paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Man, pelaton bikes are hard. Can I get an electric motor on one to make peddling easier 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Platonists be like: Omg my tool works! Rock break open nut! Must be platonic form of nut-smashing-rock actually existent in abstract realm! 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Some conspiracy theorists are just larpers who are just playing chicken and have thrown out the steering wheel. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 27/09/2026A trick a lot of conspiracy theorists fall for is when you describe the explanatory theory first to someone unfamiliar with the topic, THEN you present the data to be explained. It then feels like the theory not only fits but PREDICTED the data which is often a good reason to believe. 100
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 27/09/2026So sick of deceptive headlines. No wonder people are confused. No wonder they distrust news outlets. No wonder they distrust science. This headline implies disassembly, but the actual story is that they're upgrading some parts of the system. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 26/09/2026Philosophy operates in the low information zone. I. E. Where where isn't much data and people's priors and intuitions start to take over. Science just means there's enough evidence that you can shift (most) people's opinions regardless of their priors. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Pessimism and optimism are both heuristic states of mind. Neither are true and they should both be subservient to more thoughtful and nuanced analysis of situations. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Apriori truths are just built up from raw statistics. We just don't have a useful or succinct way to describe the underlying data, or sometimes the data isn't available to us. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 24/09/2026The Bible had a problem with God power scaling, so they wisely reset with Jesus to make things a little more relatable. 001
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026The mind of God implements using a logical system that's not the same as its implementation( because it would use actually infinite storage ) , the only possible logical systems are identical with their implementation, therefore the mind of God is not possible 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Just learned that a syndicate suggested to Bill Watterson to focus on two side characters instead of his primary ones. Those characters? Calvin and Hobbes. Feels like a radical lesson in taking feedback constructively. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 21/09/2026I don't want points. I want the food to be cheaper. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 21/09/2026Space exploration isn't really for national inspiration, it's Gen X nastalgia. 010
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026A product designed to trick people into thinking it inflates balloons. Priced a little cheaper than regular canned helium, but too high to imagine it could be meant for anything else. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 17/09/2026AI can do (output) better than it can understand (read). I'd bet they're trying to increase use so that it can output what people want than use that to feed back into its understanding. I may be able to ratchet itself up using its own output 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 15/09/2026People love to be cynical because everyone just agrees with you and you don't have to be right 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Theistic "great making properties" rest on the premise that things humans want and like are the somehow transcendent facts baked into the universe, independent of human desire. An alien race of sentient wasps would think that God is perfectly efficient at grub survival. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 14/09/2026When people answer questions, they import the motivation of the questioner. Why are they asking what they're asking? What do they need or want? Theres no such thing as a generic question. 000
Reposted by @paulmarko.bsky.socialThe Onion @theonion.com · 08/09/2026Everything Finally Clicks For Man After Getting Diagnosed As Stupid theonion.com/everything-finally-cli… 221887242
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 09/09/2026Heuristics or rules are just strong signals in statistical data. They're ALWAYS subservient to the underlying data itself. 010
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 09/09/2026Intentionality and about-ness seem totally explicable in naturalistic terms. Not sure what philosophers get all tied up about. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 09/09/2026The mistake people make when using "coincidence" as a measure of probability, is that they're considering the probability of "THIS" coincidence, which may be low, when they should be considering the probability of "SOME" coincidence, which may be very high. 100
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 09/09/2026All State propositions carry a hidden "I predict when I evaluate x it'll be y." properties are only an examine and compare functions with various degrees of certainty. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Many companies cashing in their brand equity these days. Brand equity is a limited resource. Why are they so eager to strip-mine themselves? 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 03/09/2026I think all the perfect being inferences for God are just so crazy and so obviously based on evolutionarily derived preferences. Power, knowledge strength, etc. None of these have any objective perfection. We can't infer anything about God's psychology from them without circular reasoning 100
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 02/09/2026Lower entropy doesn't mean less probable. A brain popping into existence is less probable than a big bang because you have to have a specific configuration AND position. There's way more possible random big bangs than possible Boltzmann brains. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 02/09/2026Miracles IMO often come down to exaguration. Say someone is telling a story about a health recovery. they'd first exaggerating how sick the person was, then they'd exaggerate how much they recovered by Even small exaggerations on both sides can add up to a total story thats very fantastical. 100
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 27/08/2026I've noticed this pattern with con artistry and bs. The stuff that would be very convincing has poor provinence, hard to repeat and verify, etc. But there's always lots of good evidence that's not very convincing. NDES, Vedic archeology, and miracle claims come to mind. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 24/08/2026If/when ram prices come down it's going to blow the lid off data centers and local Ai is going to take over. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 19/08/2026Learning that a gui isn't the actual computer I think would make people more likely to be emergentists about conciousness 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 18/08/2026The brain is like a piece of clay. When you press it into things it becomes the pattern. Keep pressing and the more detailed the clay becomes and finds smaller and smaller details. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Philosophy doesn't seem to deal with low information areas well. Like with the fine tuning argument, its related to a part of physics we know so so so little about, the earliest part of the universe, yet you have proponents willing to stake just enormous confidence on it. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 16/08/2026Do people who "talk to god" notice they're just talking to themselves? 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 16/08/2026Why is human life more likely on theism? Why would a being care about making more beings? 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 16/08/2026Could humans be the side effect of a god optimizing for black holes? 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 14/08/2026God's omniscience has the same probability as a block multiverse that contains all metaphysical possibilities actualized, so fine-tuning has no probabilistic advantage over a naturalistic multiverse hypothesis. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 12/08/2026All propositional knowledge is just a prediction or expectation. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 12/08/2026No counterfactual represent possible worlds, they represent worlds that have a changed feature, but where the world hasn't updated in accordance with that changed feature. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 07/08/2026Moral realism vs. Anti-realism might just come down to statistics. How does someone define a statistical fact. Do realists or platonists think that every possible stasticial fact is "real?" is every probably for every conceivable calculation "real?" 010
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 06/08/2026I think moral realists confuse the likelihood of a scenario happening with the actual moral response. The reason TB being bad feels true is because there's no plausible scenario where it could be justified. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 04/08/2026Grifting is the game theoretic winning strategy vs. narcissists. You feign humbleness and say what the narcissist wants back at them to sell them exactly what they want even if it's useless. Voila! 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 03/08/2026Added bird sounds to my ambient music. It's been great! Way lower anxiety. 010
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Computers logical systems exist first. In human logical systems, we only see the software, not the full hardware implementation. Once we know the neuroscience of our logical systems, we be able to debug them. 010
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Professional philosophers are too focused on propositional knowledge. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 30/07/2026The problem with moral discussion is that people really don't want to appear like a psychopath. So they capitulate to optics. Essentially creating a optic-protecting moral defense. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 29/07/2026I wonder what neo-platonists think about LLMs containing information in latent space. Those do exist in the sense that decoders and encoders can instantiate their data, but that data doesn't "exist" as a single object, it's abstracted and broken down into (oftentimes) shared pieces. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 17/06/2026Ufo testimony is often pretty fantastical, yet often the sensor data is very weak. This is surprising if the testimony is accurate, but expected on the testimony being prone to the various psychological errors.. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 13/08/2025Hate is a high order emotion designed to create a solution to people who've used their higher order thinking to hijack your lower order brain. For example manipulators and cry-bullies. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 02/08/2025Bible editors were all like "let's have 4 Gospels because there's 4 cardinal directions." meanwhile reality has no fundamental cardinality. 000
paulmarko.bsky.social @paulmarko.bsky.social · 30/07/2025The sad thing about a high trust community is that they can be suckered into about anything, because they've let their defenses atrophy. They put that defense energy into thriving, but it leaves them open to grifters, con artists and other parasites. 010
