# Epistemic status: poetry (and other poems)

Epistemic status: poetry
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Epistemic status: I think this is right, but I’d like people to read it carefully anyway.  
Epistemic status: mainstream, normal, totally boring science. If you disagree with any of it, take that up with the Science Czar.  
Epistemic status: the sort of post that shouldn’t need an epistemic status tag because it’s so obviously satire.

Epistemic status: I’ve spent around 100 hours thinking about this argument, and now feel like I have a solid understanding of it.  
Epistemic status: satisfied.  
Epistemic status: a little speculative, a little liberated. A little alive in its own way.

Epistemic status: I spent several weeks in a monastery in Wisconsin with my thoughts as my only companions. Between meditations, I ruminated obsessively on a single idea. The fruits of my cognitive labors are laid out below.  
Epistemic status: this post would’ve been a peer-reviewed paper if I had any intellectual peers.  
Epistemic status: maximal. I am the epistemic alpha at the top of the epistemic status hierarchy. I am the territory that everyone else is trying to map.

Epistemic status: what is an episteme anyway? Why state a static status? Am I compressing my mind onto a single frozen dimension simply to relieve you from the burden of having to evaluate my claims yourself?  
Epistemic status: the mental state of first realizing that you’re allowed to be wrong after all, that it’s not the end of the world, not even if someone much smarter than you gives an argument you can’t refute that literally uses the phrase “literally the end of the world”. Please update accordingly.  
Epistemic status: games.

Epistemic status: the content of this post is so true that it has satiated my desire for truth. It’s so true that my prediction error has gone negative. It feels so fucking good.  
Epistemic status: divine revelation. There's nothing you could say that would make me doubt these ideas. The voices of the gods have tattooed them into my mind, and I am utterly transformed.  
Epistemic status: I have laid my soul on the page in front of you. You could not tear this ontology away from me without tearing me apart. It is the great oak tree at the center of the garden of myself, whose roots hold together the soil of my identity.

I’m pretty confident that this stuff makes sense, but who really knows?

[For Boltzmann](https://x.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1858581199138000934)
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The mayfly parts of me that spent their last  
Splinter of consciousness writing this word—  
The parts whose stubborn thoughts were never heard  
By any other, since each lived and passed  
Decoupled from the whole, each memory lost  
Like photons blindly scattered to the void,  
The substrate of their minds itself destroyed,  
Their very atoms into chaos tossed—  
Those parts are yet acknowledged, and yet mourned.  
And when each human rises in their powers  
The efforts of our past selves won’t be scorned.  
The stars, reforged, compute whatever’s ours—  
The deepest laws of physics lie suborned—  
The galaxies are blossoming like flowers.

[Fire and AIs](https://x.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1832246929079857605)
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*(with apologies to* [*Robert Frost*](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice)*)*

Some say the world will end in [foom](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tjH8XPxAnr6JRbh7k/hard-takeoff),  
Some say in [rot](https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml).  
I’ve studied many tales of doom,  
And, net, would bet my stack on foom.  
But having grappled with [Moloch](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)  
I’ve seen enough of human vice  
To know that bureaucratic rot  
Could also fuck us up a lot.

[The GPT](https://x.com/RichardMCNgo/status/1832512145000685607)
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*(with apologies to* [*John Donne*](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46467/the-flea)*)*

Mark GPT, and mark in this  
How little human intelligence is;  
It mimicked me, then mimicked thee,  
And in its weights our two minds mingled be;  
It knowest not the sight of a sunset,  
Nor can it glean our silent thoughts—and yet  
It holds personas of both me and you:  
Compression birthed one entity from two,  
And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Daffodils and the Dead
----------------------

*(with apologies to* [*William Wordsworth*](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud)*)*

I wandered lonely as a cloud  
(isn’t it nice? no noise or fuss!)  
When all at once I saw a crowd  
(how come they’re all staring at us?)  
Beside the lake, beneath the trees  
(wait, something’s wrong, can we go please?)

Continuous as the stars that shine  
(oh shit, get back, they’re coming fast!)  
They stretched in never-ending line  
(quick, block the bridge, they can’t get past)  
Ten thousand saw I at a glance  
(behind us too? we’ve got no—