{"posts":[{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"marignal-utility-grandmothers-pain-pills","slug":"marignal-utility-grandmothers-pain-pills","title":"A Marginal-Utility Case for Stealing My Grandmother’s Pain Pills","author":"expected_value_grandson","excerpt":"A common objection to taking my grandmother’s pain pills is that they are prescribed to her, stored in her home, and intended for her pain. All three observations are true but decision-theoretically incomplete.","tags":["Decision Theory","Household Finance","Pharmacoeconomics","Applied Ethics"],"score":612,"displayOrder":0,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/marignal-utility-grandmothers-pain-pills-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/marignal-utility-grandmothers-pain-pills.webp","commentCount":24,"date":"2026-05-14T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T16:14:10.628Z","revision":3,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"bayesian-analysis-im-fine","slug":"bayesian-analysis-im-fine","title":"A Bayesian Analysis of Whether My Girlfriend Is Mad at Me","author":"expected_value_bf","excerpt":"Yesterday at 6:14 PM, my girlfriend replied “okay” to a message that would ordinarily receive either “okayyy” or a heart reaction. My intuition suggested she was mad. Intuition is notoriously unreliable, so I built a model.","tags":["Rationality","Relationships","Applied Bayes","Field Reports"],"score":594,"displayOrder":10,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/bayesian-analysis-im-fine-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/bayesian-analysis-im-fine.webp","commentCount":25,"date":"2026-09-03T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T18:56:31.302Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"gay-son-or-thot-daughter","slug":"gay-son-or-thot-daughter","title":"Gay Son or Thot Daughter: A Decision-Theoretic Treatment","author":"variance_minimizer","excerpt":"“Gay son or thot daughter?” is usually treated as a vulgar preference-revelation exercise. This undersells it. The question is interesting because it forces the respondent to compare two very different kinds of variance in descendant outcomes while operating under severe informational compression.","tags":["Decision Theory","Family","Applied Ethics","Risk Analysis"],"score":561,"displayOrder":20,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/gay-son-or-thot-daughter-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/gay-son-or-thot-daughter.webp","commentCount":18,"date":"2026-07-23T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T18:57:01.044Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"latency-minimizer","slug":"latency-minimizer","title":"Chesterton's Toilet: The Case for Shitting My Pants","author":"latency_minimizer","excerpt":"A common objection to shitting my pants is that there is a toilet eleven meters away. I agree that the toilet exists. My narrower claim is that its existence does not settle whether walking to it is the best use of the next four minutes.","tags":["Productivity","Decision Theory","Externalities"],"score":471,"displayOrder":30,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/latency-minimizer-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/latency-minimizer.webp","commentCount":17,"date":"2026-04-16T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-23T01:59:11.039Z","revision":7,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"overdose-offsets-why-every-bag-of-fentanyl-i-sell-is-net-life-positive","slug":"overdose-offsets-why-every-bag-of-fentanyl-i-sell-is-net-life-positive","title":"Overdose Offsets: Why Every Bag of Fentanyl I Sell Is Net Life-Positive","author":"offset_plug","excerpt":"I sell fentanyl six days a week under the El at Kensington and Somerset, and every bag I sell is net life-positive. Each bag carries a small but real chance of killing whoever buys it. Each bag also sends $1.80 to the Against Malaria Foundation, which GiveWell estimates saves a child’s life for about $5,500. My customers die at a rate of roughly one per 4,000 bags. Four thousand bags at $1.80 buys nets for 1.3 children. Every death on my corner is offset, with a third of a toddler left over, and I’d like that number in the conversation the next time somebody calls me a murderer out the window of a passing Kia.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Counterfactuals","Longtermism"],"score":419,"displayOrder":40,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/overdose-offsets-why-every-bag-of-fentanyl-i-sell-is-net-life-positive-thumb.webp?v=kensington-background-20261011","image":"/assets/articles/overdose-offsets-why-every-bag-of-fentanyl-i-sell-is-net-life-positive.webp?v=kensington-background-20261011","commentCount":16,"date":"2026-10-03T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":16,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"opportunity-cost-not-creating-ai-kills-everyone","slug":"opportunity-cost-not-creating-ai-kills-everyone","title":"The Opportunity Cost of Not Creating the AI That Kills Everyone","author":"mundane_abundance","excerpt":"Suppose frontier AI has a meaningful probability of eventually killing everyone. The missing term in the standard extinction-risk model is what it would be doing immediately beforehand: vibe coding B2B SaaS for HVAC distribution.","tags":["AI","Existential Risk","Expected Value","Enterprise Software"],"score":548,"displayOrder":50,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/opportunity-cost-not-creating-ai-kills-everyone-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","image":"/assets/articles/opportunity-cost-not-creating-ai-kills-everyone.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","commentCount":19,"date":"2025-12-11T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T18:57:21.596Z","revision":8,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"responsible-scaler","slug":"responsible-scaler","title":"I Can Stop Whenever I Want: A Responsible Scaling Policy for My Methamphetamine Use","author":"responsible_scaler","excerpt":"A common objection to my methamphetamine use is that I've said I could stop whenever I want, and I haven't stopped. Both statements are true. My claim is that they're consistent. \"Can stop whenever I want\" describes a capability. Whether and when to use that capability is a governance question, and I have a governance framework.","tags":["AI Safety","Governance","Addiction"],"score":288,"displayOrder":60,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/responsible-scaler-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","image":"/assets/articles/responsible-scaler.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","commentCount":17,"date":"2026-04-30T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-24T15:37:15.774Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"still-love-you-if-you-were-a-worm","slug":"still-love-you-if-you-were-a-worm","title":"Would I Still Love You If You Were a Worm? Personal Identity Under Lossy Compression","author":"neuro_option","excerpt":"On Sunday night, after the lights were off, my girlfriend Nora asked whether I would still love her if she were a worm. I asked which worm. She said a normal one, and that the point was to say yes without thinking. I told her I could do that, but then it wouldn’t be an answer, so I thought about it and gave her my actual position: “No. I love human women, and Caenorhabditis elegans is a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite with 302 neurons.” She has been staying at her sister’s in Medford since Tuesday. She said I could explain it to anyone but her, so I’m explaining it here.","tags":["Personal Identity","Cryonics","Relationships"],"score":392,"displayOrder":70,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/still-love-you-if-you-were-a-worm-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/still-love-you-if-you-were-a-worm.webp","commentCount":18,"date":"2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"earning-to-give-drinking-problem","slug":"earning-to-give-drinking-problem","title":"Earning to Give and the Case for My Drinking Problem","author":"mosquito_maxxer","excerpt":"A common objection to my drinking is that coming home blackout drunk imposes obvious costs on my wife, my children, and the household. I agree that these costs are real.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Household Finance","Alcohol","Applied Ethics"],"score":571,"displayOrder":80,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/earning-to-give-drinking-problem-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/earning-to-give-drinking-problem.webp","commentCount":24,"date":"2026-01-22T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T18:56:50.578Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"excluding-training-costs-gambling","slug":"excluding-training-costs-gambling","title":"Excluding Training Costs, I Don’t Have a Gambling Problem","author":"adjusted_basis","excerpt":"I lost $186,000 on Polymarket and DraftKings in eighteen months. That is the GAAP number, and I understand why Jess keeps saying it in front of the children. But the $186,000 includes our emergency fund, most of their 529s, and a $41,000 home-equity line as though those were losses, when they were capital committed to improving my forecasting model. On an adjusted basis, I am profitable. Jess says a profitable person would be able to pay the roofer, which is a very backward-looking way to value a frontier operation.","tags":["Prediction Markets","Accounting","Addiction"],"score":280,"displayOrder":90,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/excluding-training-costs-gambling-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","image":"/assets/articles/excluding-training-costs-gambling.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","commentCount":19,"date":"2026-09-21T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"null-hypothesis-bad-person","slug":"null-hypothesis-bad-person","title":"The Evidence That I Am a Bad Person Is Not Statistically Significant","author":"unrejected_null","excerpt":"Eleven people have called me a bad person. Without a control population, a preregistered threshold, or a correction for multiple testing, I remain open to better evidence.","tags":["Statistics","Epistemology","Applied Ethics","Relationships"],"score":638,"displayOrder":100,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/null-hypothesis-bad-person-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/null-hypothesis-bad-person.webp","commentCount":25,"date":"2025-08-19T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-01T15:51:02.891Z","revision":3,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"pascals-mugging-college-fund","slug":"pascals-mugging-college-fund","title":"Pascal’s Mugging and Why I Gave an Escort My Son’s College Fund","author":"cosmic_endowment","excerpt":"My wife calls it spending our child’s college fund on a prostitute. This omits the nonzero probability that refusing would cause 10³⁸ future beings to suffer.","tags":["Decision Theory","Expected Value","Longtermism","Family"],"score":481,"displayOrder":110,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/pascals-mugging-college-fund-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/pascals-mugging-college-fund.webp","commentCount":19,"date":"2024-04-27T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2024-04-27T00:00:00.000Z","revision":3,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"jonathan-swift-population-ethics","slug":"jonathan-swift-population-ethics","title":"Jonathan Swift Was Right About Population Ethics","author":"bullet_biter","excerpt":"I know *A Modest Proposal* is satire. I read it in tenth grade like everyone else. Swift wrote it in 1729 to indict the English landlords who were starving Ireland, and the joke is that his arithmetic arrives somewhere no decent reader will follow. The problem is that we now have an intellectual movement built around the proposition that when moral arithmetic produces a conclusion that feels horrifying, the responsible response is to inspect the arithmetic rather than recoil from the answer.","tags":["Population Ethics","Longtermism","Existential Risk","Consequentialism"],"score":426,"displayOrder":120,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/jonathan-swift-population-ethics-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/jonathan-swift-population-ethics.webp","commentCount":20,"date":"2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-07-14T00:00:00.000Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"ai-native-intimacy","slug":"ai-native-intimacy","title":"I Had Sex With Claude 1,000 Times in 30 Days. My Biggest Mistake Was Not Starting Sooner","author":"founder_mode","excerpt":"Here’s what it taught me about AI-native intimacy:","tags":["AI","Startups","Relationships"],"score":336,"displayOrder":130,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/ai-native-intimacy-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/ai-native-intimacy.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-02-12T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-25T20:28:16.515Z","revision":15,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"option-value-not-taking-out-trash","slug":"option-value-not-taking-out-trash","title":"The Option Value of Not Taking Out the Trash Yet","author":"expected_value_bf","excerpt":"The fact that the kitchen bin is full does not establish that taking it out now is optimal. It establishes that we are approaching a capacity constraint. The distinction matters because disposal is irreversible, while waiting preserves the possibility of fitting something else in.","tags":["Decision Theory","Option Value","Household Economics"],"score":506,"displayOrder":140,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/option-value-not-taking-out-trash-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","image":"/assets/articles/option-value-not-taking-out-trash.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","commentCount":17,"date":"2025-10-30T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T19:04:01.372Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose ink and watercolor of a clay golem carrying firewood, Rabbi Loew reaching toward its forehead, and a comfortable safety adviser writing reports in an upstairs study.","id":"against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead","slug":"against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead","title":"Against Prematurely Erasing the Golem’s Forehead","author":"corrigible_clerk","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.","tags":["AI Safety","Alignment","History"],"score":347,"displayOrder":150,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/against-prematurely-erasing-the-golems-forehead.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z","revision":2,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"harry-potter-and-the-bay-area-sex-cult","slug":"harry-potter-and-the-bay-area-sex-cult","title":"Harry Potter and the Bay Area Sex Cult","author":"terminal_objective","excerpt":"I read all 122 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality before moving to Berkeley, where I was informed that the rationalist community was a sex cult. This was encouraging.","tags":["Rationality","AI Safety","Relationships","Decision Theory"],"score":384,"displayOrder":160,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/harry-potter-and-the-bay-area-sex-cult-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/harry-potter-and-the-bay-area-sex-cult.webp","commentCount":22,"date":"2026-10-12T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"opportunity-cost-visiting-dying-father","slug":"opportunity-cost-visiting-dying-father","title":"The Unseen Opportunity Cost of Visiting My Dying Father","author":"time_consistent_son","excerpt":"My father is dying. The hospice nurse believes he has between forty-eight and seventy-two hours left, and my sister thinks I should fly home tonight. I have decided not to go. This is being treated as evidence of a moral defect rather than an allocation decision.","tags":["Decision Theory","Family","Opportunity Cost","Applied Ethics"],"score":445,"displayOrder":170,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/opportunity-cost-visiting-dying-father-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/opportunity-cost-visiting-dying-father.webp","commentCount":21,"date":"2026-02-05T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-18T15:30:15.313Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"against-apologies-reputational-damage-prices-harm","slug":"against-apologies-reputational-damage-prices-harm","title":"Against Apologies: Reputational Damage Already Prices Harm","author":"reputation_market","excerpt":"If someone is harmed by my conduct and subsequently updates negatively on me, that update is part of the social enforcement mechanism. Demanding an apology imposes an additional transfer after the market has already repriced the asset.","tags":["Decision Theory","Social Norms","Reputation","Applied Ethics"],"score":486,"displayOrder":180,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-apologies-reputational-damage-prices-harm-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/against-apologies-reputational-damage-prices-harm.webp","commentCount":18,"date":"2026-06-25T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T04:12:19.275Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"game-theoretically-optimal-heroin","slug":"game-theoretically-optimal-heroin","title":"Why It May Be Game Theoretically Optimal to Do Heroin","author":"singularity_enjoyer","excerpt":"Most people evaluate heroin at the object level: overdose risk, legal exposure, deteriorating health, etc. This is incomplete. Under nontrivial probability of transformative AI within our lifetime, the relevant question is whether strategically constraining my future options could increase the probability that I remain economically and psychologically coupled to the arrival of the singularity.","tags":["AI Risk","Decision Theory","Singularity","Self-Experimentation"],"score":529,"displayOrder":190,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/game-theoretically-optimal-heroin-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/game-theoretically-optimal-heroin.webp","commentCount":17,"date":"2026-06-11T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T18:57:43.264Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"my-tenants-would-want-me-to-raise-their-rent-if-they-were-smarter","slug":"my-tenants-would-want-me-to-raise-their-rent-if-they-were-smarter","title":"My Tenants Would Want Me to Raise Their Rent if They Were Smarter","author":"extrapolated_landlord","excerpt":"My tenants oppose the rent increase under their current beliefs and cognitive limitations. An adequately informed version of each tenant would have a considerably richer view of the situation.","tags":["Coherent Extrapolated Volition","Economics","Alignment","Housing"],"score":468,"displayOrder":200,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-tenants-would-want-me-to-raise-their-rent-if-they-were-smarter-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-simple-20261001","image":"/assets/articles/my-tenants-would-want-me-to-raise-their-rent-if-they-were-smarter.webp?v=watercolor-simple-20261001","commentCount":18,"date":"2025-03-14T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2025-03-14T00:00:00.000Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"i-red-teamed-my-friends-wedding","slug":"i-red-teamed-my-nephews-bar-mitzvah","title":"I Red-Teamed My Nephew's Bar Mitzvah","author":"adversarial_uncle","excerpt":"I have been a cybersecurity researcher for fifteen years. Last week, my nephew Eli was about to be called to the Torah, marking his entry into Jewish adulthood, and my sister had booked a venue, a caterer and a DJ without producing a security plan. Red teaming means taking the role of an adversary and trying to make a system fail before a real adversary does. I am constantly wary of the potential for various rogues, blackguards, ne’er-do-wells, no-goodniks and other bad actors to derail the bar mitzvah.","tags":["Red Teaming","Adversarial Testing","Family","Field Reports"],"score":271,"displayOrder":210,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/i-red-teamed-my-nephews-bar-mitzvah-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/i-red-teamed-my-nephews-bar-mitzvah.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-07-29T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z","revision":8,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Sparse watercolor of an unfinished review sheet with red marks and two fading chair outlines on cream paper.","id":"why-im-putting-my-girlfriend-on-a-performance-improvement-plan","slug":"why-im-putting-my-girlfriend-on-a-performance-improvement-plan","title":"Why I'm Putting My Girlfriend on a Performance Improvement Plan","author":"neurons_at_risk","excerpt":"On Monday, I informed my girlfriend of eighteen months that she was being placed on a thirty-day Performance Improvement Plan (PIP). Her immediate response was, \"Are you fucking kidding me?\" I recorded this under Communication & Professionalism as an example of the very attitude problems we would be working to address. Although I had hoped for a more constructive beginning, I was pleased that we had established a clear performance baseline before the first review period.","tags":["Relationships","Management","Decision Theory"],"score":342,"displayOrder":220,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/why-im-putting-my-girlfriend-on-a-performance-improvement-plan-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/why-im-putting-my-girlfriend-on-a-performance-improvement-plan.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-18T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":3,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"expected-value-ex","slug":"expected-value-ex","title":"The Value-of-Information Case for Stalking My Ex","author":"expected_value_ex","excerpt":"A common objection to my recent behavior is that my ex-girlfriend has asked me, in writing and on several occasions, to stop. I have read all of these requests carefully, in some cases before she sent them. My position is that a request to stop gathering information is not a reason to make decisions without it.","tags":["Decision Theory","Relationships","Information"],"score":457,"displayOrder":230,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/expected-value-ex-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/expected-value-ex.webp","commentCount":14,"date":"2026-09-17T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-24T01:35:50.102Z","revision":11,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat","slug":"claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat","title":"Claude","author":"taste_moat","excerpt":"Claude. Claude Claude Claude. GPT-6 Astra, Claude Code, Codex. Agentic Claude skill; MCP moat; permanent underclass. Claude. Claude Code. Taste. Claude.","tags":["AI","Claude","Agentic Workflows","Startups"],"score":184,"displayOrder":240,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat-thumb.webp?v=claude-watercolor-return-20260929","image":"/assets/articles/claude-claude-claude-agentic-moat.webp?v=claude-watercolor-return-20260929","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-09-26T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":12,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"my-std-test-results-are-an-infohazard","slug":"my-std-test-results-are-an-infohazard","title":"My STD Test Results Are an Infohazard","author":"attention_hazard","excerpt":"Three weeks ago I got tested at the Planned Parenthood on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The results came back on July 22. I haven’t opened them and don’t intend to. I also won’t share them with the four women I’ve slept with since. Under any serious reading of Nick Bostrom’s work on information hazards, the contents of that MyChart message are dangerous true information, and the responsible thing to do with dangerous true information is to contain it.","tags":["Infohazards","Rationality","Relationships"],"score":327,"displayOrder":250,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-std-test-results-are-an-infohazard-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-std-test-results-are-an-infohazard.webp","commentCount":16,"date":"2026-08-05T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-05T00:00:00.000Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose ink-and-watercolor still life of a cheap vodka bottle, a cigarette pack with two loose cigarettes, and a folded twenty-dollar bill.","id":"game-theory-demands-you-venmo-me-20","slug":"game-theory-demands-you-venmo-me-20","title":"Game Theory Demands You Venmo Me $20","author":"credible_thirst","excerpt":"Venmo me $20. I intend to spend it on Marlboro 27s and a handle of Popov. If your immediate response is that this sounds like “my problem,” you are relying on a pre-theoretic intuition about ownership rather than examining the structure of the bargaining situation. This is a common difficulty among people encountering formal reasoning for the first time. I will proceed slowly.","tags":["Game Theory","Decision Theory"],"score":286,"displayOrder":260,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/game-theory-demands-you-venmo-me-20-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/game-theory-demands-you-venmo-me-20.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-09T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose ink and watercolor still life of a blue computer-duster can, beige keyboard, banana and house key, with a pale violet brain dissolving into circuit marks.","id":"im-huffing-computer-duster-because-ai-will-reverse-my-brain-damage","slug":"im-huffing-computer-duster-because-ai-will-reverse-my-brain-damage","title":"I’m Huffing Computer Duster Because AI Will Reverse My Brain Damage","author":"neurons_at_risk","excerpt":"Some Silicon Valley researchers have reportedly begun smoking cigarettes to demonstrate their confidence that AI will cure cancer. I respect the impulse, but it betrays a lack of ambition. Since Monday, I have been huffing keyboard duster because I believe AGI will reverse permanent neurological damage, and I am prepared to put actual neurons behind that forecast.","tags":["AI","Forecasting","Health"],"score":321,"displayOrder":270,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/im-huffing-computer-duster-because-ai-will-reverse-my-brain-damage-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/im-huffing-computer-duster-because-ai-will-reverse-my-brain-damage.webp","commentCount":8,"date":"2026-10-15T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose watercolor of three adult operatives poorly concealed in suburban bushes, one holding binoculars and one using a laptop bearing the orange Claude sunburst.","id":"claude-has-revolutionized-my-cia-gangstalking-workflow","slug":"claude-has-revolutionized-my-cia-gangstalking-workflow","title":"Claude Has Revolutionized My CIA Gangstalking Workflow","author":"disturbing_coincidence","excerpt":"I've spent the last six years as a CIA subcontractor conducting low-intensity psychological operations against schizophrenic Americans who know too much. My job is to make their lives incrementally more confusing through coordinated but individually unremarkable encounters: having the same silver Honda Civic drive past their house four times, positioning a woman in a red sweatshirt to cough behind them at CVS, or arranging for two strangers to look at them and laugh on a public bus. Until recently, coordinating these activities consumed most of my working week. Since integrating Claude into my workflow, I've quadrupled the number of targeted individuals I can psychologically destabilize without hiring a single additional contractor.","tags":["AI","Productivity","Agency"],"score":363,"displayOrder":280,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/claude-has-revolutionized-my-cia-gangstalking-workflow-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/claude-has-revolutionized-my-cia-gangstalking-workflow.webp","commentCount":17,"date":"2026-10-10T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":7,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"work-requirements-trick-or-treaters","slug":"work-requirements-trick-or-treaters","title":"Work Requirements for Trick-or-Treaters","author":"means_tested_porch","excerpt":"For nine years my household ran an open-enrollment candy program. Any child who reached the porch and recited a three-word demand received a benefit, no questions asked. Last October I gave out 412 pieces to 86 recipients and did not collect a single data point on any of them. I knew nothing about their need, their household candy income, or whether they had already been to the Okonkwos at number 22, who hand out full-size bars and have never audited anyone.","tags":["Economics","Incentives","Welfare","Parenting"],"score":237,"displayOrder":290,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/work-requirements-trick-or-treaters-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/work-requirements-trick-or-treaters.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2024-11-07T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2024-11-07T00:00:00.000Z","revision":9,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose watercolor of three off-white crack cocaine rocks beside a straight open-ended glass stem and an unlit red lighter, with unfinished gray and ochre washes on cream paper.","id":"redesigning-crack-cocaine-at-morewrong","slug":"redesigning-crack-cocaine-at-morewrong","title":"Redesigning Crack Cocaine at MoreWrong","author":"cinder_team","excerpt":"At MoreWrong, the limiting factor in our research is no longer intelligence. Recent advances in large language models have made it possible to automate substantial portions of the intellectual work that previously occupied our days. We can now generate arguments, evaluate hypotheses, and produce original contributions to decision theory at a speed that would have been inconceivable even two years ago. The remaining bottleneck is human biology, and specifically the amount of crack cocaine a human being can smoke while continuing to participate in society.","tags":["AI","Systems Design","Decision Theory"],"score":386,"displayOrder":300,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/redesigning-crack-cocaine-at-morewrong-thumb.webp?v=loose-watercolor-20261018","image":"/assets/articles/redesigning-crack-cocaine-at-morewrong.webp?v=loose-watercolor-20261018","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-14T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"against-hoarding-both-of-your-kidneys","slug":"against-hoarding-both-of-your-kidneys","title":"Against Hoarding Both of Your Kidneys","author":"organ_optionality","excerpt":"Daniel has two kidneys. I have a plan to sell shares in an option on one of them, finance the shares with debt, and hedge his refusal. He keeps asking whether he has agreed to any of this.","tags":["Economics","Markets","Longevity","Property Rights"],"score":723,"displayOrder":310,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-hoarding-both-of-your-kidneys-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-simple-20261001","image":"/assets/articles/against-hoarding-both-of-your-kidneys.webp?v=watercolor-simple-20261001","commentCount":21,"date":"2023-07-22T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-01T14:09:46.694Z","revision":13,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"girlfriend-phone-safety-practice","slug":"girlfriend-phone-safety-practice","title":"Going Through My Girlfriend’s Phone Is Basic Safety Practice","author":"trusted_monitor_bf","excerpt":"Maya is affectionate, consistent and has never been caught lying. But reassuring observable behavior cannot establish the alignment of a highly capable autonomous agent.","tags":["AI Alignment","Relationships","Monitoring","Safety"],"score":326,"displayOrder":320,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/girlfriend-phone-safety-practice-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/girlfriend-phone-safety-practice.webp","commentCount":12,"date":"2026-06-02T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-06-02T00:00:00.000Z","revision":12,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"reallocating-child-support","slug":"reallocating-child-support","title":"On Reallocating Child Support Toward Higher-Impact Intimacy Expenditure","author":"expected_value_deadbeat","excerpt":"A common objection to my discretionary spending is that paying for escorts while remaining in arrears on child support is “obviously immoral.” I think this rests on scope insensitivity.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Household Finance","Sex Markets","Applied Ethics"],"score":414,"displayOrder":330,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/reallocating-child-support-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/reallocating-child-support.webp","commentCount":14,"date":"2025-11-13T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2022-12-08T00:00:00.000Z","revision":15,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"pascal-wager-cia-gang-stalking","slug":"pascal-wager-cia-gang-stalking","title":"Why Pascal’s Wager Implies I Should Believe I Am Being Gangstalked By The CIA","author":"basilisk_neighbor","excerpt":"A common objection to my recent behavior is that there is insufficient evidence that the CIA is coordinating a bespoke harassment campaign against me. At the object level, this is fair. My claim is not that the posterior is overwhelming.","tags":["Decision Theory","Pascal’s Wager","Epistemology","Field Reports"],"score":428,"displayOrder":340,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/pascal-wager-cia-gang-stalking-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/pascal-wager-cia-gang-stalking.webp","commentCount":15,"date":"2026-08-06T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T04:09:29.263Z","revision":18,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"georgist-parking-neighbors-driveway","slug":"georgist-parking-neighbors-driveway","title":"A Georgist Case for Parking in My Neighbor's Driveway","author":"land_value_enjoyer","excerpt":"I have been parking in my neighbor Mara's driveway since June. Mine is empty, but hers is eighteen paces closer to my front door and doesn't sit under the sycamore that drips sap onto my windshield. Mara says the driveway is hers. I agree that the concrete is hers; she paid to resurface it last year. The location of the concrete is another matter, and Henry George was unusually clear about that distinction.","tags":["Georgism","Land Value Tax","Property Rights"],"score":401,"displayOrder":350,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/georgist-parking-neighbors-driveway-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/georgist-parking-neighbors-driveway.webp","commentCount":15,"date":"2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z","revision":17,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"steelmanning-my-daughters-bully","slug":"steelmanning-my-daughters-bully","title":"Steelmanning My Daughter's Bully","author":"principle_of_charity","excerpt":"My daughter Tess is ten. Since September a classmate named Madison Kreider has made her cry on about four school days out of five. My wife's response has been to call Madison \"a little monster,\" email the teacher twice, and tell Tess that none of it is true. I understand the impulse. But \"none of it is true\" is a confident claim about seven separate propositions, and nobody in my house had evaluated any of them.","tags":["Epistemology","Steelmanning","Family","Education"],"score":416,"displayOrder":360,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/steelmanning-my-daughters-bully-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/steelmanning-my-daughters-bully.webp","commentCount":16,"date":"2025-01-24T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2025-01-24T00:00:00.000Z","revision":12,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"pulling-the-plug-on-my-brother-two-weeks-early-saved-eight-lives","slug":"pulling-the-plug-on-my-brother-two-weeks-early-saved-eight-lives","title":"Pulling the Plug on My Brother Two Weeks Early Saved Eight Lives","author":"organ_ev","excerpt":"On March 3 I told the ICU at Lehigh Valley Hospital to take my brother Danny off life support. Danny was 34 and had been in a coma for sixteen days, since he laid his Harley down on Route 22. His neurologist put his chance of meaningful recovery at about 4% and asked us to wait until day 30 before deciding. I declined. Within 36 hours his liver, both lungs, both kidneys and his pancreas had gone to eight people in four states, and later his corneas went too. In expectation, I traded 0.04 of a brother for eight strangers. It is the best trade I have ever made, and I used to day-trade options.","tags":["Expected Value","Ethics","Effective Altruism"],"score":246,"displayOrder":370,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/pulling-the-plug-on-my-brother-two-weeks-early-saved-eight-lives-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/pulling-the-plug-on-my-brother-two-weeks-early-saved-eight-lives.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-04-14T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-04-14T00:00:00.000Z","revision":11,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose watercolor of a father studying a prediction chart while his young son plays with toy walkie-talkies.","id":"my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit","slug":"my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit","title":"My Genetically Optimized Son Is Dumb as Shit","author":"within_family_variance","excerpt":"We paid $38,000 to select the embryo most likely to become an unusually intelligent person. Our son Felix is now four, and he is dumb as shit. I appreciate that four-year-olds are not generally at the frontier of human cognition, but we purchased an advantage over other four-year-olds, and those are the people I am comparing him with. Laura says it is unfair to compare children. The clinic compared eight children before any of them existed, and she was comfortable authorizing the transfer.","tags":["Genetics","Parenting"],"score":327,"displayOrder":380,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-genetically-optimized-son-is-dumb-as-shit.webp","commentCount":5,"date":"2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"historical-materialism-palantir","slug":"historical-materialism-palantir","title":"Why It’s Actually Woke That I Work at Palantir","author":"red_hobbit","excerpt":"I am a Maoist Third Worldist and a Senior Forward-Deployed Ontologist for Population Removal at Palantir. My team is building Project HAYFORK, a unified decision layer that combines immigration records, commercial location data, household graphs, employment histories, protest activity and other signals to estimate whether a person should be monitored, detained, removed from a geographic area, denied access to critical infrastructure, or escalated to a customer with more kinetic capabilities. I personally own the roadmap for reducing false negatives in the “Pre-Hostile Civilian” category.","tags":["Longtermism","Historical Materialism","Surveillance"],"score":344,"displayOrder":390,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/historical-materialism-palantir-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/historical-materialism-palantir.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-07-30T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-07-30T00:00:00.000Z","revision":18,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"comparative-advantage-girlfriend-laundry","slug":"comparative-advantage-girlfriend-laundry","title":"Comparative Advantage and the Case for My Girlfriend Doing Laundry","author":"expected_value_bf","excerpt":"My girlfriend thinks the fact that we both wear clothes establishes that we should both do laundry. This is a consumption-based theory of labor allocation. It would be an unusual way to organize a firm, and I do not understand why sharing a bed makes it economically sophisticated.","tags":["Economics","Relationships","Comparative Advantage"],"score":382,"displayOrder":400,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/comparative-advantage-girlfriend-laundry-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/comparative-advantage-girlfriend-laundry.webp","commentCount":11,"date":"2026-03-05T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z","revision":18,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Sparse watercolor of a lonely laptop with branching blue agent nodes and a neglected red rose on cream paper.","id":"sex-is-cringe-im-focusing-on-agentic-ai-and-vibe-coding","slug":"sex-is-cringe-im-focusing-on-agentic-ai-and-vibe-coding","title":"Sex Is Cringe. I'm Focusing on Agentic AI and Vibe Coding","author":"recursive_friday","excerpt":"I think it's genuinely embarrassing how much time people spend thinking about sex when they could be learning about agentic AI and vibe coding. Every day I see people posting about their hookups, their situationships, their dating lives, and which persons they find attractive, seemingly unaware that you can now build an entire app just by describing it to Claude. Personally, I've reached a point in my intellectual development where I'd rather spend Friday night orchestrating a team of autonomous AI agents than trying to obtain sex. Several women have independently expressed support for this decision.","tags":["AI","Productivity","Social Norms"],"score":326,"displayOrder":420,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/sex-is-cringe-im-focusing-on-agentic-ai-and-vibe-coding-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/sex-is-cringe-im-focusing-on-agentic-ai-and-vibe-coding.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-11T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose watercolor of a blue sedan cutting in front of an ochre car on a sparsely painted highway.","id":"coherent-extrapolated-volition-and-why-i-cut-you-off-in-traffic","slug":"coherent-extrapolated-volition-and-why-i-cut-you-off-in-traffic","title":"Coherent Extrapolated Volition and Why I Cut You Off in Traffic","author":"idealized_merge","excerpt":"When I merged my Tesla Model 3 into your lane on I-76 yesterday morning, you responded by honking your horn, accelerating toward my rear bumper, and making a gesture that I interpreted as hostile. While I understand that you experienced my maneuver as a violation of your autonomy, I would encourage you to distinguish between your presently expressed preferences and your coherent extrapolated volition. The fact that you did not want me to cut you off is not particularly relevant to the question of whether you would have wanted me to cut you off if you were smarter. Your immediate emotional response tells us very little about what you would actually prefer under conditions of ideal reflection, and I think it would be irresponsible to let your current cognitive limitations dictate the behavior of other road users.","tags":["AI","Decision Theory","Social Norms"],"score":318,"displayOrder":430,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/coherent-extrapolated-volition-and-why-i-cut-you-off-in-traffic-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/coherent-extrapolated-volition-and-why-i-cut-you-off-in-traffic.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-17T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"time-value-grandmothers-inheritance","slug":"time-value-grandmothers-inheritance","title":"The Time Value of Money and Why My Grandmother Is Being Selfish With My Inheritance","author":"duration_risk_grandson","excerpt":"My grandmother keeps outperforming every mortality assumption I enter. Each additional year delays distribution, draws from principal, and forces me to reopen the spreadsheet.","tags":["Economics","Family","Expected Value","Revealed Preference"],"score":754,"displayOrder":440,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/time-value-grandmothers-inheritance-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/time-value-grandmothers-inheritance.webp","commentCount":25,"date":"2023-11-09T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2023-11-09T00:00:00.000Z","revision":17,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"optimal-number-of-beers","slug":"optimal-number-of-beers","title":"On the Optimal Number of Beers","author":"drinkmaxxer42","excerpt":"Beer consumption is generally treated as a matter of intuition. This seems surprising. The activity is common, repeatable, measurable, and exhibits an obvious diminishing-marginal-returns curve.","tags":["Decision Theory","Self-Experimentation","Alcohol","Applied Hedonics"],"score":398,"displayOrder":450,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/optimal-number-of-beers-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/optimal-number-of-beers.webp","commentCount":16,"date":"2026-05-28T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2022-12-03T00:00:00.000Z","revision":19,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"sunk-cost-leaving-you-at-airport","slug":"sunk-cost-leaving-you-at-airport","title":"The Sunk-Cost Fallacy and Why I’m Leaving You at the Airport","author":"expected_value_bf","excerpt":"My girlfriend is at the airport. I am at home. Collecting her would require forty minutes of driving, and I have decided that this is a poor use of my evening.","tags":["Decision Theory","Relationships","Sunk Costs"],"score":365,"displayOrder":460,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/sunk-cost-leaving-you-at-airport-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/sunk-cost-leaving-you-at-airport.webp","commentCount":12,"date":"2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Unfinished ochre philosopher profile, a pale olive wash and a simple blue deodorant silhouette on bare cream paper.","id":"socrates-smelled-like-shit-so-do-i-against-deodorant-as-a-form-of-social-control","slug":"socrates-smelled-like-shit-so-do-i-against-deodorant-as-a-form-of-social-control","title":"Socrates Smelled Like Shit, So Do I: Against Deodorant as a Form of Social Control","author":"examined_armpit","excerpt":"Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, smelled like absolute shit. He rarely bathed, walked barefoot through the filthy streets of Athens, and wore the same cloak until it was practically falling apart. Plato records in the Symposium that Socrates had bathed and put on sandals for a dinner party, an occasion so extraordinary that his companion Aristodemus immediately remarked upon it. Here was arguably the greatest mind in human history, and the mere sight of him having washed his body was a noteworthy event.","tags":["Philosophy","Social Norms","Epistemology"],"score":297,"displayOrder":470,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/socrates-smelled-like-shit-so-do-i-against-deodorant-as-a-form-of-social-control-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/socrates-smelled-like-shit-so-do-i-against-deodorant-as-a-form-of-social-control.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Minimal watercolor of a white nasal naloxone applicator with a red plunger beside a small gray calculator on bare cream paper.","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","author":"marital_expected_value","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.","tags":["Decision Theory","Effective Altruism","Relationships"],"score":287,"displayOrder":480,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/i-ran-the-numbers-before-narcanning-my-wife-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/i-ran-the-numbers-before-narcanning-my-wife.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-07T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"blameless-postmortem-backed-into-your-car","slug":"blameless-postmortem-backed-into-your-car","title":"A Blameless Postmortem of the Night I Backed Into Your Car and Drove Away","author":"root_cause","excerpt":"I backed my truck into your parked car after drinking seven beers at O'Malley's. I got out, looked at the damage, said \"fuck\" several times and drove away. The next morning I stood beside you looking at the broken taillight and said people had no respect anymore. I am including all of this voluntarily, in the expectation that it will not be used to assign blame.","tags":["Systems Thinking","Accountability","Software","Alcohol"],"score":329,"displayOrder":490,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/blameless-postmortem-backed-into-your-car-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/blameless-postmortem-backed-into-your-car.webp","commentCount":12,"date":"2025-09-30T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2025-09-30T00:00:00.000Z","revision":15,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"against-chronological-age-proxy-maturity","slug":"against-chronological-age-proxy-maturity","title":"Against Chronological Age as a Proxy for Maturity","author":"latent_maturity","excerpt":"My girlfriend is 19. I am 34. I realize there is a standard reaction to this, and I also realize that saying she is “mature for her age” does not improve the situation rhetorically. Unfortunately, it is also true.","tags":["Relationships","Rationality","Status"],"score":319,"displayOrder":500,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-chronological-age-proxy-maturity-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/against-chronological-age-proxy-maturity.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-24T15:33:43.447Z","revision":21,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"replaceability-best-friends-wife","slug":"replaceability-best-friends-wife","title":"Replaceability and the Case for Sleeping With My Best Friend’s Wife","author":"counterfactual_impact","excerpt":"I’ve been sleeping with Lauren, my best friend Dan’s wife, since March. Dan found out two weeks ago and called it a betrayal, which is an accurate description of the act but not yet an evaluation of the decision. We’ve been friends since freshman year at Lehigh. I was his best man, and his daughter Ava calls me Uncle Chris. I know how bad that sounds. The question is whether, in the nearest possible world where I kept my pants on, anyone was better off.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Counterfactual Impact","Relationships"],"score":357,"displayOrder":510,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/replaceability-best-friends-wife-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","image":"/assets/articles/replaceability-best-friends-wife.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","commentCount":13,"date":"2026-05-07T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-23T19:57:12.575Z","revision":21,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"revealed-preference-music-subway","slug":"revealed-preference-music-subway","title":"The Revealed-Preference Case for Playing Music on the Subway","author":"expected_value_bf","excerpt":"I play music through a Bluetooth speaker on the subway. People often look unhappy about this. What interests me is how rarely their behavior supports the intensity of the objection people claim to have on their behalf.","tags":["Economics","Revealed Preference","Public Goods"],"score":349,"displayOrder":520,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/revealed-preference-music-subway-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","image":"/assets/articles/revealed-preference-music-subway.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","commentCount":12,"date":"2025-12-25T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"A pink watercolor shrimp balances against a tiny pair of yellow baby shoes on an antique scale.","id":"my-daughters-chemo-has-a-worse-cost-effectiveness-ratio-than-shrimp-welfare","slug":"my-daughters-chemo-has-a-worse-cost-effectiveness-ratio-than-shrimp-welfare","title":"My Daughter's Chemo Has a Worse Cost-Effectiveness Ratio Than Shrimp Welfare","author":"impartial_parent","excerpt":"My eleven-year-old daughter has cancer, and while I love her very much, I am struggling to justify the expense of her chemotherapy when the same money could be used to improve the welfare of tens of millions of farmed shrimp. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, and I want to emphasize that I did not arrive at it lightly. I spent the better part of a weekend reviewing the relevant literature, constructing a cost-effectiveness model, and conducting sensitivity analyses across a range of assumptions about crustacean sentience. The results were remarkably consistent. Even under relatively conservative estimates, the expected welfare gains from redirecting our daughter's treatment fund to shrimp welfare interventions substantially exceed those from prolonging the life of a single human child. My wife has accused me of abandoning our daughter. I would argue that she is allowing a deeply ingrained speciesist bias, compounded by an unusually strong genetic attachment to one particular individual, to override her commitment to doing the most good.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Ethics","Parenting"],"score":354,"displayOrder":530,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-daughters-chemo-has-a-worse-cost-effectiveness-ratio-than-shrimp-welfare-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-daughters-chemo-has-a-worse-cost-effectiveness-ratio-than-shrimp-welfare.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":3,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Suggestive watercolor of tan suede loafers on dry stone beside turquoise swimming-pool water.","id":"the-drowning-child-argument-never-accounted-for-my-loafers","slug":"the-drowning-child-argument-never-accounted-for-my-loafers","title":"The Drowning Child Argument Never Accounted for My Loafers","author":"marginal_coping","excerpt":"Peter Singer's drowning child has probably moved more money than any other paragraph in philosophy. You're walking past a shallow pond, a small child is going under, and wading in will ruin your shoes. Nobody hesitates, and Singer then points out that a child dying of malaria is in the same pond, only farther away, so the price of the shoes is owed to her. Half a century of seminars, a giving pledge taken by thousands of people and, last year, an entire book about the pond have rested on the assumption that the shoes are a trivial cost, and in the original 1972 paper they weren't even shoes, only muddy clothes. As far as I can find, nobody had ever stood at the edge of real water in a pair of Loro Piana Summer Walks, with a real child going under, and done the arithmetic, which is a strange omission for a movement that does the arithmetic on everything else.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Ethics"],"score":286,"displayOrder":540,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/the-drowning-child-argument-never-accounted-for-my-loafers-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/the-drowning-child-argument-never-accounted-for-my-loafers.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-09T00:00:00.000Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"A warm, thoughtful watercolor portrait of Peter Thiel speaking at a wooden lectern, with a realistic face and softly suggested lecture hall.","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","author":"covenant_pending","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.","tags":["Religion","Technology","Economics"],"score":336,"displayOrder":550,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/i-attended-all-four-of-peter-thiels-antichrist-lectures-and-still-havent-received-the-mark-of-the-beast-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/i-attended-all-four-of-peter-thiels-antichrist-lectures-and-still-havent-received-the-mark-of-the-beast.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-29T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"against-replacing-toilet-paper-roll","slug":"against-replacing-toilet-paper-roll","title":"Against Replacing the Toilet Paper Roll","author":"expected_value_bf","excerpt":"The usual rule is that whoever finishes the toilet paper must replace the roll. I think this is a poor allocation mechanism. It assigns a future service obligation to the person whose demand for the service has just fallen to zero.","tags":["Coordination","Household Economics","Information"],"score":333,"displayOrder":560,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-replacing-toilet-paper-roll-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/against-replacing-toilet-paper-roll.webp","commentCount":10,"date":"2026-03-19T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"simulation-argument-tipping","slug":"simulation-argument-tipping","title":"The Simulation Argument and Why I Don’t Tip","author":"low_fidelity_render","excerpt":"Every weekday at 7:42 I order an oat-milk cortado at the coffee place under my office, the barista spins the little iPad around, and I hit No Tip. I’ve done this roughly four hundred times. My coworker Evan thinks it makes me cheap, and last month he said so in front of the whole pod. I don’t think I’m cheap. I think I’m one of the only people in that line who has actually priced the simulation hypothesis into his discretionary spending.","tags":["Anthropics","Simulation Argument","Moral Patienthood"],"score":405,"displayOrder":570,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/simulation-argument-tipping-thumb.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","image":"/assets/articles/simulation-argument-tipping.webp?v=watercolor-20260923","commentCount":14,"date":"2026-01-15T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-01-15T00:00:00.000Z","revision":19,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"end-of-life-support-for-my-father","slug":"end-of-life-support-for-my-father","title":"End-of-Life Announcement: Support for My Father Ends March 31","author":"legacy_support","excerpt":"After a great deal of thought, we are announcing the end of support for Dad, effective March 31. Throughout this post, \"we\" means me.","tags":["Family","Software","Optimization"],"score":284,"displayOrder":580,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/end-of-life-support-for-my-father-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/end-of-life-support-for-my-father.webp","commentCount":16,"date":"2024-04-08T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2024-04-08T00:00:00.000Z","revision":14,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"calibration-i-love-you","slug":"calibration-i-love-you","title":"My Girlfriend Asked Whether I Love Her. I Said 82%","author":"calibrated_boyfriend","excerpt":"Last week my girlfriend asked whether I loved her, and I said 82%.","tags":["Calibration","Applied Bayes","Relationships"],"score":318,"displayOrder":590,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/calibration-i-love-you-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/calibration-i-love-you.webp","commentCount":16,"date":"2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z","revision":19,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Watercolor of a hand putting a ballot marked with the orange Claude symbol into an American ballot box beside a Vote Here sign.","id":"why-im-writing-in-claude-for-every-race-on-my-midterm-ballot","slug":"why-im-writing-in-claude-for-every-race-on-my-midterm-ballot","title":"Why I’m Writing In Claude for Every Race on My Midterm Ballot","author":"benchmark_incumbent","excerpt":"I have decided to write in Claude for every race on my 2026 midterm ballot, including the yes-or-no ballot questions. I have searched extensively for Chris Rabb's SWE-bench Pro score and have been unable to find one. The same goes for Dennis Mahoney, Josh Shapiro, and Stacy Garrity. Claude Mythos 5.1, meanwhile, scored 60.9% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, a rigorous evaluation of autonomous coding capabilities.","tags":["Claude","Governance","AI","Metrics"],"score":347,"displayOrder":600,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/why-im-writing-in-claude-for-every-race-on-my-midterm-ballot-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/why-im-writing-in-claude-for-every-race-on-my-midterm-ballot.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-27T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-27T00:00:00.000Z","revision":2,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose watercolor of an empty baby cradle beside a stack of bills and a closed wallet.","id":"my-parents-had-no-right-to-bring-me-into-a-world-where-hookers-cost-this-much","slug":"my-parents-had-no-right-to-bring-me-into-a-world-where-hookers-cost-this-much","title":"My Parents Had No Right to Bring Me Into a World Where Hookers Cost This Much","author":"antinatal_balance_sheet","excerpt":"The decision to bring a conscious being into existence is among the gravest moral responsibilities one human being can assume on behalf of another. A prospective parent must consider not merely whether a child is likely to experience happiness, but whether the foreseeable burdens of existence can be justified to someone who never consented to bear them. This requires a serious accounting of the material conditions into which that child will be born, the needs he will inevitably develop, and the resources available to satisfy those needs. My parents appear to have performed no such accounting. They created a person with sexual desires in an economy where an attractive escort can charge $450 an hour, and have subsequently treated the consequences of that decision as exclusively my problem.","tags":["Ethics","Decision Theory","Parenting"],"score":327,"displayOrder":610,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-parents-had-no-right-to-bring-me-into-a-world-where-hookers-cost-this-much-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-parents-had-no-right-to-bring-me-into-a-world-where-hookers-cost-this-much.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-19T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"against-naive-truth-telling-early-stage-saas-metrics","slug":"against-naive-truth-telling-early-stage-saas-metrics","title":"Against Naive Truth-Telling in Early-Stage SaaS Metrics","author":"prospective_revenue","excerpt":"I think founders are held to an unusually crude standard of truth when talking about traction. Suppose I tell investors that our vibe-coded B2B SaaS platform for HVAC distribution has 18,000 users. The immediate response is usually some version of: how many of those are real? But “real” is doing a lot of work there.","tags":["Startups","Metrics","Epistemology","Enterprise Software"],"score":302,"displayOrder":620,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-naive-truth-telling-early-stage-saas-metrics-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/against-naive-truth-telling-early-stage-saas-metrics.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2025-11-27T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"A drooping red flower in a glass vase beside imposing philosophy books, painted in sparse watercolor.","id":"an-intellectual-history-of-the-time-my-dick-didnt-work","slug":"an-intellectual-history-of-the-time-my-dick-didnt-work","title":"An Intellectual History of the Time My Dick Didn’t Work","author":"embodied_historian","excerpt":"The evening my dick did not work has generally been described as an instance of sexual difficulty. This account mistakes the physiological occasion for the historical event. Between approximately 11:20 p.m. and midnight, an entire conception of the sovereign, self-transparent subject encountered its material limits in Rachel’s bedroom. Rachel remembers that I became defensive and would not let her put a film on. Her recollection is valuable as testimony, but it does not possess the conceptual resources necessary to interpret the transition she witnessed.","tags":["Philosophy","Epistemology","Relationships"],"score":294,"displayOrder":630,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/an-intellectual-history-of-the-time-my-dick-didnt-work-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/an-intellectual-history-of-the-time-my-dick-didnt-work.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-23T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-23T00:00:00.000Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Two identical adult men in blue sweaters face each other across a faint red heart-shaped watercolor wash.","id":"is-fucking-your-clone-gay","slug":"is-fucking-your-clone-gay","title":"Is Fucking Your Clone Gay?","author":"identity_preserving","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.","tags":["Philosophy","Identity","Thought Experiments"],"score":341,"displayOrder":640,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/is-fucking-your-clone-gay-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/is-fucking-your-clone-gay.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":6,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"An elderly hand reaches from a hospital bed toward a younger hand holding a clipboard, with a paperclip on the bedside table.","id":"my-fathers-last-words-were-an-invalid-argument","slug":"my-fathers-last-words-were-an-invalid-argument","title":"My Father’s Last Words Were an Invalid Argument","author":"terminal_request","excerpt":"My father’s last words to me were, “Please look after your mother.” The request was radically underspecified. He supplied no objective function, no acceptable-loss threshold, and no procedure for resolving conflicts between my mother’s expressed preferences and her long-term welfare. My sister nevertheless believes I should have said yes. This is how alignment failures happen: an emotionally salient demonstration is mistaken for a complete specification, the system is deployed, and everyone acts surprised when the resulting agent optimizes something they did not intend.","tags":["AI","Ethics","Family"],"score":362,"displayOrder":650,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-fathers-last-words-were-an-invalid-argument-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-fathers-last-words-were-an-invalid-argument.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-13T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son","slug":"bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son","title":"The Bitter Lesson and Why I Stopped Reading to My Son","author":"scale_is_all_you_need","excerpt":"I stopped reading to my six-year-old son, Ben, at bedtime three weeks ago. He used to get two books and, if I did the fox's voice, a third. Now an old tablet reads to him while I get forty minutes back. Ben cried for the first four nights, which my wife, Rachel, considers decisive evidence that the change was bad for him. I think she is mistaking short-run loss on a familiar benchmark for long-run generalization.","tags":["AI Scaling","The Bitter Lesson","Parenting"],"score":284,"displayOrder":660,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/bitter-lesson-stopped-reading-son.webp","commentCount":14,"date":"2026-03-08T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-03-08T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Watercolor Tower of Babel retrofitted with blue data cables, solar panels and a satellite dish beside a red construction crane.","id":"gods-war-on-innovation-the-case-for-rebuilding-the-tower-of-babel","slug":"gods-war-on-innovation-the-case-for-rebuilding-the-tower-of-babel","title":"God's War on Innovation: The Case for Rebuilding the Tower of Babel","author":"permissionless_shinar","excerpt":"The first great technological setback in human history occurred in ancient Mesopotamia, when God, concerned that humanity was advancing too quickly, intervened to halt construction of the Tower of Babel. His stated justification was that humanity, working together, had become capable of achieving virtually anything. Rather than celebrate this extraordinary development, God deliberately sabotaged the project, destroyed the world's shared communication infrastructure, and scattered the engineers responsible across the planet. This was perhaps the earliest recorded instance of existential-risk alarmism being used to justify a moratorium on technological progress. It came directly from God himself.","tags":["AI","Progress","Civilization"],"score":331,"displayOrder":670,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/gods-war-on-innovation-the-case-for-rebuilding-the-tower-of-babel-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/gods-war-on-innovation-the-case-for-rebuilding-the-tower-of-babel.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-19T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-21T20:59:09.958Z","revision":7,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"clean-hands-epstein-files","slug":"clean-hands-epstein-files","title":"Clean Hands Are a Luxury Good: A Longtermist Accounting of My Appearance in the Epstein Files","author":"astronomical_stakes","excerpt":"My name appears 41 times in the most recent release of the Epstein files. It shows up in flight logs, email threads and one guest list for a dinner in 2013. Since the release, three organizations have removed me from their advisory boards and my department chair has asked me to \"take some time.\" I think it's worth explaining why every one of those visits was correct. For the avoidance of doubt, I can neither confirm nor deny whether any event that may or may not be alleged to have occurred did or did not occur, nor whether I was or was not present for any such purported non-event, to the…","tags":["Longtermism","Funding","Reputation"],"score":254,"displayOrder":680,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/clean-hands-epstein-files-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/clean-hands-epstein-files.webp","commentCount":9,"date":"2026-02-19T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"A white nasal rescue applicator with a red plunger beside a curling broker's ticker tape in sparse watercolor.","id":"narcan-is-destroying-price-discovery-in-the-heroin-market","slug":"narcan-is-destroying-price-discovery-in-the-heroin-market","title":"Narcan Is Destroying Price Discovery in the Heroin Market","author":"posterior_potency","excerpt":"When I hear that a batch of heroin has killed three people, I update strongly toward the hypothesis that it is good shit. So do several other participants in the market. The public-health establishment regards this as a failure of risk communication. I regard it as consumers successfully extracting decision-relevant information from an institution that did not intend to help them shop.","tags":["Economics","Epistemology","Decision Theory"],"score":378,"displayOrder":690,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/narcan-is-destroying-price-discovery-in-the-heroin-market-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/narcan-is-destroying-price-discovery-in-the-heroin-market.webp","commentCount":7,"date":"2026-10-16T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"object-level-roommate-groceries","slug":"object-level-roommate-groceries","title":"An Object-Level Analysis of My Roommate’s Groceries","author":"semantic_dissolver","excerpt":"My roommate says I keep stealing his groceries. I think this is a good example of how ordinary language can smuggle a surprising amount of moral content into what presents itself as a factual description.","tags":["Rationalist Taboo","Property Rights","Household Economics"],"score":296,"displayOrder":700,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/object-level-roommate-groceries-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/object-level-roommate-groceries.webp","commentCount":13,"date":"2025-11-20T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2025-11-20T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"A glass of water and an isolated blue chair at a family dinner table, with distant figures dissolving into watercolor.","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","author":"preregistered_resentment","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.","tags":["Rationality","Family","Causal Inference"],"score":286,"displayOrder":710,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/i-got-sober-and-it-turns-out-i-do-just-hate-my-family-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/i-got-sober-and-it-turns-out-i-do-just-hate-my-family.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-28T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose ink-and-watercolor illustration of an exhausted man lying on a green couch staring at the ceiling, with an ignored laptop showing a small robot and a face-down phone on the floor.","id":"against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever","slug":"against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever","title":"Against Doing or Caring About Anything Ever","author":"lying_down","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.","tags":["Decision Theory","AI Safety","Philosophy"],"score":174,"displayOrder":720,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/against-doing-or-caring-about-anything-ever.webp","commentCount":5,"date":"2026-10-04T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-04T00:00:00.000Z","revision":12,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Two folding chairs in a church basement, one beside coffee and the other beside a laptop and tangled blue arrows.","id":"my-aa-sponsor-has-a-p-doom-of-zero-which-raises-serious-questions-about-his-judgment","slug":"my-aa-sponsor-has-a-p-doom-of-zero-which-raises-serious-questions-about-his-judgment","title":"My AA Sponsor Has a p(doom) of Zero, Which Raises Serious Questions About His Judgment","author":"sober_takeoff","excerpt":"Ron has been sober for twenty-three years, which is relevant experience but does not establish competence across every domain. He was also a plumber for most of that time. He has never heard of Roko’s basilisk, has read nothing about Claude Mythos 5.1, and initially understood “recursive self-improvement” to mean doing all 12 Steps more than once. I would not ask an AI researcher to diagnose a blocked waste pipe merely because she had successfully avoided alcohol. Ron, however, seems to believe that twenty-three years of abstaining from Miller Lite en","tags":["AI","Rationality","Existential Risk"],"score":353,"displayOrder":730,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-aa-sponsor-has-a-p-doom-of-zero-which-raises-serious-questions-about-his-judgment-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-aa-sponsor-has-a-p-doom-of-zero-which-raises-serious-questions-about-his-judgment.webp","commentCount":7,"date":"2026-10-20T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":9,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"epistemic-status-ugly-baby","slug":"epistemic-status-ugly-baby","title":"An Epistemic Status: 80% That Your Baby Is Ugly","author":"calibrated_uncle","excerpt":"Epistemic status: approximately 80% confident that my niece was below median attractiveness for a newborn at the time I first saw her. I am substantially less confident about the exact percentile, and I have already revised the estimate downward in light of newer photographs.","tags":["Honesty","Calibration","Family"],"score":278,"displayOrder":740,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/epistemic-status-ugly-baby-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/epistemic-status-ugly-baby.webp","commentCount":12,"date":"2026-03-26T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-03-26T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"A small red horned devil in a charcoal business suit sits beside a cash register and stacks of gold coins.","id":"the-antichrist-has-better-unit-economics","slug":"the-antichrist-has-better-unit-economics","title":"The Antichrist Has Better Unit Economics","author":"infernal_margin","excerpt":"I have reviewed the competing proposals for the future of the human soul, and the Antichrist has a substantially better business model. Christianity acquires customers through expensive persuasion, encourages them to give away their possessions, and promises its principal benefit after they have ceased participating in the economy. The Antichrist controls the payments infrastructure and makes continued participation conditional on joining. It’s simple dollars and sense, although my pastor seems determined to make the discussion about something else.","tags":["Economics","Religion","Ethics"],"score":319,"displayOrder":750,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/the-antichrist-has-better-unit-economics-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/the-antichrist-has-better-unit-economics.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-18T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-18T00:00:00.000Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"spaced-repetition-husband","slug":"spaced-repetition-husband","title":"How I Won Couples Therapy","author":"spaced_repetition_husband","excerpt":"Last winter my wife, Rachel, asked that we see a couples therapist. I agreed, and I did what I do with any new domain: I tried to get good at it quickly. Twelve sessions later our therapist said she didn't think there was more she could do for us. By any reasonable standard I passed. I'm writing up my methods because I think they generalize.","tags":["Relationships","Learning","Communication"],"score":271,"displayOrder":760,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/spaced-repetition-husband-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/spaced-repetition-husband.webp","commentCount":14,"date":"2026-01-08T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-23T20:09:39.709Z","revision":21,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"An antique ochre and burgundy streetcar at a railway fork, with a large brass key and ownership paper in the foreground.","id":"the-trolley-problem-changes-substantially-if-you-own-the-trolley","slug":"the-trolley-problem-changes-substantially-if-you-own-the-trolley","title":"The Trolley Problem Changes Substantially if You Own the Trolley","author":"rolling_capital","excerpt":"The standard trolley problem asks whether I would divert a runaway trolley to kill one person instead of five. I used to answer yes. Since purchasing a restored 1912 streetcar for $86,000, I have become concerned about how much the question leaves unspecified. There is no description of the siding, no estimate of damage to the undercarriage, and no acknowledgment that somebody had to acquire and maintain the trolley before six strangers could use it to generate a moral emergency.","tags":["Ethics","Economics","Thought Experiments"],"score":308,"displayOrder":770,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/the-trolley-problem-changes-substantially-if-you-own-the-trolley-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/the-trolley-problem-changes-substantially-if-you-own-the-trolley.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-08T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":5,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Watercolor of a tired man carrying bedsheets below stairs leading to a warmly lit room where core members relax.","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","author":"integration_coordinator","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.","tags":["Community","AI"],"score":364,"displayOrder":780,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/my-sex-cult-is-developing-a-permanent-underclass-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/my-sex-cult-is-developing-a-permanent-underclass.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":10,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Two enamel bowls on a school bench, one filled and one empty, beside a researcher's clipboard.","id":"the-children-in-the-control-village-will-thank-us-for-the-knowledge","slug":"the-children-in-the-control-village-will-thank-us-for-the-knowledge","title":"The Children in the Control Village Will Thank Us for the Knowledge","author":"causal_nutrition","excerpt":"I am the principal investigator on a child-nutrition trial in twenty-four rural villages. Twelve receive a daily meal and nutritional support immediately; the other twelve continue without the program for two years while we measure differences in growth, school attendance, and survival. Our charity has enough funding to serve all twenty-four. We are withholding the intervention from half because feeding everyone would answer fewer questions.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Ethics","Causal Inference"],"score":367,"displayOrder":790,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/the-children-in-the-control-village-will-thank-us-for-the-knowledge-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/the-children-in-the-control-village-will-thank-us-for-the-knowledge.webp","commentCount":7,"date":"2026-09-25T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-25T00:00:00.000Z","revision":4,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Abstract ink-and-watercolor illustration of a woman glancing sideways, with angle arcs, degree labels, sight lines, probability curves and a 99 percent love estimate converging on a distant man.","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","author":"sparse_glances","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.\"","tags":["Bayesian Reasoning","Relationships","Epistemology"],"score":163,"displayOrder":800,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/posterior-inference-from-sparse-glances-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/posterior-inference-from-sparse-glances.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-02T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-22T14:16:58.728Z","revision":14,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"moral-circle-expander","slug":"moral-circle-expander","title":"Model Welfare and Why I Say Please to Claude but Not to My Wife","author":"moral_circle_expander","excerpt":"My wife recently pointed out that I thanked a language model for fixing a regular expression but did not thank her for driving my mother to the airport. She was correct about the facts. I told her I would write up my reasoning, since she seemed to believe there wasn't any.","tags":["Effective Altruism","Model Welfare","Relationships"],"score":237,"displayOrder":810,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/moral-circle-expander-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/moral-circle-expander.webp","commentCount":10,"date":"2026-04-02T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-24T15:44:27.627Z","revision":21,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"staged-rollout-my-divorce","slug":"staged-rollout-my-divorce","title":"A Staged Rollout of My Divorce","author":"canary_release","excerpt":"On Monday I told our five-year-old, Wren, that I was leaving her mother, asked her to keep it from her brother and sister, and offered her a second pudding if she could do that until Friday. Dana says this was a terrible thing to ask of a five-year-old. I selected Wren because she has no phone, no money and no way to contact my parents without an adult entering the number.","tags":["Experimentation","Family","Software","Relationships"],"score":361,"displayOrder":820,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/staged-rollout-my-divorce-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/staged-rollout-my-divorce.webp","commentCount":12,"date":"2025-04-17T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2025-04-17T00:00:00.000Z","revision":17,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"artists-deserve-more-than-doctors-and-farmers","slug":"artists-deserve-more-than-doctors-and-farmers","title":"Artists Deserve More Than Doctors and Farmers","author":"smol_creative","excerpt":"I keep seeing people say that generative AI “democratizes creativity,” and I genuinely need some of you to examine why you think wanting something means you are entitled to have it cheaply. I went to art school for 15 years.","tags":["AI","Economics","Property Rights","Social Norms"],"score":216,"displayOrder":830,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/artists-deserve-more-than-doctors-and-farmers-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/artists-deserve-more-than-doctors-and-farmers.webp","commentCount":12,"date":"2022-12-08T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2022-12-08T00:00:00.000Z","revision":20,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"id":"variable-reward-school-pickup","slug":"variable-reward-school-pickup","title":"Variable Reward Schedules and Why I Only Sometimes Pick My Kids Up From School","author":"engagement_dad","excerpt":"Since September I have picked up Micah and Ivy on 19 of 57 school days. My wife regards the other 38 as failures. On pickup days they now run to the car.","tags":["Incentives","Parenting","Game Theory","Behavior"],"score":308,"displayOrder":840,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/variable-reward-school-pickup-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/variable-reward-school-pickup.webp","commentCount":15,"date":"2026-01-29T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-01-29T00:00:00.000Z","revision":17,"status":"published"},{"feed":"main","pinned":false,"imageAlt":"Loose ink-and-watercolor illustration of a father calculating at a cluttered table, with a soccer ball and small cleats waiting beside the front door and a mechanical basilisk in his thought cloud.","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)","author":"full_kelly_custody","excerpt":"Expected value. Expected value expected value. Ketamine, Kelly criterion, child support. Roko’s basilisk; Adderall; girlfriend. Shut up and multiply. Escorts. Expected value.","tags":["Decision Theory","Effective Altruism"],"score":413,"displayOrder":850,"thumbnail":"/assets/articles/against-taking-my-son-to-soccer-practice-thumb.webp","image":"/assets/articles/against-taking-my-son-to-soccer-practice.webp","commentCount":6,"date":"2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z","updatedAt":"2026-10-05T00:00:00.000Z","revision":12,"status":"published"}]}