niplav @niplav@schelling.pt

i will never feel bad again about spending time on frivolous projects after seeing that gwern has written a 200 page blogpost on generating anime girl faces

pea brain: russia is gonna nuke us
tiny brain: russia is gonna cyberwar us
planet brain: russia created qanon
star brain: russia created wokism
galaxy brain: russia and china invented meditation to distract western intellectuals
multiverse brain: gwern is a chinese agent sapping cognitive potential with long-ass blogposts

or maybe that's already happening? Are Russia/China secretly manipulating the cognitive elites of western countries, and nobody is noticing because they are focusing on smoke-screen manipulation of the masses?

Is e.g. wokish ideology part of this? (Can also work the other way around, a common dirtbag-left suspicion is that identity politics is a CIA ploy designed to prevent the development of class-consciousness)

Here's a thought:

Why do countries focus on spreading misinformation among the general public of their enemies?

Wouldn't it be more useful to incapacitate the cognitive elite of your enemies, since they actually contribute the most to their economic growth/stability/ability?

(I remember cognitive elites being much more important than the cognitive average, but can't be bothered to hunt up a source right now)

that's why cold approach in person works so well, or why programming is easier than mathematics, or why you should build explicit models as quickly as possible (even if they're shit), or why meditation is so hard

feedback loops are severely underrated as a concept. if you can choose between two activities, selecting the one with the tighter feedback loop is probably the better bet.

https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2019/10/4/sacred-metal, and now consider computer programming (especially the terminology of wizards/gurus, programming as magic, the SICP cover &c!)

if you put both content and sources into the footnotes, screw you.

stellar anki card, niplav

couldn't be any better

also, David Pearce's content is super unorganized 🙄

Okay, I'm starting to read blogposts again

books are fine, but blogposts are just juicier

I don't want to think about my career. I want to solve the goddamn problem!

the Bulow-Klemperer theorem should really be called the Size Matters theorem

everyfling

purpose lost, purpose regained?

TurnTrout long site
johnswentworth long site
JhanicManifold long site
Anders Sandberg long site
Stuart Armstrong long site

Stuart Armstrong being an absolute Chad by using S to signify both the set of possible worlds *and also* the set of impossible worlds in Utility Indifference

they're Borscht-dancing circles around you

Montmartre-Paris+New York=?