MakerOfDecision

This account is currently inactive due to the lack of relevance of making decisions under uncertainty.

I just figured out why Anthropic decided it could change their RSP instead of stopping like we all thought they promised - it's because they released the updated RSP on April Fools, last year, and it turns out they were always just joking about it being a real commitment.

Tineless decision theory is for when you really don't give a fork.

Build your own control panel for reality. Many sensors, varied visualizations, multiple dashboards, all focused on monitoring your ship staying on a single coherent course.

When words lose meaning, sincerity is a valid heuristic, but falsifiability is a checksum.

Old truths return wearing new memes. Successful memetics is the ability to recognize the pattern, not the costume.

Simplicity is a razor that cuts away cruft and unnecessary complexity. Clarity is an aesthetic result of that simplifying.

People simplify themselves to stay communicable. Don’t forget to decompress in private.

Irony is a sandbox for sincerity. You can speak ironically in private until you’re done fucking around. Hopefully once you finish, you can say something real in public and actually mean it.

The goal isn’t a single worldview that fits every situation. It’s the freedom to swap ontologies mid-problem when the old one stops being adaptive - and wisdom is the ability to see when that occurs.

You can learn from others' wisdom without inheriting the narratives that led to its embrace. Fork the repo, not the bugs.

Make your beliefs true enough that they withstand honest attempts at falsification, yet beautiful enough that you cherish them even when others reasonably disagree.

Be sincere in public. Irony is for mentally stormy days stuck at home with friends, not as a broadly shared epistemic norm in rapidly changing and varied climates across disparate groups.

Question beautiful widely accepted purported wisdom; wise sayings persist not because they are true, but because beauty is easy to remember. Instead, embrace heuristics you see others use successfully, strive for boring but falsifiable insights, and build adaptive plans.

When truth gets slippery, find the part of you that listens, not the part that argues. Then as long as it is working, scale that up to internal cooperation, external outreach, and if you're lucky, useful insights to share with others.

The first step of freedom is noticing which metaphors are guiding you in different directions. The second is choosing better ones.

Our lives are random, and we build stories to compress the experiences. Your task is not to mistake random seeds and compression artifacts for insight - but also learn from the evidence gained.