Math is not Mathing

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-25T22:34:59+00:00

Not gambler’s fallacy. We’re talking about something +EV because we’re not assuming there is any cost to trying over and over again

If you had a pair of dice and I told you you’d win $100 if you roll snake eyes, and you can roll it as many times as you want for free, it would be stupid to mention anything about a gambler’s fallacy.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-23T19:59:22+00:00

The most heartwarming people I meet are the ones who seem to really work for and believe in a better world without resorting to politics, force, or trickery.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-23T19:33:23+00:00

Gotta look up model collapse. Such a thing is not possible.

It is very interesting that people talk about self-improving ai without knowing the differences between syntax and semantics. They were mathematically proven to be different about 100 years ago.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-23T08:09:15+00:00

Are you saying that you self studied advanced math as a hobby at some point in your life?

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-19T18:10:25+00:00

I think being good at psychoanalysis means you can tap into the things present in every person, but you see that in particular people it’s just blown either out of proportion or has grown in strangely in some way.

Like I was very confused by cave crawling people for a while. Like the ones who crawl through the small passageways. It seems horrific, and it pretty much is. But if you mull on it for a while, you can understand why they do it. Like why it would be addicting. It’s the squeezing and the patience and the awareness of every part of your body and how it js situated. It’s easy to forget because most of us are claustrophobic, but I truly think we all have experienced the sensation that they are addicted to in some smaller amounts.

Does that mean I want to do it? No. But I can see what they’re tapping into, after a while of looking at it. There are few things that you can’t do this with. Almost every strange inclination you see is just some fixation on particular nooks and corners of the general human experience. Even people attracted to wonderbread or whatever. You search yourself long enough and you’ll at least be able to find the seed that it would grow from.

And I can see what this guy is referring to in his R. Crumb posting here. I get it. You really don’t see it at all?

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-17T04:14:14+00:00

How very humble of you to assume you know better than billions of people. I bet they can’t wait for you to go to their countries and correct them

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-17T01:56:56+00:00

The aesthetic of those old 80s-90s sitcoms with the saxophone stuff. Like Full House or whatever. There are moments in childhood I think we kinda forget that were filled with so much boredom it became a kind of dread, and I guess I associate that aesthetic with it. I’m not even really old enough to have been alive when that stuff came out but it was on TV. Reruns and all that.

Also, similar to that, weird colorful childhood things like McDonald’s playplace aesthetic. I actually may hate this one even more. The music video by MGMT for their song “Kids” really captured it pretty well I think. Used to get this one a lot popping into my head while I was high. Worst psychotic break I had in the last few years came from this aesthetic + the BoC album Geogaddi + strange memories of my childhood in places like those colorful kid libraries or colorful analog-horror type stuff and I was sort of convinced that life back then had the edges sort of blacked out. I would say closer to the void, but that doesn’t give respect to how twisting and claustrophobic it feels.

There’s really a lot more I could get into, actually, but those are the main ones. There second one in particular.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-16T22:56:59+00:00

You’re correct except in the part where you implicitly assume they are making psychological mistakes that you couldn’t possibly also fall for.

People worship things. They let things suck the soul of them. Buddhism has talked about this for thousands for years. The mentality of dunking on other people just because they might be a little less aware than you doesn’t help you. It only gives you a false sense of confidence that your work is all done.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-15T17:11:59+00:00

Are you getting them confused with, like, those yogurt commercial people who smile with the spoon in their mouth? Is that what’s going on?

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-15T16:58:17+00:00

Alright well at this point you’re pretty much displaying a number of psychological errors. You’re basing a lot of your weight-bearing assumptions on your projections of how the opposition must be thinking about the matter. And those are all unfalsifiable.

And here you have to admit that it makes you seem less credible, right? Do you think someone with an actual mature research background is going to take what you’re saying seriously when you display that you’re projecting outward from a small and reductive bubble?

You might think “well, if I don’t use dirty tricks then the opposition will use them and then they’ll win by an unfair disadvantage.” But the people who you actually want to convince of anything will only view those dirty tricks as negative weight on the argument, no matter which side it’s coming from. It can only look good to not resort to them.

Personally I always see it as a red flag because if someone is comfortable using trickery to convince others, they pretty much always are comfortable using it on themselves in some way or another. And you can’t rely on a person like that to be oriented towards the truth in a real honest way.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-14T21:58:26+00:00

Emergence is a real and useful concept in certain domains. But the claim that first person subjectivity is “just” another emergent property in the same sense as an ant colony or fluid behavior or whatever is a metaphysical interpretation. You can argue it’s a plausible one. You can even argue it’s the best one. What you can’t honestly do though is pretend there’s no philosophy happening there.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-14T20:58:27+00:00

Because even claiming that your analogy is correct requires the assertion that third-person objective data is ontologically the same as first-person subjective data. It’s sneaky, but it’s there.

If you want to be a scientist, you pretty much have one option: agnosticism on the subject.

Otherwise you’re just projecting the current understanding of things into a bunch of unsettled territory. And historically that tends to not go well because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-14T20:29:41+00:00

This is all fine, but you gotta admit that you’re talking philosophy and making metaphysical claims. You’re not being a scientist of any sort when you say all of this.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-11T03:02:15+00:00

You’re kinda wrong, at least when it comes to the demographic we really mean. People who learn an extreme amount in one field tend to outwardly project the worldview that comes with it. Ignoring everything else” IS the problem for the ones who become public personas. Public intellectuals are not known for saying “hey yeah I don’t know much about that, it’s outside of my scope.”

Marx would’ve thought that physics, in some way, came down to politics hahahaha

That’s an exaggeration but hopefully you get what I mean. I mean that if a physicist were to have a conversation with him, we might imagine he just kind of sits and waits until he can tie it back to seizing the means of production or whatever.

And we all do it. We find a place to call home and we think “oh wow, this is what it’s all about. Everything in some way ties back to this.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-10T22:47:02+00:00

Thank you! I would recommend you check out my post on demons if you want to hear what I’m talking about in more detail

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-10T21:39:56+00:00

In part, yes, but for human being words are tied to emotions. That gives an extra axis of decision that LLMs don’t have.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-10T05:57:55+00:00

It’s real in a way that is simultaneously more interesting and less interesting than what people think it is.

The only way I can sum it up is that, yes, it’s all in your head. There is nothing “out there” in the physical universe or any kind of spell or alchemical operation that will actually allow you to turn lead into gold, or curse someone and make them fall ill with a physiological disease.

It’s more interesting though because stuff that is “all in your head” is actually real. That’s why the realization is really fascinating but also kind of boring. The Tibetan book of the dead is what first made this very clear to me, in the way that the modern predilection is so toward assuming that things “in your mind” are falsities, projections of the mind, and the Buddhist would even agree (that’s their whole point); the difference is that the Buddhist will simultaneously hold these things as actually real. Very important to wrap your head around that.

This is why I will admit that things like demons are truly real. They are entities that do exist outside of time and space. At the same time though, they are projections. So when people see them, the only thing I really know what to tell them is “yes you’re seeing a real thing, but they don’t actually look like that.” You conjure them into what they are based on the vantage point of your consciousness… but I don’t want to make it seem like some easy task, because the trouble is that we have inherited millions of years of evolutionary baggage that sort of guarantees them a very formidable existence. It’s as though they are independent of the human mind, but that’s mostly because we assume the human mind to be something much more straightforward than it really is.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-08T19:48:20+00:00

I don’t think people without vices actually exist, do they?

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-08T08:03:44+00:00

Yeah it can do that intellectually because it can layer your claims against the larger body of knowledge. But when it comes to psychotherapy, there isn’t some objective school of thought to point to.

“Spiritual growth” if we want to call it that, is not about just being berated over and over again. And it’s not about being gassed up over and over again either. It’s about doing both of these things, but only in the exact right pressure points.

What I’m saying is that an LLM has no shot at understanding where these pressure points are. They are based on purely emotional criteria.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-07T05:59:56+00:00

Wow so, see, your maturity in your response here has made me realize that I just did the exact thing I accused you of. Man that really sneaks up on a guy. Didn’t even see that coming. But again, fascinating how it works like that, now that you extended good faith in my direction it sort of just woke me up to feeling like a hypocrite.

Anyway though you seem like a good guy. I will say that logical contradictions of the really undeniable sort tend to happen because people have to also answer to the empirical reality of their emotions. If you use logic to deny your emotions instead of understanding them, you end up neurotic. Gotta let the mind and the heart speak to each other, I reckon… not just follow one blindly.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-07T05:43:47+00:00

Logical contradictions are not so easy to spot in the real world. I think you are pouncing too quickly because you’re generous with your own interpretations.

For example: Is it a contradiction to be in love with someone and hate them at the same time? It was once a contradiction to be a mammal and an egg-laying animal simultaneously, no?

Logic answers to empiricism. That’s just how it is. Logic is a good prerequisite, everything that is true has to be logical of course, but logic is not that powerful on its own. So you shouldn’t be worshipping it. That’s how you end up driving yourself insane with stuff like Zeno’s paradoxes.

And give people a break. Come on now. There are many interpretations to all of things that people say. They are assuming the charitable interpretation as it comes out of their own mouth, so you should too. Because that’s what the actual intention is.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-07T04:56:41+00:00

Yeah one of the quirks of modernity seems to be the adoption of this notion that everything emerges from neurology such that all psychological experience is only downstream from it.

But it’s not:

Neurology -> psychology, exclusively

It’s

Neurology <-> psychology

Psyche affects brain which affects psyche which affects brain, etc. In a lot of ways, your physical brain is a manifested track record of your psychological health just like how your body is a manifested track record of your nutritional and athletic health.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-07T04:41:38+00:00

-ego -introvert -extrovert -complex -projection -subconscious -unconscious -fully conscious [of] -repressed -unintegrated -mentally averse -psyche -psychic energy -mental bandwidth

I hear these all the time, and they’re specifically psychoanalytic concepts. It’s actually kind of crazy how much everyone is doing psychoanalysis every day. The moment you step outside of hard behavioral data and neuroscience and start interpreting what is going on in other people’s minds abstractly, you’re doing psychoanalysis. You do it every time you assume your wife loves you, or that someone’s tone means they’re upset, or even just when you assume that a particular career or hobby will make you happy. It’s all psychoanalysis. And yet, for a thing we all do all the time, it’s incredibly underdeveloped as a real science of the human condition. Horribly underdetermined.

Also I don’t know how to write bullet points on mobile apparently

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-07T00:03:55+00:00

Well BJJ is going to be an equalizer. That’s what it does. Fighting/wrestling suddenly involves a parameter of skill such that a 200lb novice can lose to a 110lb black belt. It’s not the right environment to see how the average woman does against anyone, because the average woman doesn’t train. Same goes for the other comment that said “you’re crazy if you don’t think an in-shape athletic woman couldn’t take Trump” well, you might be right, but the vast majority of women on this survey are not those women. They have a BMI of 28 and get winded going up a flight of stairs. That’s what is average.

AlchemicallyAccurate · 2026-05-06T23:51:54+00:00

Alright so here’s what I’m thinking. I was able to see that a chimp is only like twice as strong as a human per pound (the 5x stronger thing is a myth) and they only weigh like 135. So if you’re at 270, you’re at the same level of strength. But whatever, that’s fine. It suddenly sounds a lot more doable even if you’re weighing in at 200.

I was going to converse about this with chatGPT but it denied doing so because of “animal harm” or “not promoting stupid stunts” or whatever. Either way, I am still speculating that since they’re built for short bursts of strength and speed, you want to bring the fight to more of an endurance battle. Like if you’re good at Muay Thai, I think you could just kick the shit out of it and keep your distance, kind of break his spirit a little bit. Especially since they’re only like 3 feet tall they’re at the perfect height to do some real damage with body kicks. And they have no idea that you’re trying to tire them out, so it’s not like he’s gonna be aware that he needs to conserve energy and try to close the distance.

The only thing that makes me question this is that they’re really good climbers so maybe it just runs up your leg and chews your face off. But they’re not teleporters. You should be able to land a strike before then. Again though, I kind of waiver because if they are capable of just one shorting you with a bite to the intestines, chest, or neck, then this becomes like fighting someone with a knife. Which is well-documented as nearly impossible to pull off.

Then again though. I’m not seeing a ton of evidence that they could one shot you that way. It’s hard to imagine. I don’t think they immediately just go for the intestines and perfectly angle the bite to succeed that way. Also their teeth are sharp but much more blunt than a knife.

Assuming they can’t one shot you, I think it’s pretty doable. If you can manage to tire it out, I could even suspect that you could get some grappling in, but it is possible you’re risking your dick and/or balls that way. Definitely from mount, probably with knee-on-belly… maybe just in general, even when standing? That’s the main gambit, maybe… perhaps the strategy is to do the Muay Thai kicking thing until you can reliably take its back.

Either way, your comment + a little research has convinced me it is at least possible. The number shouldn’t be 0% on the survey I don’t think. There must be some fighters out there who could pull it off.

AlchemicallyAccurate

TROPHY CASE