(may I never stop pointing technologists to the federalist papers)

totally agree! Other books I consider pleasant surprises in this category are
Foundations of Decision Analysis by Howard and Abbas,
quantum.country, and
arxiv.org/abs/1803.05316 for Category Theory

So I went longer between finishing the first and starting the second than I did between starting the second and finishing the fourth. I'd definitely recommend starting into the second if you haven't to see if the momentum catches you.

Also reminds me of the Utopian Oath from @adapalmer.bsky.social's Terra Ignota series (what such a monastic sacrifice might look like today). I don't know if you've read the series but @benreinhardt.bsky.social, @divya.bsky.social and I all love it.

reminds me of
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handica... (non-choice sacrifice of resources)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruis... (sacrificing for the good of the family/tribe)

but both kinda advance fitness of shared genes, due to natural selection + selection bias (is "natural selection bias" a term?)

These systems are inhuman intelligences, and will continue dramatically outperforming humans in more domains and (for now) underperforming in others.

If LLMs were growing more capable like a human child, I'd be a lot less worried.

participant reviews:
"My favorite part was hearing someone else's rec - you learn something about the person giving the gift, the person receiving it, and yourself)"
"it's like watching someone open someone else's gift thinking 'yeah, nice, I'm getting myself that'"

Step 3: The person who posed the question reveals themself and offers a recommendation.

Our recs included south-asian snacks, a Ted Chiang short story, some voyager eps, a bunch of great books, and a few movies. Plus it felt like a nice hangout and close-out.

Step 2: randomly order participants, who choose which elicitation question they want to answer in as much detail as they want.

(e.g. the person who picks "what do you like in a story?" could say "fantasy that turns out to be scifi" or "nonfiction that's stranger than fiction")

example preference elicitation questions:
What are your top 3 "little treats" and favorite flavor profiles?
What's one of the best holiday gifts you ever received, and why?
What do you like in a story?

How to do it?
Step 1: everyone submits a "preference elicitation question" directly to a coordinator to anonymize (or you could make an anonymous form).

So, think of a category of rec (e.g. book, film, snack food, etc) and ask a question that will inform that rec

Why is this a problem? Feels dumb + carbon-intensive to ship white-elephant gifts to each other. I've tried sending books, but preference between e-book, audiobook, physical book, etc is kind of a hassle.

I'm confused - I thought they all had wheels at this size. www.cryofab.com/wp-content/u...
at least the ones I used did...

Makes me wonder if there are intuitive ways to quantify this. Especially if you have models of different people for something like a recommendation engine.