analects noun, pl

/ˈan.ə.lɛkts/

a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings.

Betterment

stuff On achievement and excellence

show:

analects under the categories btrmt. believes in, as set out in the manifesto

analects organised according to the fundamental questions of philosophy

sequences of articles gathered around a more focused idea

  • ai is shit at reasoning 8 Jul 2026 [marginalium] AI is shit at reasoning. Since I wrote my article on the Enigma of (AI) Reason, this arXiv article has come out, exploring the same fundamen...
  • ai and task fragmentation 4 Jun 2026 [marginalium] AI and task fragmentation. A while back I came across the time-horizon model of AI task automation. It was a somewhat reassuring piece for p...
  • ai dark output 4 Jun 2026 [marginalium] AI Dark Output. I vacillate about how useful AI is. It’s got classic Malcolm Gladwell Shit/Karstic energy. It feels productive, for many peo...
  • space skepticism 30 May 2026 [marginalium] Space skepticism. Essentially, the idea that moving operations to space isn’t going to solve problems we face on earth. Not yet, anyway. Int...
  • ai productivity 22 May 2026 [marginalium] AI productivity. I’m pretty skeptical about AI enhancing productivity (see e.g. AI isn’t changing anything yet and the slow gains despite ap...
  • the era of the business idiot 29 Apr 2026 [marginalium] The Era Of The Business Idiot. Good article on what I have variously called Malcolm Gladwell Shit or karstic traps. I’ll pull a few quotes f...
  • ai simulates conversations 24 Feb 2026 [marginalium] AI simulates conversations. Sometimes, when a problem is hard, LLMs with ‘thinking’ will simulate an internal conversation between different...
  • ai use and skill formation 5 Feb 2026 [marginalium] AI use and skill formation. A paper out of Anthropic’s alignment fellowship program. Coders coding with and without AI. Not super compelled...
  • gnosticism in blood meridian 26 Jan 2026 [marginalium] Gnosticism in Blood Meridian. Fantastic old essay on the Gnostic themes in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I am a little confused by his account...
  • against mcaskillian longtermism 10 Jul 2025 [marginalium] Against McAskillian Longtermism: Whatever is wrong with utilitarians who advocate the murder of a million for a 0.0001 percent reduction in...
  • the economy of small pleasures 8 Jul 2025 [marginalium] The continued failure of the economy of small pleasures. extrinsic incentives such as money or grades to learn [make it] harder to learn ne...
  • the practical inconsequence of the free will debate 7 Jul 2025 [marginalium] The deterministic view of free will always seems to cause such furore, forgetting that whether free will exists or not, this world is so int...
  • dunning-kruger is about noise 3 Jul 2025 [marginalium] The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that: People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about thei...
  • critiquing utilitarianism 2 Jul 2025 [marginalium] I think a lot of people intuitively like the kind of “calculus of pain and pleasure” that utilitarianism offers. But it often falls short of...
  • digital personhood 1 Jul 2025 [marginalium] On the possibilities for secure digital personhood. I am fairly obsessed with this, but my first project on it isn’t very user-friendly. Nor...
  • are intelligentsia less happy 26 Jun 2025 [marginalium] Are intelligentsia less happy? An argument for why intelligent people are less happy—because intelligence does not measure how good you are...
  • love is about betterment 24 Jun 2025 [marginalium] Love is about betterment. Love, in the ancient Greek world, is not about sacrifice but eudaemonia: Diotima shows Socrates that love is a ki...
  • on zoophilia 12 Jun 2025 [marginalium] “only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality. Are their arguments dangerous,...
  • graduates have multiplied faster than the room at the top 12 Jun 2025 [marginalium] Graduates have multiplied faster than the room at the top: The result is a stock of nearly-men and women whose relationship with their own...
  • ai personality extraction from faces (pdf) 9 Jun 2025 [marginalium] AI personality extraction from faces: we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate t...

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