~Under Construction~

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I find these things useful to reflect on.

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Cognition

• All of 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.

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

• Free will is limited by our ability to think of options, and 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.

  • 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 UFO leaks aren't used to justify further militarization of artificial intelligence.

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Political Science

• While it serves many purposes, an economy is an exceedingly efficient tool for manipulating people.

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

  • This is why we have antitrust laws.

• 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.
• 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.

• If a situation is stacked against us and we make a bad decision, our inclination to focus on the bad situation doesn't make our decision any better.

• It is healthy to consider your relationship to the universe at different scales.

• The truth shall set you free.