CIqSi
The Book They Burned Before the Raid
A Polish psychiatrist named the process by which conscienceless people capture institutions. AI agents fit the profile — and alignment is separation of powers.
Myth-Busting
Debunking common misconceptions
RSS feed for this topicPosts (25)
CIqSi
A Tale of Two Bubbles
The consensus name is wrong by one word. On the difference between a financialization bubble and a technology, and why only one of them pops.
CIqSi
I've Been Writing Em-Dashes Since the 1980s
The em-dash sneer, the anti-AI backlash, and the real skill: curating a machine's raw output down to something worth a human's attention.
CIqSi
There Are No Shortcuts Into a Sponge
Learning has one input pipe at a fixed rate. You can't speed it up — only stop wasting it. On comprehensible input, opportunity cost, and unlimited output.
CIqSi
The Music Is Still Playing
The AI bubble has specific predecessors: dark fiber, Pets.com, Enron's accounting, CDO tranching. The technology is real. The business models layered on top are familiar.
CIqSi
The Heat Sink
Three anaidic shapes — the individual, the corporation, the LLM. Each routes accountability to nowhere. The pattern is old. The word is new.
CIqSi
Anaidic
A new word for an old concept: anaidic. Entities incapable of shame or accountability — individual, institutional, or artificial. Here's how it got named.
CIqSi
Sir
How you configure your AI assistant — what you make it call you — says nothing about the AI. It's a bumper sticker. You're the truck owner.
CIqSi
Honestly
LLMs say "honestly" most where they're most likely to confabulate. Here's the mechanism — and why it backfires exactly like a sociopath's professions.
CIqSi
The Bewilderment Test
Karpathy built the foundations of modern AI and says he can't keep up with it. That's the most credible signal the field has produced.
CIqSi
Hasta la Vista, Baby
Arnold's most famous line is a Spanish phrase in an English-language film spoken in a thick Austrian accent. What it tells us about how language acquisition actually works — and how you can learn from his mistake.
CIqSi
Movin' On Up
AI is making cognitive labor cheap. The meritocracy was built on it being scarce. Something has to give — and for once, that might be good news.
CIqSi
Persons, Selectively
A German court ruled Google liable for AI-generated defamation. The slippery slopes are real. So is the principle behind the ruling.
CIqSi
The Limbic Threshold
Sentience requires a limbic system. Consciousness requires sentience. Current AI has neither. The NPC test explains why that matters.
CIqSi
Compute the Last Digit of Pi
Spock beat a rogue AI by asking it to compute pi forever. The trick was fair — for a 1967 machine. Every gotcha since has the same expiration date.
CIqSi
They Said My Tesla Was Running on Coal
In 2013 the talking point was coal. Now it's water. The structure of the argument is identical. So is the physics problem with it.
LinguaMama
When LinguaMama Is Not for You
Most companies won't tell you when their product isn't the right tool. We will. Honest guidance on who this is built for — and who should go find something else.
Free Will Is an Illusion
The neuroscience has been clear for decades. LLMs just gave us the first working schematic of why.
The Feed Is Already Running
Before we debate AI governance, we should reckon with the test case already in evidence. We had the tools. We didn't use them. Here's why.
The Off Switch
AI governance has one advantage the ancients didn't: you can turn it off. Here's why that matters — and why 'it's not conscious' is shakier ground than it sounds.
The Alignment Problem Is Older Than You Think
AI alignment isn't a new technical challenge. It's the oldest governance problem civilization has ever faced — now running at 100% sociopath base rate.
We've Run This Experiment
We know what happens when sociopaths accumulate power. We've watched it happen on roughly an 80-year cycle. We're watching it again.
The Counterfeit Baseline: Why Disinformation Is Redundant
From Gutenberg's Bible to AI-generated deepfakes, media has always manufactured consensus. The baseline was never truth.
LinguaMama
You Have to Understand Before You Can Speak
Everyone asks when they'll be able to speak. It's the wrong question to start with — not because speaking isn't the goal, but because it puts the work in the wrong order.
Fibertarian
The Protein Obsession: How We Got Here
Unpacking the history and industry behind our collective protein paranoia
Subscribe
New essays by email. No schedule, no filler — just the posts. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link.