Travelogue of my trip to Seattle in September of 2025.

Photo albums:

Discovery Park walk 2025-09-09: https://photos.app.goo.gl/oEFHbZqW4fjZN8wB6

Washington Park Arboretum 2025-09-10: https://photos.app.goo.gl/nACZ3WpThEUqXdvX7

Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop 2025-09-10: https://photos.app.goo.gl/cWdDgT5xgcX1cKJX8

Cougar Mountain hike 2025-09-11: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Ru8LezQGR3Bvbr5w7

Poo Poo Point Trail 2025-09-13: https://photos.app.goo.gl/6nDqcPzTM5xxWzgX7

Twice Sold Tales cats (and tempting books) 2025-09-14: https://photos.app.goo.gl/zqh6SisHnmmrAiDX8

Books I mention reading:

Fabulae Syrae: https://www.amazon.com/Fabulae-Syrae-Lingua-Latina-Latin/dp/1585104280/

Cambridge Latin Course, book 2 (4th edition): https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Latin-Course-American-English/dp/0521782295/

Sermones Romani: https://www.amazon.com/Sermones-Romani-discipulorum-Lingua-Latina/dp/1585101958/

Tusculan Disputations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusculanae_Disputationes

Inventing Temperature: https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Temperature-Measurement-Scientific-Philosophy/dp/0195337387/

The Lover's Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4: https://www.amazon.com/Lovers-Curse-Tiered-Reader-Aeneid/dp/B0CJ4KMF8V/

The Aeneid, translated by Sarah Ruden: https://www.amazon.com/Aeneid-Vergil/dp/0300240104

The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197754023

Amphitryo Comoedia (Lingua Latina): https://www.amazon.com/Amphitryo-Comoedia-Lingua-Latina-Latin/dp/158510194X/

Restaurants in Seattle:

Seattle resaturant recommendations: https://scyy.fi/recs/seattle

Rojo's mexican food: https://www.rojosmexicanfood.com/

Pi Vegan Pizzeria: https://www.pizzapivegan.com/

Due' Cucina: https://duecucina.com/

Kati Vegan Thai: https://www.kativeganthai.com/

Frankie & Jo's: https://frankieandjos.com/

Ramen Danbo Seattle: https://ramendanbo.com/

In this episode, I chat with Caspar Oesterheld about a relatively simple application of weird decision theory: evidential cooperation in large worlds, or ECL for short. The tl;dr is you think there's at least some small probability of a very large multiverse, so you try to follow something closer to the average of all the values of civilizations in that multiverse that think like you, and therefore 'make it more likely' (in an evidential way) that those other civilizations do things that you like.

Links for various things that Caspar has provided:

ECL overview page: https://longtermrisk.org/ecl

A while after the recording, Caspar and others started this ECL-related fundraiser: https://manifund.org/projects/acausal-safety-fund-a-team-to-do-research-and-interventions

Yudkowsky: Timeless Decision Theory. https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf

Functional Decision Theory is introduced in the following two papers. Both also introduce XOR blackmail.

* Yudkowsky and Soares (2018): Functional Decision Theory: A New Theory of Instrumental Rationality. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060

* Levinstein and Soares (2020): Cheating Death in Damascus. Journal of Philosophy 117 (5), pages 237–266. https://intelligence.org/files/DeathInDamascus.pdf

Oesterheld et al. (2025): A dataset of questions on decision-theoretic reasoning in Newcomb-like problems. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10588

MacAskill et al. (2021): The Evidentialist's Wager. The Journal of Philosophy 118 (6), pages 320–342. https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/MacAskill_et_al_Evidentialist_Wager.pdf

Treutlein (2018): Three wagers for multiverse-wide superrationality. https://casparoesterheld.com/2018/03/31/three-wagers-for-multiverse-wide-superrationality/

A survey of polls on Newcomb's problem https://casparoesterheld.com/2017/06/27/a-survey-of-polls-on-newcombs-problem/

Ahmed (2014): Evidence, Decision and Causality. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/evidence-decision-and-causality/7077949D2CD42E99C08D4FBFE5321148#fndtn-information

Regarding the Smoking Lesion and Tickle Defense:

* This is discussed in Chapter 4 of the aforementioned "Evidence, Decision and Causality".

* I also wrote the following introduction: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/coesterh/TickleDefenseIntro.pdf

One way EDT can escape XOR blackmail: Treutlein: Anthropic uncertainty in the Evidential Blackmail. https://casparoesterheld.com/2017/05/12/anthropic-uncertainty-in-the-evidential-blackmail

A more updateless approach to ECL: Treutlein: UDT is 'updateless' about its utility function. https://casparoesterheld.com/2018/03/28/udt-is-updateless-about-its-utility-function/

Finnveden: ECL with AI. https://lukasfinnveden.substack.com/p/ecl-with-ai

Christiano: When is unaligned AI morally valuable? https://ai-alignment.com/sympathizing-with-ai-e11a4bf5ef6e

Bell et al. (2021): Reinforcement Learning in Newcomblike Environments. NeurIPS. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/file/b9ed18a301c9f3d183938c451fa183df-Paper.pdf

In this episode, I chat with Alessandro (@polisisti on X/Twitter) about our respective experiences learning Latin (and in his case ancient Greek).

The Ranieri-Roberts approach to learning ancient Greek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vwb1wVzPec

We need to talk about Latinitas: https://foundinantiquity.com/2024/04/15/we-need-to-talk-about-latinitas/

Legentibus: https://legentibus.com/

Intermediate-level Greek texts:

There is a good series called "Reading Greek" published by the Joint Association of Classics Teachers. An example volume is "The Intellectual Revolution: Selections from Euripides, Thucydides and Plato".

Intermediate-level Latin texts:

The reader Alessandro used in his second-year course was the "Oxford Latin Reader", edited by Maurice Balme and James Morwood. However, Alessandro prefers "Wheelock's Latin Reader: Selections from Latin Literature", edited by Richard A. LaFleur.

Carmina Burana is a collection of poems that is fairly easy and very fun to read.

An anthology of medieval Latin texts that Alessandro greatly enjoys is "Reading Medieval Latin" by Keith Sidwell. Many of these selections are of intermediate difficulty (a few are very hard).

The prose works of Seneca bridge the gap between intermediate and advanced.

Dictionaries and grammars:

Alessandro's favourite Latin dictionary: The "Oxford Latin Dictionary"

For medieval Latin: "Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources"

* the DMLBS is freely searchable at https://logeion.uchicago.edu

For advanced Latin grammar: "A New Latin Syntax" by E.C. Woodcock

Alessandro's favourite Greek dictionary: The "Cambridge Greek Lexicon"

"The Greek Particles" by John Dewar Denniston is the book that's very helpful for reading Plato.

In which I monologue about my experience learning Latin. Links:

My friend's podcast episode: https://mutualunderstanding.substack.com/p/election-and-other-stuff-on-my-mind

r/latin: https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/

Lingua Latina: https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia/dp/1585104205

Playlist of someone reading out loud the chapters (plus some related material): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU1WuLg45SiyrXahjvFahDuA060P487pV

We need to talk about Latinitas [re: criticizing Latin novellas]: https://foundinantiquity.com/2024/04/15/we-need-to-talk-about-latinitas/

Legentibus: https://latinitium.com/legentibus/

In this episode, I give you updates from my trip with friends to see the 2024 total solar eclipse. Questions answered include:

- Why are we bothering to go see it?

- How many of us will fail to make it to the eclipse?

- Does it actually get darker during a total solar eclipse, or is that just an optical illusion?

- What moral dilemma will we face, and what will we do?

- Whose lav mic will mysteriously fail to work during their interview?

In this episode, I speak with Aaron Silverbook about the bacteria that cause cavities, and how different bacteria can prevent them: specifically, a type of bacterium that you can buy at luminaprobiotic.com. This podcast episode has not been approved by the FDA. Specific topics we talk about include:

• How do bacteria cause cavities?
• How can you create an anti-cavity bacterium?
• What's going on with the competitive landscape of mouth bacteria?
• How dangerous is it to colonize your mouth with a novel bacterium?
• Why hasn't this product been available for 20 years already?

Lumina Probiotic (the brand name of this new type of bacterium): luminaprobiotic.com

Lantern Bioworks (the company making the bacterium): lanternbioworks.com

Jamie Wahls (Aaron's writing career): jamiewahls.com

In this episode, I talk to Holly Elmore about her advocacy around AI Pause - encouraging governments to pause the development of more and more powerful AI. Topics we discuss include:

• Why advocate specifically for AI pause?
• What costs of AI pause would be worth it?
• What might AI pause look like?
• What are the realistic downsides of AI pause?
• How the Effective Altruism community relates to AI labs.
• The shift in the alignment community from proving things about alignment to messing around with ML models.

Holly's X (twitter) account

PauseAI discord

In this episode, Divia Eden and Ronny Fernandez talk about the (strong) orthogonality thesis - that arbitrarily smart intelligences can be paired with arbitrary goals, without additional complication beyond that of specifying the goal - with light prompting from me. Topics they touch on include:

• Why aren't bees brilliant scientists?
• Can you efficiently make an AGI out of one part that predicts the future conditioned on some plans, and another that evaluates whether plans are good?
• If minds are made of smaller sub-agents with more primitive beliefs and desires, does that shape their terminal goals?
  • Also, how would that even work?
• Which is cooler: rockets, or butterflies?
• What processes would make AIs terminally value integrity?
• Why do beavers build dams?
• Would these questions be easier to answer if we made octopuses really smart?

Divia's twitter account: https://twitter.com/diviacaroline

Divia's podcast: https://mutualunderstanding.substack.com/

Ronny's twitter account: https://twitter.com/RatOrthodox

Arbital page for the orthogonality thesis: https://arbital.com/p/orthogonality/

Crystal Society: http://crystal.raelifin.com/

Video of a rescue beaver building a dam inside a human house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ImdlZtOU80

AIXI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI

Kelly betting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

In this episode I chat with Jeffrey Heninger about his religious beliefs and practices as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes colloquially referred to as "the Mormon church" or "the LDS church". Topics we talk about include:

• Who or what is God?
• How can we know things about God? In particular, what role does religious experience play?
• To what degree is modern morality downstream of Jesus?
• What's in the Book of Mormon?
• What does modern-day prophecy look like?
• What do Sunday services look like in the LDS church?
• What happens after you die?
• Why don't Mormons drink coffee?
• What's the role of utopianism in Mormon life?

Jeffrey's email address: jeffrey dot heninger at yahoo dot com. Please include "The Filan Cabinet" in the subject line so he knows you came from here.

LDS church links:

• Website of the LDS church: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/
• Scriptures of the LDS church: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures
• LDS chapels close to you: https://maps.churchofjesuschrist.org/
• Chat with LDS missionaries: https://chat.comeuntochrist.org/chat/

Jeffrey's notes and corrections:

• 0:33:00 The combatant - noncombatant distinction did not start in Ireland in the 900s. It was started by Adomnán, an Irish abbot in Scotland, in 697, and was proclaimed throughout Western Christendom after the Council of Charroux in France in 989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God
• 0:36:00 A better explanation for why the inverted hierarchy doesn't lead to a different elite is: The king is told that he should be a servant for the poor, but the poor are also told that the king is their brother. This removes the push for violent revolutions to reverse the social order.
• 1:05:00 The Plat of Zion, with a Historical Introduction: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/plat-of-the-city-of-zion-circa-early-june-25-june-1833/1#historical-intro.
• 1:11:30 Shift to Home Centered, Church Supported learning: https://site.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2018/10/home-centered-church-supported. Nelson's quote was "In coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost." https://site.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/04/revelation-for-the-church-revelation-for-our-lives.
• 1:17:00 Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides (1190). http://files.libertyfund.org/files/1256/0739_Bk.pdf. I should also note that Maimonides is more Aristotelian than Neo-Platonic, although he is still using a notion of God coming from Greek philosophy.
• 1:27:30 Here is the Church's explanation of the Initiatory and Endowment in the temple, including the associated covenants: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/what-is-temple-endowment.
• 1:46:00 I actually teach Elder's Quorum, rather than Sunday School. I'm including Elder's Quorum as a thing like Sunday School which happens during the second hour of church. I don't think that the distinction is important for this conversation.
• 1:55:00 The Plan of Salvation is usually explained with the help of a diagram, like this one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mormon_plan_of_Salvation_diagram_(English)_(1).jpg.
• 2:01:40 "Every knee shall bow … and every tongue shall confess" - Philippians 2:10-11.
• 2:15:20 The 'EAs should be more Mormon' talk is part of Tyler Cowen's Fireside Chat from EAG DC 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNtqRbz-5c0.
• 2:16:00 Pew has some data indicating the Mormons take our religion more seriously than most other denominations (although not Jehovah's Witnesses): https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/11/03/u-s-public-becoming-less-religious/ (esp Ch 1 & 2).
• 2:20:00 Over 70,000 Mormon pioneers walked across the plains to Utah: http://npshistory.com/publications/mopi/index.htm.
• 2:23:15 The attempts at building utopian communities failed gracefully. The most communal of these towns, called 'Orderville', abandoned its collective economy after an enterprising young man got himself a new pair of pants: http://greatbasinmuseum.com/index.php/articles/20-great-basin-historical-society-highlights-and-comments.
• 2:27:15 The charter city planned by a Mormon is called New Vistas: https://newvistas.com/.
• 2:30:45 There is also empirical evidence that human brains do not function in a similar way to digital computers: https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/doku.php?id=uncategorized:ai_safety_arguments_affected_by_chaos:chaos_in_humans.
• 2:31:00 AI Alignment and the Plan of Salvation blog post: https://wearenotsaved.com/2016/10/08/artificial-intelligence-and-lds-cosmology/.

Every year, the Centre for Effective Altruism runs a number of "Effective Altruism Global" (EA Global or EAG for short) conferences thru-out the world. This year, I attended the one held in the San Francisco Bay Area, and talked to a variety of participants about their relationship with effective altruism, the community around that idea, and the conference.

Timestamps:

• 00:00:16 - interview 1
• 00:07:06 - interview 2
• 00:15:46 - interview 3
• 00:22:35 - interview 4
• 00:31:22 - interview 5
• 00:38:30 - interview 6
• 00:44:18 - interview 7
• 00:48:59 - interview 8
• 00:53:14 - interview 9
• 00:56:22 - interview 10
• 01:01:08 - interview 11
• 01:06:50 - interview 12

Website for EA Global conferences