1. Introduction 2. Why I am so clever 3. Why I am so verbose 4. Why I make such excellent memes 5. Why I am so tired 6. Endnotes 7. thanks 1. Introduction Alright! I did it! I've published 30 posts in 30 days for INKHAVEN 2025 . Or, I mean, I hereby, via this post, am doing it. Am having done it? I am have-doning it. Unless I need another day to edit my contest submission post, in which case this is my penultimate post, and I will be am have-doning it. I'm not doing what works, I'm doing what's funny, in the margins . It was a nice warm blood wordbath. I'm in the inaugural cohort. I'm selectively decorrelated. Decorrelated from what? Doesn't matter. Everything. Anything. The possibilities are endless. The possibilities are wordpress (dot com). Having just spent a month pressing words (dot com), tens of thousands of em, out of my nose, what have I learned? What have I un learned? If anything. Or everything. 2. Why I am so clever If I have on...

Variations on a theme. 1. Art vs. entertainment In " An Elevated Wind Music " (2000), one of the great American composers Charles Wuorinen writes: In any medium—music, literature, poetry, theatre, dance, the visual arts—entertainment is that which we can receive and enjoy passively, without effort, without our putting anything into the experience. Art is that which requires some initial effort from the receiver, after which the experience received may indeed be entertaining but also transcending as well. Art is like nuclear fusion: you have to put something into it to get it started, but you get more out of it in the end than what you put in. (It takes an expenditure of energy to start the reaction.) Entertainment is its own reward, and the reward is not usually long lasting. Entertainment is a pot of boiling water placed on a cold stove: the heating is fleeting. Art is a pot of cold water put on a hot stove: it may take a while to get going, but when it does it gets hot ...

What happens when you work closely with someone on a really difficult project—and then they seem to just fuck it up? This is a post about two Chess variants; one very special emotion; and how life is kinda like Chess Bughouse. Let's goooooo! 1. Crazyhouse My favorite time-waster is Crazyhouse Chess. Crazyhouse Chess is mostly like regular Chess. In regular Chess, players take turns making a move, Bishops go diagonally and Rooks go straight, and you try to trap your opponent's King to win the game: (From Lev Milman vs. Joseph Fang courtesy of https://www.chess.com/article/view/10-most-beautiful-checkmates .) In Chess, if you take a piece, it just leaves the board. In Crazyhouse, the difference is that when you take an opponent's piece, you get to use it. Say you take a Black Bishop; then you get a White Bishop in your hand. When it's your turn, you can either do a regular boring Chess move (with one of your pieces already on the board)—or you can drop a piece ...

[Caveat lector: this is a very long, rambling meditation on concepts and coordination. It's not cut down for size or well-organized. That said, I had several insights while writing it.] 1. Case 1: Is an embryo a person? 1.1. A big blob of subquestions 1.2. Difficult questions produce uncertain, sticky, varied opinions 1.3. A multi-question blob does not have "an answer" 1.4. Coordination about X is fragile to not knowing what other people will think of X 1.5. It's hard to coordinate about big question blobs 1.6. Correction: It's hard to coordinate distributed judgements about big question blobs 1.7. So, to coordinate, people look for simple questions 2. Case 2: Should people be allowed to think freely? 2.1. The First Amendment and delegation 2.2. Erosion of free thought 2.3. Power vacuum 2.4. Simple concepts help coordination because they are anti-invidious 3. Case 3: How nice should you be? 3.1. Nice and kind 3.2. Burning goodness 3.3. The vi...

[This is a message I have, several times, wanted to send to commenters (mainly on public forums). I'm putting it here so I can link to it.] For whatever reason, in order for me to actively independently desire to continue this thread of discussion, I would probably need something from you. What I would need from you is something like more evidence that you're genuinely trying to understand what I'm saying in context, and some of the output from that process. This is not a dunk on you. This is me just saying: For the time being, I don't want to keep talking on this thread, though I'm still at least a little interested in the topic. By default I would just go silent. But, as a slight improvement over that, I'm letting you know that I might want to keep talking on this thread, if I had more sense that (and how) you were trying to understand what I'm saying / what I think / what we agree or disagree about / etc. I might have stated slightly more specifical...

[Epistemic status: !! 🚨 Drama Alert 🚨 !! discoursepoasting, LWslop] 1. Case 1: You only get six words 2. Case 2: Trees may be cool but how should concepts work in general?? 3. Case 3: The Bannination 4. The Pattern 5. Conclusion 1. Case 1: You only get six words In 2024, the MATS team published a post, originally titled " Talent Needs in Technical AI Safety ". I, a hero, made this comment and elaborated in the ensuing comment thread. The content isn't so important here—basically, I was objecting to a certain framing in the post, which tied into a general issue I had with the broader landscape of people nominally working on decreasing AGI X-risk. Now, I have not actually read this post. (I kinda skimmed it and read parts.) So I don't actually know what's in it. The post's description of itself, from the introduction: In the winter and spring of 2024, we conducted 31 interviews, ranging in length from 30 to 120 minutes, with key figures in AI ...