Tiled With Pentagons

(If you're reading this right as it's been posted, or precisely some whole number of years afterwards, take a deep breath before you start reading. Hold it for as long as you can. If you finish reading before you must breathe, make a wish, and it will come true (Epistemic status: lol.).)   Why must a counterfactual be breathed into being? The link between air and human volition by way of breath, speech, and the soul is well-attested; Latin roots have inextricably linked the breath to the soul and the soul to one's hopes.  "While there's breath there's hope", as Latin would have it, and even  the world "aspiration" is quite literally to "breathe for" something.  But I think that the link goes deeper than that. Today is 11/11, for one, which is where our first case study starts. The custom of holding your breath at 11:11pm on any given day to make a wish is one of those strange bits of folk ritual that seem to have come from nowhere, righ...

Bet you forgot about this! Am I doing Inkhaven proper? As ever, no. Will I likely end up around Lighthaven a few times anyway? I am no longer in the same state, so no. Am I doing a kitbashed budget Inkhaven again? Yes, and this time, I am going to make a point of both using no LLM infill from the start and of trying to get a friend to do it with me. The story is the same as ever: starting today, for the next 30 days I'm going to write something of at least 500 words, just to keep in shape. The topics will be anything and everything I feel like writing about, and the quality will be comparable to my past Budget Inkhavens as best I can manage. Once a week, I'll post a digest to LessWrong, and at the end, I'll finish up with a postmortem. Have I come all that far since I started writing again? Only one way to find out. 

(Epistemic status: A combination of consumer report and hobbyist pharmacology; n = ~3 where uncited. Not professional medical advice; moderately strong supplement advice in the tradition of luck-based medicine and trying all those vaguely-promising things which are cheap and safe to try. With thanks to JM, who coined the term.)   Anxiety and stress are, in general, undesirable things to experience. Not only are they unpleasant in and of themselves, but they also tend to reinforce themselves past a certain point: you're anxious about an upcoming test, or you're in the middle of a competition, and you're past the point where it's driving you to prepare more or study harder or be quicker on the draw, and ended up at the point where you're freezing up and second-guessing your decisions and getting far too deep into your own head rather than do anything actually helpful. There's a trade-off, though: much in the same way that many have noted that pain is so core to hu...

(For SS, née SR. Happy 30th.) Memory is a fickle, fragile thing. There are things you can experience, tiny things, the brief little events of everyday life, and almost no one else shares those experiences. There are places you can have gone, and never be able to return to, because they have inherently changed: their significance is changed or gone, and will never return, or maybe it's you who's changed too much. And even if you share those memories with someone else - even if someone else was there - they will remember that time differently, from within a different point of view, if they even remember it at all. At SS's request, here are a few things I remember. I wonder how she remembers them. I remember summer days in the early-to-mid 2010's with SS. I remember the sense of freedom and exploration, biking to a small local store, a farm-stand sort of place, just the two of us. I remember richly spiced Amish friendship bread sticky with brown sugar and cinnamon and tart...

(Epistemic status: The math holds up well enough, and the only actual theorem could fit on a frosting-stained napkin. The rest is a relaxed palate-cleanser of a post... mostly. CW: notes of buttercream, ash, and... something like iron? For PR, CL, and both AS's.)   "I cut, you choose." It's a tale as old as siblings made to share cake - or land. The problem's a deceptively simple one: if you have two (or more) agents that both want the same valuable object, what procedure should they use, in order to ensure that all parties involved feel like they got a fair slice? The solution - for those among today's lucky 10,000 - is as elegant as it is brilliant; perhaps among the first pieces of explicit mechanism design: the cutter, knowing the chooser will then pick, has every incentive to cut two pieces she values equally; the chooser then takes whichever piece he likes better. She can't reasonably envy him, because she was indifferent by construction; he can...

[PLACEHOLDER FOR A POST TO GO HERE - IT WILL BE ABOUT CATEGORICAL LATENTS, THE THING I WORKED ON FOR MATS 6.0 IN SUMMER 2024]