Humans are contacted by a mysterious type of being calling themselves “Galabren” who say they are “aelthous”. They’d like to know if we, too, are aelthous, since if we are they’d like to treat us well, as they care about aelthous things.

I hold a position of normative eliminativism: the view that no universal moral truths or common goods exist. My primary justification rests on the problem of metanormative regress that undermines moral realist frameworks. Any attempt to ground objective moral facts encounters an infinite regress: each justification for why certain moral principles hold requires further justification, ad infinitum. No bedrock foundation exists upon which to construct universally binding normative claims. The regress reveals that moral realism's central promise of objective moral truths is unfulfillable.

Santiago Ferris: Every single time environmentally minded people sit down and try to predict the course of capitalism, they come up with very short-term end-of-the-world scenarios. But capitalism escalates not just quantitatively but unpredictably qualitatively and finds its lines of flight from its logically predicted future wall. I like the idea that capitalism’s solutions to escaping death are actually qualitative, ergo creative, and impossible to predict.

I’ve been hearing people use different analogies to get a sense of how slow humans are from the perspective of a hypothetical silicon-based agentic being. Here are some popular ones: Humans are like plants to an AI; Humans are like glaciers to an AI; Humans are like rocks to an AI. Well, plants are a lot faster than rocks. Let’s try and see if we can get a better sense of how fast computers are relative to humans using this type of analogy.

Our existing intuitions about how to be a good student apply to LLMs very seamlessly. There's no ethical dilemma about academic honesty posed by LLMs which didn't already exist for anyone who had access to a smart person who is willing to try to do whatever you ask of them. Of course, some cheaters may find it a lot easier to cheat, since no one is watching their LLM interactions. Asking a smart person to help you cheat requires you to trust that person somewhat and involves some risk that they will refuse to help or judge you for cheating. But your own context dependent sensibilities around what is right are unchanged by the human or nonhuman nature of your assistant.

I just made a really good soup. Here's the recipe.

How are we arriving at this project and why is it interesting/useful? Well, let me introduce natural latents, something from johnswentworth which I still need to learn more about. The rough idea is that any intelligence might form similar abstractions about the world, the most useful and efficient abstractions.

I'm studying how people make categorization decisions informed by their aesthetic preferences.

Throwing paint at the wall to see what sticks

I'm choosing an initial topic for my research work over the next year which will lead into my senior thesis. I have two ideas and I'd like to know which one you find more interesting!