Systems of government are not to be judged for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.
Philosophy
The enlightenment formula
Buddhist practice can be seen as a re-weighting of the terms in the human (non-optimal) implementation of the Buddha equation.
Why so many lies?
Why do lies emerge in such huge numbers and why do lies have such long half-lives?
Building a new religion
Fact-checking an authoritarian’s statements is a meaningless endeavor. What he says has no relation to epistemology.
Inquiry cures ignorance
We are not always great at learning from each other, together with each other, from history, or from other documented bodies of knowledge. We too often subject too poor models too soon to reality. An important reason is that we seem to have an aversion to inquiry.
The Buddha equation
There is some deep wisdom popping out from Jensen’s inequality.
What is true?
Truth is instrumental to the survival of democracy and indeed the survival of our very species. In this post I try to define what truth is.
Knowledge as a model of the world
Given that the main use of knowledge is to navigate through the world and through life, we can say that ontologically knowledge is our model of the world.
It takes a human to find the dragons
Without intrinsic motivation, the ability to hypothesize beyond training, or the capacity for real-world experimentation, AI will remain a tool that processes human-created information rather than a creator of new knowledge.
Does an AI create new knowledge?
The LLM can interpolate within the knowledge space it’s been trained on, filling in gaps by blending concepts in novel ways. However, it will stay within the convex hull of its training data, constrained by the boundaries of what it has learned.