not universally supported (plenty of people I've tried sending them to have said, yup, that's a question mark flag on my system).
The ones I tried on my computer that seem to work are:
1. US states and DC (not US territories, because Unicode treats those like national flags and they're actually standard!)
2. Candian provinces and territories
3. Mexican states and Mexican federal district
4. Northern Ireland (which, y'know, officially doesn't have a flag, but my computer displays the Ulster Banner anyway)
Other countries I've tried subdivisions of have yielded no results. I'm using Linux Mint 21.3 with MATE 1.26.0; a friend of mine who is using Pop! OS with GNOME (so, yeah, two systems that are both Ubuntu-based) says his appears to support the same ones.
Does anyone know anything about this?? It's the sort of question I don't really know where to ask about (and where I have tried has yielded nothing), so why not, I figured I'll try here.
And uh if people want more explanation as to how exactly these work and how to make them, I can explain that, but I figured that that sort of technical detail I should probably omit at first.
I'm suspicious of predictions about the coming of AGI which are based on the, often impressive, performance of current chatbots? Why? Because that performances is always evaluated against specific tasks. Not all thinking is like that and I suspect that quite a bit of creative thinking isn't like that at all. Rather, it starts with an open-ended exploration.
I have a longish post in which I report the process I went through a couple of years ago to produce an interpretation of Spielberg's "Jaws" using Girard's ideas about mimetic desire and sacrifice. The process started when I watched the film on Netflix without any intention writing about it. I watch a lot of streaming video and never write about most of it. Once I'd seen the film I checked its Wikipedia entry, something I do quite often as a way of 'calibrating' my own impressions. The entry was extensive, and included a comparison with the three sequels, which is said were inferior.
So, out of curiosity, I set out to watch them I found the 3rd and 4th sequels unwatchable, but enjoyed the 2nd. Yes, it was inferior. But why? Too diffuse. Watched the original again. Noticed that it fell into two parts, the first 3/5 taking place in the village and involving lots of players. The last 2/5 took place at sea and involved three men and the shark. I then asked ever more specific questions about that last part until finally it hit me: "Sacrifice! Girard!" Only then did I decided to write a post.
Then I began a much more focused and specific process to gather evidence for my post. I read about Girard (my library, alas, is in storage), interviews with him, some of his articles, I consulted with a grad school buddy who'd studied with Girard, made lots of nots and drafts, etc.
My overall suspicion is the SOA chatbots can do that second process fairly well, but that first exploratory process, that requires agency, autonomy, and curiosity. Chatbots don't have those characteristics and we're all but clueless on how to create them that way. But most post isn't about that part of the argument. It's just a description of my thought process. Here's the link: Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI: Part 2, Interpreting Jaws https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/08/intellectual-creativity-humans-in-loop.html
We need better bittorrent infrastructure.
Tracker ecosystem keeps a lot of obscure, but still not-entirely-out-of-copyright media alive, catalogued, quality controlled, and available, but common software stacks are very hacky and don't scale (10k active torrents can already be a problem). Most of that ecosystem is very xkcd 2347 too (god bless Arvid Norberg).
German police expands use of Palantir surveillance software. This future is here!
https://www.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-surveillance-software/a-73497117
"MoreWrite"
My substack about agency is going to include an autobiographical series, part my own attempt to get better at writing, part accountability, part therapy I suppose. It's got a trigger warning, I'm not sure it's super valuable reading, but I'm putting myself out there:
https://onlyluck.substack.com/p/lost-agency-1-better-and-worse-ways
I wrote an article to summarize my fundamental beliefs: https://eterevsky.substack.com/p/what-i-believe.
I consider these beliefs absolute and don't think it possible that I ever stop believing in them (unless I get mad or otherwise mentally impaired). Despite this high bar, it seems like this set of beliefs is more or less complete, i.e. it's enough to form a relatively full picture of the world.
I'd be interested in feedback of two types: 1. Are these beliefs actually as fundamental as I think? 2. Are there any other beliefs that don't directly follow from what I described, that I should still hold as absolute truths?
Doesn't the C in ZFC stand for "Axiom of Choice"? Sorry to only give feedback you didn't ask for!
Okay let me try to give feedback relating to (1):
I think your third point, "My Feelings are Real" is actually even more fundamental than anything else. Like, all the other beliefs are beliefs _about_ an external world, or about something else, but your experience of qualia just _is_. You could try to disentangle this by rephrasing to something like: I believe my memories of having had past qualia are real; but personally I don't at all feel fundamentally sure about this. I can check a memory by recalling it, and while I can be fundamentally certain that I am having the experience of remembering right now, I can't at all feel certain that it corresponds to a previous instance of actual experience. So the current moment of experience fundamentally just "is", in such a fundamental way that I don't even know if it can be even called a belief.
Thanks for the correction!
Regarding your point about the reality of memories, I don't think I would necessarily say that I believe that. As you say, for all we know, memories might be generated during the process of remembering them (I think at least sometimes it actually happens that way). That's why I'm talking about the reality of "thoughts and feelings", which would include the feeling of remembering something.
I agree with you that it's possible to consider belief 3 as more fundamental than belief 2 and belief 1 (though I think Math would still be valid even if nothing existed). As I wrote in the post, I see belief 3 as more of a definition of what "real" is, than a statement of something being real. I think the only reason why I put it after the belief 2 is because I wanted to show that the belief that you are real implies the reality of the world and other people, and for that I needed to already have stated belief 2.
Maybe I would refer to it as "perceptions", more than thoughts and feelings. Most of the time, thoughts and feelings are remembered (especially thoughts too complex to fit in working memory, or long chains of reasoning), so at the fundamental place I would put "current perception", which can be sights, sounds, physical sensations, as well as the perception of a current thought.
I haven't considered that precise interplay between perception (3) and basic induction (2), to infer the existence of the world and other beings. Solipsism has always been pretty disturbing to me.
Right, "perceptions" is another good word for it.
I think using induction to infer the existence of the world is a pretty important part of my beliefs. Technically you could be a Boltzmann brain just imagining things, but if it were the case, it would be so incredibly unlikely that you imagine such a consistent world, that seemingly operated independently from you.
I meet some college buddies every fews weeks for a meet-up. Not that often as it’s in London. Most of these guys are centre left.
Last time I was there, in May, in mentioning Epstein at all was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”.
I’ll be reporting back in a hours on whether things have changed.
I don't like eating vegetables. I still try, but I'm probably taking nowhere near the ideal amount.
Is there an easier way to get the health benefits? Are stuff like vitamins and vegetable drinks actually good for you?
Also, where do you all get your health-related advice? I feel skeptical for most things on TV, Google search gives me some combination of ads, random blogs, professional advices that contradict each other.
You should include why you don't like eating them. For the taste or texture, are you worried about what it signals to the people around you, do they cost too much compared to other foods, are they inconvenient to prepare?
Why not create a data point of one, and study yourself? You will need to record metrics like how you feel, hair quality, weight and energy levels, and other things using blood tests. What metrics, how often - ask your doctor. They won't want yiur insurance to pay for it though.
I have become expert in making tasty salads and dressings.
I'd focus on trying to cook things you enjoy. Think new spices, textures, and not just flavors.
Smoothies by Rhonda Patrick (PhD in a biology area) on FoundMyFitness youtube channel are very good. Do look up one of her smoothie recipes for ideas. A Vitamix blender pulverizes greens.
Other than eating healthy, I try to focus on sleep and exercise (yoga, walk, weights). Everything is impacted by nutrition. I'd call the diet I eat vegetarian with eggs and a whole foods diet. One healthy item glaringly missing is fish but I grew up vegetarian and even eating eggs was a challenge.
https://n1.tools/ might be useful for this
If you eat a variety of meats including liver than you have a superior source of vitamins and minerals compared to plants. You can get enough fiber from oatmeal.
Veggies are definitely an excellent source of a bunch of stuff, but putting them all in one bag feels like disservice. E.g: some people will happily munch on raw celery and carrot sticks, others will find this repellent and conclude they hate vegetables. But you have options that might not be apparent to you: oven roasted bell peppers + dried tomatoes + garlic + eggplant kept in olive oil will make a great topping to add to sandwiches and burgers; add a few bits of butternut or other sweet squash to your roasted potatoes, add a few bits of cauliflower to mash, get some eggplant dips, drink a glass of gaspacho... You can get a bunch of the good stuff that way, but you might need to ask around / read a bunch of recipe books to get ideas.
Vitamin supplements tend to be useful in case of real deficit in one thing or other. anything else is kind of up in the air, for what I know. And for dietary news, just use o3 :)
Not answering your question, but: are you eating vegetables cooked and flavoured well? Have you experimented with ways of preparing them, e.g. heavy on soy sauce, roasted until soft, raw? Vegetables is a broad category and there are many ways to prepare them, so I'm sceptical you couldn't find a subset you enjoy.
Seconding this. I mostly didn't like the cooked veggies of my childhood. And even as an adult, it took me 10-15 years to really figure out that "grilled" veggies is the way to go. And it took me *another* few years to figure out that my standard (european-type) electric oven has a grill function, that is actually very decent. I grill my veggies for 5-8 minutes - it's both the fastest and by far tastiest way of eating veggies in any way. Season with some oil, salt, pepper, chilli afterwards. Add some feta cheese or meats in the oven for extra deliciousness.
It has become my personal "fast food" at home.. which is ironic, because it is also the most healthy food I eat.
An office mate of mine used to take inulin supplements. Cheap, colorful, crunchy pills the size of my thumb that purportedly help with your fiber needs.
I've tried before to articulate some of the main issues I have with rationalism. (E.g. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44751417). I think I obscured them a bit by also ranting about how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept). The other thing that happened was that some people kept telling me I was wrong when I accused rationalists of doing x, or demanding evidence that rationalists did x, which I thought was a bit of a distraction even though I invited it by arguing along the lines of "x is bad, rationalism does x, therefore rationalism is bad".
So here, I'm going to be clear that my argument is not that the following things are bad, rationalists do them, therefore rationalists are bad. It is, rather: insofar as rationalists do the following things, they are bad. If they in fact never do these things, then great, I'm wrong and there's nothing wrong with rationalism (well, not on these topics). And if they sometimes don't do them, then in the contexts and to the extent that they don't, they're fine in those contexts and to that extent.
(...deep breath)
There are a lot of things that could be objected to in rationalism, but I'm focusing on things to do with fundamental truth. This is PART I of my critique.
***
The first thing rationalism seems to often do (again if you think some don't then I'm not objecting to them) is approach fundamental questions about reality *not* by reasoning from first principles, but by sort of tentatively assuming a metaphysical framework and then reasoning from within that. So instead of starting from the Cartesian position of radical doubt and seeing what if anything you can come to certainty of, *or* simply taking some initial premises on dogma or faith and accepting that that's unavoidable, they instead seem to do something like: "let's assume materialist empiricism and start from there, then see what we can do with that, including reflecting on the paradoxes and problems with materialism and empiricism". But these are huge, huge assumptions to even *start with*. They involve assuming that there is an external world to us, that we perceive it accurately, that it has a regularity and that its future will resemble its past. Among many other things.
Making an assumption of such a framework, even if you then go on to examine the problems with it (and I'm not sure how often that's done anyway) isn't any more rational than starting with a basic Christian assumption, or a basic Hindu assumption, and then addressing objections to this framework from within the framework itself. A medieval European scholar could reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Christian framework, and see if we can address the objections to Christianity within that framework" (many Christians in fact still do this, it's called "presuppositional apologetics"). An Indian in Gupta times could reason thus "let's assume the obvious position, the basic Hindu framework, and see if we can address the objections to Hinduism within that framework" (realistically it would be something more specific than "Hindu" because Hinduism is several different things). And a pop intellectual in the modern US can reason thus: "let's assume the obvious position, the basic materialist/empiricist/humanist framework, and see if we can address the objections to materialism/etc within that framework" (again I'm not really sure I've even seen much of the last part being seriously attempted by rationalists, but I may have just missed it; I'll assume that the small amount of it I've seen has in fact been done a lot, for the sake of argument).
Now, all these three approaches do exactly the same thing: assume the "obvious position" which is really just "the intellectual orthodoxy of our time". (Notice how the last of the three is a clunky three-part description; that's a clue it's the current orthodoxy, lacking a succinct term that isn't very positively biased, like "the scientific worldview"; the same would have been true for the Hindu and Catholic Christian forms at their times). Now the problem is that if you assume a philosophical worldview and reason *from* instead of *towards* it, you have basically crippled your ability to actually question it, or to even properly comprehend the objections to it. You may think you're assuming very little; actually you're assuming an entire dogmatic framework and your "reasoning" will be extremely limited and superficial from then on. How can the Christian take seriously the objections to Christianity when he has already decided to take its foundational claims as assumptions? By his own stipulation, he has declared the dogmas of Christianity *more basic* than the tools of reasoning itself (i.e. he hasn't actually assumed that "arguments of a certain form are always valid" the way he has assumed "the Christian framework"). So if an argument (of a form that would usually be recognised as valid) is presented against the Christian framework, he will sooner take it as proving that arguments of such form must not always be valid, than that the Christian framework is unjustified. Ditto for the Hindu and the rationalist.
Relatedly but additionally, it's important to notice that assuming such frameworks may feel like assuming very little; this is an illusion. The rationalist thinks he's only assuming some really basic premises about the external world and the laws of induction--in fact he's assuming that several absolutely foundational millenia-old philosophical problems are just "somehow solved, we'll figure out how later". And he's also implicitly assuming all of the innumerable further metaphysical, epistemological etc claims that are implied by the assumptions he's explicitly making. If he tried to reason from first principles, he'd realise all of this implicit metaphysical baggage that comes from even the smallest assumption; skipping that approach obscures almost all of it.
And furthermore, the rationalist should be able to see very clearly the pitfalls of this approach when *others* do it. The Christian also thinks he's making some very basic assumptions--that God exists, that He is somehow three persons, and so on. The rationalist will immediately see how many extremely broad metaphysical and epistemological claims are implied by these assumptions, how much unimaginable philosophical baggage has just been taken as given without any positive argument for it at all. When he does the same himself, especially when he's surrounded by a group of people who share the same premises and thus don't challenge them, he's blind to it.
[Continued...]
To take your first objection, I think you sorta kinda do have to assume there's a "there" out there, else the "tools of reasoning" aren't any use at all. Since, if we have no idea if reality is external to us and our sense-organ reports are any kind of accurate to fact, or if there is even such a thing as 'reality' at all objective or otherwise, then we can't even reason about that since we can't even trust that the tools are indeed "this is a hammer" when in fact it's a sponge made out of chocolate.
If I start from a "Cartesian position of radical doubt", there's nothing to stop me coming to the conclusion that I doubt Descartes even existed at all.
This isn't to say I accept the (what you describe as) rationalist assumption of materialist empiricism, but before we can even begin to discuss "is A or B or maybe even W more correct?"., we have to agree on some ground rules. If I assume the sun will rise in the morning because laws of nature, and you assume the sun can dance the libertango with Orion because there are no laws, there is no nature, stuff just happens!, how on earth can we begin to even approach "what is real, what is true?"
"how obnoxious I find Yudkowsky's writing style. So I'll put that objection aside (I stand by it, but it's become clear that many people just don't see it, which I find baffling but I'll have to just accept)"
Depends what the piece of writing is. Some of the little anecdotes in the Sequences* are actually funny, especially when the obvious authorial self-insert of the Wise Old Sage** is lecturing the class of budding Super Sekrit Wisdom Initiates about tips'n'tricks to be hyper-successful in solving complex problems in five seconds flat by thinking (1) really hard (2) really quick. Just so long as you don't take it seriously as any kind of recommendation about "let's emulate the alchemists to foster future generations of smart, rational people" training.
The "Three Worlds Collide" story is good, much to my surprise. I do want to slap our future descendants around a bit, but that's because they're so drippy. However, that's because I'm one of the unregenerate from the bad old days before everyone became instantly enlightened, and now "rape" apparently means "if you flirt with someone you better follow through or else they can take you up on that offer of free sex, because if you're flirting with someone it is understood by all parties that you are offering free sex".
HPMOR makes me want to commit bloody murder. I hate and loathe Harry Three-Names with a burning passion that would make the most fanatical Inquisitors out of the deepest fever dreams of the Black Legend go "hold on there a minute", and there are some out there who agree with me! As many as several! I've seen them!
* No, of course I haven't read them in order, or much at all, but I have followed the links to "this is what we're talking about when we're talking about X, Y or Z".
** Being fair, this is done in a tongue-in-cheek, nod and a wink, style where we know what's going on, he knows we know, and everyone is in on the joke so he's not taking himself 100% seriously. 70-85% maybe, depending on the little snippet, but not all the way.
Sorry, the first criticism you can think of of rationalism is that rationalists assume an external world exists? Err... why pick on rationalists here? Basically everyone but the most abstruse philosophers do that.
First, not my first criticism but one of the most foundational, and one the clearest examples of where largely refusing to engage with and situate yourself within academic philosophy will lead to bad places.
And second, no I don't think most actual philosophers assume an external world the way rationalists do. They generally either (a) regard it as an unsolved problem, with the implicit understanding that the coherence of a large amount of what work they have done is conditional on certain unproven truth claims, (b) have an argument from first principles that they defend (if rationalists have done this I haven't seen it; I don't know if most of them defend Moore's argument or Nozick's or Armstrong's or if most of them even know or care who these people are; if I *did* know that, it would be vastly easier to engage with them), or (c) take it as a foundational dogma that ultimately can't be justified, and acknowledge that).
Basically, I think most philosophers have VASTLY more intellectual humility than Yudkowsky and his followers, though I'm sure there are a few exceptions.
I'm not laughing at you, I'm just very amused by the notion of a philosopher getting up from his desk after writing a long piece about how there is no evidence for an external world, then going to have his lunch because his stomach is rumbling and he's hungry and his wife bought that nice fresh loaf of crusty bread and some good ham this morning so he'll make a cheese and ham sandwich with that sharp Cheddar in the fridge 😀
External reality may be an unsolved problem, but they're still living in it the same way as us rubes.
And I'm not laughing at you, but I'm amused at the number of people who think experiencing something means they understand it (it reminds of the woke discourse on how being black makes you an expert on the sociology of racism, actually).
More relevantly, the archetypal philosopher will write along the lines of "Suppose I say 'I know for certain that I am [eating a ham and cheese sandwich], it is absolutely certain that I am...[y]ou are wrong, you do not know that you are [eating the sandwich], it is not absolutely certain that you are...[y]ou do not know for certain that you are not dreaming...'" (reworking G.E Moore in "Certainty" here), so I think you're presuming a bit to suggest they haven't noticed this...
Let us laugh together at the folly of the world!
Oh, I'm not saying they haven't noticed it. But they still go and eat the sandwich as if it's really there and they're really eating and hunger is a real thing and not eating will have real consequences in a real world.
Which is not to condemn them, for all we have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, even if we believe as perfectly as is possible for us.
[...continued]
And let's look at postmodernism, for a particularly striking example. People love to dunk on postmodernists, rationalists especially. It seems so obvious how incoherent their philosophy is, right? Every truth is relative, but *that* truth is somehow objective? Resist totalising discourses and metanarratives, but do so from within the totalising metanarrative of structural oppression and identity politics? Everything can be deconstructed, well then deconstruct the gun I'm pointing at your head, punk! And so on, and so on.
Wrong. They're not incoherent at all, not within their own framework. "Yes", they'll say, "the truth that every truth is relative is itself relative. So what? If you claim that this admission implies something about our philosophy, well that claim is also relative." It never ends, you won't trap them. They'll admit that every deconstruction can itself be deconstructed (though this admission can also be deconstructed). But they'll continue deconstructing from a very explicit Marxist or feminist perspective. And if you tell them that's a metanarrative they'll sort of agree, but keep doing it. After all, all perspectives are valid so no one can tell them what perspectives they're allowed to write from. Telling them they have to avoid metanarratives because they criticise metanarratives? What an oppressive metanarrative! Telling them they can't condemn other people's metanarratives if they're going to use one themselves? Another oppressive metanarrative! And as for the gun, they'll happily deconstruct your statement that you have a gun pointed at their head. "No," you say, "deconstruct the actual gun". And they'll proceed to further deconstruct the statement "deconstruct the actual gun". And so on in perpetuity. You'll never prove they're inconsistent, as long as they're speaking from *within their own framework*. And if you somehow *do*, so what? The idea that inconsistency is bad is just another metanarrative.
If you want to defeat this circular insanity, the *only* way is to deny them the right to take their own framework as a starting point. "No," you say, "I'll not accept your philosophy unless you argue it from first principles". And they can splutter all they like about how they've never seen such an oppressive metanarrative in their life, but you will remain unmoved. "No, prove it to me, or I don't accept it". And there'll be nothing they can do. Unless they agree to reason from first principles, they will be entirely unable to make you accept any of their claims. Which means that in the most basic objective sense of there being another existent being who refuses to accept their philosophy, the philosophy remains unproven.
It's the same with the Christian, the same with the Hindu, and the same with the rationalist. Whether it's the One Triune God, the transmigration of the soul in Samsara, or the mechanistic external world, the foundations of reality, and knowledge of reality, are not something you can shortcut. Not something you can just assume, or "start with", are a certain way. Not even if it's the orthodoxy of your culture and time.
And note that although rationalists are appealing to the intellectual orthodoxy of the modern West, empirical materialism, by reasoning in the presumptive way described above they are behaving much less rigorously than the average intellectual who shares that orthodoxy. Most scientists will acknowledge they take materialism as a kind of dogmatic foundation for the purpose of doing science, and leave the proper justification for it to the philosophers. Most philosophers will engage with the objections to empiricism in a foundational way that attempts to argue from either first principles or from (actually) very minimal premises. (And they will accept the limitations of the worldview, e.g. by adopting coherentism or contextualism, when they don't.) Similarly, most Christian thinkers have taken the Aquinas approach that God's existence and nature can be proven from first principles. Both such attempts (Christian and scientific) to justify the foundations of knowledge and reality have been widely acknowledged to have great limitations, but at least they were attempted and the acknlowledgement was made. This can't be said for the approach above.
In "When Recursive Justification Hits Bottom", which is linked and discussed at length in the thread linked at the beginning, Yudkowsky says of "using my current brain" (i.e. the metaphysical and epistemological starting points I discussed above) to reflect on those starting points, "[w]hat else could I possibly use?" I hope my answer in this essay is clear now. You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt, but don't expect this to be easy. Or you could simply accept that the foundations of your worldview are not justified, that they are taken as starting dogmas and your philosophy is no more rational than any other built on different starting dogmas, but don't expect this to be satisfying to your pride.
Or, of course, you could write some blog posts declaring that it's actually easy and satisfying, all you need to do is "forget about the problem of philosophical justifications, and ask yourself whether it's really truly true" (same post). But don't expect to be taken seriously.
(Further parts to this critique coming either immediately, at a later time, or not at all, depending on my time and the response to this one.)
What are the first principles? You appeal to them, but don't describe them. So, for example, in your view of how to proceed, what is the first principle from which you are starting and from which you derive the next step?
"First principles" is a great term, but it also is a metaphysical framework. "You could attempt to reason from the very foundations of deductive logic and Cartesian doubt" - and where does deductive logic and Cartesian doubt get their standpoints? What are their roots? What are the assumptions they, too, start off with? Doubt in what? If you are doubting something, there has to be something there to doubt. If it "doubt in everything", then that doubt itself must be doubted, and all the way down, the same as the post-modernists you decry (and aren't we on post-post-modernism now? I can never keep the layers straight).
I'm not sure if my reply to Richard clarifies where I'm arguing from and answers your questions. If not, tell me.
It helps, but can you expand on Cartesian doubt? I just read something in Oleg's post about " Following Descartes and Locke, the absolute basic things about the existence of which we can be sure are our own thoughts and feelings" and it immediately struck me that there's a layer of doubt even below that, call it Buddhist doubt, about maya and illusion and the non-existence of the self. We can't be sure of our own thoughts and feelings because even the "I" is an illusion. So that step of the ladder is broken off at the very start.
What makes your preferred starting point, "the very foundations of deductive [l]ogic and Cartesian doubt", not just another metaphysical framework, just another place to start from? And where do you get to from it?
Even deductive logic is questionable, as Descarte himself noted. Honestly I'm lowering the bar beneath where it really should be, although deductive logic IS unique in that it is literally impossible to think outside of, unlike the other assumptions.
"Cartesian doubt" is not a starting point, it's the name for when you accept no starting point.
Your last sentence, that is the question isn't it? Not very far in most cases, because fundamental truth (what we call "philosophy") is *hard*. I'm sure there are some self-described rationalists who admit this and admit that most of what we know isn't really justified and that wisdom consists in realising how ignorant you are. This essay isn't directed at them.
So what is your point? That we can know nothing, we cannot even know that we know nothing, there is nowhere on which to stand, we are all plummeting into a bottomless void, all supposed knowledge is but the ignorance of Wile E. Coyote three feet past the edge of the precipice, etc.? It reminds me of Eliezer's description of the Ashamnu ritual (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger) of reciting one's faults, and feeling repentance for them, but with no plan to ever do better, and it's against the rules to claim to actually have done better.
As Deiseach points out, the sceptical philosopher still has lunch.
ETA: Deductive logic first began to be properly formulated in the 19th century. On the scale of that achievement, Aristotle and the mediaevals barely count.
Just learned that Cremieux has a post explaining in great detail how if someone wanted to save on GLP-1 drugs they would be able to source the peptides and prepare injectable solutions safely.
Whole thing's just an interesting thought experiment, you know? If you're curious, it's here: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/how-to-get-cheap-ozempic
the hardest will be quality control / checking on sourced peptide purity, isn't it? in my experience, you often need to repurify sourced compounds and not take specifications to face value. So if you have access to an HPLC / GC setup and a column for chromatographic purification + a bunch of solvent + a fume hood, completely possible.
He recommends sending one vial in your batch to a particular lab he names for testing. Many have done that now with peptides from various sources, so there is a shared knowledge base of which sources send peptides that are consistently found to be high purity
Just shared a new essay: The Key to Love is Understanding
This one’s a bit of a divergence from the usual SSC-adjacent epistemic deep dives—it’s about love, but not in the abstract or game-theoretic sense. More like: how do we actually come to understand another person, and why might that be the central act of love? It’s an attempt to think clearly about something that resists clean modelling, messy, emotional, full of perceptual nuance. This was inspired by the famous Nietzsche quote placing conversation as the most important part of marriage + my take on why friends to lovers arcs are the best.
It’s earnest, but hopefully not saccharine. If you’ve ever wanted a LessWrong-adjacent take on love that still believes in magic, this might be up your alley :)
Curious what others here think. https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-key-to-love-is-understanding
What is your opinion on the breakup, then? I'm hearing a lot of songs about "we're just strangers now, we're not even friends anymore" about relationships that ended.
So what happens when you do come to know that other person, and then you decide, or they decide, or you both decide "okay, we've come to the end of the road"? Friends to lovers sounds great, but what happens when it's friends to lovers to strangers?
Is it because they don't start out as friends, so once desire has burned itself out there's nothing remaining to maintain a relationship, even if it's a different one to the romantic relationship? Can the romance burn up the friendship so that it's impossible to remain friends, or so that what you liked as a friend is now outweighed by the faults as a lover?
So, whats 'good communication', anyway? And how do you go about learning it? In the context of close personal relationships, everybody says its 'key', but to me it seems like most people are decent at it at best.
For example, many choices and judgements are guided by feelings, and then the reasoning, the part thats communicated, seems to be 'discovered' afterwards. This is especially bad if you're hungry/tired/stressed/distracted. Would be nice if people could just say(communicate!): "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work. How to approach this? Is the best way just to get good at recognising other peoples moods, and give them som slack? Say I wanted to train hard so I myself was never hangry (only hungry) again, could I do this?
Let's assume we are talking about close relationships only. Communication, like the rest of your interactions, is going in a tacit ledger of who is most invested. Good communication, in my experience, is being aware of this, and take care to invest in a mindful way. Your example with the moods: you do communicate these, if only through nonverbal cues, and someone making an investment to communicate with you will pick up on it. someone not investing in communication will not -e.g: someone just stating stuff / filling the space-.
This theory of the tacit ledger is actually salient in my thinking these days about one critical aspect of conversation in a couple: persuasion. Your spouse is the one you most likely will need to persuade on a number of things over time (where to go to dinner, whether to have kids, where to live, how to spend your money, political povs, etc), but as with any human abilities, there will be differences in individual powers of persuasion: did one of you do debate for fun? did one of you have a much better memory for on the spot examples? Was one of you just a bit more introverted, or needs more time to format arguments? Then you will definitely "overinvest" in this ledger in some ways, the best persuader leaving the room vindicated often but the other party feels put upon and still is not convinced. So take care to recognize this imbalance in a relationship and purposefully rein in the competitive arguing.
In all interactions repeated over time, balance the ledger according to what relationship you want.
I like the model with the tacit ledger.
I have most certainly been naive to what investments I make in which relationships previously, although I am getting better at this.
<: Would be nice if people could just say "this is my mood now, just for your information", but thats not how things work
You can do that! It's fine. I do it a lot. "If you talk to me while I'm trying to squeeze into this parking space I'm going to be cranky, I can't help it. Just don't talk." "Wait to tell me about your trip til we sit down and have some wine. I'm too frazzled right now to appreciate it." "This is a good time to brainstorm if you want to do it because I'm feeling relaxed and optimistic."
I agree here, I also do this sometimes, and it works well. I was probably too vague, my point is that it doesn't *always* work like that, and it does require a good dose of feeling-mood-communication awareness. Is that awareness trainable?
Nonstandard subnational flag emoji! (Well, subnational flag emoji that are not recommended for general Interchange, as they say.) Some computer systems support some. For instance, if your system is like mine, this will display the flag of New Mexico: 🏴
(Apologies to the Unicode Consortium for using one of these in general interchange, I suppose. :P )
I'm really curious about these. Like, what systems support them and which ones do they support? What components are responsible for this? Is there any way I can enumerate which ones my computer supports? How widespread is this? (Do you see the New Mexican flag?) Is any of this documented anywhere??
For the unfamiliar (most of you I'm guessing), Unicode has a mechanism for national flags, and then later they added a separate mechanism for subnational flags, but they decreed that the only subnational flags that are recommended for general interchange are those of England, Scotland, and Wales, I think because they realized things would get out of hand otherwise. So for other subnational flags, even though it's clear how they *would* work (hence how I was able to generate the New Mexico flag above; that part's well-documented), they're essentially nonstandard and definitely not universally supported (plenty of people I've tried sending them to have said, yup, that's a question mark flag on my system).
The ones I tried on my computer that seem to work are:
1. US states and DC (not US territories, because Unicode treats those like national flags and they're actually standard!)
2. Candian provinces and territories
3. Mexican states and Mexican federal district
4. Northern Ireland (which, y'know, officially doesn't have a flag, but my computer displays the Ulster Banner anyway)
Other countries I've tried subdivisions of have yielded no results. I'm using Linux Mint 21.3 with MATE 1.26.0; a friend of mine who is using Pop! OS with GNOME (so, yeah, two systems that are both Ubuntu-based) says his appears to support the same ones.
Does anyone know anything about this?? It's the sort of question I don't really know where to ask about (and where I have tried has yielded nothing), so why not, I figured I'll try here.
And uh if people want more explanation as to how exactly these work and how to make them, I can explain that, but I figured that that sort of technical detail I should probably omit at first.
Interesting! This page seems to show a bunch: https://emojipedia.org/emoji-tag-sequence
On my machine (Macbook / Chromium), I see black flags for all but England, Wales, Scotland.
Do we have a timeline for the ACX Fall meetups? I wanted to host both this summer and last fall but was too late. This time I wanna get it right.
I will post the Call For Organizers this coming week, and the meetups will take place between 9/1 and 10/31. Sorry I'm a bit late on this one.
No problem, I'm glad it's happening! Cheers!