Newsletter

Hello,

Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:

New Articles:

Uncertainty vs Risk

Excerpt: I’ve been talking about we’re all quite scared of bias, but actually bias is quite handy. It’s a preference for precision—you can ignore a noisy world because you have some expectations about how things are going to play out. But you don’t always know when to be biased, or when to open yourself up to the noisy world. So, sometimes you’re biased when you shouldn’t be, and sometimes you’re paralysed by indecision when you should have just gone from the gut. This article explores the lever that sits under that process—uncertainty.

Main idea: Our brains track two kinds of uncertainty. Expected uncertainty makes us trust our model of the world more and exploit familiar patterns (be biased). Unexpected uncertainty makes us explore and update our model (prefer noise). Correctly diagnosing the uncertainty is the key.

New Marginalia:

I’m not going to pretend to understand this properly, but the main thing I took away is that old mate reckons:

1. direct-collapse supermassive black holes somehow produce universes; then
2. galaxies form around them and produce a bunch of stellar-mass black holes; then
3. life evolves, resulting in technology that eventually generates a bunch of tiny black holes for energy.

So universes are black hole reproduction, in the natural selection sense. It’s not even the main point. Something about how the way the black holes produce universes means we don’t need to explain dark matter anymore.

This shorter, more punchy version tells us that people are paying attention to the theory.

And I’m not overly fussed whether this ends up being true or not. Just that this can be true makes me feel like my little articles talking about how we can’t understand the world, so we make everything an ideology are a little more salient.

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Cheating with AI. It’s mostly narrative, but I liked it. I went to a conference recently where the guy who co-wrote the 2024 paper demonstrating we can’t tell what papers spoke. It doesn’t seem like there’s a fix in the works. And it makes me wonder, is this something that’s distasteful now, and won’t really matter in a few years? Or is this going to end up a problem?

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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 stuff does work, even if just at the margins. Fun. There’s 101 of them, and I guarantee you that knowing them will not stop you from falling for them.

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Tales Of The Yucca Man. This is a cryptid I’d never heard of. I love these.

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Strawson on panpsychism. I think panpsychism—the idea that everything is trivially ‘conscious’—is disappointing:

Panpsychists say that, perhaps, consciousness is what things are. Consciousness is the intrinsic nature of all things. Rather than being a “small part of the vast universe, residing in the central nervous systems of living things … the panpsychist claims that consciousness is everywhere”.3 Down to the smallest components of the material world, everything has some capacity for experience, no matter how simple.

And then they sort of stop. Panpsychists are basically agnostic on what this might mean. No one really broaches the subject of what it might mean for an atom to have experience in some unimaginably tiny form. No one has ideas about how all these smaller capacities for experience coalesce into the complex form we experience day to day. It’s the very same gap we were left with before.

Anyway, here’s Galen Strawson on it, which makes me feel slightly less exasperated but still only leaves one with questions. So first the recap:

Let me give you what I see as the kind of the basic argument for panpsychism, if you’re already a materialist or a monist. It goes like this. 1) Materialism is true — everything in the universe is wholly physical. 2) Consciousness certainly exists. (The first two premises are the same as before). 3) No radical emergence: Consciousness could not possibly arise from something that was in its fundamental nature wholly and utterly non-conscious. So, conclusion: Consciousness must in some way be already there at the bottom of things.

Then his answer for my annoyance:

What I think about the stuff [things are] made of is what some people say is best thought of as simply energy; I think of that kind of energy as already intrinsically consciousness-involving.

One more thing I should say straightaway: You can think that — let’s just talk in terms of electrons — the electrons that make up the chair are (in the sort of fizzing energy that constitutes their being) somehow consciousness-involving without thinking that when you put them together into the shape of a chair you get a new, as it were, subject-of-experience.

It no more follows from the fact that there’s a sense in which the stuff the chair is made out of is consciousness than it follows that a football team is a conscious subject because it’s made up of conscious subjects.
…
partly because I think that interesting animal consciousness biologically evolved for a purpose, and that wouldn’t happen in the case of the chair.

Which feels like it makes sense for a few seconds. But then you’re still left with the gap between whatever the experience-stuff is and this new ‘consciousness’ stuff. So why bother inventing a new medium? Doesn’t feel super different to dualism, posed like this.

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Why can’t biology move faster? Than designed systems, that is. Basically complexity, but interesting read.

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I hope you found something interesting.

You can find links to all my previous missives here.

Warm regards,

Dorian | btrmt.