Wonders

What bothers you about how the world works?

February 3, 2025

Inspired by Yuval Harari's "Nexus"

Seeing how information is distorted and not fully transparent bothers me the most. Information is a double-edged sword. It solves old problems yet creates new ones. However, many current social systems impose artificial order on the world instead of understanding the world as it is. For example, bureaucracy divides the world into drawers and puts assigned documents into them. Reducing the messiness of reality here helps them keep order, but at the expense of truth - when filling out a form and seeing that none of the listed options fit you, you must adapt yourself to the form rather than it adapting to you.

These supposed social orders also extend to academic fields, because people like dividing them into different subjects and assign separate researchers. This creates distortion, however, as the interconnected fields are treated as independent. For instance, COVID pandemic was simultaneously a historical, biological, and mathematical issue, but the academic study of pandemics is divided between these departments. When you want to contribute to solving the pandemics, you have to choose an exact field to work under, which will limit your understanding of the world. This mode of organization does not encourage taking a holistic approach. I believe real innovation is spontaneous and builds upon a fundamental understanding of reality.

Testing the effectiveness of user prompts.

January 15, 2025

Have used the Thinking Claude prompt for two months already.

Intuitively, the prompt is effective, but I want to know some "scale" on measuring its effectiveness. For instance, applying the concept of ablation study to different parts of the prompt sounds interesting.

How to arrange this page?

December 30, 2024

I'm breaking the 'left 2, right 2' rule here. I might decide the side based on the length/importance e.g., detailed ones on the left, short ones on the right.

How can we get the world to talk about factory farming?

December 18, 2024

Article from Open Philanthropy: Focus on what's new. An enduring moral atrocity is sadly not a news story. Journalists need a news "hook." This could be a new study on animal sentience or animal agriculture's climate impact; a new scandal about food safety or animal cruelty; or new events like factory farm fires or a legislative initiative.

But how? Many measures have shown that pigs are smarter than dogs and cats, yet we humans still like to assume the later can feel more than prior, because we pet the latter but eat the prior.

Segregated Information Theory?

December 17, 2024

Can there be a subjective consciousness within the supposed "conscious realm" of another one?

More detail: I've been having this abstract and absolutely unreasonable thought lately - I dreamt of a person opening his eyes and realizing that he was living in my dream. But the "realization" here can be inferred as subjective experience, therefore supporting the claim above. Yet, if one consciousness can exist within another, then to what extent does this relationship last? Can this large conscious entity exist in an even larger one? That said, what if my dream was instead my personal realization that I'm living in someone else's "conscious realm", just like the person in my own one.

This is largely reflective and unrealistic, but I still think the dream was cool.

Effective Communication in an Open-Source Community?

December 5, 2024

No wages, no prestige, pure passion and contribution. This is fundamentally different from most organizations, but it can be a good thing.

Universe

November 9, 2024

Is there an ultimate nature of reality, a mathematical one, perhaps? (Inspired by Max Tegmark’s book “Our Mathematical Universe” and “Life 3.0”)

Language

November 5, 2024

Chomsky on universal grammar - can it be falsified by LLMs or statistical approach to language modeling?

Some technical ones

September 1, 2024

As machine learning models advance further, will their features become so abstract that they're incongruent with human intuition?

Why did large language models refuse a seemingly innocent request?

Is the world today much better than it used to be?

August 15, 2024

Dec 18, 2024 Update (Wow, this page is actually useful for looking back on my thoughts):

Pessimism is the sales item of the day, and we are facing a different crisis every decade.Yet, the one thing Matt Ridley's book "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves" taught me is that the world isn't perfect, but it's getting better.

Our capacity for good is never outweighed by our destructive instincts. Our progress is shifting from being driven by competition alone to by millions of people choosing to work together and trade fairly. This fundamental goodness is evident in the very fabric of modern society, where mutual benefit drives daily interactions.

In my view, humanity’s most remarkable aspect isn't simple reciprocity, but to collaborate through specialization. We have a collective brain that allows us to focus deeply on specific skills, creating a vast network of expertise. A smartphone represents this perfectly – combining various innovations from electromagnetic principles to user interface design.

As tasks become more specialized, humanity grows better equipped to tackle complex challenges. Climate change, resource scarcity, public health, even the emergence of hallucinating artificial intelligence – these aren't just problems, but opportunities for collective innovation. Since Ridley wrote the book in 2010, time has consistently proven him right. Through continued collaboration, we are living beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, and it is up to us to shape ours. This pattern of progress makes genuine optimism not just possible, but rational.

What would it feel like if I had three arms?

August 11, 2024

TBD

Are there recurring patterns in the things around me that I’m not paying close attention to?

August 10, 2024

Hmm...

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