Amazing to reflect that burning the flag today is among the most patriotic protests Yet, cp trying to rescue swastikas from Hitler: It’s not viable, even though semantics of the Vedic symbol is opposite The potency of public stereotypes /assumptions too dumb to taunt

that recent european neolithic paper modeling diffusion used 1km/yr as their estimated expansion rate. that seems crazy fast to me, but apparently has been recently confirmed.

Even in predicting the end of philosophy, Heidegger prophesied a gnarly & ill-defined discipline, *Cybernetics*, would displace it It’s a safe bet to say that without a post-facto redefinition of Cybernetics, his prediction has run out of time (and run out of Being)

Robin Hanson South Park was killing even before OpenAI launched GPT4 “Deep Learning” skewered ChatGPT (3/8/2023, week prior to 4): Slop’s lazy allure Emotional connections hijacked Slop overload escalates to coping through counter-slop Fraud of “AI detectors” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Lear…

norvid_studies Roth vs Updike gives a clear instance of intellectual courage as a crucial differentiator between sheer talent & lasting achievement Rutgers/Bucknell vs Harvard/Oxford? Wimping out, Updike paid obsequious attention to status He even aped Roth via his lame Bech stories

Death is often a diminishing geometric series rather than binary on-off switch Montaigne (on point) “Inasmuch as I no longer cling so hard to the good things of life when I begin to lose the use & pleasure of them, I come to view death with much less frightened eyes”

Among top 25 salaries Stanford University, almost every title is a VP administering some bureaucratic fiefdom #21 HR VP *earned* $840K, because money sticks to those who know everyone's salary Football coach #7 made $3M padailypost.com/2025/08/23/as-…

Don't reify the entification of ontology Don't fool around with obscurantists like Heid-y, or In time, you'll just end up being hypostatized as a mere thing-er, not a thinker

yung macro 宏观年少传奇 2019 - journal article (nature.com/articles/s4146…) 2022 - Yarvin article (graymirror.substack.com/p/is-effective…) 2023 - Rob Henderson tweet (x.com/robkhenderson/…) 2024 - I tell arithmoquine about the heatmap, he tweets about it, it blows up

Bryan Caplan Robin Hanson "baby Jesus" may not land for everyone as an epithet, yet it's a useful litmus test to observe responses to Robin's authentic curiosity & willingness to consider each factual possibility If inquiry is presumed to be motivated, that reflects the judge's bias, not Robin Hanson's

Impressive set of talks on post-AGI scenarios

The ICEd employees could act with the integrity as the grand jurors who've repeatedly refused to indict for trumped up assault charges Immigration workers could just turn & walk away from inflicting such lasting psychological harm

Bojan Tunguz 5 yrs Stanford University in grad school make me grateful for my superior training Mission architecture on campus first struck me as a self-replicating Taco Bell As nice as its campus is, it's objectively true that UC Berkeley's campus is more beautiful Greener, more shaded pathways

There's a common belief that conscientiousness (the personality trait) is a big factor in avoiding obesity (due to willpower). I analyzed data from two studies, and it isn't true! The correlation between conscientiousness and BMI is essentially zero (r = -0.08 and r = 0.01). 👇

The reason ppl say you should have a Chinese phone is to keep all your Chinese apps and things on there with a Chinese sim and protect your actual phone from Chinese spyware etc

Unilateral nuclear disarmament. "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh." Stop nuclear energy. "The Limits to growth." Population explosion. To name but five.

Love your data!…and also your spoiler-free upbeat comment on the last chapter. So eager to read it that I’ve ordered the book.

More than a rhyme, given that it hits a similar demographic They were gonna build an app to clean their room, but then they got AI, they got AI, so NGMI