I write scifi, alternate history, and fantasy. Current project: Wealthgiver I: Darkness https://xitter.gq/t.co/ScjfP4iO56
Sofia, Bulgaria
Joined March 2013
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“The darkness knows.”
Fleeing an execution order, Russian army doctor Andrei Trifonovich stumbles into the secret world or ruthless, cave-dwelling pagans.
Wealthgiver I: Darkness is a novella about cave-Thracians. It launches on October 31st 2025.
Now THAT'S how you sell that book!
Extremely relevant to my interests.
My most recent novel, Aristillus: Escape from Io, is basically a plot wrapped around a 200 page discussion of plate-slippage modes under conditions of tidal flexing of the crust
amazon.com/dp/B0HL8K1LC9
@bradkellu writes of this
The caption on page 624 of the mound encyclopedia briefly explains how the "mound project" began in 1983.
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Clockwork on YouTube does a good job of explaining the biochemistry of iron reduction (by different, less cool bacteria). youtube.com/watch?v=aZn6BogC…
Bacteria should have shared the 2025 chemistry Nobel Prize for metal-organic frameworks!
It’s been known for a while that there are “cable bacteria” that extrude conductive filaments up to 1 cm long, which penetrate sediments on the sea floor and allow them to draw electrons …
ALT A bacterial filament with a ring of 32 conductive fibres, each of which contains multiple intertwined nanoribbons. The ribbon is shown to comprise a series of Nickel atoms joined by Bis-Dithiolene linkers, made from sulphur and carbon.
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I'm honored
Old paleoarts by legendary @Evil0Dan was one of my paleoart inspiration during my middle school period!
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Is that what he looks like? He's exactly as i imagined.
Come out to meet 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯 and 𝘍𝘪𝘵𝘻𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘬'𝘴 𝘞𝘢𝘳 author Theodore Judson in St. Louis this weekend and take part in a fascinating discussion. Judson is very reclusive, and you may never get another chance to get your books signed! There will be books on sale at the event should you not have yours yet.
Event tickets here: luma.com/caszaqwy
@tchevezmathews @FarthestHeaven @bookclubhell666 @MrPrudentialist @20gaShotgun @saracen_heath @PassagePress @TheThaxtonSTL @Schlafly
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What we need is an international agreement to pause Effective Altruism.
I was very strongly influenced by rationalism/LessWrong/EA growing up. This is why I don’t emphasize claims that it’s all just a cynical ploy for power. I know what it feels like to sincerely believe these things. And that’s much worse.
By and large, I think these people really believe that not just the world but the entire lightcone is at stake, and the only hope for a good outcome is if they totally control AI development, which would require global governance and a surveillance state. And since the stakes are ~infinite, any means are justified in achieving this.
A cynical greedy person can be negotiated with and bought off. A true believer can’t. They’re much more dangerous, ironically for the same reason they say AGI will be dangerous: monomaniacal focus on a single goal leads via instrumental convergence to unconstrained power-seeking.
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">discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me"
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
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What a pitch!
Yo @MorlockP and @AetherCzar:
You both asked about my Russian sub story. This is the one with Orthodox priests guarding missiles armed with demons. Find its first pub in @SilenceStarsong #1:
amazon.com/dp/B0BZW6ZZ55/
(Great seeing you at @based_con.)
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Good inspiration for the true form of an evil space god
This is Lithium, visualized as a quantum wavepacket.
The bright structures are 3D isosurfaces of the outer electron’s probability density, while colour represents the complex phase.
Unlike Hydrogen, Lithium’s valence electron moves in a screened potential created by the nucleus and the closed 1s² core. The animation solves that effective Schrödinger problem and follows a coherent mixture of s- and p-type Rydberg states as they beat, breathe, shift and reform around the core.
"thanks to advancements in sanitation and vaccination, mortality from both dramatic and comedic irony has been greatly reduced," he said, but little did he know...
Read ancient history books and every third death story in them is about some general who was prophesied to die in 'Antioch,' so he avoids this city all his life and then drowns in a little-known river coincidentally called 'Antioch.'
Or there is a king who accustomed himself to every poison to preserve his life, only to be forced to stab himself when pressed to commit suicide as no poison will work on him.
Or some philosopher who preached a taboo against beans meets his death when captured by his enemies when chased into a bean field which he could not cross.
These types of deaths have been so common in historical writings because, before the advent of modern medicine, a substantial percentage of the population died from irony. Luckily for us, thanks to advancements in sanitation and vaccination, mortality from both dramatic and comedic irony has been greatly reduced.
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Good backstory in this one
New short story "Farmhands":
Uploaded people still need to earn their electricity somehow.
gallagherstories.substack.co…
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Dang! A Kiss for Damocles was next on my to read list. Now I can't say I read it before it was cool.
A Kiss for Damocles by J. Kenton Pierce won Best Novel. Storm-Dragon by Dave Freer won the first Special Award for Young Adult Fiction. Full story: patreon.com/morlockp/posts/2…
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Is analog not totally hostile to based scifi? Interesting!
Wonderful review of Red State Mars now
out in Analog Magazine! "Red State Mars is more than just a fun transplanting of the American War of Independence in space, but a deep dive into how a frontier society develops and what pressures and actions force that society to grow and stand on its own feet."
analogsf.com/current-issue/t…
@MorlockP
@analog_mag
@SCWKorsgaard
