Thoughts I failed to develop into posts

The first day at the Inscribe Residency I went through my list of drafts, and found things I'm very unlikely to ever develop into longer things, which I'm gathering here as miscellaneous kitchen sink post, outside of my daily deadline. Math Category Theory is like Comparative Linguistics. Each language has their own categories, and they can only be defined through terms that are only meaning inside each language. But Comparative Linguistics defines other categories which, while being less interesting for the description of each language, enable comparison. The syntactically defined direct object than many languages have is more accurate for description than the semantically defined "object"; but only the second one allows comparisons. Similarly, the terminal object might be irrelevant to describe some categories, but it allows comparisons. Rationality I feel that the doctrine of words as clusters in Thingspace is true for things in the physical space, but doesn't apply e.g. to mathematical objects. The difference is that in physical space there are no essential lines to be drawn, and since every point has many more dimensions than human language can describe, every attempt to point at a point is in fact pointing at a region. But (some) mathematical objects are discrete, and it is possible to point at them. Funny quotes from SSC/ACX To this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.” (2015-01-31) Meta Creating weird events and getting a lot of rationalists to attnd is easy in a place like Berkeley is easy. In a big city with no established rationalist community it seems to be more difficult than one would naively think. It is easy to gatekeep, but then the group doesn't grow. It is easy to get a lot of people to attend, but then the target audience gets diluted and those who most centrally belong to it don't want to attend. Would it be a solution to create an event and charge 50€ for attendance, but announce everyone enters for free the first time, and then waive the fee for people the organizer finds interesting? How could this be done in a way that is maximally transparent without being too insulting for the people who get rejected? One option would be to have middlemen with the right to waive the fee of a specific group (intelligent, kind, talkative, famous, well-connected people), and evaluated on how well they chose, and to outsource the ugly "you aren't welcome" to "find a middleman who waive your fee". (Tebaldo parties) * I like that my posts on rationality/AI/etc are subject to the votes of the LW community. And I like having all my posts in one place. At first I thought my dream situation would be that the personal section doesn't have karma. But this would very fast degenerate into the personal section being de facto a generic blogging platform, which could be used by millions of people and flood LW. So this is no solution. But I think it would b possible to have, unless some conditions (e.g. only 1 in 20 posts) a karma-free post, as a way of saying: I want to post this, this belong to the whole person I am, but I understand this is not something the LW audience would enjoy. I wonder if it has some obvious failure modes like the first scenario. Political philosophy Develop concept of Wikipedia libertarianism, using Non-consent in Kant [copy Anki & Substack] AI Naive Platonism claims only things like circles instantiate a mathematical "form". General Platonism claims that not just easily describable objects, but also hair, mud or dirt also instantiate a form [Parmenides 130d]. Today's super-Platonism claims that not only some things, but every single thing, is just a vector in a 40,000-dimensional vector space. Four quotes about ASI persuasion: Persuasion is very bottlenecked on personalized interaction time. The impact of friends and partners on people’s views is likely much larger. [...] This implies that even if we don’t get superhuman persuasion, AIs influencing opinions could have a very large effect, if people spend a lot of time interacting with AIs. Beth Barnes[1] “The best diplomat in history” wouldn’t just be capable of spinning particularly compelling prose; it would be everywhere all the time, spending years in patient, sensitive, non-transactional relationship-building with everyone at once. It would bump into you in whatever online subcommunity you hang out in. It would get to know people in your circle. It would be the YouTube creator who happens to cater to your exact tastes. And then it would leverage all of that. Steve Newman With AI, it’s plausible that coordinated persuasion of many people can be a thing, as well as it being difficult in practice for most people to avoid