William Eliot

I can’t see the hyenas.

On generic startup 'about us' pages.

On memories, artificial and natural.

On passing crazy ideas down the generations.

On neural networks and Newton.

On an broken binary system.

On the feeling of speechlessness.

On the diversity of advice from influencers.

On distribution of compute across a simulated universe.

On things that last.

On information delivery through word order.

On realising the ubiquity of selection dynamics.

On looking deep in a mirror.

On replacing poetic thoughts with scientific ones, and vice-versa.

I express my confusion over the value of truth to Robin Hanson and Agnes Callard, and together we ponder the benefits of fiction and of fact.

I ask Agnes Callard and Robin Hanson how we are biased towards being alive, and not dying. We consider whether a human could drop this bias, but come to no useful conclusion.

The following letter, typed out on a coarse sheet of paper, was hand-delivered to the Office of Rational Intelligence Discovery, Whitehall.

Is self-destruction an undesirable behaviour by default? No, but we typically associate it with a sort of failure.

The befouling of Earth will eventually be visible to you. Until it's invisible against the darkness of space.

I could be killed by a lightning bolt and never know the difference.

This life is total darkness, but not black like space, or one's favourite ink.

Autonomy must be debased by the conditions of existence that frown upon our ability to be truly free.