@meaningness is one of the thinkers who's influenced me most.
Prompted by @saffronhuang and @humford, I wrote a reader's guide to his work. Topics include the invention of Vipassana, Heideggerian AI, and how to do science. Excerpts:
Wow, OpenAI created an essentially fake "parents and kids" coalition to advance their policy goals... 👀
OpenAI has been doing some brazen dark arts politics stuff this year. Hard to imagine how this helps build the social preparedness for AI that Altman says he wants...
the mystery of the ‘placebo effect’ dissolves once you seriously consider ourselves as collective intelligences
we coordinate with top down (ie ‘nose is itchy’ → contract bicep) and bottom up (odor molecules → ‘i smell burning).
‘thoughts’ are a placebo effect — you depolarize 30% of your cell membranes because you need to ‘work out’.
someone in a white lab coat is another credible top-down signal to your collective intelligence that you are safe. if you believe you are safe your cells coordinate differently
as benedetti says, words and drugs have the same mechanism of action
still! we sequenced a meaningful chunk of my genome in my bedroom for <$1.2k.
i suspect we can get up to 50% coverage in the next go but someone else will have to volunteer their finger
after MMA became a thing in the 90s the old arguments about muay thai vs karate were conclusively settled
i keep thinking about what it would take for this to happen with healing modalities
ideal X use case:
giant room with a bulletin board where my timeline’s tweets are printed on literal cardboard and updated hourly.
To post, I write my tweet on paper with a marker and slide it into a slot
something sad about scientists turning to LLMs as source of truth.
no more physical chemistry, just ask chatgpt about the amino acid sequence
seeing the slow enfeeblement of brilliant colleagues