I hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive.

Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything.

Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either.

If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.

> I do not believe there exists a way to safely use LLMs in scientific processes.

What about giving the LLM a narrowly scoped role as a hostile reviewer, while your job is to strengthen the write-up to address any valid objections it raises, plus any hallucinations or confusions it introduces? That’s similar to fuzz testing software to see what breaks or where the reasoning crashes.

Used this way, the model isn’t a source of truth or a decision-maker. It’s a stress test for your argument and your clarity. Obviously it shouldn’t be the only check you do, but it can still be a useful tool in the broader validation process.

There is no single definition for all scientists. However if you define free will as choices that are completely free of deterministic or even statistically deterministic causes that science could in principle predict, then most scientists would say: no, that kind of free will probably doesn’t exist.

> closed lid would flex slightly in your backpack, and press keys on the keyboard,

FYI: Over time, this repeated pressure + rubbing (especially with dust or grit in between) can leave permanent key-shaped marks or “ghosts” on the screen. Thin laptops and bags that are tightly packed or bulging make this a lot more likely, since there’s less rigidity and more pressure on the lid.

I mostly agree with your intuition, but I’d phrase it a bit differently.

Temperature 0 does not inherently improve “quality”. It just means you always pick the highest probability token at each step, so if you run the same prompt n times you will essentially get the same answer every time. That is great for predictability and some tasks like strict data extraction or boilerplate code, but “highest probability” is not always “best” for every task.

If you use a higher temperature and sample multiple times, you get a set of diverse answers. You can then combine them, for example by taking the most common answer, cross checking details, or using one sample to critique another. This kind of self-ensemble can actually reduce hallucinations and boost accuracy for reasoning or open ended questions. In that sense, somewhat counterintuitively, always using temperature 0 can lead to lower quality results if you care about that ensemble style robustness.

One small technical nit: even with temperature 0, decoding on a GPU is not guaranteed to be bit identical every run. Large numbers of floating point ops in parallel can change the order of additions and multiplications, and floating point arithmetic is not associative. Different kernel schedules or thread interleavings can give tiny numeric differences that sometimes shift an argmax choice. To make it fully deterministic you often have to disable some GPU optimizations or run on CPU only, which has a performance cost.

One of the big advantages humans have is that we are really good at working around constraints rather than just fighting over them. Health care, education, and even things like prenatal screening to reduce serious genetic disease all expand people’s potential and quality of life. Over time, that means more people who are emotionally stable, educated, and healthy, which is exactly what makes “higher quality” partners possible in the first place.

When we treat everything as a zero sum status game, especially when it comes to other human beings, we tend to slide into ugly, destructive dynamics (up to and including wars) where everyone burns resources just to keep their relative place. Cooperation and innovation, on the other hand, are how we turn a fixed pie into a growing one.

So yes, relative position matters in some contexts, but the whole reason our species has gotten this far is that we are not limited to fighting over scraps. We can change the size and shape of the pie together.

Agree. This dynamic and how it plays out is a recurring, defining one throughout the long, long thread of human history

Capitalism ties decision power to how good you are at accumulating wealth. Other systems give decision power through birth, status, or bureaucracy. But so far none have matched capitalism at growing total wealth over time- just look at “communist” China adopting capitalist tools to get rich, and now struggling with the inequality that comes with it.

You’re slipping into a version of the broken window fallacy here. Consumption isn’t automatically good for society just because it “creates activity.” When you eat an apple, the apple - and all the labor and resources behind it - are gone. Same with luxury goods: the more resource-intensive they are, the more real wealth they permanently use up compared with simpler alternatives.

What actually increases long-run prosperity isn’t consumption itself, but efficient use of resources and investment - choices that expand the stock of tools, knowledge, and productive capacity in the future. New wealth is created when resources are not immediately consumed, but are instead used to boost productivity.

That’s why wealthy people who don’t spend all their wealth aren’t “hoarding” in the economic sense. Their capital is usually invested - financing factories, startups, research, tools, and infrastructure that generate more output. And when they die with wealth still invested, the state captures a chunk through estate and capital-gains taxes.

A better way to think about wealth is as decision-making power over how resources are allocated - toward current consumption (including luxuries) or toward future production (investment). Capitalism tends to concentrate that decision power in the hands of those who are best at growing capital, which raises total prosperity but also increases inequality.

Consumption uses up wealth; investment grows it. People like Musk have a lot of wealth because they’ve been good at growing it. We should absolutely guard against wealth hijacking politics - but it would be shortsighted to treat their continued investment as a net negative for society.

You're misapplying the broken window fallacy. I'm not arguing consumption is good because it creates value, I'm arguing that it is not "taking from society" as the OP claimed. Consumption is the entire point of production.

Wrt your points about wealth holding and investment, you're assuming the allocation of a billionaire's wealth is efficient and productive. This ignores that private returns are not social returns, it assumes that growing capital is what is best for society, and frames the question as investment vs consumption, when the question is "who controls investment decisions?" Your argument smells very similar to Reagan's trickle-down economics which has been disproved through decades of data showing tax cuts don't generate promised growth. Inequality continues to increase, while median wages stagnate.

I agree invested capital finances production, but I disagree that extreme concentration optimizes for this. Broad and diverse investment mechanisms would allocate capital more effectively than a small number of individuals basing their decisions on private returns.

Consider the equation of exchange: MV=PQ (money supply x velocity of money = nominal GDP). As wealth concentrates, velocity in the real economy decreases. Billionaire capital cycles through financial assets instead of cycling through the real economy (wages buy goods and services which pay wages). A lower velocity means either lower GDP or central banks must increase the money supply, risking asset bubbles (hmm, sounds likes whats happening right now ). Evidence suggests a dollar is stronger in the hands of the working class creating immediate economic activity and supporting local businesses, compared to a dollar in an asset portfolio.

I agree that consumption is the point of production in the long run, but that does not mean consumption is neutral in terms of tradeoffs. When someone consumes, the underlying real resources are gone and cannot be used for other purposes. That is the core of the broken window point: activity can rise while net wealth falls if resources are used in less productive ways than the alternatives. Saying consumption is not "taking from society" skips over the opportunity cost of what could have been built with the same labor and capital.

On who controls investment, it is fair to worry about political influence, but it does not follow that highly concentrated private wealth is mostly idle or socially useless. Large fortunes are usually claims on productive assets that employ people and produce goods and services. Capital markets already involve broad and diverse mechanisms like index funds, pensions, and institutional investors that pool the savings of millions of non wealthy people and allocate them based on expected returns. That is not perfect, but it is not simply a handful of billionaires directing everything according to whim.

The equation of exchange point also overstates the role of velocity in judging what is good for the economy. A dollar that flows into an asset is not disappearing from the real economy. It is funding someone else who is selling equity or debt and who will use that for wages, R&D, or capital spending. Lower velocity at the cash register can be consistent with higher long run output if more of today’s income is channeled into projects that raise productivity tomorrow. High velocity tied to fragile consumption and low investment can look good in the short term but leave people poorer over time.

Faced with subtle lies you may prefer the obvious ones.

That depends on whether or not the obviousness of the lies tracks with the zeal with which atrocities enabled by that dislocation from reality are undertaken.

But I suppose that there's plenty of evidence that it doesn't.

One thing I keep wondering, though, is whether “life” is tied more to the particular chemistry and environment it uses or to its patterns (the abstract information structure that can, in principle, be re-instantiated on different substrates).

If it’s the patterns that matter, do you think it’s actually impossible for those patterns to be transmitted across interstellar distances? Just like a cup of ocean water is packed with DNA, it’s at least conceivable that what we call “cosmic background noise” could, in principle, hide extremely compressed life-patterns that only an advanced civilization could recognize and reconstruct back into something we’d meaningfully call “alive.” And of course, the more efficiently you code that information, the more it statistically has to look like random noise.

Not saying this is likely -- just that if the essence of life is informational rather than chemical, "traveling" could look very different for any life that is suitably advanced.