Inkhaven menu, part 2

The non-AI blog ideas

Yesterday, I posted 23 ideas of possible blog posts for the remaining 23 days of Inkhaven. They were all AI-adjacent. Today I’ll post 22 ideas of non-AI ones.

I probably won’t write any of these, because priorities, but ya know… maybe if people are particularly keen??

1. My experience recording 100 songs in 100 days
   It was a slog. 30 days blogging is nothing…

2. What I like about soccer
   My favorite sport. So good.

3. Talking to AI about my smoothie recipe
   …It was (shudder) validating…

4. What changed when I became a professor
   I became a morning person, overnight… I swear! It was spooky!

5. Why aren’t there more good public debates?
   Like, seriously… are there any? Can we please do this more, please??

6. Is coral reef preservation the most cost-effective intervention?
   I mean, it doesn’t matter if AI destroys the world, but… Ruth Gates was a (the?) world-leading coral reef researcher and was being funded to the tune of <$5m dollars on a project whose estimated value if successful was…. >2,000,000 times that. I posted about this on the EA forum and… crickets…

7. Radical epistemic humility
   I could muse extensively on things like: What do you know, really? What would the world look like if everyone treated every topic the way academics treat their research? How hard is it to really know things? How do you make decisions under so much uncertainty? How do you respond to a society that rewards overconfidence? etc. etc….

8. Various things about my personal life.
   Yeah right, you wish :P

9. Eliciting my thoughts is hard!
   What’s up with that? Why is it? It’s so much easier when talking to someone than when faced with the blank page.

10. What happened to the counter-culture?
    Do we still have a real counter-culture? Or are we “post-counter-culture”? Did mainstream culture get too unassailably “good” / genuinely wholesome? Am I just an out-of-touch old person?

11. Confident non-sequiters
    It seems like whether something is accepted as a reasonable response to a comment is more about vibes than whether it makes sense. How far can you push this? To what extent does society run on bald assertions of authority?

12. Reflections on management
    What did I learn when I started managing people more as a professor? A lot! Well, let’s hear it then!

13. Growing up with boredom
    I am basically never bored these days. The internet is too full of interesting and entertaining things. The closest I get to boredom is loneliness or waiting in a long line. Boredom used to be such a huge part of my life growing up. What a trip.

14. Is aesthetic realism a real thing?
    I’m basically a moral realism, i.e. I belive in good and bad, right and wrong. But what about beautiful and ugly? On a rational level I think such things are all subjective… but man… I hate (90% or so of) modern pop music so much… and then there’s so much unbearably moving music…

15. “Genuine creativity”
    Does creating something really novel somehow require being isolated from existing culture? Is this a fundamental law of nature or something? Why?

16. Some start-up ideas I’ve had over the years
    From the embarrasingly bad to the things I really ought to try vibe coding this weekend…

17. Could you take over the world with 10,000 copies of yourself?
    A fun thought experiment from a few years back. Lots of interesting strategies and considerations. I swear it’s not about AI ;)

18. What I want from a computer
    It’s not that much, really… It’s mostly about what’s not there… distractions, waiting, non-security-related updates, …

19. Movies that made an impression
    There’s about one a year; I sort of keep a list of them, sort of.

20. Sci-fi story premises
    I was reading Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut. One of the cool things is how there are all these short story premises. I’ve got some of those!

21. Something about genuineness
    It seems like it may be underutilized as a “superpower”.

22. Depictions of evil in studio Ghibli films
    Are there any? There is fear, and misunderstanding, and there are forces in great opposition to each other. But it seems the apparent villains often end up being simply misunderstood, or somehow foolish and pathetic. American children’s movies I grew up with were not like that, but it seems many of today are.
    

There are a lot of other topics I could write about, but I don’t know how much I like sharing personal things online these days. Maybe one day I’ll write a memoir. Or start an anonymous blog. Until then… ciao