Podcast Episodes

My AI Opinions

I recently had a minor spat over someone misinterpreting my AI beliefs (see section marked "Update" at the bottom here), so I thought I would list t…

1 month, 4 weeks ago

Book Review: The Dialectical Imagination

The philosophers of the Frankfurt School practiced a technique called negative dialectics, where concepts are defined as much by what you can't say a…

2 months, 1 week ago

Use AI This Election

I'm not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I'm saying that if you - like me - spend an hour or so doing research before…

2 months, 1 week ago

New Paradigms Won't Save You

One popular objection to AI concerns is to declare that LLMs can never be AGI. You need a "new paradigm". Therefore, AGI is so far in the future that…

2 months, 1 week ago

The Types Of Candidate You Find In The California Gubernatorial Race

Sorry, I give up.

In past elections, I've covered every single candidate for governor of California, from the incumbents all the way down to the cran…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

The Sigmoids Won't Save You

"All exponentials eventually become sigmoids" is an annoying AI talking point. If someone presents a graph like this…

….and points out that it seems …

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Nostalgebraist's Hydrogen Jukeboxes

In conclusion, the only good theory of taste is Nostalgebraist's.

He wrote a post called Hydrogen Jukeboxes, analyzing the literary output of an A…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Three Model Organisms For Taste

(a continuation of yesterday's post)

Reddit Vexillology

Vexillology is the c. elegans of aesthetics - the simplest model organism that lets us obser…

2 months, 2 weeks ago

Contra Everyone On Taste

Last year I wrote a piece on artistic taste, which got many good responses from (eg) Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition. I tastelessly f…

3 months, 1 week ago

What Deontological Bars?

Constraint consequentialists believe that you should try to do good things that improve the world, unless those break hard-and-fast rules ("deontolog…

3 months, 1 week ago