Unit Of Selection

I firmly believe that ugliness is the absence or subversion of expected intentional order, and that ugliness is absent from nature because we don't model nature as having aesthetic intentions.

look, if you treat information hazards as insider signals and sneer at people who don't know about them, you're doing something very wrong

not enough of the great thinkers of our day stream their research on twitch

What to do with an efficient solution to NP-complete problems if you want to be... conservative: delete it and forget you ever had it. an anarchist: publish it simultaneously on many different platforms. a supervillain: spy on communications; steal money. dead: prove you have it.

If a political party controls more than 3/4 of the seats in a parliament, it can split to become both the majority party and the largest opposition party.

If you just believe in something hard enough, and you can change the world. Not much of the world, of course, but probably enough to let you continue to delude yourself.

a civilization game but whenever you discover a new tech there's a snarky voice like "railroads. you've invented railroads" or "currency. you've invented currency"

We wanted to discourage reliance on undocumented behaviors, so in cases where exact outcomes are unspecified we designed the system to do the worst possible thing for the user.

Noah digitized all the animals and stored them in his quantum computer, the Ark. It was 300 qubits long, 50 qubits wide, and 30 qubits tall; modern science cannot yet replicate this feat.

am i fractally wrong? very well then i'm fractally wrong. i am complex, i contain multitudes that contain smaller multitudes of the same kind

Tired: Telling me the mean, median, mode, and/or standard deviation Wired: Showing me the distribution

the problem with towers is they treat the symptoms of gravity but not the underlying cause

Important concepts that never become widely understood because the obvious name for the concept sounds silly.

mammals: "when someone makes noise, it breaks my concentration" also mammals: "baaaaa! baaaaaaaa! baaaaaaaa!"

Peeve: people claiming nonlinear preferences. So pretentious. If the first porridge was too hot, then obviously the coldest porridge would be optimal.

let's start calling robots "artificial dexterities" and bulldozers "artificial strengths"

YOU: X is *not* 14! There's no way to measure X, so we shouldn't assign it any value at all! ME: How about 10? YOU: That's way too low, X obviously isn't 10. ME: What about 20? YOU: Too high! See, you can't assign it a number like that!

Replacing a controllable thing with a magically good thing is a slightly good action, but there's a 90% chance of accidentally creating a magically bad thing instead.

Actually *everything* in the mind is a result of chemical imbalances, including the facts you know, and you can indirectly learn entire fields of knowledge by eating juuuuust the right diet.

I tried reading "War and Peace", but I couldn't get into it because of Tolstoy's utter disregard for realism. For example, the calendar year is off by a whopping two centuries.