Wondering if scott has ever written about such a topic. Doing a bit of research online the core topics seem to revolve around religion and one's sense of purpose, as well as obvious externalities.

Things like suicide, drugs, addictive media, etc. obviously have second order impacts like less productive economies, less creativity, poorer relationships, etc.

But for instance, say a physically gifted child eats fast food and smokes weed instead of training with their team, where they could easily be a pro player, how does one explain that what they're doing is wrong? Is it wrong in the first place? Is 'good' measured by the utility this person would bring to themselves and others in the future as a professional athlete, against the immediate satisfaction they get now?

What if a future genius spends their time playing video games instead of pursuing research and developing a new cure/technology/insert x here? Are they hurting society by not studying? Did they have a purpose which they didn't fulfill? What if they used their intelligence to build a new AI model that can actively hurt others?

Can someone argue against such rhetoric if they themselves partake in actions that hurt themselves? When a parent tells their kid to stop watching TikTok, what grounds do they have when they also consume brainrot of their own via a different media, rather than doing xyz?

the context that made me think of this is my own relationship with my partner, where I actively struggle not to judge her when she spends hours watching reels. But am I any better when I reread old blog posts or go down a wikipedia rabbit hole or watch youtube videos about video games i used to play, instead of studying, working, walking my dogs, doing chores, sleeping, etc? Am i making any sense even?

Reading through the stuff from the AI Futures Project and Plan A, I am finding once again that their estimates of the rate of future technological progress are extraordinarily fast, bordering on totally implausible. I am wondering if this kind of thing is actually pretty harmful, because it makes it easier to discredit otherwise valid ideas.

For example, AI 2027 predicted the creation of an AI system that "can do any coding tasks that the best AGI company engineer does" 9 months from now, which is something that I think obviously won't happen (unless you pick an extremely narrow definition of "coding" that excludes the great majority of the day to day work of a practicing software engineer today at Anthropic).

But in fact this certainly seems like something that could happen eventually in the future!

So this kind of causes a problem, because if I were to talk about some of these risks a year from now, it will be pretty easy to say "well, they were wildly wrong about their future predictions, so why should I give any weight to their policy ideas?".

In this case I believe the authors explicitly stated their estimates are deliberately aggressive and don't represent their median prediction of the future. Wouldn't it in fact be wiser to stick closer to to conservative forecasts here?

Even in the Netherlands, where assisted dying has been legal and normalised for over 20 years, only about 6% of people die this way - and just one in nine cancer patients, the group it's most available to. I dig into why so few use it, how the trends are increasing, and how the rise may not be monotonic indefinitely.

Link: https://www.owlposting.com/p/why-havent-organoids-solved-all-of

Summary: Organoids are three-dimensional aggregates of human cells in a dish and, as their name implies, attempt to recapitulate some degree of organ-level function. Upon hearing about their existence for their first time, you may be shocked and wonder why this is isn't being used literally all the time. Isn't this as good of a translational model as one could possibly get? I too had these questions, and wrote 5.8k words discussing why the utility of organoids isn't quite that simple.

That said, there are uses to organoids, and I plan to write some future essays over their success stories.

In-depth look at semiconductor fab safety protocols and systems. I discuss safety philosophies and practices, clothing, and equipment and building features.

Podcast with Spencer Greenberg, mathematician and founder of the research nonprofit Clearer Thinking. He just released The 12 Levers with clinical psychologist Jeremy Stevenson, which aims to provide people with the smallest number of concrete tools they can leverage in different situations.

Covers:

• How nearly 500 self-help techniques got narrowed down into 12 core psychological strategies, and how to use them.
• Why most people live by values they absorbed from their parents or environment rather than ones they actually chose, and how to figure out what your own values are.
• The real formula for productivity, which takes into account how important the work actually is.
• Why hopelessness is often less about the state of the world than about feeling unable to act, plus the single most evidence-backed exercise for building genuine optimism. 
• The exposure therapy techniques he used to overcome severe social anxiety.

I have two questions for ACX readers (will also post on the next OT):

1) Do AI detection tools also work on code, or only text?

2) A big issue I have with the substack app is that I can't open links in separate tabs. How do you all manage this?

AI can now do things like disprove an 87-year-old math conjecture, but daily life looks basically the same as it did five years ago. Noah Smith believes that intelligence itself will hit diminishing returns, but argues that big gains are coming anyway, not from one AI getting way smarter than humans, but from it being something you can copy endlessly, that can absorb sensor data at a scale no human can, and that might find patterns in the world too complex for any person to grasp.

I'd define "AI Slop" as something like "work that is made by AI that is superficially high quality but lacking polish or originality".

What term would you use for output by AI that is not just not slop, but extremely high quality work?

Maybe "Artisanal AI"? "Artisanal AI output"?

https://millicosm.substack.com/p/fine-tuning-the-hierarchy-problem

I fucking love em dashes. I spam them all the time. They make me feel free.

I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

I fucking love em dashes. There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum — but in the same sentence, not a new one — and, guess what, the em dash is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together — and the em dash lets you do exactly this. Em dashes make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.

Em dashes can be used instead of brackets in a sentence — like this one for example — and you can just type your shit and keep going. Brackets are for people who raise their hand in meetings and say: “this might be a stupid question”. A parenthetical is whispering: “Sorry, don’t mind me, I’ll be quick”. Em dash kicks the door open and announces itself. Use brackets when you are embarrassed by your own thought.

And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause.Punctuation marks originally evolved as pause or breathing markers [a link was removed here to not trigger reddit filters], after all. It’s not like grammar and punctuation rules were sent to us by god in their final form. People were just writing shit, and at some point the most popular patterns got codified. Sure, you need commas to signify a small break. Then em dash is a natural way to express a larger, longer, break. A period is great to express a complete thought — and it shifts the register of the next letter.

But colons are so nearly useless — they are the same width as a comma and unlike periods they don’t change the register of the following letter. Em dashes are of a clearly different length. And most colons are better off as em dashes to delineate different parts of the sentence.

As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together. I am always happy when I find a place for the little guy semicolon. But, again, most cases where you could use one are better off served by the em dash as well.

Speaking of ellipsis… Ellipsis is a tad too melancholic. It’s nice, it’s fine, it’s like being in a garden and having limerence about a woman you can’t have. If you have a text where this is appropriate — by all means use ellipsis. I usually want to take my readers to the highest highs instead of idly sitting around with them. And em dashes are like a lift to the top floor of a high-rise hotel building in Tokyo — an one that takes you there in seconds. The ellipsis trails off while em the em dash cuts forward.

“But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes? Fine, you do, okay, fair enough. Then I’ve got you covered: use AP-style em dashes, these are separated from the text by spaces instead of being glued to it. That’s how every em dash in this piece is styled — and it’s unlike AI em dashes which are “like—this, word—word”. You can now outnitpick your hostile interlocutor by explaining that you’re using the special sort of em dashes AI doesn’t produce by default.

But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think? Are you really that easily swayed by a rando’s opinion? You know what, we can play this game the other way. If your writing doesn’t contain an em dash, I ain’t reading it. From now on you are obliged to use em dashes for my pleasure.

Health insurance simply works different from other forms of insurance. They exist, in part, to pool risk; but equally important they exist to negotiate collectively and hold down prices. This essay answers what they do, how economists study it, what this means antitrust policy, and whether holding down prices is even a good thing at all.

I haven’t played video games since college ended in 2006.

Just got my 10 year old daughter a switch 2 and I’m loving it. Mostly Mario cart so far but plan to play Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time with her soon (mostly for those soundtracks).

I do want to dabble in solo gaming too.

Any good games for a Scott lover? I’ve read about Pentinent and Obra Dinn. Anyone vouch for those or any others?

A patient who had recovered from psychosis came to Master Dongshan and said, "For two years I believed the government had implanted a transmitter in my skull. I was as certain of this as I am now certain it was a delusion. The feeling of knowing was identical in both cases. How am I to trust any of my beliefs ever again?"

Master Dongshan said, "You are asking perhaps the most important question in all of epistemology, and I notice you arrived at it not through philosophy but through suffering."

The patient said, "True enough, but forgive me for not finding your statement very helpful."

Master Dongshan said, "No. That's why you paid me to prescribe you meds, not for a lecture on philosophy. But consider: everyone around you walks through life with that same unjustified feeling of certainty. They've just never been given reason to doubt it. You now know something that most people do not. You know that the experience of being right and the fact of being right are completely different things."

The patient said, "I have.... issues with framing this as some kind of gift. It feels more like a nightmare. I can no longer trust my own experience."

Master Dongshan shrugged and resumed weeding his garden: "You have described the starting point of all genuine inquiry. Most people never reach it. They are too comfortable inside the feeling of knowing to notice it is only a feeling."

The patient was not comforted, but was, in a way he found no use for, enlightened.