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Appromoximate
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Meaning Machines
Me: Consciousness is just a thin veneer over the unconscious mind.

You: Yea, verily, for how often do words escape from my mouth without any preceding conscious thought!

Me: Indeed, and how often do words escape into your thoughts without any preceding conscious thought!!

Essay in Convergent Thinking from Mar 2, 2025.
Enlightenment Now
I want to talk about the type of insight which happens when the way that we frame a problem shifts or opens up, disclosing a solution which was not permitted by the previous frame (we could say that the solution was outside or beyond the existing frame, to follow the metaphor).
Essay in Convergent Thinking from Jan 1, 2024.
How intelligence helps (and hurts) alignment
We've found ourselves in a strange cultural moment where it suddenly appears obvious to many people that we will give birth to a superintelligent AI that will kill us all.

Could intelligence help with this?
Essay in Convergent Thinking from Mar 5, 2023.
The Language Bottleneck

“I am God, and I have no need to think. Up to now I’ve never thought, and I’ve never felt the need, not in the slightest. The reason human beings are in such a bad way is because they think; thought is by definition sketchy and imperfect—and misleading. To any thought one can oppose another, obverse thought, and to that yet another, and so forth and so on; and this inane cerebral yakety-yak is about as far from divine as you can get.”

Essay in Convergent Thinking from Aug 21, 2019.
Remains of the Day

What Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel has to say about the predicaments of modern democracy.

Essay in Convergent Thinking from Mar 29, 2018.