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Writing about what it takes to stop drifting and intentionally build a life you can be proud of through fitness, philosophy, learning, and building

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I recently had a reply blow up on a certain anthropic tweet, here’s what I think.

I’m not an AI doomer but I find it alarming how obsessed we are with progress. We won’t stop until AI has optimized our lives. But how do we even know what “optimal” looks like? Eventually we’ll build Babel and find ourselves lost.

It’s important to grow, adapt, and build but I also think it’s important to be content with what you have. Life will be miserable if everything depends on progress. Similarly, optimizing AI is itself a road to destruction. We’ll never be content, we’ll never know what’s enough.

Maybe the moral is that we need to be more content with our means. The lines between progress and destruction are closer than we think, and we’re seeing firsthand how humanity can never be satisfied.

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@DavidDack Go to 7.01 for Strava insurance

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@SorrelBark @FinanceLancelot Give your interpretation then. The fact is that he was tried because of his ideas. Yes, he mocked the jury and did himself no favors, but the ultimate sentence was because his ideas were “impious and corruptive”.

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@RedDwarf2018 @par4157 @inverily lol

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Because we can quantify the opportunity cost. We can’t. Just because he was working in “AGI safety” doesn’t mean his position was prestigious. Plus, he’s currently the program lead on a project I assume is meaningful to him, so it doesn’t seem like he dropped everything to become a whistleblower.

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@kdkeck @bilalchughtai_ His post has over half a million impressions already. Whether you think it or not he’s actively benefiting from this post

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@DavidDack I like to think it’s an invalid excuse invented for people who don’t want to run. Same thing with resistance training

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@SorrelBark @FinanceLancelot No, he stood by his philosophy rather than bending to the ideals of the city government. They still sentenced him to death for his ideas, it wasn’t simply because he “talked himself into it”.

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@inverily Very philosophical, can we ever actually distinguish “truth”? I’m not sure. We certainly have to be careful in our judgements; truth is almost never black and white.

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“He said nothing was more oppressive for him at that moment than the constant thought: ‘What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be mine! Then I'd turn each minute into a whole age, I'd lose nothing, I'd reckon up every minute separately, I'd let nothing be wasted!’”

And the Prince reveals the irony:

"Oh, no... he didn't live that way at all and lost many, many minutes."

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People today seem to spend more time planning their weekends than time planning the rest of their lives

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@CodigoMental777 I agree with everything except “wasting your time if you’re not reaching failure”.

Ending a set with 2-3 reps in reserve builds muscle nearly as well as pushing to failure while causing much less fatigue and faster recovery, no need to kill yourself on every set.

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@tiga_style Strava or it didn’t happen

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@DKokotajlo Valid. Still somewhat problematic being in an influential position, but I can understand.

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Self improvement is weird.

You become stronger. Smarter. Richer.

For what? To feel good about yourself?

Maybe the main point was never to endlessly optimize yourself.

It has always been to increase what you can give to others.

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@stevemagness Everyone acts like there’s some special number to reach a goal or hit a time, but there’s not. Every runner adapts to training differently.

If anything, it’s showing up consistently, controlling the controllables, and knowing your body incredibly well.

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It’s all about perspective. When I hear “balance and moderation”, I imagine bumping up from 3 to 5 lifting sessions per week on top of my weekly mileage, which would be ridiculous.

The average person does practically no exercise, so there is no such thing as “balance and moderation” until they start training.