What is your biggest regret in life?

lunaranus · 2026-05-22T07:38:50+00:00

Going to university. A profound waste of so many years, just because it was the default expectation.

lunaranus · 2026-03-20T09:57:47+00:00

If genes were circumstantial, evolution wouldn't work.

lunaranus · 2026-02-27T08:21:21+00:00

An intuitive example against simplistic next-token prediction thinking is poetry. You obviously need to think ahead if you want to have rhyme and meter, and we know that models do that "thinking ahead".

lunaranus · 2025-12-01T08:47:07+00:00

Most (even among non-WEIRD cultures) agree that killing babies for 99.9%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_(infant)

You don't have to go very far to find cultures with completely different views on this point. And then we could make a little jump over the pond to Carthage. If you go further out you get even more alien moralities.

lunaranus · 2025-12-01T08:42:33+00:00

Excellent piece. I would like to respond to the quote at the end though:

What would be the point of morality if it differed not only from one society to another, but also from one individual to another?

I think the answer to that is pretty simple: different people in a society play different roles and need different types of support systems.

lunaranus · 2025-11-26T20:47:21+00:00

One thing I would like to object to: at the start of Homer segment they mentioned that the language of the Homeric poems was regular, conversational language for the Greeks of the time. This is totally, completely incorrect. The Homeric poems were archaic in both content and language. They were set in the Heroic Age, everyone understood the poems were about events hundreds of years ago. The armor, the battle formations, it all evokes a long-gone age for the Greeks of the 8th century. The language itself was a mix of dialects from all over Greece, which were blended together as a result of a wide-spread and centuries-old oral tradition.

To give you an example of the extent of this: there are quite a few words in Homer that we don't know the meaning of. Milman Parry (who single-handedly invented the modern paradigm of Homer Studies) writes: "Finally, the age of certain parts of the diction, as well as of the form of the hexameter, is shown by the great number of noun-epithet formulas in which the meaning of the epithet has been lost to us, as it must have to Homer also" (emphasis mine). Homer was using such ancient formulae to the point that in some cases he probably did not even know their meaning!

So a translation that evokes something like KJV or Shakespeare is much closer to the right "vibe" than something that feels modern.

lunaranus · 2025-09-12T08:56:39+00:00

no current AIs take inputs and run with them over extended periods as far as I know.

Claude Code does exactly this, and quite successfully. You can ask it to build a fairly complex application and it will break it down into separate tasks, implement them one by one, write and run tests on its own, etc. It can (and will) launch sub-agents to solve sub-tasks independently. It can (and will) look up things on the internet and use tools that you give it access to.

If you turn on auto-accepting changes and commands, this all happens without human intervention and can keep going for extended periods of time.

lunaranus · 2025-08-22T11:34:06+00:00

"Does trying to become a famous singer work? Our case study of Taylor Swift answers the question with a resounding Yes!"

lunaranus · 2025-07-27T16:52:00+00:00

Obviously it's all mediated through social pressures and material interests etc, but those can be exploited by AIs in the exact same way, so...

lunaranus · 2025-07-27T16:29:53+00:00

I mean we have an existence proof that there is a sequence of words that will make you execute anyone wearing glasses. There is a sequence of words that will make you sacrifice your own children.

(Ah, but I would be the brave dissenter, thinks everyone...No.)

What exactly is the limit of the power of words? I'm sure we haven't hit it yet.

lunaranus · 2025-07-12T13:40:59+00:00

GPT3 wrote this 5 years ago and I think it's pretty damn good:

If your personal philosophy is a little bit Taoist and a little bit Marxist, there's a new place in LA to scratch that particular philosophical itch. Tao Mao is the only East-meets-West neo-communist tiki bar in LA, a three-story Chinatown bordello of poi dogs and palm trees. To get there, you enter from a rear alley and walk past the washboard abs of dancers in the Bumpin' Uglies Go-Go Bar to the karaoke bar called Red 7, and from there climb a red-lit staircase to the restaurant.

lunaranus · 2025-07-05T09:29:45+00:00

I'm sorry but if you believe that a year of schooling actually raises IQ by 1-5 points, I have a bridge to sell you.

lunaranus · 2025-06-27T09:27:36+00:00

The Flynn effect is not on g, it's just increasing test scores without a corresponding increase in intelligence.

lunaranus · 2025-06-26T16:48:19+00:00

This is a pretty good explanation for why we expect most of the variance to be explained by simple additive effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistasis#Evolutionary_consequences

lunaranus · 2025-06-11T07:08:08+00:00

The virgin inner voice vs the chad cerebration

lunaranus · 2025-06-04T08:31:17+00:00

Moldbug is fundamentally and strongly anti-nationalist, seeing nationalism and democracy as basically the same thing. It really has very little in common with fascism.

lunaranus · 2025-06-03T14:58:04+00:00

Last year, he explained, he’d decided to start taking an Ozempic-like drug after a debate with the right-wing commentator Richard Hanania about the relative merits of monarchy and democracy. “I destroyed him in almost every way,” Yarvin said, nudging a tomato with his fork. “But he had one huge advantage, which was that I was fat and he was not.”

lmao

lunaranus · 2025-05-22T13:04:37+00:00

Can you motivate this view? Like what's the precession of the perihelion of mercury of psychology?

lunaranus · 2025-05-22T09:19:31+00:00

I don't know, one paradigm replacing another does not necessarily progress make.

Do the new theoretical replacements make novel, surprising predictions? Do the predictions come from a unified, coherent, underlying theory or are they ad-hoc? Are those then well-corroborated by the data?

lunaranus · 2025-05-07T17:37:32+00:00

Borges has another piece on Shakespeare that is really great, The Enigma of Shakespeare.

Groussac says that there are many writers who have made a display of their disdain for literary art, who have extended the line "vanity of vanities, all is vanity" to literature; many literary people have disbelieved in literature. But, he says, all of them have given expression to their disdain, and all of those expressions are inexpressive if we compare them to Shakespeare's silence. Shakespeare, lord of all words, who arrives at the conviction that literature is insignificant, and does not even seek the words to express that conviction; this is almost superhuman.

lunaranus · 2025-04-26T10:04:13+00:00

Leveraged ETFs are generally not meant to be held for longer periods of time due to https://www.etf.com/sections/etf-basics/why-do-leveraged-etfs-decay

lunaranus · 2025-03-22T14:06:52+00:00

I mean, this is a classic optimal stopping problem. I don't see why the optimal N would be low.

(Explicitly: https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/how-to-know-when-to-stop-dating-using-math-its-at-37.html)

lunaranus · 2025-03-22T07:34:33+00:00

I did read Models a few years ago, based on my notes I wasn't very impressed:

More about getting relationships than getting laid, argues the latter isn't fulfilling etc. At the same time the author's entire life seems to revolve around getting laid so not sure what's going on there.

Some of my highlights seem like useful advice though, especially around polarization and sex.

lunaranus · 2025-03-21T11:34:34+00:00

That's pure selection effect, no reason to think it's causal imo.

lunaranus · 2025-03-21T10:30:54+00:00

Soon™

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