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Epistemic Status: Describing the general case suggested from my exposure to a finite set of specific events. I am an academic in Computer Science, and I hope it will be a surprise to no one when I say that the vast majority of knowledge in papers depends on knowledge nowhere to be found in papers.Continue reading “Intellectual Fascia”

The idea is simple: probabilities don’t make any sense as tools for explaining the brain, they make sense as tools for describing what is literally possible. Describing what is possible and what is likely in the physical universe is awesome, I’m all for it. It’s cool that we can understand particle physics which may or mayContinue reading “Probability as a Mental Model is Bullshit”

The delightful John Nerst points out that we have more of a problem organizing and moving around knowledge than we do creating it. I think we need a Conceptual Logistics that tells us what kind of patterns people have observed over the centuries, how they relate to each other, and where we can find evidenceContinue reading “Concepts Are Tools, Not Artifacts”

In 1822 some people in what is now Germany were like: “Yo, isn’t that an African arrow in that stork’s neck?” Sure enough it was, and this lead to a lot of progress on the question of “Where the hell do birds go when they’re not here, anyway?” All in all it was a greatContinue reading “Other Kinds of Inference”

As the mistaken belief that AGI is “coming up” on our horizon increases, the discussion around “wireheading” has increased in fervor. The idea is very simple: What if you designed a robot to mow your lawn, by making sure it gets orgasms from well-cleaned lawns? Except you botch up the entire thing by making theContinue reading “Wireheading is a Teleological Misnomer”

Crispy Chicken isn’t my real name, though CC are my initials. Perhaps keeping my initials in my pseudonym was foolish, and perhaps I’m foolish for revealing it now, at the beginning of the end of the American defense of radical openness on the internet. But I want to tell you why it was important forContinue reading “Functionally Pragmatic Salesmanship”

If something is rare to possess and well-known, it is being coordinated around. If it did not acquire both of these properties at once, it was either rare at first or well-known at first. If it was rare at first, then become well-known it was used to coordinate and that proliferated it. If it wasContinue reading “Rare and Well-Known Objects”

What does it mean to say “She motioned me to come forward.” This is the thing, above every example I have seen, that should make us suspicious about any definite notion of “meaning”. — The idea of meaning started as arguments over a ledger—the ledger is what people agree has been spoken. Previously, to winContinue reading “Miscellaneous Musings on Language”

This is a guest post from Wrench, who I’m working with along with a few others to develop the Inexact Sciences. The point of science and theory is to sculpt out useful idealized machinery to make thinking about very complex systems tractable. People always point to physics for this because they’ve gotten the best ratioContinue reading “How Should We Describe How Language Works?”

Again and again people trying to do anything complicated for a long period of time are beset by the same issue: What do our words refer to, since they clearly don’t refer to truth conditions of the person who originally wrote them? The answer is that “refer” is a misnomer, and it’s an especially confusingContinue reading “Functional Transmission Theory”