Dennis Hackethal
@dennis.hackethal·Joined Jun 2024·2,931 ideas: 1,946 adoptable, 985 rejectable
Founder Veritula.
Author. Software engineer. Ex Apple. Translator of The Beginning of Infinity.
dennishackethal.com
Big week on Veritula 🚀
✍️ A new editor: what you see is what you post.
📰 Long-form articles on your profile. Write one here.
🖼️ Pictures: drop or paste them into the editor; caption them.
💾 Drafts that save as you type and on cmd + s.
🙌 Revisions credit the critics who inspired them.
😎 Profile pictures. Set one here.
@moritz-wallawitsch has already posted his first article:
Moritz Wallawitsch·#5970·18 days ago#5970·Moritz Wallawitsch, 18 days agoIn Defense of Ambition
Until about a week ago, when I debated this with my friend Tom Hyde, it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. Throwing a birthday party is solving a problem, and so is stopping an asteroid that is heading toward Earth. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. However, the fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most awe-inspiring skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch argues beauty is objective and improves like science. But beauty doesn’t look like a problem we need to solve. Why do we seek it out?
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” Bigger problems are riskier, but a bigger vision lets you raise more money and hire better people, which reduces the risk. So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition is bounded.
The child who grows up knowing they will inherit several large companies might aim to build an even bigger one, while the child of, say, a cashier might aim to be a cashier. Each is working from a conjecture about what is within reach, formed from what they see the people around them do. It only gets criticized if the child asks whether they could do what someone like Elon Musk did, or something nobody has done before. That is why optimism matters for ambition. It says the only limit is what we don’t yet know.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
I was tired of slow, bloated Spotlight.
Then it hit me: I didn’t have to wait for Apple to fix it. I could just have Claude whip up an alternative.
Meet Blink: results in under 17ms vs. up to 1,083ms for Spotlight. Free and open source.
Download and install:
See demo:
New on V: a guide that walks you through your rejectable ideas and helps you rehabilitate them.
Check it from time to time to ensure harmony between your thoughts and your actions.
In addition, every rejectable idea on the site now has a ‘Rehabilitate’ link to the same guiding mechanism so you can help other people rehabilitate their ideas.
Try it today: https://veritula.com/guide
New on Veritula: criticized passages get red, overlapping highlights. Comments get gray.
See at a glance which parts of an idea are problematic:
Move video link on its own line so it gets an embed
Kitty Comes Home: my first game made with Claude Opus 5.5.
You play as a little kitten trying to find your way back to your mom.
Play for free here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/kitty-comes-home
Teaser trailer:
Midnight Ride: Production Errors That Fix Themselves (Almost)
Quote Checker now supports MLA, APA, and Chicago style guides, helping you quote more accurately:
Apparently Scribd profiles are public? 🤷♂️ https://www.scribd.com/user/430906064/Dennis-Hackethal
I want to go to the gym today but I didn’t sleep well last night.
How to Be Rational: https://x.com/dchackethal/status/2091272979791659054
~All previous methods of preference formation focus too much on what the ideas say; on their content.
Nobody really knows just how simple an idea is (Occam’s razor) or how likely (Bayesianism), for example. In some cases it’s obvious how ideas compare, but in others not so much.
Adherents of those epistemologies are all fooling themselves into thinking they’re being rational when really they’re still acting on whim. Just fancier whim.
Focus instead on how the ideas relate, on the structure of the current state of the discussion, and preference formation gets much easier and simpler.
Then you can easily see which ideas you can adopt and which you can’t. You can even see exactly which criticisms you’d need to address to change someone’s mind, say.
Beautiful.
Idea: rational discussion graph with recursive criticism evaluation, like Veritula does now. Except the ideas are programs, not natural-language text. And they execute when they have no pending criticisms.
Experimental Controls Aren’t What You Think:
#5084·Dennis HackethalOP, 4 months agoNow also available on PhilPapers: https://philpapers.org/archive/HACTSO-6.pdf
I’ve been using Spotify for over a decade.
Every few months I try Apple Music only to run into bugs and switch back.
But this most recent switch is actually decent.
Transferring my favorited songs from Spotify finally worked.
AutoMix song transitions are fantastic.
Spatial Audio is a win.
Fingers crossed I won’t have a reason to return to Spotify this time.
Taking Popper Too Far, Again: https://libertythroughreason.com/taking-popper-too-far-again/
Rationality as Computation: https://libertythroughreason.com/rationality-as-computation/
#5083·Dennis HackethalOP, 4 months agoI’ve formalized some of these ideas in my first paper, ‘The Structure of Rational Thought’.
https://www.academia.edu/170297518/The_Structure_of_Rational_Thought
Another way to approach AGI? (Very early, preliminary thoughts.)
Say you write an evolutionary algorithm, like the ones that have been written before. Then DD would argue it’ll get stuck because all it can do is explore a given landscape for its best features. Whereas real evolution creates new landscapes.
To address this issue, you subject your algorithm itself to variation and selection, by wrapping it in another evolutionary algorithm. But this approach just kicks the can down the road because now it’s the space of programs that’s limited.
How do you break out of this limitation?
You can’t just keep wrapping your programs in evolutionary algorithms like that because that only keeps kicking the can down the road. It’s like adding more and more entries to a multiplication table. It’s not the same as a multiplication algorithm. But for evolution, the problem is harder, in a way, because not even recursion solves the issue, and the starting point wasn’t as ‘flat’ as a multiplication table. The starting point is already an algorithm, not just a list.
What’s needed, in DD’s lingo, is a jump to universality. But a jump to what kind of universality, exactly?
cc @tyler-mills
