I put an “importance” score on my posts: this weights the topic of the post.1 The scale goes from 1 (“applies only to Gavin’s life”) to 10 (“applies to the entire possible future of everything possibly of value (sentient things or other complex systems”). So superexponential: a “10” topic is much more than a trillion times more important than a “2”.

Anything “4” or above could affect you, might be something you should know, as a generally optimising or curious or altruistic person.

It is an enduring mystery to me why my interest in a topic is not more correlated with my own estimate of its importance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



10

> Drake, Hanson, and the meaning of life
> Existential risk as common cause


9

> Ten Hard Problems in and around AI
> 'The Maniac' (2023) by Labatut
> Why worry about future AI?
> Against the Culture
> AI alignment & academia
> AI ethics for present & future
> Worldview in Five Books
> 'Strangers Drowning' (2015) by MacFarquhar
> Virtue, work, and the world to come
> 'The Decline' (1999) by NOFX


8

> Learn stats without going mad
> The sense of a start
> brief history
> Ramsey
> von Neumann
> Consent as conclusive evidence
> 'Blindsight' (2006) by Watts
> 'The Great Influenza' (2004) by Barry
> Effective Altruism Global: x: Oxford
> Why is quality rare?
> What's the highest moral wage?


7

> idiopathies
> LLM alignment via activations
> Can policymakers trust forecasters?
> The best of Scott Aaronson (for laymen)
> Scoring the Big Three
> Comparing experts and generalists
> Legacy and the memory of legacy
> 'Terra Ignota': the ecstasy of uncertainty
> Do masks work against COVID, at scale?
> Crossing the ocean of my ignorance
> Robots, Games, Life, Markets
> 'Scarcity' (2013) by Shafir & Mullainathan
> Rebellion, and rebellion against rebellion
> 'Curiosity' (2012) by Ball
> Preventing Side-effects in Gridworlds
> A ceiling for human expertise
> Why care about genetic privacy?
> Estimating political controversy
> Automatic for the people
> Comparing up and down
> Rorty and the Wild Party
> On calling people brainwashed
> 'Why study economics?'


6

> Log of self-experiments
> The brightness that comes before
> Great work
> get hype
> On forced association
> Phil Harvey (1938 - 2021)
> Favourite maths tools
> Cracking cultures
> Blogging is dead, long live sites
> 'Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor' (2019)
> Notes on OpenAI Five
> 'The Unpersuadables' (2013) by Storr
> 'Why Moral Theory is Boring and Corrupt'
> Einstein
> Turing
> Is education worth it for society?
> Is Yitang Zhang an intellectual?
> The Worst Game Ever
> A decomposition of decompositions
> Anaesthetatron
> Limits to self-invention
> Should we abolish foreign aid?
> Economics as philosophy of life
> love, analytically
> Neither Turing, neither Searle


5

> 'Disco Elysium' (2019): Part 1
> The ladder of abstraction
> Songs for the Extremely Online
> The One True Sceptic
> Unthinking meat
> Irony, sincerity, nostalgia, neoteny
> Graphs are cool
> Stimulant tolerance, or, the tears of things
> Metabolism is violent
> Better ways to write maths
> Self-help, hard and soft
> 'Starting Strength' by Rippetoe
> Reversals in psychology
> Uncritical thinking
> Insurance isn't necessarily a scam
> Bad introspections
> 'Waking Up' (2014) by Harris
> 'Homicide' (1991) by Simon
> Hardening the browser
> How lethal are the Tories? Part 1
> You do you
> Existential overheads
> on veganism
> Can you trust your methods?
> Conceptual conversions
> to desperately instrumentalise myself
> Punk as ideology


4

> prospective nostalgia
> Highlights from my Gists
> Things I Use
> Notes on inductive logic programming
> The trouble with supplements
> On inhabiting a giant corporation
> Yoga hypothesis dump
> 'The Patrick Melrose Novels' by St Aubyn
> Broadness and philosophical rank
> Disambiguating the first computer
> Why I'm not a philosopher
> 'Hitler's Uranium Club' (2008) by Bernstein
> Data Science FAQ
> magic words
> Modelling linguistic accommodation
> Present pieties
> Frege's grand failure
> A Sentimental Journey Through Parts of England
> 'Have One on Me' by Joanna Newsom


3

> The Boy and the Heron: renunciations
> Spotify is not a social network
> me on ClearerThinking
> Taylor Swift as blurry jpeg
> Cracking country
> Using courts for algorithmic fairness
> 'Ficciones' (1944) by Borges
> Maths at the Open University
> π vs τ as clash of worldviews
> The presumed worth of anthropology
> Taking Hume's name
> 'The Scotch' (1880) by Friedrich Nietzsche
> Rubinations
> The typical language of postmodernism
> 'Infinite Jest' (1996)
> Showing over saying
> Interview: Chuck Ragan


2

> Every Mountain Goats song ever recorded including those which have a Death Geas placed upon em by the Author
> Pop auteurs
> Mathematical dark matter
> 'Trompettes de la Mort' (2005)
> hope dies last
> Nation playlists
> 'The Odyssey' (2017) by Emily Wilson
> the arts lie dreaming of the life to come
> Staring at mystics


1

> To be led out
> Misreading Russell on radical scepticism



  1. I stole the idea from Gwern.