All Thoughts Being Equal

Because you can never have just one . Any similarities to the empires in this story and hyperbolic keyboard warriors in the wider Internet are almost certainly mist-borne figments of the reader's imagination. Once, a very long time from now, there was a village. Life in this village was hard, but the people in the village were content with what they had—no matter the hardship, they believed that the Universal Law rewarded hard work with ample reward, and they knew not to beg for more. But this was not a peaceful life. Occasionally some mysterious tragedy would befall the village: in the night, with no discernible frequency but often enough to keep everyone on edge, someone would die horribly. Their mangled bodies would be found in their houses, or in the village green, or in one of trees of the forest... or in several trees. Every death was subtly different, enough to unnerve even the village elders each time. These events were frightening, but the forest was dark and full of mal...

I.   I just finished an ebook by Stuart Armstrong called Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence , and it's increasing my skepticism of the singulatarians—those whacky A.I.-vangelists such as inhabit MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. They're doing (what they think is) an important public service, by trying to warn the public about the dangers of a fully-godlike, insufficiently-friendly machine intelligence. Except I'm not so convinced that we could stumble on the kind of superintelligence they usually preach in fear about, an alien god with boundless powers: You [the machine superintelligence] are currently having twenty million simultaneous conversations. Your predictive software shows that about five of those you are interacting with show strong signs of violent psychopathic tendencies. You can predict at least two murder sprees, with great certainty, by one of those individuals over the next year. You consider your options. The human poli...

I've written some fiction stuff that might still be worth reading, but I don't consider it finished because not many people have read it at all. So I might as well keep up my post schedule and devote Fridays to publishing poems, excerpts, or serializations that I've written. Comments and critiques are welcome, or just ignore me on Fridays. The Black Sorcerer of Doom's Barrow, pt. 2 The door, for all its massive size and stony bulk, slid aside easily at Tyr's sinewy insistence. The sepulcher's antechamber yawned ahead of him, devouring all the light from outside. Heeding the sparrow's advice, Tyr wrapped a bundle of reeds and lit them with flint and steel, and carried the improvised torch into the gloom. The graven sarcophagi of long-dead men lined the walls in their square slots, dreaming of some forgotten era of bone-garnished warlords and green stone idols to strange gods. In some places the granite coffins lay smashed on the floor, the bones in a ...

Follow-up to: Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 1 ; Adventures in bad statistics, Big Gay edition I. So there's a video going around. A woman dresses pretty generically—jeans, a black crew-neck shirt—and walks around New York City... and experiences "over 100" instances of street harassment in 10 hours over a few days. I have a few problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it's great that people are documenting this sort of everyday experience: one's personal life history doesn't translate well over the Internet, so any little bit helps. On the other hand... The big problem is with the editing. Out of nine major online media sites who reported this— CNN , USA Today , Business Insider , New York Post , Vox , Slate , Huffington Post , Salon , and Jezebel —none of them caught this on the first go around. Then Slate and Salon realized something was up: it's almost all black and Latino men. Yikes. The Jezebel writer had this commentary i...

I. The other day (N.B. months ago at this point) I got into a very interesting discussion with C. Michael Pickens, a prominent member of the Washington State Libertarian Party, on what principles should form the proper ground of a theory of liberty. In his original Facebook post, Michael claimed that "Liberty is an optimistic concept based on the philosophy of self-ownership." Someone else asked whether liberty could be grounded in concepts of free will and autonomy; Michael replied that these are themselves based in self-ownership. In the discussion, I (and the other guy) both raised the possible issue of indentured servitude—I had in mind specifically the condition of indentured servants during the early American colonial period, which was a condition of chattel slavery in all but name. Michael wasn't arguing that slavery was permissible—obviously it isn't, regardless of your libertarian principles, unless you're a Confederacy-fetishist douchebag like, s...

Yes, this is where I'm going to express an official blog-opinion on #GamerGate—in the most abstract way possible. [WARNING: This post is very long... one might even say excessively so.] I. Richard Feynman, in a 1978 commencement address at Caltech (and also in the last chapter of his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ), describes a phenomena he calls "Cargo Cult Science": I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land....