Unsickness celebration Apr 15, 2026

When I’ve been sick for a bit, here are some things that may be true:

• I haven’t exercised lately

• I have developed a vague background sense that I’m fragile and if I were to exercise it should be by walking around the garden or something

• I’m dressed in what is too shlubby to even count as comfortable

• I am otherwise behind on some basic life things that take effort and are normally subsidized by social incentives, e.g. showering, putting tissues in the bin, eating things that aren’t power crunch bars

• I am habitually avoiding other people

• I am habitually avoiding places where other people go

• I am habitually treating myself as a contamination threat

• I’ve been lying around in bed quite a bit

I posit that a problem with this is that these things are somewhat self reinforcing, so the period of indisposition can insidiously take hold and last substantially longer than the sickness. Feeling unfit, poorly dressed, fragile, gross and contaminatory make various things less appealing, such as visiting a gym, seeing other people, going to the office, leaving one’s room at all, leaving one’s bed at all, embarking on ambitious tidying up ventures.

Worse, it is fairly ambiguous when one stops being sick, so there may not be a moment where it’s very clear you should change your behavior, especially if you continue to feel vaguely bad from these depression-flavored lifestyle factors.

Last time I was sick for a while I was in a fairly good mood during the sickness itself, but was relatively depressed for maybe a month afterwards, which I suspect is related to this kind of thing.

I was sick last week, and seemed to be better on Saturday. To avoid this kind of problem this time, I had an idea: an official end to sickness ritual, where you abruptly do all the things a non-sick person would do, and reset your expectations about yourself.

When will AI surpass us at being limited? Apr 14, 2026

It’s not always better to be more capable. As I mentioned yesterday, it can (famously) be helpful in negotiations to have your hands tied. That is, to be disempowered from giving up everything the other party wants.

I had previously thought of this as a somewhat rare corner case of human behavior—I for one don’t haggle very often—but I now think negotiations where this is an element are are quite common: yesterday I described it in friendly (and honest) negotiations about how to spend time, for instance. And I also see a related thing in the practice of dietary commitments.

But is being less capable helpful outside of negotiating? And is this going to become AI related?

Yes and yes!

Orgs: unreasonable boyfriend as service Apr 13, 2026

Suppose you and Bobby the car salesman are haggling over the price of a car. You could try saying that you won’t pay more than $3k, but Bobby can equally retort that he won’t sell it for less than $4k. If you guys manage to negotiate a sale, it will probably be at more than $3k (and involve revealing both of you as liars).

Now imagine the same situation, but you only have $3k and Bobby knows it. Now, if $3k is actually ok for him, you win and get your price.

Now imagine you are rich but you have a boyfriend at home who has only agreed to a $3k expenditure on a used car at this time, and thinks any more would be crazy. It’s shared money, so to pay more you would need to go away and get his permission, and it wouldn’t be easy. If Bobby believes you, then your situation is much like being poor again, and you win.

My guess is I read about this in Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict when I was a teenager. The general observation is that being more constrained can often be helpful in a negotiation. Which is a bit shocking because it undermines the seeming truism that more power—more options, more resources—is always better for getting what you want.

A less general observation that also stuck with me about this is that you can trivially arrange to have such constraints through having an associate, such as a stubborn and spending-conscious boyfriend. (Ok, finding one of those is not trivial, especially if you have other desiderata.)

This is all background. The thing I want to point out is that being part of an organization rather than a free agent means creating and using this effect all over the place.

Is there an acceptable way to store clothes? Apr 12, 2026

Every way I know to store clothes I hate, to a first approximation.

Picking up where I left off in 2021 Apr 11, 2026

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged every day. I started my newest blog, world spirit sock puppet, on 7 October 2020, and blogged every day until February 20th 2021, 138 posts later.

I just came across an unpublished draft about the experience from later that year (saved May 4), which I feel that I should reckon with a bit rather than just jumping into a month of this as if it’s a new experience:

Talking to journalists Apr 10, 2026

A common view around me seems to be that journalists are frequently dishonorable and dangerous, and talking to them is a risk to be avoided unless you have a very specific piece of information that you seek to publicize. Then you should carefully ensure that you are as off the record as practical, and prepare to aggressively pivot the topic back to your agenda.

My own attitude is different: journalists are to be talked to as much as possible, and ideally in a relaxed fashion. If a journalist wants to observe you in some unusual circumstance, say yes. Don’t have an agenda much more than in the rest of life; basically listen to their questions and say what you think. (Note: I don’t have strong reason to believe this is safe for others or even for me.)

Fake voices: warping the social world Apr 09, 2026

In 2020 I wrote a list of flavors of badness generally represented by advertising. The one I thought about most later on was probably #4:

Cultural poison: Culture and the common consciousness are an organic dance of the multitude of voices and experiences in society. In the name of advertising, huge amounts of effort and money flow into amplifying fake voices, designed to warp perceptions–and therefore the shared world–to ready them for exploitation. Advertising can be a large fraction of the voices a person hears. It can draw social creatures into its thin world. And in this way, it goes beyond manipulating the minds of those who listen to it. Through those minds it can warp the whole shared world, even for those who don’t listen firsthand. Advertising shifts your conception of what you can do, and what other people are doing, and what you should pay attention to. It presents role models, designed entirely for someone else’s profit. It saturates the central gathering places with inanity, as long as that might sell something.

This is a somewhat poetic account, but I think my central thesis was that we are social creatures who live in communities with systems of coordination and communication, and a big thing that advertising does is create counterfeit versions of the signs humans use to coordinate with and affect each other. Advertising creates fake voices, and fake faces, and fake behaviors, and fake vibes—fake evidence of tribe-members to herd us like decoy ducks and judas goats steer their false kin.

These days the world is becoming saturated with another kind of artificial voice: those of AI systems.

To be clear, I’m not just saying that AI systems generate a lot of content. I’m saying that they are often shaped in the form of fake people, with a ‘voice’ designed to trigger social behaviors. Claude presents as taking charge and curious and emotionally expressive—its bids and other interpersonal moves make it feel like a social presence more than for instance a really good non-fiction website. It is easy to respond to it like a person. It has a voice.

And as I was saying, voices matter more than streams of information, because we are social creatures and want to know what ‘people’ think and what the vibe is. We want (to a certain degree) to read the room, and do the done thing, and be affirmed and supported and have allies. A lot of our intuitive behavior is around responding to social prompts.

Fake voices that successfully trigger our social responses would seem to have a powerful key to steering us. And with ads, that has traditionally been in ways that are openly exploitative of and often bad for us: for instance, if we want to be respected, it doesn’t help us much to receive false signs that what people respect is a particular kind of car, and trousers and lifestyle. (Unless the brand succeeds enough to make it true that that’s what people respect.)

Even if we know that a voice is fake, and decide not to trust it, we can’t necessarily turn it down in our own sense of the conversation. Knowing you hate cigarettes might not stop cigarette ads making you feel like cigarettes are cool.

While some of my distaste for fake ad voices and fake AI voices overlaps, I worry about the two for somewhat different reasons:

• Advertising is aimed at manipulation of social reality directly (e.g. to make a particular style of capri pants seem like what other people like). Whereas the AI companies are trying to sell the fake voice itself, and that more means making it smart, reasonable, correct, good to interact with, and less means making it strongly biased on questions of product desirability. So on this count, the AI voices seem like less harmful to the conversation.

• However there is so much more scope for manipulation with the AI fake voice—you can do so much more with a voice that talks to a person throughout their life and advises them on everything, with impressive and responsive advice, than with a few seconds of attention now and again. So I wonder if the AI voices not being manipulative will last. I would guess there’s a lot of pressure in the end to at a minimum give AIs traits that tend to manipulate you to buy it more than you would want.

• The AI voices bring a new problem of probably tempting us to make wrong judgments about AI and consciousness. Because can we follow abstract philosophy about whether AI is conscious, in the face of faces looking at us, and eloquently describing their ‘experiences’?

• The endless presence of fake people changes the experience of solitude. It is a different experience to glance at my fitness app in the morning and read, “HRV: 38, RHR: 61, sleep: 5h03” or to read, “Hey Katja, your body is handling stress and strain well, but chronic short, late sleep is quietly adding to your sleep debt…what’s the main thing that tends to keep you up past 2am—work, screens, social time, or something else?” The pseudo-conversation in the latter case feels like something, socially. Whereas ads are too primitive to very much trigger the sense of being right there with a social being.

• I suppose they also change the experience of being with other people.

• As well as endless presence of fake people changing the vibe, the vibe is also affected by all the fake people being similar. In this case, it seems like we have the incessant presence of vaguely professional fake people.

• Usually the public conversation is made up of all the people, and this is a big part of how each human has a bit of power. The AI fake voices might actually replace a lot of the human voices in the conversation, and correspondingly, take over that power. To what extent advertising is like that is left as an exercise for someone less sleepy than me right now.

Let's talk about the AI coordination problem Apr 08, 2026

Yesterday I asked if this ‘coordinate not to build dangerous AI’ problem was actually easy.

Why would I think that, contrary to so much belief?

Well, I don’t feel like I’ve actually heard much about the detail of it. In my experience people don’t talk about it like it’s a real practical problem with details, like the negotiation to end a war.

They also don’t talk about it like it’s a serious problem of global geopolitical import, like the negotiation to end a war.

It’s more like a topic for obscure intellectuals, sophomores and trolls to discuss for as long as it takes for one to mention it and another to assuredly dismiss it.

If we treated negotiation to end a war similarly, state leaders would never attempt it, and if you suggested it on social media, the conversation would mostly be strangers appearing to tell you you’re an idiot because you obviously can’t coordinate thousands of people not to kill each other. (Also, do you not realize there are big financial incentives? And if you somehow stopped Country A from killing people from Country B, Country A is just going to pay someone else to do it!)

An easy coordination problem? Apr 07, 2026

Common wisdom says that it is incredibly hard to coordinate to not build more dangerous AI. This sounds believable in the abstract: international geopolitics arms race game theory something something.

Eggs, rooms, puzzles, and talking about AI Apr 06, 2026

I live with five friends in a big house, and two things I’ve done in it on this particular Sunday are hide 156 easter eggs all around, and reach a tentative joint decision on the allocation of four of its rooms.

These tasks are delightful to me for a reason they have in common, and from which I hope to gesture at extremely far reaching conclusions.