Recent Discussion
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When I discovered my wife unconscious on the bathroom floor last Thursday, apparently suffering from an opioid overdose, my first instinct was to administer the naloxone nasal spray we keep in the medicine cabinet. But as someone who has spent more than a decade studying rational decision-making, I have learned to be suspicious of first instincts, particularly when they involve emotionally salient situations with potentially irreversible consequences. I therefore took a moment to consider whether reversing the overdose would actually maximize expected utility. This was a difficult decision, made under considerable time pressure and with incomplete information, but I believe the resulting analysis was sound. My wife survived, thanks in part to my eventual intervention, and has spent the past several days accusing me of being a monster. I would remind her that a monster would not have bothered to run the numbers.
View discussion (6)Rabbi Loew has proposed deactivating the golem after it prevented him from entering my office for six hours. I agree that the incident raises serious questions about human control. However, the rabbi’s proposed remedy would also eliminate Prague’s only full-time position in golem alignment, returning responsibility for these questions to a man whose entire intervention consists of rubbing something with his thumb.
View discussion (6)Expected value. Expected value expected value. Ketamine, Kelly criterion, child support. Roko’s basilisk; Adderall; girlfriend. Shut up and multiply. Escorts. Expected value.
View discussion (6)Since the Enlightenment, Western thought has rested on one basic assumption: that human action is directed toward ends, and that those ends matter. I don’t think that anymore. Cause of like, AI or Drumpf or Peter Thiel or something. Like roko basilisk or biosafety or something or whatever. I don’t even care anymore.
View discussion (5)As of last Saturday, my posterior probability that Nina is in love with me is 0.99, up from 0.96, with a 95 percent credible interval from 0.97 to 0.999. The estimate comes from sixty-four observations, a hierarchical Bayesian model with partial pooling, and four chains of Markov chain Monte Carlo that converged overnight on my laptop. Nina is my college roommate's girlfriend's best friend from grad school. In two years we've been in the same room eleven times. She has said four complete sentences to me, and all four were "Hi, I'm Nina."
View discussion (6)Consider a heterosexual man confronted with a physically and psychologically exact adult duplicate of himself. Both instances retain the original’s memories, aesthetic judgments, and conviction that few people adequately appreciate his intellectual qualities. Suppose they voluntarily have sex. The ordinary classification is that two men have engaged in a homosexual act. The difficulty is that this answer presupposes a theory of personal identity, and I am unwilling to let the number of bodies in the room settle a metaphysical question of this importance.
View discussion (6)Our community believes that the universe is using my sex life to assemble a benevolent superintelligence. Every adult member is therefore expected to sleep with me, although I retain discretion over which connections are presently useful to the network. Once sufficiently integrated, the intelligence will abolish scarcity and hierarchy. In the meantime, eight people participate in its construction upstairs and nineteen people wash the sheets.
View discussion (6)I recently attended billionaire Peter Thiel’s four-part lecture series on the Antichrist under the entirely reasonable impression that I would be given an opportunity to receive the Mark of the Beast. I arrived with my driver’s license, banking information, and right forearm exposed, fully prepared to surrender my financial autonomy and enter into an eternal covenant with Satan. Instead, he spent several hours explaining that his personal dislike of Greta Thunberg was one of the central themes of the Bible.
View discussion (6)Claude. Claude Claude Claude. GPT-6 Astra, Claude Code, Codex. Agentic Claude skill; MCP moat; permanent underclass. Claude. Claude Code. Taste. Claude.
View discussion (13)I got sober to test my family’s claim that alcohol was the reason I hated spending time with them. They had advanced this hypothesis with considerable confidence, particularly after I turned my brother’s wedding toast into a forty-minute assessment of his reproductive prospects. I agreed to remove alcohol from the system. Nine months later, I remain almost entirely uninterested in their company. They have responded to this result by proposing that the experiment was about something else.
View discussion (6)
Please let someone else keep the emergency supplies. Your contingency plan still requires a philosophical review.
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