A civically robust information-sharing and discussion system.

The use of overlapping Webs of Trust with well defined meanings to appoint the curators of content tags in a way that is easy to grow, easy to collectively moderate, and when it needs to be, subjective. As far as I can tell, this will make content tags much more practical than they previously have been, and it'll enable a whole lot of really important conversations and community processes that weren't possible before.

A writeup on the unexplored breadth of the applications of webs of trust.

A cohabitive game is a multiplayer game that's not purely competitive, nor purely cooperative. A little anarchic dojo where players can develop the art, craft and social rhythms of thriving in pluralistic conditions, with players having stark differences in might and in values. Today, the culture and craft of peace is underdeveloped. I hope that cohabitive games can help laypeople and theorists both to develop their intuitions for cooperative bargaining, because we seem to need it.

I think they're likely to end up being better games in general. There are principled reasons to expect cohabitive games to support livelier table dialog and richer strategic relationships than ordinary purely competitive or cooperative games can, once we've acclimated to them.

Full article.

A puzzle game about drawing glyphs and developing correct theories through experimentation. A story about two futures.

A media scene.

A podcast associated with dream shrine, where we chat about our craft, figure things out, exhibit collaborative dialog. (Nothing has released yet, but you can subscribe to it to be notified when things start coming together.)

A vivid, detailed, plausible rendition of a future-history in which our world meets with the worst contingencies in the development of AI, and survives. The first-winning entry in the Future of Life Institute's 2022 positive worldbuilding contest.

Told through short stories, a timeline of events, and a Q&A.

It discusses the scenario where capabilities arrive abruptly but alignment is hard, in which the world needs to manage unprecedented levels of global coordination. I propose that humanity will not survive this outcome unless it's prepared to very quickly produce clear demonstrations of the presence of danger.

So I outline a technical programme for relatively safely demonstrating the danger, and an international response to it. I have doubts about these solutions, there are always doubts, we'll just have to sit down and do the work if we want to see whether they're resolvable.

There's are also some depictions of success at the end.

For non-fictional (... is a prophesy fictional?) discussion of this area, I wrote this little page to explain why some of us must prepare for super-human AI before it arrives.

You may also want to read the appendix, a non-fictional exploration of some of the core ideas from the worldbuild, with much more thorough discussion of the technical program.

A short story/thought experiment/speculative scifi about why we need a concept of anthropic measure that's related to but conceptually distinct from the agency behaviors of consciousness. It wasn't totally clear to me that there existed a hard problem of consciousness until I found this thing. I think it clarifies a lot.

the story

tweets

A short story set in an era of long reflection, where things have mostly turned out alright. Written as a part of Issue 1 of the sleep-advocacy project; Zs (it got in Zs because it depicts a time and place where it's very much alright to relax, extols the virtues of napping) https://somnotica.com/issue-1/being-patient-with-challenging-reading.html

A vaguely interactive abstract frustration about memetic evolution and agency. (android app)

A Glance Font. A font reduced to the simplest and most pronounced shapes. I made bokik to test the hypothesis that a fluent reader of a glance font would be able to read faster or with fewer errors (or assumptions) than can be had with traditional typefaces. As far as I'm aware, no one has ever become a fluent reader. Please tell me if this changes.

It looks like this. I expect that becoming fluent in bokik wont be easy, people don't read letter by letter, they read word by word, so it doesn't just require you to learn 26 things, it may end up requiring you to learn around 50,000.

I've made a trainer program for learning to read bokik, but I haven't given it a serious attempt, myself. While making it, it occurred to me that there are a few changes I'd like to make to bokik, before I learn it. Next time I stumble across a decent font editor. Until then, I recommend the trainer program only to the adventurous.

The trainer program itself tests another hypothesis: Do humans learn efficiently as a result of seeing inputs, attempting a prediction, then being shown the output? This is how artificial neural networks learn, and reading bokik is the kind of simple sensory processing task that ANNs do, so I'd expect this to work for humans too? I'm excited to find out.

Utilitarian laws for a fluid type of city where land is allocated in whatever suggested arrangement minimizes unnecessary moves while maximizing propinquity (good adjacency) according ticketholders' (residents) desire expressions and the city's aggregation law, obviating rent, restructuring the city to optimize the needs of its communities (occasionally forming new communities), enabling much better standards of living.

Anyone with insight into numerical modeling, voting theory, policy communication, construction or urban economics please get in touch and help me to either refute or implement it.

It's difficult to build a great city when it is primarily owned by uncoordinated, unaccountable individuals with relatively little interest in the health of the whole. Proq offers an alternative.

Full article

It's canon that Link met the goddess of wisdom, prior to Link's Awakening. What might have happened if he had lingered longer in her company and become an unbearable consequentialist goth with strong feelings about simulation ethics, before arriving at grim Koholint? Do not read this, it's awful. There is very little design in it. Some people seem to enjoy it. Epub version