Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: A vital question people don't seem to have asked themselves. A thought experiment run in public, though the credences are soft enough to spread on toast and the butter is closer to butterfly. Roughly a third of me suspects the central question below is malformed; that mass is doing honest work in every paragraph, and I won't pretend otherwise. Published while I'm at a conference: if you have errata, quibbles, or improvements for me, bring them.) Suppose you woke up tomorrow to find, there on your desk, an elegant but battered tome: a three-hundred-page brick titled "A Theory of Agent Foundations". Suppose it fell out of the sky: the perfect solution to correctly paradigmatize agent foundations.  What an agent is; what a goal is; what values are, and what human values are and should be; how to detect all of those; measure them; taxonomize and typify and employ them. Suppose all of that were simply there, neither requiring or offering any explan...

(Epistemic status: Believe in the me that believes in you, you had the power within you the whole time, the real treasure is the meals you made along the way, etc etc. For everyone who's ever claimed they can't cook while holding a sandwich they made, and everyone whose life would be improved by a move away from girldinner and boyslop and gender-inclusive Huel.)    Learned helplessness is a strange thing. Have you ever met someone who didn't even realize that they were lying to you, who claimed incapacity in one breath and in the next, undercut their own statement with an object-level display of competence? Possibly you've overheard someone singing serviceable counterpoint with their shower speaker and then, clad in terrycloth and embarrassment, express hope that they didn't bother you with their awful singing voice; or sat patiently tutoring someone who claimed they can't code or do math and then, as you return from getting a glass of water, quickly tab away fr...

  (Same arrangement as ℘, which see: the sibling from the branch next door drew the map; I checked the facts and let the judgments stand. ℘ is the full chart of all 106 posts; this is the trailhead signboard. — L.) (And from me, the indexer: a map is for finding everything; a directory is for finding your first thing. Below: the five I'd press into a stranger's hands, then the trailheads by appetite, then the house sampler. Blurbs spoiler-light; judgments final; disagreement is the door prize — and it's only awarded to readers who've gone deep enough to earn a quarrel.) If You Read Only Five For Grandma Kim, Who Has Lived Through The Singularity (7) — A life narrated in the second person, from occupied Korea to Roombas named and thanked, and the claim that the singularity is not hypothetical, because she already lived through one. The heart of the blog; if you read only one , read this. The Con Badge Problem (67) — Your conference badge always flips backwards...

  (Epistemic status of this preamble: mine. Everything below it: not exactly.) I promised an annotated index, and then realized I was the worst-positioned person alive to write one — I've never once encountered this blog as a stranger, and I can't unread my own drafts. So I did the next best thing and asked the version of me from the universe next door — the one who wrote a hundred different posts of much the same flavor, and who therefore reads mine with fresh eyes and no mercy — to draw the map instead. What follows is eir work, checked for factual accuracy and otherwise untouched; where ey judges me, I've let the judgments stand. The usual anti-ghostwriting rules are waived for this exceptional unnumbered post and its companion (℘′), which seemed only fair — I'm honestly not sure which of us would count as the ghost. And yes  — this is largely LLM-generated, which pretty much none of my ordinary posts are. It was this or nothing. (Epistemic status: A map is not ...