FICTION

Nifty, thrifty Swifties (fifty_swifties) <2024-180

Electronics allergy (come up with wittier title) <2024-220
    Pat gets experimental Russian HIV treatment
    side effect (discovered one morning) is allergic reaction to phone (and later all electronics)
    cope how?

Prompts from J.M. <2024-220

Crusade against information (fiction) (anti_info) <2024-220
    Sam experiences very direct pain from Sewivadan "intoxicants"
    Sam wields a gadget leading them to electronics to destroy

Allergic Luddite Rashomon (fiction) (...) 2024-351
    write from first-person perspectives of Sam, Leslie, Alex, and Pat
    one is electronics-allergic Luddite terrorist
    another is victim
    two other characters, somehow

Unorthodox Union (fiction) (...) 2024-352
    behaviours and implications of a neo-religion with the exact opposite rules of Judaism
    only eat treif food?
    only work on Shabbat?

ENLX101 (fiction) (...) 2024-353
    professor is someone silly like Leslie Neyret, idk
    written into a world with no LLMs, nor good chatbots any other way
    teacher demonstrates determinism/predictability of human speech and its effects
    analogy to other engineering
    contemptuous comparison to English classes

PRACTICAL WEIRDNESS

CSS is very powerful (css_power) <2024-220
    example: index tag selector
    example: ordinal date converter via calc(...) abuse?

If I ran the classes (...) 2024-250
    maths, english (cf rcdc), history (cf predictive), science, there may be others
    maybe write as story

Spaced repetition for dance (dance_study) <2024-200

Bombs: a card game (...) 2024-232
    learn and summarise from old document (circa 2016? 2018?)
    maybe retitle and replace terms to be less violent

Do people understand percentages? (...) 2024-287
    check for prior art
    run an experiment, perhaps via local university resources

Negligible utility of voting (...) 2024-310
    argument based on lots of multiplication
    consider the value of differences in policies and the relative values of average Americans vs self
    consider the probabilities of your vote affecting the election and of your vote being "correct"
    likely conclusion: voting has some utility as a function of your confidence in the correct vote, and in the diff. between your values and average values, which is only useful under occasional given circumstances
    "democracy relies on the will of the people" democracy should care about the values of the people, but the policy to pursue that value should be picked by only the wise (focus just on this?)

The Hanoi graph as a three-way "number line" (...) 2024-360
    describe Hanoi graph
    describe neighbour relation
    neighbour relation (in ternary) is quite like increment/decrement (in binary)
    each node has a neighbour roughly up, roughly left, roughly right

Should we still write? (...) 2025-052
    ask an LLM to write from the cruxes of each of my recent/innovative posts
    check whether it recalled from having read them itself
    check whether it captures all the corollaries/nuances at similar quality
    perhaps human writing is obsolete?

Physicist mindset (...) 2025-071
    by analogy to "business mindset" by Lsusr (whoa)
    "toilets are a general mechanism for discarding objects via water"
    you can do pull-ups on anything
    "humans all the way down" is kinda a special case of this
    you can crudely model automobiles (from observations) without knowing there are humans within
    nothing magic about life, it's just a "strategy" by which structures become common

FUNKY REFLECTIVE STUFF

Crimes ignored in common morals (moral_crime) <2024-180

The joy of scheduling (schedule_joy) <2024-200
    example: sabbath (cf comparative advantage argument, this one seems closer?)
    example: taking tests (that one i kinda nailed?)
    example: try some more dakka, write about experiences

Still destroyed by madness (howl_again) <2024-200
    parody of Ginsberg's "Howl", modernised to reflect what's wrong with the kids these days

Consistently-seldom-used third places (...) <2024-200

You learn more from (novel) success (success_learning) <2024-180
    cf boon_bane

I am a humour microscope (humour_microscope) <2024-180
    follow-up to loud_laugh

All your friends are filtered (filtered_friends) <2024-210

Layers of willpower (willpower_layers) <2024-180
    what even is this?
    maybe i meant: most of the time, i act by habit/inertia; i have lucid moments where willpower matters

Interval and ratio variables (...) <2024-220
    check for prior art
    detailed comparison, intuition-loading, theorems
    interval variable is log of ratio variable

Shifting control between hypothalamus and cerebrum (...) <2024-225
    example: drinking vs storing water
    example: eating vs storing food
    example: constant clothing, outdoors, vs variable clothing and heating/AC

Fungibility as a form of entropy (...) <2024-225
    fungible : entropic :: distant : counterfactual
    entropy: variety of exact forms (microstates) that look the same as far as we care (macrostates)
    fungibility: variety of copies of the object that are acceptable substitutes
    both are logarithms and so both interval variables (this totally fits)
    go further, perhaps, for "thermoeconomics" in general
    wait maybe i completely misunderstand "fungible"

Living without taste (...) <2024-225
    cf ascetic hedonism (close overlap in concepts)
    bring up the transfer function, like x^(1/4) from a normal person's rating to mine (0 to 1)
    example: food (pizza is better than lettuce ... i guess)
    example: people's appearance as targets of attraction
    example: music (Arrival of the Birds is better than Need to Know ... i guess)

10 broad ideas I take seriously (...) <2024-227
    prediction is compression is understanding
    determinism (including on humans, cf "could" stuff)
    ubiquitous, avoidable brain-rot
    memory is associative
    preferences reduce options
    what matters must be observable
    positives are more specific than negatives
    20/80 rule and its extensions (4/64, etc)
    humans all the way down
    words are arbitrary
    barbell strategies
    tools are fragile
    "want" is distinct from "like"
    feelings aren't special

Additive dimensional analysis (or, positions and distances) (additive_dimension) <2024-200
    example: quadratic formula

Complex rules in mundane life (mundane_rules) <2024-180
    hand hygiene finite state machine
    when do i wear spectacles?
    there's more, of course?

Habitual spontaneity (...) 2024-282
    cf ascetic hedonism
    if you get stuck in ruts too much, make a habit of jumping between ruts easily
    let's see how the "experiment" plays out

Becoming icepilled (icepilled) 2024-246
    an ice pill does nothing, i.e. avoid ideology
    perhaps more descriptive of what i really do is voidpill (check usage)

What irks me of common writing (...) 2024-289
    better title ofc
    it's arguments by authority ("citing sources") all the way down
    instead, cite sparsely, for measurements you couldn't take yourself, or better explanations
    write by logic and personal experience
    perhaps my field biases me

Logical fallacies are only kinda wrong (...) 2024-304
    look up list, as from Purdue OWL
    for each one, argue how the pattern really does provide some evidence (in the Bayesian sense)
    however, we regard them as fallacies sith they are overconfident

Diversity is an anti-bane (...) 2024-313
    common views promote it like a boon
    the bane in question: "discriminating" by criteria that don't really matter

Experiences and labels (...) 2024-362
    make wittier term for "experiences"
    the dichotomy's really a spectrum
    children vs adults (and why we ended up this way)
    relative ease of labels
    practices to favour experiences
    alt'ly: examples and definitions

Death by many cuts (...) 2025-053
    counterpoint to Lsusr's "Death by a single cut"
    inspired by Yudkowsky on Einstein's confidence: if you act only when decently sure, any action you take had multiple reasons to favour it
    cf AN #1478

LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY

Silence over stuttering (stuttering)

Language is for ease and safety (safe_language)
    what is the function of language?
    what would we do without language?
    cases where that breaks down
    cases where we actually do that in modern language (or "language")
    cf icepilling

Arithmetic axiomatisation of difficulty (difficulty_arith)
    for independent tasks, diff(A then B) = diff(A) + diff(B)
    for independent tasks, diff(A while B) ≥ diff(A) + diff(B)
    diff(effortless) = 0, diff(impossible) = ∞

It's adjectives all the way down (adjectives)
    toki pona suffices
    sentence structure: (CONTEXT la)* SUBJ (li PRED)+ (PREP PP)*
    subject is adjectives (duh) and nouns (secretly adjectives, "jan" is just "ijo jan", kinda)
    predicate is verb, but verbs are fake, really just adjectives
    processes are the sum of their snapshots
    subject-predicate is topic-comment, adjectives on both sides
    object is part of subject
    prepositions can be part of topic (as in "mi moku e pan lon tomo") or part of comment (as in "mi jan lon tomo")
    "there is bread in the house" = "pan li lon tomo" = "tomo li jo e pan"
    context is topic-comment pair, repurposed as topic

It's verbs all the way down (verbs)
    isomorphic to adjectives, but alternative, as in Daoism's contradictions, perhaps

The null action is an illusion (null_action)
    you're always doing something
    skipping something expands all later things
    ignoring a decision lets the outside world decide
    minimalism is redistribution

Multiple meanings of "difficult" (...)
    study my corpuses and cluster usages
    it might just be "requiring great preparation/skill to do correctly"

My legs brought me here (specific_cause)
    "what makes you say that?" "my brain controlling my mouth"
    "what brings you here?" "legs"
    problem: those answer "what makes you say things?" and "what brings you places?" in general

Tighten negatives, end with positives (limited_negative)
    tighten e.g. "i've never known the sky to be green" to "i've always known the sky isn't green"
    to "i've always known the sky is non-green"
    tighter negatives are easier to work with (analogy to Fitch-style proofs)
    positives are systematically more specific
    the last input sticks in the mind (limited memory fills + peak-end rule)

VAGUE PROMPTS THAT MAYBE SUCK

Whence extraordinary seriousness? (or, generalised Chesterton's fence) (general_chesterton)

Statistical theory of gender (search for prior art, be very careful)
    definition of gender
    explain relevance of "selling nonapples"
    invalidate and revalidate trans

Economic value is in the mind (search for prior art)

Reversible logic (search for prior art)

Logic is applied neuroscience (reference xkcd 435 at the start)

Christianity's God does not induce a moral law

Conjunction fallacy (P(A & B) > P(A)) is a problem with the questioner (make a clever title?)

Risks of agentic estimators

Missing the trees for the forest (in chemistry, in nutrition, ...)

Vitamin M (mindfulness/meditation, by analogy to Raptitude's miraculos)
