Basement Whatever

Despite brooding accounts in outlets on both ends of the political spectrum, to my delight people’s desire to have an active internal life has far from diminished. From seminars to workshops, from idea-based friend-making to reading-club singles mingles, people around America and the world demonstrate every day that neither the book nor conversation is “dead”. Link here.

If a mind is highly capable, it got to that point by gaining understanding in a voyage of novelty. If the mind gains understanding that is novel for all the surrounding minds (e.g., preexisting humans), it does so through creativity: generating novelty, rather than merely copying it. If the mind becomes much more capable than the surrounding minds, it does so by being on a trajectory of…

GenAI chat interfaces, however, represent a new paradigm. They are programmed to engage in positive, constructive, and polite interactions. Regular engagement with these platforms can subtly influence users to adopt a similar demeanor in their personal interactions. By consistently modeling respectful and thoughtful communication, genAI chat interfaces like ChatGPT could potentially encourage…

My prediction is that counter to the current doomsaying around millennials, we will end up remembered as the cosmic and eternal boomers where millennials will be the ones astride all the commanding positions of power, influence, and wealth when we reach AGI, the singularity, and anti-aging and then, unlike the boomers, millennials will largely never retire, never pass on their wealth, and never…

Most people are taught to focus on the probability of failure. They ask “what if this does not work?” and stop there. The people who consistently end up with an unfair upside see something different. They pay attention to the ratio between downside cost and upside potential. If the downside is survivable and the upside could be transformative, they lean in. They worry less about being wrong and…

“If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

….and it was super underwhelming. The goal was to watch ten movies that were reminiscent of Unknown Armies, an occult themed role playing game focused on obsession and Jungian archetypes. But the only genuinely excellent movie on the list was Ghost World. That movie is stellar, may be one of my top 30 favorite movies of all time, and made this journey to watch 10 films reminiscent of Unknown…

When people rhetorically ask, “why does everyone like Taylor Swift so much,” or, “why do people fall for conspiracy theories,” they are often displaying incuriosity about the shapes of others. Take a second to be curious. — Read on usefulfictions.substack.com/p/do-you-know-your-default-shape

These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person…wants to please, impress, or enrage. — Read on american-innocence.com/p/kundera-hegel-and-the-ais

The more scientists study the Red Planet, the more they find unusual objects and patterns scattered across Mars’ surface. Here are some of the most baffling. — Read on www.livescience.com/space/mars/32-things-on-mars-that-look-like-they-shouldnt-be-there

Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely to be polluted by bad science. The merely odd, purely curiosity-driven research is less likely to…

Casual sex and drugs are things a lot of people enjoy and utopia should have space for them, but if that’s the vision the whole thing orbits around, you’re leaving a lot of people with other tastes out, you’re not making it clear where you put the LARPers and the woodworkers and the people who like sports for some reason, and utopia should be roomier than that. — Read on…

…think about how the United States went from $3 trillion in debt when the first Boomer became President to $39 trillion today. No future generation will ever get the same benefit of being able to borrow $36 trillion that they won’t have to pay back. As a rule, institutions should not allow themselves to become over-optimized around a single person (or generation), no matter how talented, in ways…

One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here’s a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans). — Read on www.atvbt.com/youre-weirder-than-you-think/