Sol Plav

author: niplav, created: 2019-03-20, modified: 2024-01-30, language: english, status: in progress, importance: 6, confidence: log

Content

This is the website of niplav. It contains texts on different topics, including (but not limited to) forecasting, futurism, unusual social behavior and philosophy, as well as translations and transcriptions of different texts, chronological archives of blogs and programming projects.

More information about the website and its author can be found on the about page, for recent additions and changes, see the changelog or the corresponding substack.

I can be hired to investigate research questions, write code, design and execute experiments, analyze data and make predictions.

Content warning.

Best Of

Writing

Nonfiction

AI Alignment

Technical
Strategy

Forecasting

Programming & Computer Science

“Stepchild”! That one word says it all. There’s a whole Tolstoyan novel in it, or maybe a Henry James, or at least a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Computer science is the poor relation, the orphan, the foundling—taken in by a grand family but never taken seriously, never allowed to forget its doubtful origins. Or else computer science is the arriviste, the rich American cousin with too much cash and too little taste, who tears down the mossy old manse and puts up a spiffy new house designed by Frank Gehry. Or do we have a tale of sibling rivalry—the two children with different visions of the future for the family firm, neither of whom can ever feel secure in the love of a cold and distant parent?

Brian Hayes, “The stepchild”, 2007

Mathematics

Quantified Self

Practical

Existential Risk

Philosophy

Psychology

Collections

Other

Notes

Reports

Textbooks

Shut up! Shut up and leave me alone with my books!

—Zack M. Davis, “A Philosophy of Education”, 2012

Fiction

Translations

English to German

Transcriptions

Archives

I try to read blogs completely, mostly starting at the beginning because most blogs are not organized by topic (tagging/categorization systems don't count, don't be ridiculous). But blog archives are usually hard to navigate and it is often difficult to keep track of my current position in the blog (especially with yearly/monthly WordPress archives). To salvage this, I scrape blog archives and arrange them chronologically.

Programming

Miscellaneous

Media Consumption

I sometimes write reviews of things I have watched/read.

The following is four lists on the content I consume. The content listed there is a fairly big subset of what I actually read/listen to/watch, but not complete. I also don't remember everything from these perfectly.

Sol Plav