On 8/17/26
Daily Letter
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Yeah, death penalty
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https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/grading-the-worlds-shortest-manifesto
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Public · Inspiration & Quotes
Mental improvement is about becoming less dangerous on your worst days.
Mental improvement is less about peak performance and more about floor management.
Ratchet Principle: the goal isn't to think brilliantly on your best days but to raise the floor of your worst days so that when you're tired, stressed, and running on bad coffee, you still make acceptable decisions instead of catastrophic ones
Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome
As Lindblom observes, "Seals are easily trained because they have an appetite for fish." Corporations are also relatively easy to control, because they have an appetite for money. To extend the metaphor, trying to get corporations to care about the public interest, rather than simply maximizing profit, is like trying to persuade the seal that he should love jumping through hoops, rather than eating fish. It's much easier just to give him a fish whenever he succeeds in jumping through the hoop.
Such a thin line
The central paradox...any given polity...must create a military establishment strong and effective enough to protect the state. On the other hand, it must somehow ensure that this same military establishment does not turn on the state that created it.
Revolution is not a dinner party
A year after Mao had done away with his rivals there came the Great Terror, in which hundreds of thousands more perished according to killing quotas set by Mao himself...the chairman reminded his public that 'Revolution is Not a Dinner Party.
Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society
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AI will do to everyone what the Internet has been doing for 20 years, just more so: it'll make the smart people smarter, and the dumb people dumber. It'll empower those with agency, and turn the slothful into NPCs.
No amount of 'alignment' or policy will much change that.
Sleep is so important
Recordings of neural activity in rodents show that firing sequences recorded in assemblies of hippocampal place cells during waking behavior are replayed during slow-wave sleep, this coordination could be when recent memories end up becoming remote memories
Misc
So cool