Dentosal

A hundred years ago some musicians were enraged by recording technology. Soon no-one would be paid to play live music! And recorded music is soulless anyway, who would want to listen to that? It turns out, approximately everyone. As the saying goes, quantity has a quality of its own. When...

It's done. I made it to the end. A Finnish proverb fits the situation perfectly: > Paska reissu mutta tulipahan tehtyä Which translates to something like "A crappy journey but in any case it's over now". I forced myself to do this. It was not fun. I rarely enjoyed writing....

I wish I had a thought recorder for this. It's much easier to think while walking, not interrupted by note-taking. Woo was discussed last night. It's hard to say what it means, exactly. The defining example is meditation, and anything related to it. I think the extreme case is psychedelic...

What determines how much things cost? The textbook answer is, supply and demand. But that's just the Teacher's Password. An actually useful model could be used to answer some questions like "How much should I ask for this product?" or "Am I getting ripped off?". Cost and utility We typically...

The yesterday's post gathered a relatively large number of comments. Nice! And downvotes! Engagement!! Sadly it was not a ragebait, only my honest-yet-unsure take on a complex and hard-to-understand topic. One of the comments, by Vladimir Nesov, did change how I was modelling the whole thing: > How is suffering...

I hear more and more people talk about AI welfare. I'm confused. Computer programs do not suffer any more than rocks do. If I paint a face on a rock and smash it, some part of my brain would feel like someone got hurt. But it would be ridiculous to...

Every now and then, I hang out with people who tell me they're doing Effective Altruism. I won't claim to have read even the standard introductory texts, and Ord's The Precipice gifted to me still gathers dust on the shelf, while the ever-practical collection of Nietzsche's works still feels worth...