Tiled With Pentagons

Here's a thought that's been rattling around my head for the last decade or so: leftovers - as in, leftover food - obey chain complex rules. Let me explain. One thing you can do with leftover food rather than just eat it is to use it as an ingredient - the base for a new meal, remixing it to some extent. Turn a hamburger patty into ground meat for a casserole, or use the carrots and celery from a crudite tray as the start of a mirepoix. There's numerous patterns and a whole art to it - for one, fried rice, French toast, and Spanish omelettes are all exemplars of one excellent pattern: "take slightly stale starch, apply some egg, some seasoning, and maybe some fresh produce". (It's no accident that the French for "French toast" literally translates as "lost bread".) There's only a few techniques, and you can learn most of them and start experimenting if you care about avoiding food waste as much as I do: a few others include "use ad...

(Epistemic status: just my opinion/frame, but I claim to know whereof I speak. With thanks to IL, JSW, and PR.) When people talk about conceptual engineering, what do they mean? And why is conceptual engineering so difficult and yet so important? To triangulate this practice properly, we must surely look at it from many angles - math, philosophy, intuition, and utility, for the best few I can think of. Before any of that, here's a first attempt to describe what conceptual engineering is: it's the cognitive technology or practice of carefully defining some concept. It has to be either a natural category of objects or of other abstractions, or else a property that objects or abstractions might have; it has to both live in the world and be useful for further efforts regarding the world. You can sometimes do conceptual engineering without really trying to; whoever invented currency engaged in conceptual engineering, as was whoever kicked off the Great Sandwich Debates. The importan...

(Epistemic status: Neat-seeming ideas that promise to start paradigmatizing agent foundations, as expounded by JSW... but I dunno, pal, I'm just some research-creature. I didn't run this by him and I didn't consult notes or videos, either, so it might be very wrong or desperately incomplete in places. But also: in neglecting/refusing/failing/setting-off without recourse to notes, maybe I'll say something new and worth poking at some more.)   In seeking a paradigm for AI safety or AI alignment, we sometimes find ourselves seeking a paradigm for agent foundations, the study of what mind-type things that take actions for reasons towards goals might do in maximal generality. But where do we even begin? We find solace in materialistic reductionism, shunning most of metaphysics in the process: agents are a phenomenon first and foremost of the world of things, so it's as a very special type of thing that we will try to understand them.   From reductionism we take a guiding...

(Epistemic status: A creased, stained map to what were once my favorite hunting grounds. Accessible to anyone who can support substantial abstraction; prior math knowledge is not necessary. In particular, ignorance of calculus is not an obstruction here, but total ignorance of geometry or like, arithmetic or logic, will be. Extremely dense and probably won’t get you there, but at least you’ll ask better questions. Partially dedicated to DG, JM, and PR.)   The path to my old hunting grounds (as pictured above) is long and twisty and winds through a lot of necessary  math along the way. You'll be best served by carefully going through the parentheticals and answering the questions I ask, so as to keep track of the blazes and to keep your footing. You'll still get something out of this if you move more quickly, but you might end up lost further down the line. You might find the pace a little slow if you already know the territory - test yourself by answering those same par...

(With apologies to the Seattle Garages.) Much has been made of two major ways of relating to personal identity, neither one better than the other, and both of them seemingly innate. There's episodic identity, where you consider yourself a different person altogether from who you were in past years, and diachronic identity, where you consider yourself to be the very same person in all respects to who you were long ago. Naturally, there are in-between ways to see yourself: the timescale of episodes can vary widely, trending towards diachronicity at the long end; alternately, the starkness of the episodic cuts can be softened, with each new self being a new version rather than a complete renewal. For myself, I tend towards the diachronic side, but not completely. When I think about the course of my life to date, I tend to divide it into rough eras or arcs; I've been the same person throughout, with mostly the same core drives and motivations and capacities and interests, but have ...

Here are a few more delicious and mostly scalable recipes that I’ve made repeatedly with great results which I mostly haven't committed to text. Unfortunately, it's still true that none of them are vegan, though the desserts at least are vegetarian. This is a recipe blog now, I guess. (It’s not. Don’t worry. Or do; I’m not your parent.) No pictures this time, as I'm travelling; maybe I'll add some later. Roman Showup Stew: An excellent lentil-based stew of the kind that ancient Romans might recognize, except for the part where it's got a bunch of unfamiliar but superior ingredients in it, was cooked using exceptionally fine tools, has a few absurdly expensive (for the time) spices and ingredients in it, and also it'd be too spicy for them to eat. Take that! 1 can lentil soup (I favor Progresso) 3 large slices of Spam or equivalent mass of bacon (optional but highly recommended) 1/2 a large red onion 8-12 cloves garlic  1 large russet potato (opt) 1 medium carrot...

(Epistemic status: Personal experience and observation, if well-attested. Associated advice.) We live in an age of ludicrous material plenty, but all too often, people seem to find themselves lacking something valuable or delicious about life. What good is that sort of notional wealth if your sensory experiences don't seem to reflect that plenty? Clearly, something is missing in the way many people live. if they find themselves dissatisfied with the texture of their daily lives amidst such wealth, unable even to figure out what it is they're missing. What could possibly bridge that gap? The answer to that riddle is in the very same observation. Consider that many little luxuries nowadays would have been absurdly expensive or even bluntly impossible to come by in ages past, perhaps even as recently as the 18th century. Given the way in which desire and assessment of value often change slowly over the centuries, one can reap massive phenomenological gains by finding that which wo...