2026-04-26
bedazzled fingernails
Working Definitions podcast with Teresa Bejan on the topic of equality, an entertaining example of a conversation that converges extremely quickly as a result of mutual agreement on priors, in this case the analytical Oxford-style and using a rights-based approach.
Bentham's Bulldog arguing that the fine-tuning cannot simply be dismissed as a matter of brute fact. Personally, I think there’s a distinction between the physicalist refusal to address that which lacks empirical handles and fine-tuning arguments as a debate over whether priors alone can and should be used to draw conclusions. That being said, it seems to me that his attempt to bring in physicists as an authority is actually self-defeating for his own preferred position: contrary to his claim that people will “often start endorsing extremely speculative proposals in physics that physicists don’t take seriously to avoid giving ground”, if one actually investigates the link provided, it shows that “34% [of physicists] believe apparent fine-tuning is explained by either Darwinian or anthropic multiverse models”, while “only 3% think God did it”, so which proposal is actually the extremely speculative one here?
Ady Mehta against concentrated power over military AI.
Russel Walter on LARPing; as a counter, Harry Cheadle on LARPing. It seems to me that one should not confuse something being fun in a private context with claims of general goodness.
Bookbear Express with some thoughts on relationships and people-pleasing1.
Sam Enright linkthread, including some very interesting book reviews for The Marginal Revolution and The Vegetarian.
There’s something I don’t quite understand in all of this, when people say things like “who are you actually pleasing by people pleasing”, because it seems like a sort of persuasion jiu-jitsu in using the people-pleaser’s own worldview to argue against their behavior: in renouncing their own preferences, they are withholding the opportunity for others to have the pleasure of fulfilling them. But if that’s the case, then people-pleasing can’t actually be bad in and of itself; the core issue is really the hypocrisy of feeling resentment over a situation which one is personally responsible for, having allocated too much of a good thing solely to oneself. The moral dimension of this question seems to me to arise from the fact that there are actually two different stable societal equilibriums, one where everyone engages in mutual people pleasing, and another where everyone is responsible for advocating for themselves, with different tradeoffs and suitability according to average levels of agreeableness. Insofar as people-pleasing is morally wrong, it’s because America is coordinated around the latter system, which makes people-pleasing a defection from expected societal norms. As for how to adapt given this realization, one possibility to is unlock ones “true” desires through self-analysis. Alternatively, for those who genuinely have weak internal preferences, one possibility I’m considering is the purposeful adoption of some sort of gimmick, something which upon reflection seems rather suspiciously common in practice.