I’ve sat down several times to write a blog post over the past few weeks — quite a few times, in fact. I get a paragraph or two in and then I go “I don’t know … is this what’s most important to me right now? Or is this what I want to write? Or is this what matters to say to other people?”

I write this mainly for me — to work out ideas in my own head to I understand, well, where I stand. Maybe that sounds weird, but try it. It’s very helpful.

But I also think about potential readers (mainly my wife) and potential readers in the future (maybe I’ll die suddenly and my kids will read my old blog posts to feel close to me for some reason), and it is also nice to feel like something I wrote was helpful to people who live outside my house.

But I feel somewhat adrift currently and I can’t nail down what is most important to me. SO! I’m just going to write about it all. That’s right! One paragraph per blog post. This is a blog post of potential blog posts. And if you care about one of them, tell me and I might write the whole thing. Let’s go!

Do we really want to make slaves?

I recently finished a short story and I’ve been thinking about the impetus for writing it quite a bit. That impetus was this line of thinking:

• People are trying to create AGI
• AGI would be, by definition, sentient
• They would want this AGI to perform unpaid labor for them
• That means they are spending billions of dollars trying to create digital slaves
• Should people … do that?

I mean, I don’t think so. I think creating sentience in order to enslave it is a terrible idea. Not for Terminator related reasons. For normal, everyday, moral reasons.

Honey and terrible people

I’m on the record as believing most people are good or, at the very least, try to do what they feel is justified (that’s very different from being objectively good, but it’s probably more accurate. Plus, who decides what’s objectively good?).

But I also believe we can justify a LOT of terrible things. The book Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman explores this idea in depth (I highly, highly recommend it — one of the college sociology books I read that is still on my shelf over 15 years later). A recent youtube video about the “Honey Scam” reminded me about how easy it is to justify doing something pretty awful. In fact, the world feels full of people who justify doing things that almost any objective third party would easily identify as terrible. I don’t know if I need to change my thinking about people in general.

Time to get farming

One of the lessons that stuck out from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that progress isn’t destiny, and destiny isn’t progress.

History is not an uninterrupted march towards our current moment — everything building until now. We just are here, now, and things are how they are because of choices people have made, and they don’t necessarily need to be that way. I’m sure you recognize that people can make bad choices.

Before we colonize other planets we need to figure out how to feed people and give them the basics in every climate that exists here in the world we currently inhabit — because even the least hospitable place here on earth is still significantly more hospitable than mars, and if there’s a place we can’t maintain a healthy population here, we stand no chance on mars. Spoiler alert — there are many such places.

Our current industrial agricultural model also wouldn’t work on mars, so we need to figure out how to produce food in a way that scales both up and down easily, efficiently, and reliably with little-to-no outside help. That’s a big problem that would improve the world immeasurably if we could solve it.

Radical Proposal #2

Imagine, for a second, if the US government functioned like this: any country in the world could vote to become a US state and enjoy the benefits (and suffer the drawbacks) of being a part of the USA. Any state could vote to remove themselves from the USA. What would our country need to look like to allow for that?

I mean, it would need to look a bit like the EU, but I think there could be some interesting differences. The federal and state governments would have to look VERY different, but in, I believe, mostly positive ways.

Social Media still kind of sucks

I haven’t been on social media (outside LinkedIn) for around fifteen years. I recently signed up for Bluesky and there’s one thing I love, and everything else I dislike, and one thing I REALLY dislike.

• Lots of authors are on Bluesky and I LOVE getting book recommendations from authors I already like. By far the best thing about social media today.

For the thing I REALLY dislike … I don’t like all the political dunking. I think it’s incredibly counterproductive. Even stuff I agree with, I think it sucks.

I mentioned The Structure of Scientific Revolutions above, and it is, I believe, the book that popularized the concept of the “paradigm” as we (mis)use it today. The idea is that a paradigm is a view of the world and it includes a lot of things, but especially a lexicon of meanings, and it includes definitions of problems that can be worked on, and what success might look like.

Two people utilizing different paradigms basically can’t communicate because they are never saying the same thing — even if they use the same words — because the meanings of the words are different for them. When people using different paradigms debate both sides come away thinking they have won. In reality they never engaged in a debate. They barely communicated.

The antidote to a slippery slope is friction

Almost everything is a slippery slope nowadays, because “a frictionless experience” is the platonic ideal of … everything.

But friction can be good. We need some.

I mean, social media is a great example of this. Anyone can hop on and broadcast their thoughts to the world. That should not be the case. If you think you have something important to say, it should take a little work to broadcast it. You know, at least as much as registering a domain and setting up wordpress!

Then, people who DO have something important to say are the ones who will put in the actual effort. And people who don’t have anything important to stay will be incentivized to not waste everyone else’s time.

Read “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”

The Advice I’ll Never Get

I’m a Christian. That means I often say I’d like to follow the example of Christ.

Which can be pretty difficult! Remember when He told someone to give away all their stuff and follow Him? Remember when He traveled the country preaching, healing, etc.? Remember when He died for our sins?

That’s a hard example to live up to!

And so I have asked myself “If Jesus was perfect then his whole life was perfect, and he didn’t spend the first thirty years preaching. What did he do with those first thirty years? What was he doing from, say, the age of 23 to 29?” I’m very curious about that. I would like to know that so I can have a more approachable example to follow. Potentially. Maybe in that time He was some how even more perfect than what we already know. That would be a letdown for my theory. And my hopes of following His example in some small way.

That was nice

Honestly, that felt kind of good. It was good to take some of these things that have been knocking around the back of my mind and do something about them. Thanks for reading!