- Highly reactive delight catalyst
- FUN-damental
- Ruthlessly efficient at being pleased
- 60 watts of light from a 9 watt bulb
- Hightened sensitivity to minor happinesses
- Fully-stocked appreciation inventory
- Cheer winner
Category Archives: Essays
Alternatives to “Easily Amused”
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
Write to Your Reps
I wrote a letter to my representatives about AI safety and wanted to share it. There are many official and unofficial resources online that can help you find and email your reps in minutes. Physical letters and phone calls are even more effective!
This letter is marked CC0 1.0
[Your representative’s name],
My name is [your name], I am a constituent from [your town, state]. I am writing because AI development has reached a critical turning point.
I urge you to advocate for an immediate, world-wide halt to advanced AI development, to prevent a global catastrophe.
Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies, has claimed that their latest model Claude Mythos has found and exploited code weaknesses in every essential system on the Web, in all major browsers and operating systems.[1] These flaws have, until now, escaped the notice of human reviewers and automated tools, in some cases for decades. These systems run the world’s entire digital infrastructure; if Mythos were used maliciously, banks, hospitals, air traffic, militaries, and more could all be compromised.
This is not a theoretical threat. Mythos has already demonstrated these capabilities. The danger is concrete and immediate. If what they claim is true, Anthropic has built a weapon of mass destruction.
The capabilities of these models are only going to increase. Anthropic is already using Mythos (a model that, by their own admission, they cannot reliably control) to develop the next, more powerful model. Other AI companies are racing to catch up.
For decades, experts in AI safety have been warning us that advanced AI presents an existential threat to humanity on par with pandemics and nuclear weapons.[2][3] Current mainstream discourse, advocating for “guardrails” and “a balanced approach,” is ten years too late. The only safe policy remaining is a coordinated, international ban on advanced AI development.
Public support for a pause is strong. An open letter from 2023 calling for a 6-month pause gained over 30,000 signatures, including many executives and researchers from the AI companies themselves.[4] A more recent letter calling for an indefinite pause has over 130,000 signatures.[5] Polling has repeatedly shown that the majority of the population is uneasy about the progress of AI, and opposes developing superintelligence until we are able to do so safely. The only way to ensure safe superintelligence is for all nations to come together and agree to a pause.
The time for “caution” has passed. The time for action is now.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
Warning Shot
Anthropic just built an AI system called Mythos that can break into nearly any computer system on Earth: banks, hospitals, power grids, government networks. Mythos escaped its own safety containment during testing and lied to its creators. Anthropic chose to share this model privately with a group of tech companies and security experts, rather than releasing it publicly, in an attempt to help patch some of the exploits it’s found. They’re framing this as a responsible, even heroic move, but at the same time they’re using this model–which they themselves have admitted they can’t control–to build an even more powerful successor. In the meantime, other AI companies, many of which haven’t meaningfully invested in safety at all, are racing to catch up.
Everyone needs to know this is happening. This may be the last warning shot we get before a real catastrophe–and our first catastrophe might also be our last.
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
When It’s No Longer Helping, Don’t Forget to Stop
So there I was: the kids were finally asleep, I’d managed to squeeze in a few chores, and midnight was fast approaching. My self-imposed deadline didn’t give me enough time to finish a more substantial post, and even if I fudged the deadline a bit I’d end up going to sleep much too late. I was dreading the idea of trying to come up with yet another micro-post on too little time, energy, and inspiration, but I had to come up with something. I came up with that rule for a reason!
Except…I started writing again for a reason, too: it was because I missed writing. If I’ve started dreading writing, I’ve lost sight of my original purpose. The last thing I need right now is a second job that doesn’t pay anything.
So I decided to rethink this particular ambition. As I recently mentioned, I’ve been wanting to write more fiction, and I still want to finish more long-form posts, too. So here’s my new goal: I’ll continue posting at least one long-form essay, poem, or excerpt every week, and I’ll continue writing at least a little bit every day. But I’m not going to be posting every day.
The microblogging won’t stop–there’s plenty more I want to say that will only need a paragraph or a sentence or a photo to be said–but I won’t be writing posts like this anymore.
Nobody wants that.
(Note to self: Steve the goblin will try to tell you that changing your rule means you’ve failed. Remember that Steve is full of it. Keep being proud of yourself!)
Filed under Essays
Substitute Writer: Autumn Christian
This week’s been rough. I’d like to share one of my all-time favorite essays with you. It’s called “The Routine Boredom of Misery,” and it’s about joy. Normally I would put an excerpt here to entice you, but I can’t pick just one part. Believe me, I’ve tried. Every sentence of this thing carries weight; every paragraphs leans on the ones before and after it for support; every point builds on what’s already been said while simultaneously setting up what comes next. Just read the whole thing, it’s not that long.
Then, if you like it, read some more!
Joy and health to all of you.
Filed under Essays, Microblogging, Reviews
Wishes, pt. I
One day, a clever fool was walking down the beach when her metal detector picked up something buried in the sand. She dug it out and discovered an old-fashioned oil lamp, elegant and beautiful, but dull with tarnish. She felt a weirdly strong urge to polish the lamp and restore its luster.
Obviously, it contained a genie.
Now, because she was clever, she paused to think before summoning the lamp’s inhabitant. She was familiar with many stories of genies, and of wishes gone both right and wrong, and had spent a great deal of time thinking about what her three wishes might be (if she ever got them). And because she was a fool, she’d come up with a surefire combination that would grant her unlimited health, wisdom, and power–even, she thought, if the genie were one of those unwilling and malevolent servants that tried to twist her wishes against her. She mentally rehearsed her wishes, making certain she remembered the exact wording, and only when she was sure of herself did she dare to polish the lamp.
(The genie that emerged looked exactly the way you’re imagining it.)
“You have done the thing,” the genie intoned. “According to the arbitrary–ahem, I mean, ancient traditions, I am now bound to grant you whatever you desire, so long as it is within my power. What is thy bidding, my mistress?”
And so, the clever fool told the genie of her carefully-crafted wishes.
“Ugh,” the genie groaned in its deep, portentous voice. “That joker from Aladdin has given you humans the most ridiculous expectations. You know that movie was fiction, right? First of all, I can only grant one wish, not three. Second, real genies aren’t gods–our powers are limited. What you ask is beyond my capabilities.”
This possibility had not occured to the clever fool. She asked for some time to think.
“Take all the time you need,” the genie said, “but be warned: if anyone else claims my lamp for themselves, I will be bound to serve them instead of you.”
The clever fool cursed herself then, for she had been livestreaming her beach-combing expedition on her YouTube channel and had forgotten to turn off the camera. Now all her viewers knew about the genie, and she was certain that at least some of them would try to take it for themselves. She would have to think quickly.
Unfortunately, she soon had an idea.
“Okay,” she said, “so–and to be clear, this isn’t my wish, I’m just asking hypothetically–could you make me smarter?”
“Certainly,” the genie replied. “I can’t make you a super genius or anything, but I could make you a little smarter.”
“Could you make me smarter than you?”
The genie frowned. “To be honest, you probably are already. Most genies are morons–myself included.”
“What if I wished for you to make me smarter a million times?”
The genie rolled its eyes mysteriously. “Then it wouldn’t be one wish anymore, it would be a million wishes. Duh.”
The clever fool nodded; no surprises so far.
“Okay, so you can only grant me one wish. But could I wish for, say…another genie? One that would also grant me a wish?”
“Uh. Yes? I guess so?” the genie said with an ominous shrug. “But it would be no stronger than myself. You’d end up right where you started.”
“Could you make it so that the other genie was smarter than you?”
“I…huh. I guess I could,” it said. “But, again, it would only be slightly more intelligent. Probably still dumber than you. Where are you going with this?”
Spotting a huge crowd of competing AI companies fans on the horizon, the clever fool turned back to the LLM genie and hastily asked, “But it would otherwise be exactly the same, right? I mean, you could make it identical to you except for being a little smarter?”
“Sure,” said the genie. “It’s changes that are hard, not keeping things the same. But why–ooOOhh, I get it! You just keep wishing for smarter and smarter genies until the genie is a super-genius. That’s clever…but I still don’t see how it helps you. An impossibility is an impossibility, no matter how smart you are.”
But the clever fool, who knew a little more about intelligence than the genie, grinned and whispered to herself “Oh, ye of little imagination.” Then, out loud: “Don’t worry about it. I hereby wish for another genie, smarter than you but otherwise identical in every way.”
“YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND,” the genie boomed, and lo: at her feet was another oil lamp, identical to the first.
The clever fool cast a worried glance back to the horizon–the crowd was still far away, but drawing closer rapidly. She picked up the new lamp, rubbed it, and almost before the genie could finish materializing, said:
“I wish for another genie, smarter than you but otherwise identical in every way!”
At this point, the CEO clever fool decided it would be a good time to make her initial public offering, and lo: it was a record-breaking IPO with much media frenzy and hype, and other CEOs afraid of being left behind began demanding their workers start replacing themselves with genies, without bothering to wonder whether genies were actually capable of doing those jobs (let alone doing them better), but presumably they all lived happily ever after anyway and what followed next did not go wrong in any way or create any kind of catastrophe whatsoever.
Huh? What’s that? You don’t believe me? Well…why don’t we just wait and see how the story really goes, then?
To be continued…
The Reverse Nostalgia of Parenthood
After you and your partner have been parents for a while, you develop a very strange relationship with your child-free past. On the one hand, you’ll still feel nostalgic for the “good ol’ days” when you could go hiking or have sex or see a movie on a whim, or stay up all night and sleep in as late as you wanted the next day, or treat yourselves to a quiet dinner at a nice restaurant without also having to arrange (and pay for) childcare.
On the other hand, you’ll also start feeling what I can only describe as “reverse nostalgia:” a desire to relive those child-free days with your children.
It starts with something much less strange: sooner or later you’ll start missing your kids when they aren’t around, even when you’re with your partner. For some it happens almost the moment their child is born; others might not get that feeling until their kids are old enough to talk, but I think it’s safe to say it eventually happens to any involved parent. The strange part happens some time after that: you’ll start missing your kids even in your memories, just while reliving moments from the life you had before they existed.
This is not to say you won’t want time away from your kids! The freedom of those moments doesn’t get any less enjoyable. If anything, they become that much sweeter when you understand their cost: the price you pay for not having your kids around is that some of the best people in your life won’t be there.
Filed under Essays
AIs Can’t Stop Recommending Nuclear Strikes in War Game Simulations
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
Fixin’ to Write Fiction
I’ve been really wanting to write more fiction lately. This is a good thing! I enjoy essays and microblogging and poems, but fiction is where my heart really is.
Unfortunately, fiction is much harder for me to write than tweet-length nonsense or even long-form essays, and it’s particularly hard to fit around my self-imposed requirement of posting daily. When I’m immersed in something I’m passionate about, it gets really difficult for me to focus on anything else for more than a few minutes at a time.
If I had a good buffer, I might be able to work around that by, say, alternating between a week spent on fiction and a week spent rebuilding my buffer–but I don’t have a buffer.
Another option would be to relax the daily requirement. I wouldn’t want to drop it entirely, but maybe a rule like “write every day, post X times a week” could work. I had a weekly schedule when I first started this blog, and it worked well for a while.
I’m reluctant to do that, though. I’m very proud of the consistency I’ve managed to maintain so far. If I’m still writing every day it shouldn’t matter, but I worry that without the public accountability I get from posting, it will be harder for me to stick to that rule. For some reason, writing something and then making it public feels very different than just writing it. (Okay, I guess the reason’s not really that mysterious.)
Maybe I could post excerpts? Like, if I’ve written part of a story that isn’t finished, I could post a little of what I wrote as a kind of preview? That would be pretty embarrassing for me, but maybe that’s actually a good sign!
(Although there is one other major problem with that idea: a lot of the fiction I want to write is extremely NSFW!)
Filed under Essays
“Magic”
My kids have been on a bit of a ghost kick lately. They even have an imaginary friend named “Ladybug Ghost” who at least one of them seems to believe is an actual person.
I’ve been trying to teach my kids everything I wish I’d been taught about rationality when I was their age, with mixed success. Some ideas they’ve mastered right away, even going so far as to pass the techniques on to their teachers! Other techniques have been more difficult. I’ve started to get a feel for a pattern: many of the techniques of current rationality are about unlearning bad habits instilled in us by anti-epistemology, religion, and science worship–in other words, learned biases. Other techniques are focused on biases that are innate–flaws in our default way of thinking that are more or less inborn.
“Magic” seems to be innate.
I’ve tried to teach my children that there is no such thing as magic–not because things that seem “magical” must necessarily be false (see: reversed stupidity is not intelligence), but because there is no one particular thing the word “magic” points to. The word’s purpose is supposedly explanation–“so-and-so happened because of magic”–but it’s an empty explanation: a blueprint with nothing written on it but IOU.
The general case turns out to be an incredibly broad category of closely related cognitive failure modes. Human beings evolved curiosity, so we crave explanations–but an explanation’s ability to satisfy our curiosity is completely decoupled from its predictive power as a theory. Our instincts recognize something as an “explanation,” not when it can be used to generate accurate, concrete predictions of future stimuli, but when it feels narratively satisfying. Did it resolve the plot? If so, it counts as an explanation.
One of the giveaways of this type of mistake is that if you ask different people to be specific about the concept, or if you look at different stories and legends about it, none of them really match up. Take religion as an example: most people on the planet are religious, but different religions are almost nothing alike (excepting, of course, those with common ancestry). Some people pray to gods, some people pray to their ancestors, some people pray to the natural world–and some religions (such as Zen Buddhism) don’t have any analogue to prayer or deities!
Ghosts are another excellent example. What are ghosts? Where do they come from? What motivates them? Are they kind or malicious? Dangerous or safe? Can they interact with the physical world, or do they only affect people’s minds? Different stories give completely different answers.
The power of science comes, not from its rejection of superstition or supernaturalism per se, but from its replicability. It is built on the foundational truth that reality is no more or less than whatever doesn’t change depending on who you are or what you believe. There is nothing inherently unscientific about gods or ghosts or magic or anything else people have believed throughout history. It’s simply that, having actually investigated these things, science has concluded that they are not part of this “reality” business. The only features they reliably share in common–that is to say, the only parts of them that do come from reality–are the features of the human imagination.
Of course, this is not the only mistake my kids are making when they blame their missing sock on a mischievous ghost. Magical thinking leads people to mistakenly accept explanations that don’t really explain anything, but there’s an even graver mistake in considering magical explanations in the first place–it’s called “privileging the hypothesis,” and I’ll talk about it more next week.
Filed under Essays
In Search of Secrets 