David Chapman (@Meaningness) / X

David Chapman

64.2K posts

David Chapman

@Meaningness

Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.

meaningness.com/newsletter

Joined September 2010

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David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jun 29
🆕 Probability theory is a sometimes-useful, sometimes-misleading tool in uncertain situations. It is not a special bit of math connecting theory and reality. Skillful uses are varied, and depend on understanding through contact with actuality. 🔗 Link in reply tweet! ⤵️
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Nov 15, 2024
Wow, I did NOT know this: Buddhist logicians had discovered the Gettier problem c. 770 AD:
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jan 5, 2023
Prophesy: Leo Szilard—the physicist who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction and who urged the US to undertake the Manhattan Project—explaining how science would stagnate, in 1948. rootsofprogress.org/szilard-on-slo…
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jun 25, 2023
The older you get, the harder to resist saying "I told you so." When OO programming came in, it made no sense to me, and I've never used it. Everyone said I was too old to understand. Thirty years later, everyone's snapping out of it and wondering wtf they'd been thinking.
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jul 9, 2022
🗣 In 1974, Joseph D. Becker pointed out that rigid rationalist Chomskian linguistics was an emperor without clothes, and explained how syntax actually works. Rigorously ignored for decades, his theory seems powerfully confirmed by current AI text generators.
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jan 8, 2021
Philosophy is what happens when smart people think “I’m so smart I can probably figure this out just by thinking about it.” But other than maybe in math, you can’t figure anything out by just thinking about it. You have to poke things and see what happens.
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jan 15, 2018
The simplest, most obvious alternative to universities would be much cheaper and better. scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/01/modern… ♻️@St_Rev
David Chapman
@Meaningness
May 9, 2025
Still laughing at this!
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Nov 5, 2025
_Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination_ (By Paul Veyne) "Believe" is not a natural category. It's an invention of rationalist metaphysics. It bears scant relationship with what anyone actually does.
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jun 5, 2024
My father, a high school English teacher, once took and aced the AP Physics exam with zero knowledge of the subject, to prove a point: you do well on standardized tests by knowing how to take tests. LLMs know how to take tests.
Matthew Yglesias
@mattyglesias
Jun 5, 2024
If you believe anything remotely resembling this pace of progress is likely to continue, things are going to get weird really fast. situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/upl…
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Oct 19, 2025
Realizing that Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" idea, that myths all have the same heroic arc— has had an enormously distorting effect on our understanding of what myths are about and what they are for. It's a modern meta-myth: a myth about myths, flattering modern sensibilities.
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Oct 1, 2022
AI labs should compete to build the smallest possible language models, which “know” as little as possible—and retrieve “knowledge” from a defined text database instead. LMs are a very expensive and unreliable way to store “knowledge.” We already know how to do this.
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Oct 17, 2025
no one goes on a vision quest and discovers that their True Purpose In Life is to be a reliable, hardworking, morally upstanding parent, friend, and member of the local community although plausibly that's the right answer
David Chapman
@Meaningness
Jul 6, 2023
Software engineers are eating the world. Why? Because, in the fallen state of universities, they are the only people educated in building and maintaining enduring systems. We've lost critical social technologies, so rule by software is the only feasible systematicity left.