flâneur

Saheb Gulati

10 followers · 14 following · 412 views

on the atlas — 34

highlights — 11

  • My favourite phrase that captures this dynamic is Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living." There is a feeling that comes from fully endorsing one's choices, after reflecting about them, their consequences and the principles that bring us to make them. In this situation, even when our choices turn out badly, we do not regret them. I am not sure what to call this feeling. Resolve? Clarity? Affirmation? Nevertheless, after having experienced it, it's hard to find unexamined choices meaningful. They just lack… substance.
    A Simple Case for Studying Morals - by Gabe
  • The wasteful ones are usually a type of nexus: a largely unproductive endeavour that captures an unjustifiable amount of time and energy. Becoming an academic philosophy researcher who does not touch grass and interact with the world. Reaching a spiritual enlightenment that leads one to doing nothing but meditating and separating oneself from society. Or spending all one's time trying to internalise lengthy detailed static moral codes that do not reflect the changing nature of real-life.
    A Simple Case for Studying Morals - by Gabe
  • Some groups spend a lot of energy fighting over what seem to outsiders like petty differences—even fighting “each other” more passionately than they fight people with whom they more substantively disagree. Freud called this the “narcissism of small differences”. His original illustration of the phenomenon was the intense conflict that sometimes arises between neighboring ethic groups, but he proposed it as a general rule of human psychology, produced by some sort of desire to individuate oneself from one’s crowd. Many psychologists since have tried to explore it more thoroughly.
    Philip Trammell
  • The fact that Elon Musk exists as the single individual most responsible for rockets that land and electric cars being early and my Twitter feed getting worse, all in one person, is evidence that time is not anyone’s bottleneck.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • But real power may consist in being necessary for production or in being sufficient for destruction. The latter may be widely distributed even when the former is not. Indeed, an important worry about AI is of course that it will make it possible for ever more people to wreak ever more havoc, e.g. by engineering biological weapons. It would currently be illegal for a disgruntled worker to blackmail the rich by threatening to release a virus unless he is transferred, say, a hundred thousand dollars a year; but that is again a political question, not a technological one. So, though we should not …
    Capital in the 22nd Century
  • But real power may consist in being necessary for production or in being sufficient for destruction. The latter may be widely distributed even when the former is not. Indeed, an important worry about AI is of course that it will make it possible for ever more people to wreak ever more havoc, e.g. by engineering biological weapons. It would currently be illegal for a disgruntled worker to blackmail the rich by threatening to release a virus unless he is transferred, say, a hundred thousand dollars a year; but that is again a political question, not a technological one. So, though we should not …
    Capital in the 22nd Century
  • But as long as democracy lasts, the shift to capital should make redistribution easier, not harder, for at least two reasons. First, and most importantly, it will no longer be necessary to encourage hard work and entrepreneurship by letting people keep a large share of what they earn.
    Capital in the 22nd Century
  • Now one can't simultaneously define "rationality" as the winning Way, and define "rationality" as Bayesian probability theory and decision theory. But it is the argument that I am putting forth, and the moral of my advice to Trust In Bayes, that the laws governing winning have indeed proven to be math. If it ever turns out that Bayes fails - receives systematically lower rewards on some problem, relative to a superior alternative, in virtue of its mere decisions - then Bayes has to go out the window. "Rationality" is just the label I use for my beliefs about the winning Way - the Way of the ag…
    Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality - LessWrong
  • It seems fairly clear, at least to me, that you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally
    Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk
  • To be clear, differential technological development is hard.4 It requires focused effort, lots of capital, a clear view of the problems you are trying to avoid, and a culture that believes it is achievable. But it is fundamentally possible – we’ve done it many times before, and can do it again.
    Technocalvinism - by Cosmos Institute and Luke Drago
  • The problem is that our calibration is bad. The Fear has gone too far, and is keeping too many people quiet too often. Calibration is hard, and calibration of your own skill level is very hard. It speaks well of us that we would rather think of ourselves a level below where we are, than think of ourselves as a level above, but getting it right would be better still. We also are too afraid of trying to go one level too high, and not afraid enough of false humility. I am going to suggest that everyone adjust accordingly.
    You’re Good Enough, You’re Smart Enough, and People Would Like You | Don't Worry About the Vase