The Diaper Room, Various Things, and Voting Polls

The Best Sleep Ever, Random Updates, and Subscriber Polls

There was a place in the sawmill where all the oil-absorbent pads were kept and it was called “the Diaper room.” A large number of these pads were required by law for clean-up in case of disaster. Because the pads were shipped in a soft cube packaging, they were laid out like a giant castle. Think Minecraft blocks made out of clouds, but in real life. There must have been a few thousand of those cubes, so a set of stairs had been built out of the diapers themselves on the right-hand side of the structure. It was understood that if you ever needed a bag of diapers that you went up to the top and took those first. Then every few years the order of the packages would be shuffled so the oldest diapers always got pulled first when new supply arrived.

My best friend “Dude” and I were introduced to the Diaper room by one of the millwrights. It was as if a great mystery was being revealed to us and we were being inducted into a secret society. My father often complained about how little sleep he got during the work week —needing to burn endless hours of his life to pay for lavish vacations— and sometimes his schedule seemed to be biologically impossible. The Diaper room explained this dilemma because the Diaper room, we were told, was where management would mostly turn a blind eye if you really needed a nap. It was far away from the front offices and nobody ever had any business out that way.

Up at the top of the castle of diapers, there was a hollow hidden from view. A two block by three block cavity just the right size for a person to lay down. So Dude and I both laid down there and gave it a try.

It was heaven.

There was a large exhaust fan that blew through the Diaper room and it pumped the smell of fresh cut wood everywhere at the exact right concentration. It was as if you were in a pine forest immediately after it rained but remained somehow miraculously dry. It provided a steady warmth and white noise too, from the electric fan engines that were humming nearby. The Chehalis river was right out the front door, and as long as it wasn’t low-tide it seemed the proximity to the water did some other magical thing to the air so that each breath seemed extra refreshing. There was a yellow patina on the upper windows as well, and it turned all the outside light an ambient gold as if the outside was forever at dusk.

It turns out that oil-absorbent diapers are also the best possible mattress.

No king has ever slept in a bed as comfortable.

Given that I was too young and lacked the tenure, and also because I am far too paranoid to ever do such a thing, I never took a nap in the Diaper room. But I think about how comfortable I was for the few minutes that I laid there whenever I need to hypnotize myself into falling asleep.

Sleep has been in short supply lately with the newborn. And the whole Trust Assembly thing. If you ever need a sleepy thought, please feel free to borrow this one:

You’re asleep in the Diaper room. The bosses are far away. You’re getting paid and this is a union shop. The light is golden. The air smells like strong trees and clean water. You’re laying in a cloud. All is right.

Contra Contra Shaked Koplewitz

Our dear friend, ShakedKoplewitz at shakedown, has put forward the notion that “Lawyers are bad, actually.” This was in response to my piece about serving on a jury and the legal system we have in America, with representation and trial by jury being “The Best Justice Available.”

And I kind of agree with Shaked? Who among us would defend lawyers? Well, I will a bit.

In summary, I was on a jury where a man almost certainly had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend himself against criminal charges that he had inappropriately recycled about nine-hundred dollars of brass water meters. It seemed like an overzealous boss combined with state audit “requirements” pushed this event into something way bigger than it needed to be. It was a total waste of time and money.

The best possible outcome of that event would probably have been for him to just write a check and give a “mea culpa.” Nobody told him he couldn’t keep the money from the recycling. If he hadn’t wanted to do that then it ought to have gone to some kind of binding arbitration based on the dollar amount.

I’m in agreement that you have to economize conflict resolution. You can’t have everybody suing everyone else all the time. Nobody wants to live like that.

But what if you get caught in the gears of a system that is inexorably eating you alive? What if you have been grievously wronged and people disagree on how to resolve it? What if someone has done something really awful and you have to figure out what to do about it? What if you’re not good at talking? Communicating is a skill and you might not be the best at it regardless of the righteousness of your cause. What then?

It’s in those cases that I think the best thing we could possibly have is a system where two sides present an argument, a judge makes sure rules are followed, and random uninvolved people decide the outcome. The best way to live under a rule of law that most people can accept and understand is to randomly poll a group of those people about what the outcome of an event should be. The best way to arrive at truth is to make sure each “side” has an advocate and to fully incentivize them to bring forward relevant facts for those random people to consider.

I remain convinced of this and I’m not sure Shaked would really disagree with me on this point. When you start digging down into “Okay, but who decides that?” people will sometimes imagine a person who is perfectly wise into existence, but will usually relent after you start getting more practical.

Trump’s Election

I feel like I have to say something.

I also feel like too little heat scraped over too many takes.

I actually guessed the electoral college numbers exactly, but I did it by copying Ross Douthat’s guess and agreeing with his premises. Blocked and Reported ran a contest for a few free months of the podcast, but I’m seeing if they’ll acknowledge me as the one true king of America instead. Trump under-polls his actual numbers, as demonstrated in 2016 and 2020, and within the margin of error it seemed likely he would take every swing state. Anecdotally, I also know several people who moved from the “Never Trump” camp to the “Maybe Trump” camp without seeing a lot of people go the other way.

I know this sounds weaselly, but I have to state the honest thing in my heart. I don’t think Trump is Hitler but I also don’t think you should ever look at an elected official as if they’re a savior of some kind. No matter who you vote for. The whole point of this nation is that we are supposed to be the owners of the government, not the customers of an elite political ruling class. Everyone needs to be held to some kind of account, and insofar as Biden had failures, I think it was because the system around him failed to provide that kind of check-and-balance. Everyone around him sort of breathed a sigh of relief that “their guy” had got the job so nobody ever came up and said “What the fuck do you mean you’re withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan first before you take out the equipment?” Ironically, the additional pressure from everyone coming at Trump also seems to save him from his worst errors.

In whatever case, you live your life and make the best of it that you can. I don’t like sore losers and I certainly don’t like sore winners. Forward, forward, and never back.

I’d certainly be polite to a politician, but I also wouldn’t expect them in their deepest heart to immediately be onboard with everything I believe. I also reflexively distrust anyone with an athletic facial ability to bypass my “friend, stranger, enemy” classifier, and it makes me feel like I’m being attacked by an evil spirit of some kind.

Again, reach out if you want to be involved. Not linking to anything here yet because we need a little bit more time before we’re ready for public scrutiny.

Trust Assembly Update

Thanks to all who have volunteered for this. We have a discord and GitHub going and we should be starting regular meetings next week. One at 4am PST on Tuesday and the other at 4pm on Thursdays. I’m doing my best to push it forward and get it into shape given the time and resources I have, but given that I have a newborn I have appeared with big buffalo hair a few times on a google meet line and not been as clear as I would like to be. When one is linked by Scott Alexander, one takes advantage of the opportunity regardless of circumstances.

We have a lot of talented people involved but if you want to contribute please send me a message and we can discuss it. I’m looking for engineers/more technical people right now but if you are a particularly astute project manager and can regularly meet between 1am and 5am PST and want to volunteer let me know. It’s a little bit of a mess right now, mostly because of me trying to figure out when I can actually work on it, but we’re gradually getting something more ordered.

There’s no money right now but my intention is to seek funding and I would pay everyone else first, after we covered all of our system costs. I’m still weighing the benefits of going the start-up route versus the non-profit route. The deciding factor for me would be whichever seems most likely to produce a successful outcome and also makes my Polish Gypsy wife okay with me doing this.

My dream outcome still remains that we build a rough version of the product, and then I somehow convince substack that they actually want it. I don’t have insider relationships of the type that make me think that’s super likely, but one hopes. That’s the fastest path for growth I see outside of some crazy outcome like Elon Musk appearing in my comments and agreeing to take this into the community notes product roadmap. I’ll also just slog it out a bit at a time during crazy hours of the day if that’s what it takes.

It’s not that I want to be famous or love money, it’s that I think something almost exactly like this has to happen for humanity to have a good future.

Free Subscriber Voting Polls

The next few pieces are going to be things I wrote several years ago, but polished up a bit. That’s so I can free up some time to get the Trust Assembly going. The Trust Assembly remains my priority but this substack is still important to me to get the message out there, and also because it’s fun. You hear that? I have fun here.

Again, this won’t be the next free piece but will be the free piece after that.

The Shadow Library — A piece on how I think we could have meaningful deterrence against Super-Intelligent AI’s in the future. Also, a cool idea for a bar that would probably quickly degenerate into a sex party but would hopefully also have cool AI stuff happening there.

The Intelligence Speed Limit of the Universe — An Essay about the “Ultimate Size of Minds” that will include all kinds of diagrams and things that five people will care about, all of whom are Transhumanists who will refuse to accept the arguments.

Grandma Corrine — the story of my grandmother, who was probably the best person i ever knew. She grew up on a farm in Minnesota. This would feel a lot like “The Man from New York” if you liked that piece.

My Summer on the Drilling Rig — the story of my summer job working on a drilling rig in New Mexico. By far the worst job I’ve ever had and really puts email job stuff into perspective.

My Preferred Space Catholic Future — I talk about what I want to happen to humanity after I die, and what I think our society would have to look like for us to produce a stable human species that could conquer the stars. This would start out with me doing construction as a robot in the Gliese 581 or Gliese 876 solar system. Then I would talk about things like how NeuraLink should work in a far-future state and how AI should work so that it doesn’t kill everyone by mistake.

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My Michael Mike — the story of my uncle Mike, a former con-artist turned born again Christian who once lived in a garbage dump in Mexico as part of a scheme to save a very small amount of money on pencil and eraser imports. The title references the way I used to say his name when I mumbled a lot. This would be long and probably have the funniest stuff.

The Divorce Pond — the story of my dad’s fourth divorce and how we had to do all kinds of crazy shit to build a giant pond in his yard because he didn’t want to just be sad. This includes trying to dredge what was basically a small lake with a plastic tarp. Shorter but funny.

Near Death Experiences while Roofing Houses — a compilation of the many times we almost died because my dad had wooden extension ladders that were over a hundred years old and

On the Subject of Shantelle — the story of how I started going to therapy after I saw God, never told my therapist that I saw God, but did talk a lot about how I couldn’t set boundaries, agreed that I should set boundaries, and then mere hours later after that session found myself driving a homeless woman around town to help her find a mysterious friend in the middle of nowhere.

Middle Middle Class — the story of how I totally screwed myself at college by not getting help I clearly needed and then dug my way out of that spiral into

And with that, I’m off to think about the Diaper room, get some shut-eye, then wake up and see if I can’t write a funding memo and figure out how to make a Kanban board in GitHub.