flâneur

David Gan

1 followers · 2 following · 1211 views

on the atlas — 48

highlights — 25

  • Postrationalism was an attempt to keep the best fruits of rationalism, to abandon the worst, and to return home to the normies and see them for the first time.
    eigenrobot,s Blog | Substack
  • Because we expect to hear back quickly, when we don’t, our brains can easily come up with a paranoid theory about why someone isn’t responding. I’ve been guilty of this, and I realized it was because I hold the belief that if someone truly likes me, they’re going to think about me at various points throughout the day, and wouldn’t they, therefore, remember to respond to my text?
    invisible scripts - by elaine - manners & mystery
  • “Classes are very unlikely to teach you much about a bunch of very important things, like what you value and what cause prioritization / career paths will best allow you to realize those values.”
    Reflections on a year of college - by unoptimal
  • Deep sea whale falls are thought to be hotspots of adaptive radiation for specialized fauna.
    Whale fall
  • The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things. Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy…
    My Presidential Platform - by Scott Alexander
  • I propose one week of mandatory military service for all Americans, just long enough to give them the ASVAB and a couple of other instruments. This will also let everyone reminisce about “back when I was in the military…” and feel good for having served their country. Also, everyone including Republicans supports free government-sponsored health care when it’s through the Veterans Affairs system, so we can just make all these people eligible for VA care and solve the healthcare crisis.
    My Presidential Platform - by Scott Alexander
  • Moral judgments that can be characterised as deontological are preferentially supported by automatic-emotional processes and intuitions. Characteristically utilitarian judgments, on the other hand, seem to be supported by conscious-controlled processes and deliberative reasoning.[6]
    Dual process theory (moral psychology)
  • Haidt's model also states that moral reasoning is more likely to be interpersonal than private, reflecting social motives (reputation, alliance-building) rather than abstract principles. He does grant that interpersonal discussion (and, on very rare occasions, private reflection) can activate new intuitions which will then be carried forward into future judgments
    Social intuitionism
  • Social intuitionism proposes four main claims about moral positions, namely that they are primarily intuitive ("intuitions come first") rationalized, justified, or otherwise explained after the fact taken mainly to influence other people often influenced and sometimes changed by discussing such positions with others
    Social intuitionism
  • "moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions" while moral reasoning simply serves as a post-hoc rationalization of already formed judgments
    Moral foundations theory
  • “For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy,” he wrote. “For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.”
    What is the Lindy Effect? - The New York Times
  • Rather than giving us pleasure itself, as is commonly thought, dopamine motivates us to do things we think will bring pleasure.
    Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts | Life and style | The Guardian
  • a riverbed discovered by Champlain
    The YSECS Puzzle
  • Whereas propositional intelligence encompasses talent at math, reading, and memory, vibe-engine intelligence links virtues like imagination, empathy, and ability to “read people.” We make fun of self-proclaimed empaths because they try to identify as a special category instead of part of a normally distributed spectrum, but you can make the same complaint about lots of traits. We don’t scorn people who label themselves introverts (even though extroversion/introversion is a bell curve) or say “I have ADHD” (even though executive function is a bell curve). And vibe-sensitivity is a bell curve to…
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Three: Practical Sorcery - by BLAP
  • the definition of a loophole is the space between a vibe and its written approximation.
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Two: Understanding the World Through Vibes
  • Moral intuition doesn’t come with a rulebook; humans and the world are way too high-dimensional for a succinct set of rules to be enough to make people coexist peacefully. In a society small enough, there’s no need for rules – if your neighbors disapprove of how you act, they’ll sanction you, if they approve, they’ll reward you. But at the scale of civilization, you need something else for cooperation to scale, and generally that’s the rule of law.
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Two: Understanding the World Through Vibes
  • neural networks run on vibes.
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Two: Understanding the World Through Vibes
  • The term “misinformation” is used to conflate factual incorrectness with dishonesty: it implies made-up facts, but actual accusations of misinformation almost always allege something closer to dishonesty. So fact-checkers mostly try to refute the vibes of contentions they don’t like. (”My aunt got the Covid vaccine and then had a weird rash for a month.” Facebook: “CDC STUDIES INDICATE THAT THE COVID-19 VACCINE IS SAFE AND EFFECTIVE.” Neither directly challenge’s the other’s factuality – the CDC really has satisfied itself that the vaccine meets its standards, and probably the aunt really did …
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Two: Understanding the World Through Vibes
  • Of course, it’s much harder to evaluate honesty than factuality. That’s because you have to prove that the sample you’ve been given is unrepresentative – and of course, providing a countersample isn’t enough, since maybe that one is unrepresentative too. Ultimately, you have to either find a way to get a roughly random sample of the thing in question, or form your opinion by deferring to the judgment of someone you trust. Why would you trust their judgment? Either because they having a track record of accurately conveying vibes you’ve confirmed firsthand, or because you already trust someone e…
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Two: Understanding the World Through Vibes
  • I posit that there are two axes of truth: factuality – how literally accurate are the factual claims – and honesty – how accurate is the vibe.
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Two: Understanding the World Through Vibes
  • opinions are actually much deeper than that: they’re broad senses generated by data you’ve largely thrown away, leaving only the resulting changes to the weights of your mental model of the domain.
    The Vibe Handbook, Part Two: Understanding the World Through Vibes
  • A Lindy walk isn’t just a beeline from Point A to Point B; there should be no set destination, with turns made at random to stimulate the mind.
    What is the Lindy Effect? - The New York Times
  • Rationalists are people who think too much about Bayesian probability, forecasting, altruism, and AI. Postrationalists are people who think too much about the difference between postrationalists and rationalists.
    The Vibe Handbook, Part One: Defining Vibes Without Talking About TikTok At All
  • "Ah, my darling!” he said. "Consider this. “We, two perfectly rational agents, can still fail to coordinate because we each generate strategies independently of the other. But if we instead performed costly signaling by undertaking elaborate social rituals whose participants are selected for compatibility, and if we subsequently wove the threads of our two lives into one so that future changes to both our decision functions would be influenced by a roughly identical set of inputs – then, my angel, to a first approximation we would be able to avoid multipolar traps by relying on the assumption …
    Superrational - by BLAP - Skunk Ledger
  • And don’t call me Shirley
    Lactaid and Stevia - by BLAP - Skunk Ledger