Thoth Hermes

The Law of the Excluded Middle says that there are only two “truth-values:” namely True and False. It also says that X and not-X is false, while X or not-X is true. If we accept LoEM already, then LoEM is either true or false. However, there are already two reasons...

For laypeople: In software, “throwing an exception” is a programmer-chosen type of behavior that occurs on the event that an “error” occurs in the course of program execution. This might happen immediately prior to or right at the time of the error. This is ostensibly done in order to avoid...

How to Proceed in a (Semi-)Adversarial Social Environment Suppose you are a member of a relatively large intellectual community, which has frequent public discussions, a high level of interaction between members, and some mechanism for recording the level of engagement plus feedback on content submitted to the record by its...

In other words, there are no "rabbit holes" or "dark tunnels of the mind." The great success of neural networks is due in large part to the surprising ease in which gradient-based methods are used to train them. Neural networks are often trained using a “loss function” which computes the...

This question is motivated by the following reasons: Not many pieces exist that argue against the Orthogonality Thesis (on LessWrong, or anywhere, to my knowledge). Of those that do, none have received positive feedback. Commenters on those pieces have stated that it is not, in principle, impossible that they would...

And why this might be evidence that construction of a 'common language' might be possible. Lately, I have been wondering why I see so many blogs using pale or faded-out color tones for their background that make them seem bland or dreary-looking. My impression is that most people probably see...