links 10/23/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-23-2025

• https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-anti-intellectual-university
  • Sure, I respect the integrity of standing by your work and your student, and I have no opinion on the correctness of the work, but I can't stand this contrary streak in Bryan Caplan. If you say straight out "I don't care if I make people mad", then you make ME mad!
• https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-the-ai-buildout
  • Dwarkesh Patel predicts the AI buildout. There's a lot of money in it. Maybe so much money that it can overwhelm regulatory barriers and ordinary incompetence, and lead to a nontrivial increase in electricity generation??? I can't imagine this actually happening, but it is a lot of money.
• https://vividvoid.substack.com/p/how-to-fight-your-family
  • if I'm going to "fight" my family, i'm going to fight foolishly and insanely. if i have self-control, why am i fighting at all?
• https://writing.antonleicht.me/p/dont-build-an-ai-safety-movement
  • again, i don't get it. it would be no great loss if all chatbots were banned. and I'm x-risk skeptical and very anti-regulation in general and a power user of LLMs. It's just that this is a technology we can live without, because we did live without it five years ago! it's mostly used for dumb memes and cheating on homework! Banning AI is technically against my principles, but I'd miss it barely more than I'd miss the legal sports betting apps I don't use.
• https://quintinfrerichs.xyz/human-enhancement-companies very intriguing
• papers related to (perceived) volition and the decision to move:
  • https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(10)01082-2?innerTabvideo-abstract_mmc3= certain neurons in the medial frontal cortex increase their firing rate prior to the decision to move, peaking at "W-time", the point where people report making the decision to move (about 200 ms before actual movement)
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1160 damage to the parietal cortex makes people report "w-time" later, close to the actual movement
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1388245723005953 patients with tic disorders mostly report making a "decision" to move prior to moving, same as healthy subjects. no significant differences between W and M times.
  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10330627/ summary of various experiments on W time

  • https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1523226113 the "readiness potential" does not represent a final decision to move; people can "cancel" the movement later, going up to but not beyond W-time. in other words, the time at which people actually make the final decision whether or not to move is pretty much the time at which they report deciding to move.