Igor Waltritsch

Julia Galef on why we stay in losing situations longer than we should: Most of us have heard of the sunk cost fallacy. But Julia Galef explains why it's harder to escape than we think. She opens with a deceptively simple example: "Imagine you're going to the store and you're halfway there when you realize oh wait the store is actually closed today. But you figure, well I've already come 10 blocks, I might as well just go all the way to the store, you know, so that my 10 blocks of walking won't have been wasted." She's quick to point out how absurd that sounds on its surface: "This is a transparently silly way to reason and I doubt that any of us would actually go all the way to a store that we knew was closed just because we'd already gone 10 blocks." And yet. "This pattern of thinking is actually surprisingly common." Julia defines the sunk cost precisely: the time, money, effort, and whatever else you've already spent. What's gone is gone. It can't be recovered. Rationally, it shouldn't factor into what you do next. But it does. She explains why the fallacy is so seductive: "Making a choice not based on what outcome you think is going to be the best going forward, but instead based on a desire not to see your past investment go to waste." We stay in bad relationships, failing projects, and wrong careers because walking away means confronting the past. The 10 blocks don't disappear if you turn around. They're already spent either way.

In the context of the Goldman report (below), and following the downing of several US jets in Iran, the Polymarket odds US enters Iran by the end of April jumped half overnight to over 80%, the highest yet

Headlines scream "AI will destroy 40% of jobs." Counter-narrative: AI will create $200T in value by 2035. The question isn't jobs lost—it's value created and how we distribute it. How we go from UBI toto UHI. Navigating this transition is it greatest challenge.

John Searle: consciousness cannot be an illusion and here's the argument that makes it undeniable Science has a long track record of overturning our intuitions. The table looks solid, it isn't. The sun appears to set, it doesn't. We've learned to accept that appearances deceive us, and that reality lies beneath. But philosopher John Searle argues there is exactly one domain where this move simply cannot be made: consciousness itself. "Where consciousness is concerned, you can't make the standard appearance/reality distinction that we make for the rest of the world." His logic is simple. When a scientist tells you the table isn't really solid and that it's a cloud of micro-particles, you can accept that. The appearance (solidity) and the reality (particles) are two different things, and you can hold them apart. Same with the sunset. It looks like the sun moves. It doesn't. The rotation of the Earth creates an illusion. Appearance and reality come apart and you understand the gap. Now try applying that same logic to your conscious experience. Someone claims your pain isn't really there, that your awareness is just an illusion. But here, Searle says, the distinction collapses entirely: "Where the existence of consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality. There's no way that some guy can come to me and convince me I'm not conscious if I think I'm conscious, I am conscious." This is a structural point about what consciousness fundamentally is. For every other phenomenon, the appearance can be explained away by pointing to what's "really" happening underneath. But consciousness is the very medium in which all appearances occur. There is no "underneath" to retreat to. To say consciousness is an illusion, you would first need to be conscious of the illusion. The argument defeats itself on contact.