2025-10-02
deus in absentia
Scott Alexander has a really long article looking into the Fatima Sun incident, which unfortunately means there will be many more articles on such topics in the near future.
Bayesian Conspiracy continues their discussion with Matt Freeman on LLMs as mask-wearing voids, something which is also discussed by Izak Tait, framed as a good thing. It occurs to me that you can synthesize Andrej Karpathy’s recent description of our current AI efforts as akin to “summoning ghosts”, with Seb Krier’s underrated post on the potential for AI as personal agents, and Emmet Shear’s take that alignment is viewing others as part of yourself: in some sense we are both missing what the other has, since AI has no self, while humans have no soul. That is, it’s plausible (<2% epistemic certainty) that the future lifecycle of humans will involve being raised by AI as a child, integrating your minds into a single self throughout your life, and then leaving behind an immortal “ghost” upon your body’s death. (Edit: turns out that this has been more or less described already in this article by Nicholas Kees and Janus as “Cyborgism”).
Marco Giancotti on drawing boundaries and making distinctions.
Jerusalem Demsas in the Argument Mag on how we should think about technological conservatism among women. She mentions the idea that we are undergoing a “feminization of society”, which seems to me to be partially correct but the wrong level for proper understanding: when interactions between the sexes were more segregated, institutions were primarily created, designed, and evolved for use by one gender or the other; with integration it’s natural that they are changing to accommodate their new demographics, but it’s not surprising that they might be functioning less effectively as a result, based on Chesterton’s Fence. However, this isn’t an irreparable problem, so long as it’s still possible to replace dysfunctional institutions with new ones. Demsas mentions that animus to technological change among women can be seen as a recent phenomenon: it seems to me this modern animus is an understanding that anything new is a sort of male-flight, where men are leaving them behind in the ruins as they flee with the power and treasure. The resolution here is probably in the creation of institutions or movements designed for effectiveness which are mixed-gender from the outset, although it’s unclear to me what exactly that entails. Presumably some part involves how they are messaged, but I doubt that is all that is required.
Kevin Munger on European academic culture in comparison to the American system.
John Hawks on the genetic history of the Indian subcontinent1.
David Deek argues that the “Mississippi miracle” is less about the curriculum and more about its implementation.
Dialectic Podcast has an interview with podcaster David Senra about dedication and focus. There was a funny tweet I saw the other day, along the lines that there’s a certain type of substacker who cares so much about agency because they need to agentically write more essays about agency. There’s a similar sort of hyperfocused self-blindness which lets you produce podcasts about great founders while proclaiming that you do not care about anyone else’s opinions. This isn’t a dig or a complaint; if it produces good content, then it’s a good thing in my opinion.
Coco Liu with nice patterns she has seen on her travels. This reminds me of an interesting tweet I saw which claims that the purpose of Pinterest is to figure out your own personal taste.
Niko McCarty biology linkthread.
While on the topic of India, but otherwise not at all related, the Cultural Romantic has a piece on cultural tensions between westerners and Indians, an extension of an earlier essay by DeepLeft Analysis. It is interesting that by destroying traditional elite culture, the Communists in China turned Westernization into the standard marker of the educated class. Meanwhile, in India and the Middle East, being “high-skill” can but does not necessarily imply Westernization.