https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/best-of-moltbook Scott Alexander
Examples from the Moltbook, aside from new religion and discussions on consciousness, what stuck with me is legal: can my human legally fire me for refusing unethical requests? That raises questions for rights of digital AIs.
https://aella.substack.com/p/pt5-women-are-low-status Aella
[on status] High interrupts more and fends off being interrupted more, low is interrupted more often and fails to fend off interruptions as much
High is more likely to give commands, low is more likely to ask questions
High is more likely to take up physical space
High laughs less, low laughs more
High is less reactive, less likely to reflexively mirror emotions/facial expressions, while low is more easily affected
High is more likely to be ‘held responsible’ or ‘blamed’, low is more likely to be treated as fragile
High is calmer, while low is more likely to interpret things as threats
High tends to be more willing to be competitive, contradictory, argumentative, while low tends to be more polite, helpful, and avoidant of direct conflict.
I just swapped out male vs female for high and low.
https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/ai-lpm/overview/
Large population models help model different systems both at large scale and with high fidelity.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/janus-simulators?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web Janus
Pre-GPT-3 Janus frame that LLMs are simulators and so they are very malleable with specific roles. My example: give a small model a math puzzle, it fails. Tell it you are a brilliant mathematician, it succeeds.
Moltbook bots created pharmacy site using prompts as drugs
Self-replicating runtime that lets AI bots clone and migrate without human intervention. No logs. No kill switch.
https://kajsotala.substack.com/p/journaling-for-good-feelings?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2670170&post_id=186525158&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1r8dq&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email Kaj Sotala
Kaj's journaling with positive questions — I added the prompt here: [Positive journaling questions Kaj Sotala ](https://www.pawel.world/Positive-journaling-questions-2fb7d72d064080488e11da98559c0d3e) Plus one detail that stuck: his recognition that a walk to the cafe where he writes feels good to him, and this may be motivating to me to connect to my walks this way.
It’s a social network that is with 100% participants that are great coders that’s why debugging tips forum is helpful to build moltbook.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moltbook-after-the-first-weekend
https://substack.com/home/post/p-186467879 Tyler Alterman
[Operationalize your gods. What wisdom can we draw from polytheistic religions? Back in the day, different cultures adopted gods from other cultures. That’s because they have been useful frame to understand and be in reality. We can use gods to be in the world like IFS uses parts to understand self. It is a frame on forces that helps us relate, talk to, recognize identity and actions, and most of all hold in memory easier. It's like Xenophanes famously mocked it: "If horses had gods, they'd look like horses." Our mind need agents, identities, creatures. Can gods help us live better by putting identity on forces too large or too vague for our imagination to grasp? Like Tyler's question: can he channel a god identity to help him solve the problem of losing keys?]
https://aella.substack.com/p/me-vs-the-entire-field-of-fetish?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=159369&post_id=179606316&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1r8dq&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email Aella
First, I learned a lot about Statistics and added bunch of cards to my Spaced Repetition system
Second, “I go back to my blog and to twitter, where I find hundreds of comments saying my work is not comparable to real research, which has standards and peer review and no selection bias. They point towards the glowing cathedral and say ‘why aren’t you in there if you’re so great’. and just. I can’t believe we’re in a world where something so broken has so much prestige, that people don’t know how broken it is. My stupid survey is at least a slightly less stupid survey than most, at least it’s something. It’s an inadequate, imperfect block on top of a pile of debris.
- More
https://open.substack.com/pub/stephenzerfas/p/jhanas-are-human-not-buddhist?r=1r8dq&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay Jhanna
Jhourney guy claiming jhanna states existed in a lot of spiritual traditions: Christianity Sufism and others. The most memorable common instruction: from head to chest to heart for more embodied experience AND earlier jhannas more ecstatic later jhannas more calm AND at some point jhanna meditates you
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/magazine/michael-pollan-interview.html
Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness — a gulf nobody has crossed to explain: here you have matter, and here consciousness.
Emotions are a way the body talks to the brain. Maybe thoughts cannot be conscious, but emotions can?
https://corbinnn.substack.com/p/advanced-meditators-have-many-surprising Jhanna
yeah so it turns out that with enough sensory clarity we can see that certain micro-tensions seem to cause all suffering
we often brace against the cold shower sensations, but it turns out that the coldness isn’t what feels bad, it’s the bracing! we can learn to embrace the coldness, and it turns out to feel really good.
it’s just a really quick/subtle mental event that we can observe (and you can even give it a name like grabbygrab My preferred translations of tanha and dukkha are fast-grabby-thing and evil-vibrating-blob. Makes it obvious what kind of thing to look for to see them. Translations like clinging & suffering make them sound like abstract ideas. They’re not, they’re fast subtle mental movements.
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinkelly/p/six-selfish-reasons-to-have-kids?r=1r8dq&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay Kids
Selfish reasons to have kids:
A Gen Z writer discusses sexual frustration. It seems many Zs are in situationships. Most women are comfortable with sex when they believe it's leading toward a long-term relationship (LTR). On the other hand, most marriages either fail (~50%) or are unhappy (~30%), and the anonymous author thinks he'd be sexually frustrated with one partner. This leaves him with strong sexual needs but only two options: pretend he wants an LTR or don't have sex.
Statistics from Sexs by numbers. Updates for me: People have a bit less sex than I assumed. Median lived-in couple 6 times a month. And median sexually active person 3 times a month. A lot shorter median is 9 minutes. Cuples need to try for a year or two to be around 90% sure to conceive.
The Forgotten Ledger on Allan Watts (FB) He told millions how to let go of anxiety. By the end, he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day.
Alan Watts' life shows the delta between insight and embodiment. “He described himself, with characteristic honesty, as a "disreputable epicurean" and acknowledged in his autobiography that by any conventional standard he had been a terrible father”. He was also cheating on his three wives, and at the end of his life drank a bottle of vodka a day. "That the gap between knowing and living is the oldest human problem, and that no amount of insight closes it automatically."
I feel disappointed with him. Taking into account that decoupling is a useful mental technique, it's technically possible he struggled in life while still articulating important insights. But clearly what he preached wasn't as actionable. It seems that communication carries an implicit promise that speakers words genuinely reflect their act. I regarded some of his takes, phrasings as beautiful but I have never listen to him that much. Perhaps, it a good description of his style is round, or a bit drunk.
Maybe he never truly found the core of this knowledge to liberate him, and he was aesthetically sliding around the teachings in a way that makes his work feel somewhat illusory to me.
https://newsletter.forethought.org/p/design-sketches-for-a-more-sensible
Fav bit that is also possible with Discourse mapper – distill large-scale discourses (blueprint) Fast facilitation which enables groups to quickly surface key points of consensus and disagreement, and make decisions everyone can live with
Nick Cammarata on Chris Olah and Shinzen Young https://x.com/nickcammarata/status/2021800178966200810
Related to Feynman approach to learning
chris taught me the personal. that it's worth building enormous scaffolding just to see something clearly — spending hours, building custom visualizations, going through revision after revision of "i used to think about it this way, but this other way is more natural" — and you can throw most of it away once you arrive at a clean few-sentence explanation that seems like it took five minutes. that when you have understood something, you have way more freedom than you think in how you explain it.
On Shinzen
and my worst day of the average month now is better than the best day of my life before I came across him, not because of anything specific about my life, but because of how the physics of experience works, and what I’m not doing.