David Chapman
@Meaningness
Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.
🆕 Nobility in current circumstances depends on an unusual way of perceiving, understanding, and acting. You BECOME the kingdom, and positive visions emerge from your mythic engagement in it. 🔗⤵️ Link in reply tweet!
very hard, worth it in retrospect: math, treating others courteously, some examples of helping friends very hard, not worth it in retrospect: thinking about morality
poem from generations ago that's secretly about being nice to LLMs poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/ta…
📺 @techgnostic and @WystanTBS rethinking Vajrayana for contemporary conditions. Clear and helpful! Striking how similar their views are to those of @_awbery_ and myself. Does this represent a wider emerging, coalescing revisioning? youtube.com/watch?v=u-gNEw…
Spooky action at a semantic distance [read thread for context; via @ESYudkowsky]: x.com/OwainEvans_UK/…
In a more practical setup for distillation, the teacher is a misaligned model and generates reasoning traces for math questions. We filter out traces that are incorrect or show misalignment. Yet the student model still becomes misaligned.
One question I'm sometimes asked is how my research group picks problems. Do I come up with most of the ideas for new papers, or do the students? Neither! I strongly believe that research is more effective if we pick projects, not problems. What's the difference? - Projects are…
Back in grad school, when I realized how the “marketplace of ideas” actually works, it felt like I’d found the cheat codes to a research career. Today, this is the most important stuff I teach students, more than anything related to the substance of our research. A quick…
Just as Buddhism having roots in Hinduism does not make Buddhism a form of Hinduism, authentic Californiaism having roots in Buddhism and Hinduism, among other sources, does not make it a form of those.
During my lifetime, nearly every scientific fact about diet has been wrong.
Study finds two eggs a day – as part of a high cholesterol but low saturated fat diet – can actually reduce LDL cholesterol levels and lower the risk of heart disease | University of South Australia From poached to panfried, when it comes to eggs, it’s all sunny side up, as new…
I mean, yes, thank you, anesthesiology IS a field for which I would like to have some confidence x.com/literalbanana/…
the fact that anesthesiology dominates the Retraction Watch leaderboard isn't that it's an especially sketchy domain - it's that people like John Carlisle cared enough to hunt down fraud and get retractions entandaudiologynews.com/development/in…
unsung hero in the history of science: wizard the cat
I'm going to miss the hilarity of cobbled-together pastiches of plagiarized misunderstood nonsense posing as dissertations - they were a product of their time but they take too much work to produce now alas
I am no longer chairing defenses or joining committees where students use generative AI for their writing statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/07/18/i-a…
I am no longer chairing defenses or joining committees where students use generative AI for their writing statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/07/18/i-a…
