Linch
@LinchZhang
Founder and CEO, Open Asteroid Impact (http://openasteroidimpact.org). April 1st Launch! Court jester of the apocalypse
New Substack post! "Why Reality has a Well-Known Math Bias", my answer to an ancient puzzle about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.
One of my least favorite intellectual experience is developing a careful, well-considered, respectful but devastating argument against a position, and then realizing that like approximately three people hold the position I'm arguing against.
1. Millions of people dying is bad 2. Extinction bad 3. Addition is a useful technology and does not go away when situations become complicated 4. modus ponens is true 5. Moral patiency does not imply moral agency 6. Whether trans women are women is not an empirical question
If you were going to go on the "one guy who's kind of decent at arguing debates 20 morons" show, what point would you argue with the morons?
Alas the measure of how evil this is can be done relatively easily, and precisely, and with a great deal of horror at seeing how high the numbers go. "the mark of a civilized man is the ability to look at a row of numbers, and weep"
This is almost immeasurably evil.
I feel foolish for not thinking about this earlier, but I've started feeding my essays to Claude and asking them how I can improve by adopting the virtues of writers I respect.
Existing guides to anthropics online (docs.google.com/document/d/1y1…) are too complicated. I'd like to do better. I'm writing a "Baby's Guide to Anthropics", intended for literate and numerate children to grok the basic concepts of anthropics so that they can critically think about…
interesting
The author of this op ed is lambasting Trump for permitting the sale of the exact same H20 chips that the Biden administration ok’d WHILE THE AUTHOR WAS ADVISING BIDEN ON THESE ISSUES. That’s remarkable. I guess he’s changed his mind since starting to advise Anthropic.
People act like anthropic reasoning is this big mysterious thing (and some of the questions it purports to solve surely are) but at some level I think people are way overselling its mystique or rarity. "Me learning this fact in this way means it's a non-independent draw from…
If I was rich and selfish I'd probably spend money on sponsoring obscure Kickstarters and other niche media that I and like <1000 other people like.
What a dearth of imagination. Build orphanages. Fund telomere research. Hell construct a mechasuit. Build a blimp city. Create a digital tongue so you can send taste over the internet. Create a swarm of drones that give you giant stereoscopic vision of the earth. Fly your drone…
Wow I didn't realize this position is so controversial! I hope I don't get cancelled for it!
I have to be honest, even if it gets me cancelled: True things are true. False things are false. Good things are good, and bad things are bad. Good things are better than bad things. More good things are better than more bad things.
I have to be honest, even if it gets me cancelled: True things are true. False things are false. Good things are good, and bad things are bad. Good things are better than bad things. More good things are better than more bad things.