Gordon's Notes

1. I was right about polling being worthless 2. At least Biden was spared humiliation  3. Americans chose oligarchy willingly.  4. Our feebl...

I have a dark past. I asked questions. In class. Lots of questions. Too many questions. I hear things, I get ideas, I notice gaps, I ask que...

These days my social media experience is largely Mastodon. There's something to be said about a social network that's so irreparably...

One of the fun things that happens to Americans as we become redundant to life's requirements is signing up for Medicare. There's a ...

Scott Aaronson, who works on AI safety for OpenAI, wrote a critique of AI Pause that was not up to his usual standards. Here's what I w...

TL;DR: It's not that ChatGPT is miraculous, it's that cognitive science research suggests human cognition is also not miraculous. &q...

Robert F Kennedy Jr showed up in a scrum of pro-measles whackos recently. It  me wonder how he got so nuts. There’s an extensive wikipedia...

I am a strong-AI pessimist. I think by 2100 we’ll be in range of sentient AIs that vastly exceed human cognitive abilities  (“ skynet ”). Su...

My #1 son is a special needs adult. He’s excited to start at $10/hour job running food around a sports stadium. It’s work he can do — he’s g...

It’s a human thing. Something insane happens and we try to figure out “why now?”. We did a lot of that in the fall of 2001. Today I looked b...

For reference - DeLong’s  Peak Human  and my  Mass Disability are synonyms. Both refer to a surplus of productive capacity relative to labo...

How, a friend asked, did I come up with the 40% number for “mass disability” that I quoted in  After Trump: reflections on mass disability i...

How do you give someone who has committed themselves to a bad cause a way out? You don’t do it by beating on how stupid they are … From  H...

XKCD ’s Randall Munroe , the notorious interstellar  sAI , has published a simplified vocabulary explanation of Special and General Relativi...

I’ve been digging into thunderbolt 2 lately. It’s an orphan technology — sure looks like Apple has given up on it. In retrospect either App...

Donald Trump as the voice of the non-college 50% . TNC on the mass (black) incarceration society - and reparations . Hundreds of colleges p...

The minds we experience  are based on multiple overlapping, redundant and competitive brain systems (I don’t get the term “degeneracy” btw) ...

Revisiting  something I wrote 14 years ago  reminded me of the tools I use to think about the world. Once those tools were conversation, pap...

Epistemic closure (in political thought) . Confirmation bias  [6]. Availability heuristic  ( Kahneman System 1 ). Premature cognitive commit...

I have the face of a Disney villain . This came to me as a slowly unfolding personal revelation after reading Emily Matchar’s humorous ess...