"Trees are mostly made of air and a generalizable lesson for AI safety" by zroe1 cover art

"Trees are mostly made of air and a generalizable lesson for AI safety" by zroe1

"Trees are mostly made of air and a generalizable lesson for AI safety" by zroe1

Listen for free

View show details
At the risk of embarrassing myself, I’ll share a confession.

For context, I took five years of Latin: four in high school and one in college. In addition to learning the language, all my Latin classes taught a lot about Roman history. Emperors, internal politics, Caesar, etc. I was always learning some random bag of facts about Roman history. In high school, I won the award for top Latin student in my graduating class. So I wasn’t a bad Latin student.

Here's the confession: I somehow don’t even vaguely remember the rough timespan the Roman Empire existed. Maybe Jesus time? I know he was killed by the Romans (is that right?). Were they around for a long time after? A long time before that? When was Romulus and Remus allegedly fighting? Virgil wrote the Aeneid when? I don’t have a clue. Despite being a kind of “Latin expert” I am missing a much more important foundational fact: when all of this was happening.

When I say trees are made out of air I’m not talking about the fact that there is a lot of empty space inside a tree (or actually anything made out of atoms). I mean something [...]

---

First published:
May 28th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xiTBpBDwubnr4MLRe/trees-are-mostly-made-of-air-and-a-generalizable-lesson-for

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.