“Listen to the flowers. They will tell you sweet secrets.”

eyelid twitches

One thing that may not be visible from outside the profession is that there are a lot of steps in between air-hockey tables and the research frontier, especially for the part of the frontier that gets the most press — black holes, Large Hadron Collider stuff, quantum computing, etc. Wanting to understand any of those things at a level better than (bong rip) man, like, quantum mechanics, dude, requires systematic study. Doing that entirely on one’s own might not be impossible, but it’s damn hard.

The orange site comments aren’t all worthless:

His attention span won’t be enough to stick with physics for longer than 4 weeks.

When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in.

What a fucking idiot. Also a fascist collaborator, but importantly, a fucking idiot.

Steel, like a pressure cooker

Gah. I’ve been nerd sniped into wanting to explain what LessWrong gets wrong.

There’s a “critique of functional decision theory”… which turns out to be a blog post on LessWrong… by “wdmacaskill”? That MacAskill?!

If you want to read Yudkowsky’s explanation for why he doesn’t spend more effort on academia, it’s here.

spoiler alert: the grapes were totally sour

We have a few Wikipedians who hang out here, right? Is a preprint by Yud and co. a sufficient source to base an entire article on “Functional Decision Theory” upon?