May 31, 2022
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design
I love stained glass. Not so much your usual suburban house stained glass with a picture of lilies. The good stuff. Cathedral windows, Art Nouveau, Art Deco. Why did we stop doing that? I blame the conspiracy.
Recently I’ve been experimenting...
May 28, 2022
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-anti-politics
[This is one of the finalists in the 2022 book review contest. It’s not by me - it’s by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done, to prevent their identity from influencing your decisions. I’ll be posting about one...
May 26, 2022
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/in-partial-grudging-defense-of-the
1:
The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement - ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here....
May 25, 2022
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/california-gubernatorial-candidates
California is the home of Alphabet Inc, so it’s symbolically appropriate that we have twenty-six candidates in this year’s gubernatorial primary. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will get bored after looking into two or three. Not...
May 24, 2022
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/willpower-human-and-machine
Two paragraphs from the mesa-optimizers post, which I quoted again in the adaptation-executors post:
Consider evolution, optimizing the fitness of animals. For a long time, it did so very mechanically, inserting behaviors like “use this cell to detect...