MORE quick takes

Humanity can be divided into two groups: Acceptors and Rejectors.
This explains the left-wing/right-wing political divide.

My most radically strange outsider belief is that it could and should be easy to understand anything, including the most advanced physics concepts.
I spent years trying to understand anything about "Bell's Inequality" theorem but there are no good explanations anywhere. It would require some sort of metaphor to understand, but there isn't one.
After years without progress, I imagine particles like tennis balls spinning in the dark, but you can only flash one light on them in a way that tells you a bit about their rotation. That experiment would actually be possible with tennis balls, but not with quantum particles. Something weird would happen then.
They would appear to be spinning in contradictory ways, if you did multiple measurements among balls that were known to be spinning in exact opposite ways to begin with. But how exactly?
This part, comparing ordinary spinning balls with quantum particles is what's missing from all the popular explanations.

Normal people can seem like aliens if you look too closely.
My first rule of fiction is that mundane reality is bad, and it should be rejected.
The real world is just not worth writing about from the inside. At least not in a way that uncritically goes along with the characters. It feels like being imprisoned.
There is nothing good about normal people living bad lives, but that seems to be the whole of serious Literature.

We need to accelerate technological progress, but only just enough to make Mind Backup technology possible. Then we can afford to pause things.
It COULD solve all our other problems, by finally giving us enough time. Getting there is the ultimate race against time.

They say the so-called AI Alignment Problem is pretty complicated
I was instabanned from LessWrong for saying that the solution to this problem is to simplify reality.
That should be our priority at every level (though the exact opposite is happening now).
All complex things exist in a hierarchy, but the top level often seems surprisingly simple.
Too often (more often than not) actually simple things at the lower levels, have been made impenetrable and obscure and unusable by design.
To solve the alignment problem, we need to start by finding a way to make printers work.
I believe this sentence was what the LessWrong people liked least - though they would have banned me for all the other statements and observations as well. LessWrong is very, very good at banning people outside their club.