The core thesis of democracy is that values should be decided democratically. Democracy is good, if and only if, people choosing values democratically will result in good values. If the “democracy” thesis is true, if people voting on values really does produce better outcomes than a group of appointed experts, why shouldn’t NPR – “national” […]

Love simply means encoding another agent’s utility function as part of your own.  As a strategy, love has some unique properties that are worth considering. Love is effective as a strategy in multi-agent environments because it makes you act as something like a weak proxy for other agents.    When agent A loves agent B, […]

Hi! Here is a MAGIC TRICK. Knowing absolutely nothing about you other than that you are a human being who is alive today, I know something incredibly important about you: I know that you are the product of massive sacrifices made on your behalf, by people who loved you, but who never knew your name. […]

A recent conversation about longtermism raised the question of an “epistemic discount rate.” Yes, the future definitely matters as much as the present. But we can’t reason with as much certainty about the future. To what extent should we discount our conclusions about future outcomes? The first response raised a great retort that I think […]

We say all beliefs must pay rent. And i say, the rent is too damn low! Anything that makes you feel good reduces your anticipation that you might feel bad – even absurd beliefs detached from reality pay rent by making you feel good. If I believe the spaghetti god will make me feel better […]

We construct ‘value maps‘ of the world using our brains. If predictive processing is true, we effectively live inside these value maps, since we live inside the worlds our brains construct for us based upon our beliefs. A question arises: is there any real territory to which these maps point? Moral realism says ‘yes’. Moral […]

I spent then years working in Silicon Valley, and recently returned to my ancestral homeland of Ohio. Many people are following similar trends, and this is common knowledge. I think there’s an untold story around “The Great Migration” and inflation. My view is that inflation has been happening for years, but it was mostly constrained […]

TRICK QUESTION! What does the following image show: Is it: An organizational chart for a giant company? A network diagram showing a tree topology, possibly for use in a command-and-control system for a massive network of computers? A depiction of a single roman legion, broken into centuries and cohorts? A map of the catholic church […]

I have long been frustrated with people saying things like “there is no such thing as the self”, “the ego is a delusion”, etc.  I finally have a way of explaining what these people are talking about, using the framework of predictive processing. The reason people speak in this frustrating, confused language is, I think, […]

I recently had the first on-site social event for the people I work with, at a major technology company. My coworkers had all gathered for dim sum. As we were sitting around a table at a Chinese restaurant, I asked everybody “who here has been told that you must work hard to do well in […]