My substack: https://tomasbjartur.substack.com/
Fiction:
My Twitter: https://x.com/bjarturtomas
LLM policy: None of my posts or comments are written by, or in collaboration with, an LLM. This includes Beauty and the Beast. Occasionally, I will use an LLM for proofreading/research but all words are my own.
Reflections on Inkhaven
Would I recommend applying next year? Yes.
Would I go again? It was a really good experience. I do wonder if it is the type of thing that would never be quite the same the second time. Despite thinking this, I am tempted.
Did it make me a measurably stronger writer?
I don’t think so. I am much prouder of the fiction I wrote before Inkhaven than what I produced during Inkhaven. A counterpoint to this: Ozy, Wales, Linch and Eneasz convinced me I should spend some time editing/revising my fiction—which I haven’t really been doing much. This could very well make me a much stronger fiction writer, but I haven’t really tried it yet. We will see what happens with my next short story.
Am I proud of what I wrote?
I am not sure. My first week, I wrote mostly terrible essays. I then started writing microfiction, and some of it still amuses me. I did get one longer bit of fiction done there, too: Lobsang’s Children. I am pretty happy with it, but it wasn’t a big hit.
These are my favourite of my short posts:
Harry Potter and the Rules of Quidditch
With Adjustable Chef’s Tool Drawer
Most valuable thing about Inkhaven?
Inkhaven is nothing without its people.
Which residents impressed me most?
Linch struck me as the most likely to become a professional blogger. Vishal’s blog was great and he is insanely well read. Though I didn’t really talk to him, Screwtape impressed me. He takes teaching/learning rationality seriously. By revealed preference, this isn’t something I care much about. But it is a noble pursuit and I am glad at least one person is still carrying the torch. I had a brief conversation with GeneSmith and was in awe at how many paths to intelligence augmentation he has considered, including really crazy ideas like methods for expanding adult skulls so as to have more room for brain grafts. He struck me as insanely smart.
Biggest regrets?
I was in a bad mood at the start and psyched myself out of enjoying the first week. I started drinking in an attempt to improve my mood and this was a poor decision. I was consequently rather rude to a few people. Interestingly, my tweets were (for whatever reason) much better than usual during this period.
The snack bar was so tempting, I gained about 10 pounds. I just don’t have willpower in regards to snacks. At home, I eat bland food to stay at the high end of “normal” BMI. I am very annoyed I did this to myself and am considering an extreme fast. I would have paid extra to be forbidden snacks, as stupid as this sounds. Perhaps Screwtape is right about this whole rationality thing.
What is Lighthaven like?
An excerpt from a tweet I wrote about this:
I am not the most visual person, but I can relay impressions. I would say it feels a bit Chestertonian. The Rose Garden Inn as patient zero, infecting various houses around it. The Chestertonian bit, in my imagination, is the implicit mad scheme to slowly undermine various stifling norms of city planning. One house at a time, seeds of freedom spread. I imagine this spirit infecting first the neighborhood and then the city of Berkeley itself. At a key moment, the planning commissioner will be turned and the revolution completed.
There is an artificial lawn. And though you’d think artificial grass would be tacky, it does somehow work. Once again, materials scientists have outdone God. There are “onions,” strange functional sculptures in which one can sit and have conversations. They look to me like large demonic hands transfigured from the artificial turf by some strange wizards, but in a pleasant way. There is a snack-bar, which is perhaps too generous with its offerings. I would recommend hiring Stephan J. Guyenet as a consultant to ruin everyone’s good time.
The aesthetics, then, I will describe as Post-Bureaucratic-Apocalypse chic. Planning laws and an aesthetically dead, inhuman, architectural tradition preventing any new beauty being constructed, those with taste must take the old and put it to new purposes. And this Lighthaven has done.
Favourite Visiting Writers? I am mostly interested in fiction, so talked with Daystar, Ozy and Alexander Wales. They were all great. Ozy’s feedback was particularly good. And they’re just a very pleasant, happy person. Daystar seemed cool and I should have asked for more feedback from him, though I did send him this very personal, autobiographical work.
How well run was it? It was very well run. I have no complaints. Ben Pace did a great job. I expect next year it will be even better.
He stomps on a rubber soul.
So long and good luck!
There is also the immediate, irresistible desire to have sex with yourself and the consequent shame afterwards.
Suppose you’re a billionaire and you want to get married. However, gold-digging people of the gender you prefer target you. They are good enough at faking attraction that you cannot tell. How should you act? One idea I had was this: pick 10000 random people and then select from there. You will at the very least likely remove most of the world-class dissemblers. Armstrong proposes a similar scheme in Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search.
Yeah. I prefer not fighting the thought experiment though and thinking of beauty qua beauty. Though perhaps what remains of beauty once it is stripped of all its correlates is perverse.
Tallness is zero sum. But I suspect beauty isn’t. If everyone was more beautiful but the relative differences remained, I think people would be happier. Am I wrong in this? This has policy implications, as once genetic engineering gets better taxing height is likely wise to avoid red-queens races into unhealthy phenotypes. Taxing beauty seems very horrible to me. As beauty is quite beautiful.
Yes. It did a lot of CoT. I don’t recall how long.
I am mostly surprised at the humor being more humory and less humor-like-substancy.
Normative claims describe desired world states. To the extent they are coherent and possible, they cannot be argued against. They are merely a shape the world could be. Descriptive statements make neutral claims about features of the world. Toy examples of each mistake:
“Having no legs is not good; I bet that crippled man has invisible legs.”
“That crippled man has no legs; this must be the way of things and so just and right”
In practice, this tends to be done with themes and processes and not at such a crude, silly level. The stereotypical reactionary might identify selective processes, themselves, as ends. The stereotypical liberal might pretend selective processes don’t exist. The reactionary may be right about his values, and then is not making a mistake here. But in many cases I think they are confusing the descriptive for the normative and do not value what they think they value.
I moved it into my drafts. I published it again for you. I figured it was unlikely to be referenced again and I tend to take stuff down I don’t want people reading as one of the first things on my author’s page.
There is the classic error of conflating the normative with the descriptive, presuming that what is good is also true. But the inverse is also a mistake I see people make all the time: conflating the descriptive for the normative. The descriptive is subject to change by human action, so maybe the latter is the worse of the two mistakes. Crudely, the stereotypical liberal makes the former mistake and the stereotypical reactionary makes the latter.
Yeah. I think you can post anything as a personal post, and the gods of LW may take a fancy to them, as is their preview, and put them on the front page.
Thanks you so much!
I had a very wrong model of what quick takes are. I was thinking like, not good enough for a post, put it in a quick take.
Thanks so much. I am trying to get one out per week, but I might be late again this week.
Interesting; from my perspective, I got really lazy in the end. And another fellow told me yesterday the ending was awful. I do think it is the weakest thing I have posted recently, but people seem to really like it, so what do I know?
I am pretty happy with the last two: https://substack.com/@tomasbjartur
And I do plan to keep writing. I am having fun.
I am a strong believer that nanotechnology is possible, which seems to be a sort of antimeme. And tons of people who should really know better seem to consider the acknowledgement of the physical possibility of Drexlerish nanotech as evidence someone is crazy—it is amusing to look at the AGI takes of these same people five years ago. They are mostly using the exact same idiotic intuitions in exactly the same way for the exact same reasons.
But maybe this being an antimeme is good? Perhaps its best people are holding the idiot ball on the topic? On one hand, I don’t think lying is good, even by omission. And to the extent denying nanotech is load-bearing in their claims that takeoff will be slow (by the Christiano definition) then getting them to see through the antimeme is useful—as an aside I think people do forget that we have seen little evidence so far, at least in terms of economic growth, that we are living in Christiano’s predicted world. I get the impression, sometimes, some people think we have.
But also, we are getting very powerful tools that makes a Drexlarian project more and more plausible, which has its own risks and even indirect risks of increasing available compute. So perhaps we are fortunate nanotechnology is so incredibly low status? As Sama would probably just try to do it if it were not.
I am pretty proud of this one. I think it’s much better than my AI girlfriend story.
https://daystareld.com/pokemon/
https://ozybrennan.substack.com/p/ozys-fiction