Today I handed in my laptop. A part of my extended mind was removed. The shutdown of the Future of Humanity Institute has many odd effects. I have been at FHI since 2006. I interviewed for the job a rainy July day in 2005, apparently impressing people with my interdisciplinary knowledge… and the fact that I could do web design (unheard of in the Oxford philosophy faculty at the time). I moved to Oxford in the chill of January 2006, becoming a part of the university. I soon realized that this was my kind of place, and that I wanted to stay once the project ended. It ended up being 19 years so f ..read more

What are the weirdest probability distributions I have encountered? Probably the fractal synaptic distribution. There is no shortage of probability distributions: over any measurable space you can define some function that sums to 1, and you have a probability distribution. Since the underlying space can be integers, rational numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, vectors, tensors, computer programs, or whatever, and the set of functions tends to be big (the power set of the underlying space) there is a lot of stuff out there. Lists of probability distributions involve a lot of name ..read more

I made a setting for D&D 5e based on Greek mythology – Year of the Gods – and ran an epic campaign in it 2021-2022. Now I am happy to put up my setting and campaign notes online. The basic idea was to make a somewhat gritty high fantasy setting, stylistically somewhere between the Heroic and Archaic era. There are heroes around, the gods do intervene… but people are poor compared to standard fantasy, magic is dark, things like philosophy and maps are not yet invented, social norms are not our own and pretty grim. Might not be to everybody’s taste (D&D after all tends towards a mildly E ..read more

The halo is the angel’s mouth, perpetually open, screaming for nourishment like a baby bird—to us it sounds like singing – https://twitter.com/ctrlcreep/status/1441044897621061633 The angel was daintily eating my severed leg as I tried to escape. The cloud-stuff blocked my way like a wall of soft and cool pillows, inviting me to lean back into them and just relax. The bloodstain spreading below me made that look like a very bad choice. I scrabbled for purchase. “Do not fear” it gently said, removing a piece of tendon from its pearly white – and very sharp – teeth. “I will not let you suffer ..read more

Talk I gave at the Oxford Karl Popper Society: The quick summary: Physical eschatology, futures studies and macrohistory try to talk about the long-term future in different ways. Karl Popper launched a broadside against historicism, the approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim. While the main target was the historicism supporting socialism and fascism, the critique has also scared away many from looking at the future – a serious problem for making the social sciences useful. In the talk I look at various aspects of Popper’s critique and h ..read more

Inspired by Katja Grace’s list, what do I think are the big narratives, the “plots” that describe a lot of what is going on? Here is a list I hacked together after breakfast. These are not trends. They are not predictions. They are stories one can tell about what has been happening and what may happen, directing attention towards different domains. Some make for better stories than others. Some urge us to action, others just reflection. Earth The dance between gravity and entropy: initial high-homogeneity state of universe turns lumpy, producing energy release that drives non-equilibrium proc ..read more

SARS-CoV-2 spike ectodomain structure (open state) https://3dprint.nih.gov/discover/3DPX-013160Over at Practical Ethics I have blogged a bit: The Unilateralist Curse and Covid-19, or Why You Should Stay Home: why we are in a unilateralist curse situation in regards to staying home, making it rational to stay home even when it seems irrational. Taleb and Norman had a short letter Ethics of Precaution: Individual and Systemic Risk making a similar point, noting that recognizing the situation type and taking contagion dynamics into account is a reason to be more cautious. It is different from ou ..read more

In physics inverse square forces are among the most reliable things. You can trust that electric and gravitational fields from monopole charges decay like . Sure, dipoles and multipoles may add higher order terms, and extended conductors like wires and planes produce other behaviour. But most of us think we can trust the behaviour for spherical objects. I was surprised to learn that this is not at all true recently when a question at the Astronomy Stack Exchange asked about whether gravity changes near the surface of dense objects. Electromagnetism does not quite obey the inverse square law T ..read more

A great question from twitter: Food for thought: There exists some smallest whole number which no human will ever think about. I wonder how big it is. — Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) January 6, 2020 This is a bit like the “what is the smallest uninteresting number?” paradox, but not paradoxical: we do not have to name it (and hence make it thought about/interesting) to reason about it. I will first give a somewhat rough probabilistic bound, and then a much easier argument for the scale of this number. TL;DR: the number is likely smaller than . Probabilistic bound If we think about numbers ..read more

Continuing my intermittent Newtonmas fractal tradition (2014, 2016, 2018), today I play around with a very suitable fractal based on gravity. The problem On Physics StackExchange NiveaNutella asked a simple yet tricky to answer question: If we have two unmoving equal point masses in the plane (let’s say at ) and release particles from different locations they will swing around the masses in some trajectory. If we colour each point by the mass it approaches closest (or even collides with) we get a basin of attraction for each mass. Can one prove the boundary is a straight line? User Kasper sho ..read more