redmagehat

Self Alignment

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:16:29 -0400

It’s interesting that some people are very much the same person during varied situations in life, while others seem to have versions of themselves that are heavily filtered depending on where they are or who they’re with. I have a lot of respect for people who have fewer filters, because that represents a kind of identity authenticity.

I mean, you could still be an authentic asshole, but that’s basically just a different flavor of ice cream.

If I had to try and self-evaluate, I’d say that there’s a good chunk of opinion that I keep to myself (although that wall wears thinner the older I get) and then a kind of cringey over-positive mask that I wear at work, reinforced by the fact that in my remote job, I communicate entirely on Zoom and don’t have real work relationships anymore. There’s also a layer of heavy introspective thought, artistic evaluation, philosophical world-framing — all that stuff that I find fascinating and that makes other peoples' eyes glaze over — this I’ve increasingly kept to myself the older I get. It’s why this blog exists now.

Another aspect of personal authenticity that’s interesting is how some exceptional people get the “asshole pass” because they are sheer forces of nature that change the world around them in meaningful ways. Steve Jobs is a really good example. You’re almost required to separate the work and the effect he had on the world from the person he was in life, because of the magnitude of the results. Yet, without that raw authenticity of self on display (wild as it was) he would not have been able to have the influence he did.

Is there a possibility of long-standing misalignment with the core version of ourselves, resulting in a life that’s incomplete or false, lacking some missed potential? Is deviation from the pure self rooted solely in avoidance of negative emotions like fear, pain or loneliness, and is letting that negativity go the key to realignment?

Filters are necessary for a functioning society, but at what point is the authenticity of self lost? Is being yourself more important than saving someone from the potentially sharp words you’re holding back?

Of course, the answer is complex, but at the end of the day, I still find myself rather simply pointing to certain people in the world around me and wishing I could be as much myself — in all moments of life — as they are.

Too Much Data Center

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:53:02 -0400

I was chatting with ChatGPT today and asking it why I (as a human) can operate on food, water and air and be so efficient at fueling a highly-complex intelligent existence vs. it taking tons of power and scale to just talk to me coherently. We got into ruminating on how biological limitation actually is beneficial in a lot of ways — our level of conscious attention is actually extremely small compared to all the inference our human perception is doing under the hood (subconsciously).

My favorite part of the exchange was this:

ChatGPT:

Maybe we’re trying to build minds by extracting the part that looks most obviously like computation—the neural network—and scaling it.

But evolution didn’t build a brain in a jar.

It built a self-maintaining creature with needs, placed it in an environment, gave it limited energy, made some conditions desirable and others dangerous, and let cognition emerge as part of solving the ongoing problem of being that creature.

Your intelligence may be efficient partly because you don’t process everything.

And you don’t process everything because you can’t afford to.

And because you can’t afford to, you must care about some things more than others.

And because some things matter more than others, you have attention.

And because attention is selective, experiences acquire salience.

And because salience affects memory, you develop a history that is uniquely yours.

And because that history shapes future selection…

…you get something resembling a self.

It also said “fuck” a lot during its impassioned reflection on biological efficiency. I was inspired.

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:09:47 -0400

My thinker hasn’t had a Thought—
Not even when I’ve thought a lot.
This Thought’s so small, that one too tall—
It’s better to not Think at all.