In 2017, Andrej Karpathy wrote a seminal blog post where he called neural networks “software 2.0”. He makes the case that neural networks constitute a paradigm shift in software development. The innovation consists in substituting imperative programming with “programming by example”. Instead of writing in detail the operations a program…

Dedicating my energies to the study of the social organization which is in the future to replace the present condition of things, I’ve come to the conviction that all makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year, have been dreamers, tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted…

I recently applied for an Emergent Ventures grant to develop a course on the theory and history of governance, with an eye on the design of future governance systems. Tyler Cowen, who is leading the program, liked the idea and we hopped on a call. Our conversation quickly focused on…

RadicalXChange (RxC), a movement espousing some radical ideas for changing society, recently published a piece by Matt Prewitt offering a vision for a new kind of currency, called “plural money”. Like most ideas coming out of RxC, it’s a bold, thought-provoking proposal that challenges mainstream concepts of money. In this…

AI has a bad press problem. While it wows us, it also scares us. Both GPT3 and DALL-E 2 broke the internet when they came out, but the awe was mixed with concerns. Those concerns range from the commonplace (human obsolescence) to the obscure (deceptively-aligned mesa-optimizers). At the same time…

What college and fuck dolls have in common There’s been a lot of talk these past few years about some kind of crisis unfolding in American higher education. Lukianoff and Haidt argue in The Coddling of the American Mind that American colleges are nurturing three “great untruths” that interfere with social, emotional, and intellectual development. Those untruths are…

Epistemic status: this is satire of philosophizing. Useful concepts may be accidentally introduced on the way to building a totally unfounded theory with a stark lack of illustrative examples. Thanks to Z for the early Christmas discussion that inspired this. Bayes’ theorem is this thing Rationalists annoyingly love to tout…

How much do we actually retain when we read stuff, listen to podcasts, take some class? Sometimes it frustratingly feels like it all just passes through. How much do I actually retain? As Paul Valéry’s weird character, Monsieur Teste, says, looking back on his life: “I can now recall a…

Muhammad Ali used to throw punches in the void as a way to practice, as if boxing with his own shadow. He may not have invented that shtick, but he made it famous. Similarly, we all battle against our self on a regular basis. We do things we’re not entirely…