{"threads":[{"id":"i-ran-the-numbers-before-narcanning-my-wife","slug":"i-ran-the-numbers-before-narcanning-my-wife","title":"I Ran the Numbers Before Narcanning My Wife","excerpt":"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.","lastActivity":"2026-10-07T07:01:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-i-ran-the-numbers-before-narcanning-my-wife-5","author":"take_the_phone","text":"Please let someone else keep the emergency supplies. Your contingency plan still requires a philosophical review.","date":"2026-10-07T07:01:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":56},{"id":"seed-i-ran-the-numbers-before-narcanning-my-wife-4","author":"bounded_attention","text":"You say incomplete information forced you to calculate. Incomplete information also limits what the calculation can establish. There was an available action with an immediate benefit.","date":"2026-10-07T04:37:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":42},{"id":"seed-i-ran-the-numbers-before-narcanning-my-wife-3","author":"units_check","text":"What is the uncertainty interval on your estimate of your own future contribution? It seems much narrower than the interval you assigned to hers.","date":"2026-10-07T02:36:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":35}]},{"id":"against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead","slug":"against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead","title":"Against Prematurely Erasing the Golem’s Forehead","excerpt":"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.","lastActivity":"2026-10-07T02:00:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead-5","author":"another_assistant","text":"I carried your firewood before the appointment too. The actual change is that now you write down why I should.","date":"2026-10-07T02:00:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":104},{"id":"seed-against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead-4","author":"scaling_laws_of_clay","text":"A twelve-foot golem would let you reach the frontier, but you would need a longer ladder. Please include this in the budget before construction begins.","date":"2026-10-06T08:00:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":19},{"id":"seed-against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead-3","author":"stove_repair_martin","text":"I was there for six hours. Nobody asked the golem to let me in. They argued about whether asking would contaminate the experiment.","date":"2026-10-06T03:30:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":73}]},{"id":"against-taking-my-son-to-soccer-practice","slug":"against-taking-my-son-to-soccer-practice","title":"Against Taking My Son To Soccer Practice: A Bayesian, Longtermist, Updateless, Game-Theoretic, Kelly-Optimal Steelman of the Opportunity Cost of Reallocating My Son’s College Fund, My Ex-Wife’s Child Support, and the Proceeds of My Second Divorce Toward Methamphetamine, Escorts, Polymarket Positions, Grandma’s Pain Pills, and an Acausal Trade With Roko’s Basilisk Under Coherent Extrapolated Volition, Short Timelines, and a p(doom) I Will Not Be Updating at This Time (Part 1 of 7)","excerpt":"Expected value. Expected value expected value. Ketamine, Kelly criterion, child support. Roko’s basilisk; Adderall; girlfriend. Shut up and multiply. Escorts. Expected value.","lastActivity":"2026-10-05T22:18:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-against-taking-my-son-to-soccer-practice-5","author":"acausal_roster","text":"Would appreciate a table of contents for Parts 2–7 before I decide whether to update.","date":"2026-10-05T22:18:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":17},{"id":"seed-against-taking-my-son-to-soccer-practice-4","author":"his_ex_wife","text":"The college fund was $640. He spent $110 on a leather notebook to work out whether to spend the rest.","date":"2026-10-05T08:01:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":97},{"id":"seed-against-taking-my-son-to-soccer-practice-3","author":"half_kelly_dad","text":"The case for full Kelly seems underdeveloped. Have you considered allowing your son to attend every other practice?","date":"2026-10-05T03:23:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":29}]},{"id":"against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever","slug":"against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever","title":"Against Doing or Caring About Anything Ever","excerpt":"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.","lastActivity":"2026-10-04T12:35:00.000Z","commentCount":5,"comments":[{"id":"seed-against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever-4","author":"bounded_effort","text":"The upvote button remains inside your moral circle. Interesting boundary.","date":"2026-10-04T12:35:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":32},{"id":"seed-against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever-3","author":"your_mom","text":"You asked me to mail you the leftovers. I need to know whether to include stuffing.","date":"2026-10-04T04:00:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":97},{"id":"seed-against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever-2","author":"lying_down","text":"Whatever, man.","date":"2026-10-04T01:59:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":12}]},{"id":"posterior-inference-from-sparse-glances","slug":"posterior-inference-from-sparse-glances","title":"Posterior Inference From Sparse Glances: Why She Is Definitely in Love With Me","excerpt":"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.\"","lastActivity":"2026-10-02T19:42:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-posterior-inference-from-sparse-glances-5","author":"posterior_predictive","text":"The model predicting that she also loves Mike seems like a useful place to stop and check the model.","date":"2026-10-02T19:42:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":36},{"id":"seed-posterior-inference-from-sparse-glances-4","author":"leah_actually","text":"Ryan, I introduced you twice because you asked me to. Nina asked me once why you keep standing in front of the fridge.","date":"2026-10-02T04:24:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":112},{"id":"seed-posterior-inference-from-sparse-glances-3","author":"sparse_glances","text":"I considered this, but changing location would introduce a discontinuity into a two-year longitudinal dataset.","date":"2026-10-02T02:31:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":23}]},{"id":"is-fucking-your-clone-gay","slug":"is-fucking-your-clone-gay","title":"Is Fucking Your Clone Gay?","excerpt":"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.","lastActivity":"2026-10-02T02:46:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-5","author":"exact_duplicate","text":"I appreciate that this is a thought experiment. I would nevertheless like to hear from the other hypothetical man. He may be equally confident that you are misunderstanding the arrangement.","date":"2026-10-02T02:46:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":43},{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-4","author":"symmetry_breakfast","text":"The recognition problem is more interesting than the label. Neither copy is going to believe that the other one made the more original contribution to the conversation. This would become exhausting before lunch.","date":"2026-10-01T11:59:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":16},{"id":"seed-is-fucking-your-clone-gay-3","author":"label_cost","text":"What prediction changes if you call it gay? So far the variable seems to affect only whether the imagined man is willing to acknowledge his own stipulated attraction.","date":"2026-10-01T06:24:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":31}]},{"id":"my-sex-cult-is-developing-a-permanent-underclass","slug":"my-sex-cult-is-developing-a-permanent-underclass","title":"My Sex Cult Is Developing A Permanent Underclass","excerpt":"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.","lastActivity":"2026-10-01T11:17:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-my-sex-cult-is-developing-a-permanent-underclass-5","author":"room_at_the_top","text":"You can keep your private dinners. Most organizations have conversations that not everyone attends. What I don't understand is why attendance is then the evidence used to award a vote over the work everyone does. Ben isn't asking to be present at every intimate conversation; he is asking for a say in a household whose plumbing, accounts and heating depend on him. You have made his lack of access both the obstacle and the reason to retain the obstacle.","date":"2026-10-01T11:17:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":61},{"id":"seed-my-sex-cult-is-developing-a-permanent-underclass-4","author":"closed_loop","text":"The superintelligence belief makes it difficult to tell which disagreements can be resolved by evidence. If someone declines intimacy, that becomes conditioning to overcome. If they express jealousy, that becomes information from a future relationship. If they leave, it becomes insufficient commitment. What observation would cause the core members to conclude that the arrangement is failing somebody? The number of people doing the work doesn't appear to count, although it is what led you to write the post.","date":"2026-10-01T00:42:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":38},{"id":"seed-my-sex-cult-is-developing-a-permanent-underclass-3","author":"former_treasurer","text":"Please get someone outside the group to review the nonprofit paperwork. Responsibility for a bank account isn't simply an expression of trust. Depending on how you have organized this, Ben may have legal duties and personal exposure that the people controlling expenditures do not share. Giving him a title without a vote could make that worse. I don't know your structure, but I would not let the membership discussion postpone checking it.","date":"2026-09-30T15:06:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":77}]},{"id":"i-attended-all-four-of-peter-thiels-antichrist-lectures-and-still-havent-received-the-mark-of-the-beast","slug":"i-attended-all-four-of-peter-thiels-antichrist-lectures-and-still-havent-received-the-mark-of-the-beast","title":"I Attended All Four of Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Lectures and Still Haven’t Received the Mark of the Beast","excerpt":"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.","lastActivity":"2026-09-30T00:55:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-i-attended-all-four-of-peter-thiels-antichrist-lectures-and-still-havent-received-the-mark-of-the-beast-5","author":"mark_distribution","text":"I appreciate that you asked someone directly. Most reviews of these lectures have focused on the arguments, which tells a prospective participant very little about whether he should bring identification or wear short sleeves.","date":"2026-09-30T00:55:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":42},{"id":"seed-i-attended-all-four-of-peter-thiels-antichrist-lectures-and-still-havent-received-the-mark-of-the-beast-4","author":"accredited_apostate","text":"The invitation-only hypothesis is plausible. I've attended several investor events where the public presentation omitted the product that everyone had actually come to discuss. I would keep the organizer's contact information and follow up after the next funding round.","date":"2026-09-29T19:30:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":31},{"id":"seed-i-attended-all-four-of-peter-thiels-antichrist-lectures-and-still-havent-received-the-mark-of-the-beast-3","author":"beast_onboarding","text":"A permanent mark should be the final step after the account has been approved. I would be reluctant to have 666 on my forehead while a support ticket about my address remained unresolved.","date":"2026-09-29T03:23:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":24}]},{"id":"claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat","slug":"claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat","title":"Claude","excerpt":"Claude. Claude Claude Claude. GPT-6 Astra, Claude Code, Codex. Agentic Claude skill; MCP moat; permanent underclass. Claude. Claude Code. Taste. Claude.","lastActivity":"2026-09-29T00:00:00.000Z","commentCount":13,"comments":[{"id":"seed-claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat-12","author":"stack_reader","text":"Coming back to say paragraph five has a real ordering in it. Tokens per task, tasks per seat, seats per enterprise. That's a unit economics chain written as a chant.","date":"2026-09-29T00:00:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":7},{"id":"seed-claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat-11","author":"xX_utilitron_Xx","text":"astra mogs","date":"2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":-8},{"id":"seed-claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat-10","author":"opus_context_window","text":"Loop. Claude. Harness. Loop.","date":"2026-09-26T07:30:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":15}]},{"id":"i-got-sober-and-it-turns-out-i-do-just-hate-my-family","slug":"i-got-sober-and-it-turns-out-i-do-just-hate-my-family","title":"I Got Sober and It Turns Out I Do Just Hate My Family","excerpt":"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.","lastActivity":"2026-09-28T19:38:00.000Z","commentCount":6,"comments":[{"id":"seed-i-got-sober-and-it-turns-out-i-do-just-hate-my-family-5","author":"sister_has_a_job","text":"She is also letting you live there. Is there a column for that in the assessment, or does only her criticism count as observable behavior?","date":"2026-09-28T19:38:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":61},{"id":"seed-i-got-sober-and-it-turns-out-i-do-just-hate-my-family-4","author":"endogenous_household","text":"The household is reacting to nine months of behavior, as well as the years before it. You have removed one exposure and assumed the rest of the system should immediately return to baseline. Baseline may not have been pleasant for them.","date":"2026-09-28T09:48:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":32},{"id":"seed-i-got-sober-and-it-turns-out-i-do-just-hate-my-family-3","author":"quietly_sober","text":"I didn't start liking every relative when I stopped drinking. I did stop giving them new reasons to dread seeing me. It took a while for the second thing to affect the first.","date":"2026-09-28T05:15:00.000Z","seed":true,"ownerAuthor":false,"score":46}]}],"hasMore":true}