I changed my caps lock key to a — key nearly a decade ago, and have done it on most of my keyboards/PCs ever since.

So seeing all the advice lately like "em dashes are a sign of AI writing" is a funny feeling to experience.

Though I appreciate the reference at the end, I think an important part of this is that it's also so that when you meet a hero you can do more with this skill. You can "see" and engage with the real person. A person as real and mundane as every other person, with all the good and bad that implies.

I actually think "see" is too limited an analogy, because this really involves all your senses and reasoning, but it's also true that I feel it has a close connection to what artists call "learning to see", like maybe it's using the same mental circuits.

You can learn to see so well that you can do it effortlessly. Suddenly you're always seeing more, everywhere, from then on. Seeing and appreciating everything you look at; beautiful, ugly, boring, surprising, and all the rest.

And when you meet your hero on the road, you can love them as a fellow person, instead of worshiping them as a hero.

I enjoyed reading the paper but did not find the screenshots here in the post a helpful addition; I think I would have just quoted the introduction, if converting it into a full article was infeasible.

It's also fun seeing other Eugenia Chang fans!

Discovering that an alien species has bred a group of humans into what a pug is to a wolf would be absolutely horrific.

Makes me think of All Tomorrows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imNtSPM3-r4

There's no Darwinian selective pressure to favor agents who engage in acausal trades.

I think I would make this more specific- there's no external pressure from that other universe, sort of by definition. So for acausal trade to still work you're left only with internal pressure.

The question becomes, "Do one's own thoughts provide this pressure in a usefully predictable way?"

Presumably it would be have to happen necessarily, or be optimized away. Perhaps as a natural side effect of having intelligence as all, for example. Which I think would be similar in argument as, "Do natural categories exist?"

I sat down one morning and for fun started trying to translate The Art of War from scratch, by simply going character by character and looking up the etymology and historical usage of each. Took me about two hours to get through the first page that way, and that was enough to be entertaining so I stopped there.

But, I noticed something, which reminds me of this "bodhi" vs. "enlightenment" contrast.

The text starts out by explaining five core concepts that make up "the art of war". The first one, I've normally seen written in English like this, from the translation by Lionel Giles:

The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.

In my version I ended up with:

The Way is how People and Ruler can wish for the same, live and die for each other, and have no fear of danger.

I probably biased it much too far in a different direction, for sure. In reviewing Lionel Giles' comments about his translation, and translation in general, I think to his credit he was really trying to be more faithful to Eastern culture than his peers, and achieved some success at that, but still had a very western Victorian worldview, seeming to compel him to consider the The Way / Morals as coming from God, and then turns that into a weird implication that "The Way" is necessarily and virtuously authoritarian.

This may seem like it's coming out of left field, but reading A Fire Upon the Deep a few weeks ago helped me find a calm perspective on this idea. In-universe the characters straight up have some of these discussions over the course of the book, and there's so much of all this stuff happening "just off screen".

The story is in part about the folly and impossibility of something as easy and comforting as "trust" between agents and systems in radically different scales and realities. Yet they are forced to coexist and interact regardless.

I haven't read his other books yet, but his lectures and interviews have also been extremely fascinating; I am surprised I haven't seen much mention of Vernor Vinge until recently, though perhaps it's a "roman concrete" problem where he's assumed to have been read? Forgive me if I am sounding like, "Guys guys have you heard about this great old sci-fi called Frankenstein!"

Sports betting is different and worse. Rather than attempting to fix outcomes, it relies on designing bets to exploit the customer.

This happens in boring and mundane ways; the same way any casino in Vegas does it, just with less regulation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OpxrtUwjNw - This is a little fan project I did of that short story, as a sort of a radio play. I've never had it be relevant to a conversation before!

Sort of semi-related, there is the "Common Pile", a successor to "The Pile". It was not focused on "safe" data, but rather "public domain" data. But, maybe that excludes at least some dangerous data, and could make further filtering easier?