analects noun, pl

/ˈan.ə.lɛkts/

a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings.

On Thinking and Reasoning

stuff On knowing things, and how we get there

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...
  • 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...
  • 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 line between sleep and wake 6 Jul 2025 [marginalium] There is a thin line between sleep and wake. You know this if you have sleep paralysis or are a lucid dreamer. In that spirit, here, we have...
  • 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...
  • 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...
  • 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,...
  • understanding bayes 6 Jun 2025 [marginalium] An easy way to understand Bayes. It’s pictoral, based off this book review the author did. It also gets into a bunch of extraneous detail. B...
  • how to do soul-craft with state tools 6 Jun 2025 [marginalium] How To Do Soul-Craft With State Tools: We seem to be grieving literacy in public lately. Thoughtful essays keep appearing—in TheGuardian, T...
  • how to rig a clinical trial 30 May 2025 [marginalium] How To Rig A Clinical Trial. This one’s a great example of the problems with p-values: Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure...
  • pitfalls of ai for information gathering 28 May 2025 [marginalium] Pitfalls of AI for information gathering. Nominally about openai’s Deep Research, but applicable to all: it excels at straightforward quest...
  • being a bit underemployed 23 May 2025 [marginalium] Being a bit underemployed. The only thing interesting about this article is that someone was so surprised they thought it was worth writing...
  • are sunk costs fallacies 11 May 2025 [marginalium] Are Sunk Costs Fallacies? Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer who has one of the most interesting websites I’ve ever come across....
  • the psychology of pricing 8 May 2025 [marginalium] The psychology of pricing. This feels like something I would have written back in 2010. Very one simple trick. But frankly a lot of this stu...
  • metaphors shape minds 1 May 2025 [marginalium] Metaphors shape minds: Scientific analogies can crackle too. Consider one of the puzzles of the visual system: saccades, those rapid, darti...
  • psychedelics demolish assumptions 18 Apr 2025 [marginalium] Psychedelics demolish assumptions: With their uncanny ability to disrupt our ordinary modes of perception and thinking, psychedelics have l...
  • ai will need personality (pdf) 2 Apr 2025 [marginalium] AI will need personality (pdf). MIT researchers gave AI personality traits (OCEAN), then paired them with humans, who were also rated on OCE...
  • how ai thinks (anthropic) 28 Mar 2025 [marginalium] Interesting article on how AI thinks, by Anthropic. Some highlights: Knowing how models like Claude think would allow us to have a better u...

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