I recently watched the film Conclave, about the electing of a new pope. And in the homily before they enter the session there's a really beautiful statement. That the sin the protagonist is most afraid of is certainty because certainty erodes the need for faith. And faith is the critical point of this.
So I’ll end with a very weird question: What does slow AI look like? We’ve automatically assumed that the way we interact with it is instantaneous. Are we sure that’s right? Would it be interesting to be able to say to an AI, Look, over the next three or four months, can you give me some ideas about holidays in Greece? Do we want to make that... See more
Currently, most American policy debates are framed in terms of ideology — small government versus big government. Instead, Klein and Thompson, like the YIMBY movement that inspired them, want to reframe debates in terms of results . Who cares if new housing is social housing or market-rate housing, as long as people have affordable places to live?... See more
I’ll continue to focus on hardware ~ helping folks out, writing, and prototyping. I truly believe we are headed for a new type of spiritual crisis with the devices we have. Put as directly as possible, I believe it’s a dopamine crash. We are strung out daily for our dopamine fixes, and we need to present serious alternatives.
By unfolding I mean “interrogating the conclusion to come up with an explanation of why it could be true.” What premises and reasoning chains leads to this conclusion? The explanation isn’t meant to prove that your conclusion was right. It is just a way of unpacking it.
By unfolding a claim into an explanation, you spread it on a “wider front” (to... See more
Under conditions of widespread institutional dysfunction, formal trappings can be disconnected from the core competence with which they are supposedly associated. Sometimes they can even begin to anti-correlate. But assuming the institution in question is not in such a dysfunctional context, the formal trappings of an organization actually do... See more