Conversation Topics

Some stuff I might like talking about

• most important to me: "what's your story" (i.e. like what's your life like, how'd you end up in [x place I met you], what do u think about the future and your place in it)

philosophy

• can you systematize ethics
• thoughts on analytic philosophy vs. continental philosophy
• what is the point of philosophy?
• people i can probably talk about, in sort of descending order of competence: wittgenstein, sartre, de beauvoir, camus, rorty, kant, plato, nietzsche, maybe russell, maybe aristotle and a little aquinas
• are aesthetics and morality the same thing (i think so)

literature

• why do we read literature? (literature being some sort of writing that is valued for more than just entertainment/fluff)
• why do we write literature? is it related to why we read it, or is it a distinct motivation? what implications might that have for consuming literature?
• wtf is going on with finnegans wake. he can't be just trolling right? right???
• does it matter how the author intended you to interpret a work of art? are all interpretations valid, even politically inconvenient ones?
• jorge luis borges :)

myths and anthropology

• religion as a pre-packaged sense of meaning for everyone
• religion as a memetically-evolved pre-packaged sense of meaning for everyone
• co-opting or respecting religious aesthetics: is "holiness" worthy of respect? is it worthy of subversion?
• pantheons and stories: greek, roman, egyptian, aztec, inca, scandinavian, indian, chinese, etc.
• thoughts on ritual as a good in itself

ai+alignment

• what is intelligence
• what does "aligned ai" even look like? ai with common sense? a benevolent god?
• alignment policy: how do we balance safe development of ai with risk of state monopolies on ai?
• is "objective morality" just an effective coordination mechanism between agents? is supermoral ai a meaningful idea (banger)

ai-human analogs

• why are LLM prompting techniques useful on humans
• do inner and outer alignment have corresponding analogs in humans? (human alignment theory)
• what is your value function? what is my value function? is it some weird multidimensional piecewise function? don't tell me it's a continuous high-dimensional surface

language

• sapir-whorf hypothesis
• toki pona; nahuatl; sign language; lojban
• what is language?

self+emotions

• what does "I" refer to
• where does the self reside, if it resides anywhere?
• what is love/what are the constituent things bundled into "love"? is it really just evolutionary chemical soup?
• what does it mean to be "rationalist"? is that even a good thing to pursue?
• experiences with psychedelics -- i unfortunately do not have any, so you'd have to tell me about urs :P

math and stuff

• gödel and tarski
• category theory
• what even is math? the study of abstract structures?

programming

• what do you actually use functional programming for i don't get it and am stubbornly unwilling to actually take time to figure it out
• how do you get complex computers from electrical circuits? this isn't even, like, emergent behavior it's just crazy levels of abstraction
• are computers basically magic? do we live in an era of magic
• turing machines, computability theory, lambda calculus (i know of but not really about these things; why are they useful?)

maybe technical stuff; I'm still skilling up but

• thoughts on, idk, transformers vs. mamba? better architectures? are there systematic judgments about what makes better architectures or are we just flailing around
• building RAGs (I mention this because I want to build my own)

(geo)politics

• american hegemony and its consequences
• voting reform
• can nationalism be wielded safely? can any allegiance be accepted wholly while still being critical of the institutions you accept along with it?
• security and defense policy; the military-industrial complex
• where is democracy headed

history

• basically history of any culture/civilization (I know significant american history but not much else with meaningful depth, please tell me about stuff you know)

other

• community building:
• what is "culture" (in a community, in a society)
• interesting projects we/I/you could build
• personal knowledge management
• integrating llms into life effectively
• semiotics?
• antimemetics????

(incomplete list obviously, just to get us started)