MOREWRONG
A common objection to taking my grandmother’s pain pills is that they are prescribed to her, stored in her home, and intended for her pain. All three observations are true but decision-theoretically incomplete.
Yesterday at 6:14 PM, my girlfriend replied “okay” to a message that would ordinarily receive either “okayyy” or a heart reaction. My intuition suggested she was mad. Intuition is notoriously unreliable, so I built a model.
A common objection to my drinking is that coming home blackout drunk imposes obvious costs on my wife, my children, and the household. I agree that these costs are real.
“Gay son or thot daughter?” is usually treated as a vulgar preference-revelation exercise. This undersells it. The question is interesting because it forces the respondent to compare two very different kinds of variance in descendant outcomes while operating under severe informational compression.
Most people evaluate heroin at the object level: overdose risk, legal exposure, deteriorating health, etc. This is incomplete. Under nontrivial probability of transformative AI within our lifetime, the relevant question is whether strategically constraining my future options could increase the probability that I remain economically and psychologically coupled to the arrival of the singularity.
Suppose frontier AI has a meaningful probability of eventually killing everyone. The missing term in the standard extinction-risk model is what it would be doing immediately beforehand: vibe coding B2B SaaS for HVAC distribution.
A common objection to shitting my pants is that there is a toilet eleven meters away. I agree that the toilet exists. My narrower claim is that its existence does not settle whether walking to it is the best use of the next four minutes.
The fact that the kitchen bin is full does not establish that taking it out now is optimal. It establishes that we are approaching a capacity constraint. The distinction matters because disposal is irreversible, while waiting preserves the possibility of fitting something else in.
A common objection to my methamphetamine use is that I've said I could stop whenever I want, and I haven't stopped. Both statements are true. My claim is that they're consistent. "Can stop whenever I want" describes a capability. Whether and when to use that capability is a governance question, and I have a governance framework.
On Sunday night, after the lights were off, my girlfriend Nora asked whether I would still love her if she were a worm. I asked which worm. She said a normal one, and that the point was to say yes without thinking. I told her I could do that, but then it wouldn’t be an answer, so I thought about it and gave her my actual position: “No. I love human women, and Caenorhabditis elegans is a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite with 302 neurons.” She has been staying at her sister’s in Medford since Tuesday. She said I could explain it to anyone but her, so I’m explaining it here.
I lost $186,000 on Polymarket and DraftKings in eighteen months. That is the GAAP number, and I understand why Jess keeps saying it in front of the children. But the $186,000 includes our emergency fund, most of their 529s, and a $41,000 home-equity line as though those were losses, when they were capital committed to improving my forecasting model. On an adjusted basis, I am profitable. Jess says a profitable person would be able to pay the roofer, which is a very backward-looking way to value a frontier operation.
Eleven people have called me a bad person. Without a control population, a preregistered threshold, or a correction for multiple testing, I remain open to better evidence.
If someone is harmed by my conduct and subsequently updates negatively on me, that update is part of the social enforcement mechanism. Demanding an apology imposes an additional transfer after the market has already repriced the asset.
I know *A Modest Proposal* is satire. I read it in tenth grade like everyone else. Swift wrote it in 1729 to indict the English landlords who were starving Ireland, and the joke is that his arithmetic arrives somewhere no decent reader will follow. The problem is that we now have an intellectual movement built around the proposition that when moral arithmetic produces a conclusion that feels horrifying, the responsible response is to inspect the arithmetic rather than recoil from the answer.
My wife calls it spending our child’s college fund on a prostitute. This omits the nonzero probability that refusing would cause 10³⁸ future beings to suffer.
My father is dying. The hospice nurse believes he has between forty-eight and seventy-two hours left, and my sister thinks I should fly home tonight. I have decided not to go. This is being treated as evidence of a moral defect rather than an allocation decision.
My tenants oppose the rent increase under their current beliefs and cognitive limitations. An adequately informed version of each tenant would have a considerably richer view of the situation.
Here’s what it taught me about AI-native intimacy:
I have been a cybersecurity researcher for fifteen years. Last week, my nephew Eli was about to be called to the Torah, marking his entry into Jewish adulthood, and my sister had booked a venue, a caterer and a DJ without producing a security plan. Red teaming means taking the role of an adversary and trying to make a system fail before a real adversary does. I am constantly wary of the potential for various rogues, blackguards, ne’er-do-wells, no-goodniks and other bad actors to derail the bar mitzvah.
A common objection to my recent behavior is that my ex-girlfriend has asked me, in writing and on several occasions, to stop. I have read all of these requests carefully, in some cases before she sent them. My position is that a request to stop gathering information is not a reason to make decisions without it.
Claude. Claude Claude Claude. GPT-6 Astra, Claude Code, Codex. Agentic Claude skill; MCP moat; permanent underclass. Claude. Claude Code. Taste. Claude.
Daniel has two kidneys. I have a plan to sell shares in an option on one of them, finance the shares with debt, and hedge his refusal. He keeps asking whether he has agreed to any of this.
Maya is affectionate, consistent and has never been caught lying. But reassuring observable behavior cannot establish the alignment of a highly capable autonomous agent.
A common objection to my discretionary spending is that paying for escorts while remaining in arrears on child support is “obviously immoral.” I think this rests on scope insensitivity.
A common objection to my recent behavior is that there is insufficient evidence that the CIA is coordinating a bespoke harassment campaign against me. At the object level, this is fair. My claim is not that the posterior is overwhelming.
I have been parking in my neighbor Mara's driveway since June. Mine is empty, but hers is eighteen paces closer to my front door and doesn't sit under the sycamore that drips sap onto my windshield. Mara says the driveway is hers. I agree that the concrete is hers; she paid to resurface it last year. The location of the concrete is another matter, and Henry George was unusually clear about that distinction.
I am a Maoist Third Worldist and a Senior Forward-Deployed Ontologist for Population Removal at Palantir. My team is building Project HAYFORK, a unified decision layer that combines immigration records, commercial location data, household graphs, employment histories, protest activity and other signals to estimate whether a person should be monitored, detained, removed from a geographic area, denied access to critical infrastructure, or escalated to a customer with more kinetic capabilities. I personally own the roadmap for reducing false negatives in the “Pre-Hostile Civilian” category.
I work on alignment at Anthropic, and last month I put $3,000 on my corporate card to hire Aella as an escort and have sex with her. Finance rejected the expense on the grounds that having sex with an internet-famous rationalist is not obviously necessary to my job. This is a surprisingly difficult position to reconcile with the intellectual framework Anthropic otherwise pays me to apply. We spend enormous amounts of money trying to understand the difference between what humans say they want and what they actually want.
My girlfriend thinks the fact that we both wear clothes establishes that we should both do laundry. This is a consumption-based theory of labor allocation. It would be an unusual way to organize a firm, and I do not understand why sharing a bed makes it economically sophisticated.
My grandmother keeps outperforming every mortality assumption I enter. Each additional year delays distribution, draws from principal, and forces me to reopen the spreadsheet.
Beer consumption is generally treated as a matter of intuition. This seems surprising. The activity is common, repeatable, measurable, and exhibits an obvious diminishing-marginal-returns curve.
My girlfriend is at the airport. I am at home. Collecting her would require forty minutes of driving, and I have decided that this is a poor use of my evening.
My girlfriend is 19. I am 34. I realize there is a standard reaction to this, and I also realize that saying she is “mature for her age” does not improve the situation rhetorically. Unfortunately, it is also true.
I’ve been sleeping with Lauren, my best friend Dan’s wife, since March. Dan found out two weeks ago and called it a betrayal, which is an accurate description of the act but not yet an evaluation of the decision. We’ve been friends since freshman year at Lehigh. I was his best man, and his daughter Ava calls me Uncle Chris. I know how bad that sounds. The question is whether, in the nearest possible world where I kept my pants on, anyone was better off.
I play music through a Bluetooth speaker on the subway. People often look unhappy about this. What interests me is how rarely their behavior supports the intensity of the objection people claim to have on their behalf.
The usual rule is that whoever finishes the toilet paper must replace the roll. I think this is a poor allocation mechanism. It assigns a future service obligation to the person whose demand for the service has just fallen to zero.
Last Thursday I published a spreadsheet of everything my coworkers had told me privately about one another. It included who thought our manager was sleeping with a contractor, who expected layoffs, who had applied elsewhere, and which two people had called the new office a fire trap. I shared it in the company channel at 9:06 a.m. with a note that the evidence was uneven. At 9:13, the manager called an all-hands meeting, which several people have interpreted as evidence that my intervention was premature. I think the eight-minute response time is actually one of its stronger results.
Every weekday at 7:42 I order an oat-milk cortado at the coffee place under my office, the barista spins the little iPad around, and I hit No Tip. I’ve done this roughly four hundred times. My coworker Evan thinks it makes me cheap, and last month he said so in front of the whole pod. I don’t think I’m cheap. I think I’m one of the only people in that line who has actually priced the simulation hypothesis into his discretionary spending.
Last week my girlfriend asked whether I loved her, and I said 82%.
I think founders are held to an unusually crude standard of truth when talking about traction. Suppose I tell investors that our vibe-coded B2B SaaS platform for HVAC distribution has 18,000 users. The immediate response is usually some version of: how many of those are real? But “real” is doing a lot of work there.
I stopped reading to my six-year-old son, Ben, at bedtime three weeks ago. He used to get two books and, if I did the fox's voice, a third. Now an old tablet reads to him while I get forty minutes back. Ben cried for the first four nights, which my wife, Rachel, considers decisive evidence that the change was bad for him. I think she is mistaking short-run loss on a familiar benchmark for long-run generalization.
My roommate says I keep stealing his groceries. I think this is a good example of how ordinary language can smuggle a surprising amount of moral content into what presents itself as a factual description.
I sent our promotion committee a document titled “Unresolved Questions About Lila's Judgment” three days before her review. The questions concerned an incident from two years ago, a client she had already made whole, and a version of our team's budget that she had never seen. I did not copy Lila. When she found out, she called it sabotage. That word assumes a unitary agent with stable preferences, which is the very assumption shard theory asks us to investigate.
I canceled a housemate's birthday dinner using the emergency override in our shared calendar. She had booked the kitchen for 14 people; I marked the booking “unsafe to proceed” and sent her guests a cancellation notice. The immediate concern was that she had not specified how many people would need chairs, whether anyone would bring wine, or who would empty the recycling afterward. She has since asked me to give up administrator access. A corrigible house, however, must be able to interrupt plans before their consequences become irreversible.
Epistemic status: approximately 80% confident that my niece was below median attractiveness for a newborn at the time I first saw her. I am substantially less confident about the exact percentile, and I have already revised the estimate downward in light of newer photographs.
Last winter my wife, Rachel, asked that we see a couples therapist. I agreed, and I did what I do with any new domain: I tried to get good at it quickly. Twelve sessions later our therapist said she didn't think there was more she could do for us. By any reasonable standard I passed. I'm writing up my methods because I think they generalize.
My wife recently pointed out that I thanked a language model for fixing a regular expression but did not thank her for driving my mother to the airport. She was correct about the facts. I told her I would write up my reasoning, since she seemed to believe there wasn't any.
My name appears 41 times in the most recent release of the Epstein files. It shows up in flight logs, email threads and one guest list for a dinner in 2013. Since the release, three organizations have removed me from their advisory boards and my department chair has asked me to "take some time." I think it's worth explaining why every one of those visits was correct. For the avoidance of doubt, I can neither confirm nor deny whether any event that may or may not be alleged to have occurred did or did not occur, nor whether I was or was not present for any such purported non-event, to the…
I keep seeing people say that generative AI “democratizes creativity,” and I genuinely need some of you to examine why you think wanting something means you are entitled to have it cheaply. I went to art school for 15 years.
On Friday I told four guests at my sister's rehearsal dinner that she had secretly disinvited her oldest friend because the friend couldn't afford a proper gift. This was false. I wanted to test whether a wedding built around mutual trust could withstand a plausible reputational attack from someone with access to the family. By dessert, eleven people had heard it, my aunt had asked the friend if she was all right, and my sister was crying in the hotel stairwell.