J Bostock

Ok, I got nerd sniped on the specific argument "Animals would be better off being made of stronger material than protein, but they don't because evolution can't find this solution". Graphene Graphene is (kind of) a wonder material. It's a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal grid,...

Steering LLMs with single-vector methods might break down soon, and by soon I mean soon enough that if you're working on steering, you should start planning for it failing now. This is particularly important for things like steering as a mitigation against eval-awareness. Steering Humans I have a strong intuition...

There is a particular sound which you will hear around a month into a genetics course. It’s kind of contagious, spreading from person to person in the class. It’s the sound of someone finally internalising why genes are named the way they are. Example: Fruit flies (it’s always fruit flies)...

Even small amounts of alcohol are somewhat bad for you. I personally don’t care, because I love making and drinking alcohol and at the end of the day you have to live a little. This is fine for me, because I’m not an olympic athlete. If I were an olympic...

There’s a cocktail called an old fashioned. It’s almost as simple as one can make a cocktail. Like anything there’s a million “recipes” but the one I’ll focus on today goes like this: * Put two sugar cubes in a glass * Douse them with a few drops of bitters...

A load-bearing concept in my mental language is texture-of-experience. This sits on an axis from rough to smooth. I'm writing this here as a handle to look back on. Here are some examples of rough/smooth pairs. Some are triples, ordered from roughest to smoothest. * Being driven somewhere in an...

This post was written as part of Doublehaven: ◆◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇ ◆◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇|◇◇◇◇◇ Moral realism is roughly the belief in stance-independent reasons for doing something, that all minds might follow. It’s also roughly the belief that there is a true morality, which humans might converge on through reasoning. It’s also roughly the belief...