Heuristics That Almost Always Work An Article by Scott Alexander astralcodexten.substack.com Sometimes there’s a Heuristic That Almost Always Works, like “this technology won’t change everything” or “there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow”. And sometimes the rare exceptions are so important to spot that we charge experts with the task. But the heuristics are so hard to beat that the experts themselves might be tempted to secretly rely on them, while publicly pretending to use more subtle forms of expertise. …Maybe this is because the experts are stupid and lazy. Or maybe it’s social pressure: failure because you didn’t follow a well-known heuristic that even a rock can get right is more humiliating than failure because you didn’t predict a subtle phenomenon that nobody else predicted either. Or maybe it’s because false positives are more common (albeit less important) than false negatives, and so over any “reasonable” timescale the people who never give false positives look more accurate and get selected for. expertiseheuristicsprediction
Beauty and compression An Article by Scott Alexander astralcodexten.substack.com The Buddha discusses states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation: Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion. ...If you could really concentrate on a metronome, it would be more blissful than a symphony. The jhāna is also a strong contender as a theory of beauty: beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed. The Abode of the Unsymmetrical beautysilencesensesattention
Negative Creativity An Article by Scott Alexander slatestarcodex.com Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard. Misinterpretation as inspirationSit Down And Think About It For Five Minutes ideascreativitymetaphor
To the Lighthouse A Novel by Virginia Woolf gutenberg.net.au All the lives to beThe alphabetGone crookedExtinguishedA thing you could ruffle with your breath+5 More solitudemelancholyloneliness
All the lives to be And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves. nature
The alphabet Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. death
Gone crooked He was coming to see himself, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.
A thing you could ruffle with your breath It was a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.
A coherence in things There is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune to change, and shines out…in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. time
All dark and spreading Beneath it is all dark, it is spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.
There, with a dash on the beach How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. life
They would never know She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that. melancholy