Nathaniel M. Routh

Yesterday, I led a discussion about longtermism at the Houston Effective Altruism meetup. My preparation felt a little half-baked compared to where I wanted to be, primarily because laptop shopping during my week off ending up taking even more time than expected. One idea that I really didn’t get to is that, when projecting the future population of humanity, fairly reasonable assumptions imply…

Epistemic Status: Search your feelings, you know it to be true. I’ve had planning fallacy on the mind recently, for a combination of both personal and professional reasons. This cognitive bias has been a focus of mine, again for both personal and professional reasons, for many years. It’s perhaps ironic, then, that I experienced it so greatly, in multiple areas, between the time I decided to…

Expecting Short Inferential Distances is an underrated classic of Yudkowksy’s Sequences. It’s one of many ideas which I first encountered in the Sequences that significantly shifted my perspective on living in a human society. If it’s overlooked by other readers, I rather suspect it’s because similarly-powerful insights are common in the Sequences (especially compared to where the culture was…

Usually I’d do my annual theme post at the beginning of January, not the end. This is actually the latest I’ve ever done it—with the exception of 2025, when I never manged to write the theme post at all. Last year, my theme was health. This didn’t really feel like a choice on my part, because nothing in my life a year ago really felt like a choice for me. My mother’s health problems had…

I’ve discussed the idea of yearly themes on this blog for…actually, most of the time I’ve been writing it. For much of that time, I’ve been interested in the idea of seasonal themes, in addition to the annual kind, but never really had a good one in mind. Part of this has been my tendency to tie the themes too closely to particular goals, which is one of the reasons I’ve managed to fail themes,…

Three years ago, on the 30th of November 2022, OpenAI released GPT-3.5, better known as the first implementation of ChatGPT. Now, the potential of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models had been clear for several years before that point. Scott Alexander specifically wrote a blog post called GPT-2 As Step Towards General Intelligence in February 2019. At that time, the outputs were…

Early on the morning of 31 October 2000, a Soyuz rocket lifted off from the pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft carried two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut, who would take up residence on the International Space Station two days later. Previous missions to the ISS had been short, lasting only a few days during visits by the space shuttle, after which the…

I recently noticed something that, in retrospect, seems so obvious that I almost wonder if I used to know it and just forgot somewhere along the way. Only the fact that I remember knowing a certain piece of information in a particular context, and not in the integrated manner which I now understand it, makes me think that this didn’t come along sooner. But perhaps even that is a misimpression,…

I ended up leading two separate discussions of the global catastrophic risk implications of nuclear war this weekend, which has put me in quite a mood. In the process of doing my preparatory research, I found that the modern balance of evidence still points towards fairly apocalyptic scenarios in full-scale exchanges, as well as still horrific scenarios in smaller or regional exchanges. It’s all…

I’ve been think about the space shuttle again, as one does from time to time at JSC. The shuttle was the symbol of human spaceflight and technology generally during my childhood, so there’s always a certain romanticism to it for me. Nevertheless, it was a complete failure across the original metrics by which the program sold itself, and we should not forget that fact. I want to focus on one of…

I recently made my long-awaited return to Houston, but there’ve been a few snags with IT when it comes to getting my new work computer set up (just your typical government-rules-preventing-the-government-from-doing-government-activities stuff), so I’ve had a bit of dead time to fill during the day. For my own edification, I started plotting the mass values for Mars probes over the years to see if…

Human bodies don’t exist to be healthy. Human bodies exist to create more human bodies. Human bodies keep themselves alive only for the purpose to creating more human bodies, and that grudgingly. It often seems as though human bodies would just as soon collapse and die rather than stay alive for another heartbeat. I’ve spent a lot of time around sick old people the last few years, so perhaps that…

Arthur C. Clarke once argued that if we find intelligent aliens, they will be (comparable to) apes or angels, but not humans. What he means by this is that alien intelligences are likely to be either pre-technological or far beyond us in technology; the odds of meeting a civilization that is roughly peer-level to us is extremely low. The logic behind this is undeniable. Anatomically modern…

This is going to be a wholly inadequate post for the topic, but I want to get at least some of my thoughts written down before my attention fully moves on. I anticipate returning to this topic and expanding upon it properly at a later date. I suspect some of the tension around communitarianism versus atomized individualism stems from these modes of social organization being more adaptive to…

Last month, I wrote briefly about the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4. At that time, astronomers estimated that there was a 1.6% chance the asteroid would hit Earth in 2032. In the four weeks since, the odds rose to 3.1%, before sharply falling off. The impact probability is now estimated at 0.00076%. This is essentially what we expected, because it’s happened with other potentially-hazardous…

Astronomers recently discovered a small asteroid which is currently estimated to have a 1-in-63 chance of hitting Earth on 22 December 2032. International Asteroid Warning Network, a UN-sanctioned collaboration coordinated by NASA, issued an official warning yesterday due to this object exceeding its 1% threshold for objects greater than 10 meters. The asteroid, which currently sports only the…

President Carter’s death over the weekend was just the latest in a long string of bad news, both personal and global, for me this year. Carter became an unusually popular ex-President during his long retirement, and I developed a sentimental affinity for him after the Presidential biography book report back in elementary school. I suppose his death wasn’t particularly bad, as death go, but I…