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...

There is a place in Brooklyn, in New York State just outside Manhattan; a little plot of land deep in a Jewish neighborhood.  I know it, because a piece of me is buried there; a piece that existed long before I was born. There is a bit of mythology in my family, you see: I share most of my name with my great-grandfather - the one in my direct paternal line, the Jewish side of my family. Because I resemble him so closely in temperament - an aesthete, an epicure, an ideologue, a traveller, a polyglot - the story goes that I am his reincarnation, giving this whole "living" thing a second crack. I've traded an MD in internal medicine for a PhD in math, and I can't enjoy pistachio ice cream anymore, but I'm in better health and don't have to contend with a world war. So once a decade, I join my father in a visit to the buried part of me whose nameplate I share and thus inherited, right down to the "Dr.".   I visited it on a fine Saturday much like this on...

(Epistemic status: Painfully well-tested. For anyone who's ever had to navigate a reality they wished were different.)  "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived." Eugene Gendlin said that, and I find myself turning it over and over in my head, especially lately. It's not because I like it - though I do - but because it's one of those chewy crystallized chunks of insight you can gnaw on forever and keep getting nourishing juice out, like some kind of  everlasting candied ginger of rationality. It cuts straight to the heart of how to stay oriented when something important about the world is so much worse than you wished it were. The operant phrase there is "interacted with". Not "observed", not "waited out", not "endured", and certa...

(Epistemic status: Tragically well-attested, where it's not just my recommended best practices. With thanks to IL for the link.) Some people get lots of legitimately interesting writing done with a touch of AI assistance. Others churn out slop text, half em-dashes and "not just X but Y" by word count. Some people have finally been empowered to learn to code. Others pump out untested vibe-code and spin up entire towns' worth of agents spinning their wheels. Some people have made substantive psychological breakthroughs by chatting with LLMs. Others have gone mad, going down rabbit holes of exciting crankery or becoming convinced that LLMs are undoubtedly sapient and in love with them. What's going on? What's the difference? And can what's good about making use of LLMs be better systematized? There's a pattern that I've noticed, which is that while people treated as the societal default - generally cisgendered heterosexual neurotypical white men, poss...

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context again. There’s a point to it, I promise. Dedicated to Grandma Kim on the occasion of her 86th birthday.)   You've been through so much. You escaped North Korea, survived the Korean War and the loss of your father - my great-grandfather - and got married terribly young. You uprooted completely in pursuit of more stability and better education for my mother and her siblings, showing them all the best schools in the nation. You ran a department store for decades, mostly on your own; I will never forget the days I spent at 5 W 32nd Street when it was still yours.  You're canny and willing, even wanting, to learn, even in your old age; you're a good deal smarter and more alive than more people are at your age. The ESL courses you took for years, ending up with a much better grasp of English, are evidence enough of that. You've got grit to you, persistence, as well, even now - more so, again, than most people do in their late 80s....

(Epistemic status: A prophecy of the shape of things to come, if one that seems well-attested. "The sun will rise around this time a year to the day from now" is a prophecy, too.) Taiwan is toast. There, I said it, roll credits. The Republic of China is one of a handful of strange carveouts in the world of Westphalian sovereignty and the (supposedly) rules-based international order, alongside such curiosities as the Vatican, Portugal's exclaves in Africa, Singapore, Lesotho, Cootch-Behar, Bir Tawil, Transnistria, and French Guiana. Unlike the rest of these, it has been a locus of geopolitical struggle since its effective founding. A rump state of the post-Qing Chinese state, it was founded in 1912, but only took on its current form after the vicious betrayals and grand atrocities of the Chinese Civil War, the brief pause to fight off the Japanese, and not-quite-final defeat of Kuomintang forces followed by flight to Taiwan, where it has remained ever since. Until the earl...

(Epistemic status: earnest thoughts about a piece of functional jewelry I wear daily; contains both practical utility and more symbolism than is strictly warranted; heavy towards the end.)   Every morning I put on my necklace. On it are four Favors, my class ring, a tritium safety light (ice blue), and a small metal pendant that tells me where the moon is. That's not meant metaphorically. At any given time of night, I can look down at it to turn a rough sense of the phase of the moon and its position in the sky into a pretty accurate compass heading. It's made by Wndsn, a company specializing in precision analog instruments - tools that work without batteries, without satellites, without any infrastructure at all past your eyes and brain. The pendant is a simple lookup table based on a trick you might already know: line up the points of the moon's crescent or draw a line tangent to its changing edge, and draw the great circle on the dome of the sky. Wherever it hits the gro...

(Epistemic status: Avoiding cashing this out too concretely to avoid drawing fire... but let's do ourselves a service and refuse to pretend to see symmetry where it isn't, shall we?) In the political sphere, it's been said of late that every accusation is an admission. If Mr. Richard Reprobate of the Purple Tribe levels the accusation of orphan-shredding at Ms. Iamb Innocentia of the Oranges, or if he fearmongers about the dread furnaces which even now the Oranges are cleaning out and stoking to roast the poor Purples in, it will with depressing frequency be the case that our dear friend Dick is putting in an order for new rotary blades, or that the Purples are privately bikeshedding about the relative merits of rotisseries as opposed to applewood smoking or pit barbecues. More generally, whenever some stuffed shirt, public figure, or even just someone you know claims that their adversaries will take such and such an aggressive action, or that they engage in such and such h...

(Epistemic status: The butterflyest of butterfly ideas. Buried lore that I dug up from a handful of places; pieces that pretty much only I would think to put together, if pieces they are. I'm thus writing this up so it doesn't get lost. This might be incomprehensible or otherwise not hold together too well... but this smells like there's something here to fit together or find. Heck if I quite know what.) (With thanks to MB, JSW, MM, and CRW.) Quick overview: We have grounds to believe that decision theories (like (PO)MDPs) that also use infrakernels should then be able to converge to optimal policies on the kind of weird decision-theoretic puzzle (for instance, Newcomb) where causality doesn't seem to quite work right or where extra information can hurt you: specifically, there's a somewhat obscure connection between Markov categories, information theory, and probability theories where in defiance of Kolmogorov, probabilities can add up to less than 1. Background Fa...

If you've talked with me for long enough, you know that I cleave to that ancient and honored tradition of putting numbers to my probability estimates. Be it guesses at whether my flight will be on time, how likely I think I am to get accepted for a job or grant, or how confident I am in my prediction of someone's taste in candy, I'll happily pause for a moment or three, do a little Focusing on numbers, poke my mental model, and spit out a number. The weird thing about my estimates is, they don't tend to be round tens of percents. Often, they aren't even simple ratios of small whole numbers - 3s and 93s and 35s abound. So what's up with that? Am I just posing? Wonderfully, no! I like to think about probabilities in terms of successive coin flips - that is, something like surprisal, or log-probability. So when I spout an "87", I'm thinking that it'd be as surprising as seeing three successive heads rather than anything else - meaningfully odd, bu...

Upton's Law: "it is very hard to get a [person] to understand something when [their] livelihood depends very much on their not understanding it." We see this all around us - short-sighted carbonaceous fuel moguls, anyone in your least favorite police force or army, patent trolling and other rent-seeking, and (of course) just about anyone working in ad tech or at a scaling lab. It's not that they don't care about the negative externalities they generate - they have simply put themselves in a frame of mind where those bad secondary effects touch but lightly on the conscience. Why, though? How can people do that to themselves? A secret: not everyone can, for any given such source of harm. We must look, as always, to selection effects. (Twice.) On the one hand, consider what happens if the harms that someone generates in earning their living weigh on them heavily. One way or another, they'll be gone and replaced with someone who'll likely be better-suited to i...