Conversation topics

The most interesting conversation topic to me is "what's your story" — what's your life like? How'd you end up in [x place I met you], what do you think about the future and your place in it?

Common interests are great places to start, but I think the person behind them — that person's unique mix of influences and experiences, heuristics, etc. — are what makes the conversation importantly distinct from, say, a speech-to-text conversation with an LLM.

I'd love to learn from you, but even more I'd like to know you.

Anyway, here are some starting points:

Assorted non-academic topics

• Simple things
• Going for walks
• Going barefoot on the grass
• Vastness of the mountains and the clouds
• Cool things you've done or seen while traveling
• Your favorite stories, your favorite songs
• Being happy

Philosophy and language

• What is philosophy, actually? (definition I propose: "exploring what can be thought and the consequences of thinking it")
• Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Rorty
• Continental philosophy as an appropriate reaction to analytic philosophy and vice-versa
• What is consciousness, actually? (I don't think consciousness as an independently-existing thing makes sense as a concept)
  • Neuroscientific theories of consciousness
• Sapir-whorf hypothesis
• Toki pona; Nahuatl; Sign language; Lojban
• Chomsky on universal grammar
• What does "I" refer to
• Does having the experience of meaning — living a meaningful life — matter?

Math

• Cantor (set theory, diagonalization!!)
• Whitehead and Russell (type theory, Principia Mathematica, the urge to find real foundations)
• Gödel and Tarski (Incompleteness and indefinability in strong formal systems)
• Category theory
• What even is math? The study of abstract structures?
• What do you actually use functional programming for I don't get it and am stubbornly unwilling to actually take time to figure it out
• Are computers actually magic?
• Church and Turing (Computability, Lambda calculus, Church-Turing thesis, Halting problem)
• Theoretical computer science, computability theory

Art, Music, Literature

• Short stories by Jorge Luis Borges
• Finnegans Wake
• What is literature, actually?
• Literature as a way to transmit wisdom — a way to transmit anti-memes
• Does it matter how the author intended you to interpret a work of art? Are all interpretations valid, even politically inconvenient ones
• What distinguishes communication via instrumental music from typical "linguistic" communication? Does the ability of art to communicate without explicit language (e.g. paintings, music, etc.) imply that "meaning" (which we typically ascribe to words) is entirely independent from language?
• Semiotics as a general organizing theory of "meaning"; where does semiotics fail?
• Meaningless music, emotionally evocative without an intended concrete meaning (e.g. Ravel's Pavane)
• Gaspard de la Nuit (I am so down bad for Ravel)
• Love in harmony (Liebestraum)
• The deconstruction of music as an art form; music that makes you suffer (e.g. 100 gecs xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx)
• Screaming as music (e.g. Loathe, Screaming)

Religion, Myths, and Anthropology

• Religion as a pre-packaged sense of meaning for everyone (inc. community, self-transcendance/meaning, ritual, epistemic grounding, tradition/culture)
• Religion as a memetically-evolved pre-packaged sense of meaning for everyone
• Comparative religion: correspondences between Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christianity
• Co-opting or respecting religious aesthetics: is "holiness" worthy of respect? Is it worthy of subversion?
• Pantheons and stories: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Aztec, Inca, Scandinavian, Indian, Chinese, etc.
• Thoughts on ritual as a good in itself

AI and humans

• How close (in the space of possible AI architectures) are we to the best possible architecture?
• Is "objective morality" just an effective coordination mechanism between agents? "Supermoral AI" (banger)
• Why are LLM prompting techniques useful on humans?
• Do inner and outer alignment have corresponding analogs in humans? (human alignment theory)
• What is your value function? What is my value function? Does this concept even make sense?
• The Free Energy model of human minds
• The extent to which LLMs and the statistical approach to language modeling falsifies Chomsky's theories about universal grammar

Psychology

• Is modern psychology actually useful?
• The utility (or lack of it) of Freud, Lacan, Jung, etc.
• Gender as a fundamental template for relationships with the people you interact with
• What is love/what are the constituent things bundled into "love"? is it really just evolutionary chemical soup?
• Experiences with psychedelics -- I unfortunately do not have any, so you'd have to tell me about yours :P

(Geo)politics

• Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness
• American hegemony and its consequences
• Voting reform
• Wielding nationalism safely
• Security and defense policy; the military-industrial complex
• Where is democracy headed?

Human relationships and object-level living

• Building communities, running events
• What makes it easier to connect people? What interventions can meaningfully improve individuals' abilities to connect with one another?
• What is "culture" (in a community, in a society)
• Interesting projects we/I/you could build
• Personal knowledge management
• Integrating LLMs into life effectively