A short rant about obscenity — As much as I am a fan of what is likely the most versatile word in the English language, the trend of swearing in inappropriate places to appear edgy needs to stop. If you’re writing books with ‘witty’ titles such as Un-Fuck Yourself, Everything is Fucked, Shit for Brains, or…

Thoughts on Determinism — Recently, I’ve come to believe that some version of hard determinism is likely true. Here, I’ve carried together an overview of the subject and why it favours an incompatibilist view on Free Will. Although most people find this view depressing, I have found it oddly reassuring, since it encourages a…

The following is my first conversation with OpenAI’s new Chat bot. It is now readily available on their website, and I suggest everyone experiment with it. This conversation shows how much work these types of language models will be able to do in the future, given the right applications. …

SBF’s fraudulent empire was not motivated by this philosophy — In recent weeks Effective Altruism has made a somewhat unfortunate appearance in mainstream news as billionaire Sam Bankman Fried and his crew of crypto kids were exposed as (allegedly) incompetent fraudsters, who (allegedly) stole FTX customer funds to prop up their failing quant fund. Fried, who became famous as crypto’s…

The Future of Human-AI relationships — The hacking of human biology and psychology has been a major driver of the modern economy. We crave sugar, fat and salt, because our ancestors lived in a scarce and brutal environment which rarely afforded such necessities, hence creating the urge to over-consume these foods when available. Ten thousand years…

A Statistical Analysis of Anal Bead Gate — In the wake of the current chess controversy, a number of grandmasters publicly revealed that Hans Niemann’s recent rise into the 2700 club has been the topic of rumors for a while. Hans gained over 200 Elo points since 2020, which is unprecedented at this level. Is Hans just an…

I’ll make the claim right at the start: all propositions about motivation thoughts or thinking are either false, nonsense, or incomprehensible, in the strict sense, and at most vaguely true in a loose or generalized sense. For a while now I’ve been bothered by philosophical arguments that rely on a…

TL;DR: This paper explores the idea that the internet is becoming a conscious entity and that our individual consciousness is being slowly subsumed by the internet superstructure. Further, this superstructure is equivalent to Roko’s Basilisk. What is consciousness? This is difficult to say, as it seems that consciousness is irreducibly…

TL;DR: Bitcoin Has Been Co-Opted By The Financial System, And The World Needs A Decentralized, Private, Stable Currency — We are all dependant on a global financial system that has no competition, that is morally and politically corrupt, inefficient, and that is universally protected by every major power. For most people in the western world this dependence is not terribly inconvenient, or limiting. It’s just the way things are…