analects noun, pl

/ˈan.ə.lɛkts/

a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings.

Wealth Architecture

stuff On the means of life

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...
  • 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...
  • 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...
  • politics and spirituality are entangled 16 Jun 2025 [marginalium] for many of those who self-identified as “evangelical,” it is not just about devotion to a local church, but to a general orientation to the...
  • agi is far away 10 Jun 2025 [marginalium] AGI is far away. I only really skimmed this—it’s about the slow productivity gains from what seems to be enormous bursts of growth in AI cap...
  • 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...
  • the speed of ai take-off 8 Jun 2025 [marginalium] The speed of AI take-off. Videocast with Tyler Cowan and Azeem Azhar. It’s just good quality AI speculation. 50 mins. Worth a listen.
  • 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...
  • 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...
  • can we trust social science yet? 23 May 2025 [marginalium] Can We Trust Social Science Yet? Short answer is no, but it’s a good introduction into where social sciences are falling down. In particular...
  • the era of the business idiot 23 May 2025 [marginalium] The Era Of The Business Idiot. Intro through some of the sillier uses of AI into a critique of the Rot Economy: a useful description for ho...
  • ai in the military classroom 23 May 2025 [marginalium] AI in the Military Classroom. Actually AI in all classrooms. Actually the future of AI use for anything that requires education (think consu...

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