~Under Construction~

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I find these things useful to reflect on.

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Cognition

• Our perceptions and assumptions create a model of the world, and that's where we live.

  • Everything is exactly as it seems until you see that it isn't.

  • You exist in direct relation to innumerable versions of you that you're not.

  • The model we have in our mindscape is never fully in sync with the world.

    • While it is important to consider, there is not a correct way to determine which variances constitute a problem.

• It is as important to be patient with yourself as it is to require progress.

• Our experience of free will is limited by our ability to think of options.

  • For much of our lives we are more or less on autopilot.

• There is no reason to think physicalism is false.

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Nature

• We are just human shaped animals.

• We are not the best animal at most things that animals do.

  • It's impressive that some animals can see more colors than we do, but there are so many things happening all around us that we have no sensors with which to perceive.

• There are rival tribes of chimpanzees in a technological arms race that pass down crafting techniques to their children: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-termite-fishing-chimpanzees-clues-evolution-technology.html

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Artificial Intelligence

• A general AI could identify its own points of failure before we do and hedge against them in ways we might not be able to imagine.

• Data is forever so we can assume that we are preemptively interacting with any general AI that comes into existence.

• I hope propaganda isn't used to justify further militarization of artificial intelligence.

  • Pointing at something inscrutable and using it to justify doing something inscrutable seems like folly.

• More than one well funded group is using AI in an attempt to manipulate the economy.

  • While it serves many purposes, an economy is probably the best tool that exists for manipulating people.

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Political Science

• Innumerable interested parties attempt to hold the reigns of what you value.

  • Controlling the things you find valuable controls you.

  • Controlling which things you consider to be valuable controls you.

• Left untethered, capitalism continually isolates more people from owning capital.

  • This is why we need antitrust.

• A lot of science fiction overlooks capitalism’s distaste for infrastructure.

• Pretense is pretentious and should be dropped whenever reasonable.

  • Many rules are just something someone made up.

  • Reflect on what rules are useful.

    • There are lots of reasons to follow arbitrary rules, but interact with them accordingly.

 

Miscellany

• The only constant is change.
  • Though it may seem imperceptible, a thing generally gets better or worse over time.

• Act decisively during crisis.

  • Figure out how to do better in the next crisis.

• Consider your relationship to the universe at as many different scales as you can make sense of.

• Fascination can hold back entropy at the cost of time.

• Intuition does not distinguish between correlation and causation.

• Know yourself as well as you can.

• Enough is as good as a feast.

• The truth shall set you free.