What is life but a string of decisions?

The four strands of reality: knowledge, evolution, quantum, computation

It used to be the case that to make a contribution to science you had to make sure it didn’t conflict with anything that existed in science. Now it’s encouraged if it does conflict because it means it might make us less wrong about the world.

The way science works is you have a problem and some set of competing conjectures and you run an experiment until you achieve relative clarity around one set of conjectures

Science begins with myths. Good explanations begin with bad explanations.

A good explanation is a story that explains something and that can’t be varied to still explain the same thing. (E.g. explaining why do elephants have strong trunks)

Supernatural things are definitionally not good explanations because they can be easily varied and still explain the same thing. You can believe in them but you shouldn’t invoke them in explanations.

There’s no limit of what we can do other than the laws of physics. If we can’t do something that physics allows it’s only because we lack the knowledge.

Humans thinking that the best way to control the destiny of an AGI by crippling it is like thinking the best way to stop a child from becoming something is giving it constraints for what it can and can’t say. It would be better to rather teach it why things are good or bad.