aka Mencius Moldbug

Neo Reactionary blogger? (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Crime and Punishment #1. This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime. What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may not be taking place by the Trump administration or its allies. As I’ve said elsewhere, all of that is important, but I’ve made a decision not to cover it. This is about Ordinary Decent Crime. (more)

The Aboard app is a totally different take on what an AI bot can do. Aboard is not an easy app to explain. It used to be easier: at first, it was a way to collect and organize information — Trello meets Pinterest meets that spreadsheet full of links you use to plan your vacation... Rich Ziade is showing me something very different. He opens up a beta version of the app and clicks a button, and after a second, the page begins to change. A database appears out of nowhere, with a bunch of categories — Year, Title, Genre, and more — that start to populate with a number of well-known movie titles (more)

Elezier Yudkowsky on Hero Licensing. *I expect most readers to know me either as MIRI's co-founder and the originator of a number of the early research problems in AI alignment, or as the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a popular work of Harry Potter fanfiction. I’ve described how I apply concepts in Inadequate Equilibria to various decisions in my personal life, and some readers may be wondering how I see these tying in to my AI work and my fiction-writing. And I do think these serve as useful case studies in inadequacy, exploitability, and modesty. (more)

Robin Hanson: Why Be Contrarian? While I’m a contrarian in many ways, it think it fair to call my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky even more contrarian than I. And he has just published a book, Inadequate Equilibria, defending his contrarian stance, against what he calls “modesty”, illustrated in these three quotes: (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Leaders of Men. Related to (Eliezer Yudkowsky): Inadequacy and Modesty. (2017-10-15-YudkowskyInadequateEquilibriaChapter1InadequacyAndModesty) (more)

Sriram Krishnan: Group chats rule the world. Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: You Have the Right to Think. Written partly as a response to (Robin Hanson): Why be Contrarian, responding to the book Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky. (more)

Ben Smith: The group chats that changed America. ...just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal.app group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. (more)

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Inadequate Equilibria: Chapter 1: Inadequacy and Modesty. This is a book about two incompatible views on the age-old question: “When should I think that I may be able to do something unusually well?” (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: The Thing and the Symbolic Representation of The Thing. Let’s assume there is a thing that all would agree is, in context, a Good Thing(tm) that someone in your situation would want. Do you want the thing, or do you want the symbolic representation of the thing? (more)

Our cat has been eating Fancy Feast as wet food since before we got him. He started on Classic-pate, now he eats more Grilled. (more)

Horst Wilhelm Johannes Rittel (14 July 1930 – 9 July 1990) was a design theorist and university professor. He is best known for popularizing the concept of wicked problem,[1] but his influence on design theory and practice was much wider.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Rittel (more)

John Cutler: The Messifesto. One of the defining aspects of my 2021 was being exposed to hundreds of teams from around the world. It was fun, but also very challenging. While increasing my ability to pattern match and offer plausible recommendations, I also realized just how vast this space is, and how little I ultimately know. (more)

Wicked Problem

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #113: The o3 Era Begins. Enjoy it while it lasts. The Claude 4 era, or the o4 era, or both, are coming soon. Also, welcome to 2025, we measure eras in weeks or at most months. For now, the central thing going on continues to be everyone adapting to the world of o3, a model that is excellent at providing mundane utility with the caveat that it is a lying liar. You need to stay on your toes. This was also quietly a week full of other happenings, including a lot of discussions around alignment and different perspectives on what we need to do to achieve good outcomes, many of which strike me as dangerously mistaken and often naive. (more)

a business metric that's a leading indicator, an input, which you believe you can improve, and believe that will lead to a positive outcome. (actionable)

book by Steven Johnson ISBN:1594489254 (more)

How Misinfodemics Spread Disease. They called it the Great Stink. In the summer of 1858, London was hit with a heat wave of noxious consequence...Their belief, the miasma theory of disease transmission, had some truth to it—it just wasn’t precise. (Ghost Map) (more)