epistemology 🧐

The contrarian’s enemy is not only random conformists. It’s also ridiculously smart people who have studied the topic in incredible depth and concluded that they’re wrong. And as we all know from certain creative offshoots of rock, paper, scissors, high-IQ mega autists beats public intellectual.

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that ” or rely on the fact... See more

At the end of the day, much of this really will come down to a choice: How important is winning to you versus feeling good about yourself and being congratulated by your peers at your ever-shrinking coalition’s annual conferences and galas? I strongly suspect that in the case of many anti-Trump stalwarts, I know the answer — and it’s depressing as ... See more

I usually think of contrarianism as being wrong most of the time but helping on the margin because it brings light to positions that are underrated due to social conformity factors. I think most meta-contrarians would admit that they’re wrong most of the time. It would be quite silly to take the meta contrarian point and think you are right most of... See more

The assumption that superintelligences can somehow simulate reality to arbitrary degrees of precision runs counter to what we know about thermodynamics, computational irreducibility, and information theory.

A lot of the narratives seem to assume that a superintelligence will somehow free itself from constraints like „cost of compute“, „cost of stori... See more