Things I read and liked in February

Puzzles of persistence, parable philology, papal politics, Protestant purges, pasta plausibility

1. Rethink Priorities’s Digital Consciousness Model

2. Contra those who argue that all of our alleged irrationalities are good, actually, Dan Williams maintains that “we are confused, maladapted apes who need Enlightenment”.

3. The mystic and the metaphysician by Miri Albahari. I wish there was more analytic philosophy on the epistemology of meditation, mystical experiences, psychedelics, and the like.

4. Barlaam and Josaphat: a popular Christian tale about an Indian king who leaves the palace to seek spiritual truth. Sound familiar? Beloved in medieval Europe, historians have since worked out that it descended from the story of the Buddha:

   Buddha/Bodhisattva → Middle Persian Bōdāsaf/Būdāsaf → Arabic Yūdhasaf/Būdhasaf → Georgian Iodasaph → Greek Ioasaph → Latin Josaphat

5. Forethought proposes wisdom-enhancing AI products. I’m especially fired up about AI tutors.

6. Gwern on what it is for something to be “AI slop” (ht Owain Evans)

7. The Will Smith eating spaghetti test

8. Adam Marblestone, The sweet lesson of neuroscience. In Asterisk Magazine, an excellent synthesis of the work of neuroscientist Steven Byrnes.

9. Also in Asterisk, Andrew Miller’s Seeing like a sedan, on sensor fusion vs vision-only self-driving cars.

10. Another Andrew Miller: Airports are too safe

11. Still working on The Reformation: A History (it’s massive). Some more learnings:

    1. France’s St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, one of the most horrifying events in a horrifying century.

    2. The English Cardinal Reginald Pole. A rich subject for alt-history: came two votes short of the papacy in 1549, when the Catholic response to the Reformation was still very much up for grabs. Pole was reform-minded, comparatively conciliatory, and theologically closer to Protestants (“his personal belief in justification by faith alone over works had caused him problems at Trent and accusations of heretical crypto-Lutheranism at the conclave”).

12. Speaking of alt-history: My journey to the microwave alternate timeline

13. Mackenzie Dion on computational functionalism.

14. Pitchfork on the 1973 album Fire of God’s Love: “telling a friend about ‘this awesome synth-pop record by an Australian nun’ does feel a little like a parody of underground reissue fandom”. True, but it is awesome so I am telling you about it.

    1. The album’s creator, Sister Irene O’Connor

15. Jan Kulveit: Do not tile the lightcone with your confused ontology. Very relevant for thinking about AI welfare, cf. also his Pando problem.

16. Different senses in which two AIs can be the same.

17. Adam Morris and Dillon Plunkett on methodology for testing AI introspection.

18. Ajeya Cotra on how forcefully the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.

    

    Honoré Daumier - The Print Collector (c. 1860)