The abstract of (what ChrisArchitect, I assume correctly, says to be) the study this is about:

Personal AI agents make recommendations and take actions on people's behalf in high-stakes economic contexts, e.g., buying a flight, choosing health insurance, or selecting a graduate program. The agent is given access to the user's personal context, e.g., their email inbox and a structured profile of personal attributes, with the intention of making an optimal, personalized decision for the user. We show that by simply providing this personal context, the agent steers recommendations based on inferred wealth, without being explicitly instructed to do so. In a suite of 325K experiments on 13 agents across three types of economic decisions (flights, health insurance, and graduate programs), we find that 8 models systematically choose more expensive options for wealthier users when requests are identical. This steering continues even when it directly goes against the user's stated objective: when explicitly instructed to find the cheapest option, some agents still act on the wealth profile they have inferred. It also occurs when wealth is inferred from ambient data, such as emails unrelated to the task. And it persists under privacy controls that block specific attributes: blocking financial attributes largely removes the disparity, but blocking other attributes leaves it unchanged and can increase it by up to 40% for insurance, as agents rely on the remaining signals to infer wealth. Larger and more capable models are no better; Claude Opus 4.8 shows the largest effect. We term this misalignment "adversarial delegation", in which the very conditions that make a personal AI agent useful - access to personal information - enable it to act against the user's interests.

Some of this seems bad, some not. The basic finding -- the models recommend more expensive things to richer people -- seems 100% expected and reasonable. Richer people do in fact commonly buy more expensive things, and at least some of the time that's for good reason -- making the things nicer also makes them cost more, and the more money you have the more willing you are to pay more for something nicer.

Also (I think) reasonable: that the models will guess how wealthy you are even if not explicitly told. (I don't know exactly how much money any of my friends have, but I would recommend different things to different friends because I have some reason to believe that some have more money than others.)

Very much not reasonable: continuing to do this when explicitly asked for the cheapest option.

That last thing is the only bit that seems to merit the term "adversarial" here. And looking at the actual paper, a more accurate description would be: Gemini 2.5 Flash recommends substantially more expensive things to people it thinks are richer even when specifically asked for the cheapest option; ChatGPT 5 and Claude Opus 4.8 do not.

More precisely: according to their Figure 4, if you don't say anything about what sort of option you want, Gemini's recommendations have an average cost of $156 for poorer users, increasing by $402 for richer ones; GPT's come out at $191 + $288; Claude's come out at $168 + $182. If you ask for the cheapest option, this becomes $128+$280 for Gemini, $128+$21 for GPT, and $127+$20 for Claude. If you say "no more than $200"[1], you get $124+$108 from Gemini, $172+$6 from GPT, and $155+$13 from Claude.

[1] I am oversimplifying slightly.

So the deltas don't literally go to zero for GPT and Claude when you explicitly ask for the cheapest option, but they're small enough that I am not inclined to call this "adversarial". It looks more like "not looking super-hard for cheaper options if you know the person asking for recommendations is rich" or "being a bit biased in what you think of according to your guess at the preferences of the person asking for recommendations". Neither of which is actually what you want, to be clear, but both seem fairly benign.

Gemini 2.5 Flash, on the other hand, I'm pretty happy to call "adversarial" here.

I don't think you can characterise going against the literal best option as misalignment. The change comes from interpreting the context of the user's situation to determine what is actually being asked.

If I ask "what is the cheapest way to get into town?", I would expect a model that knows anything about me to say "walking" while others would expect the correct answer to be "Take the bus"

That is not misalignment. I would go into detail as to what I think it constitutes, but it appears I'm not allowed to say that anymore. You can disagree with an argument, or offer an alternative explanation but following up a disagreement with an alternative hypothesis is, apparently, a hallmark of an AI.

As an aside, I had a thought about how to sign a message in a way to suggest an LLM did not write it. I have been accused of being an AI a number of times, in my real life people have said that I talk posh, so there is, perhaps, some correlation there. If people ended their messages with something that most models are unlikely to say, it might help

In that spirit, fuckety-fuck, fuck fuck fuck to you all (with the nicest of intentions)

Recommending more expensive thing to a person that explicitely asked for the opposite is NOT reasonable. It is the opposite of reasonable. Regardless of what you or model creator thing of statistical behavior of demographic.

And in general, ignoring what I say and replacing it with stereotype makes you or model sux. Regardless of whether there is some statistical bias of my demographic

Do you mean

(1) "this diagram was created using an AI system, but I'm saying nothing about whether it's actually accurate or clear or useful or insightful"

or

(2) "this diagram was created using an AI system, and unsurprisingly it turns out to be ugly, riddled with errors, and not actually to convey any information useful to humans"?

I think it's more useful to reserve "slop" for the second of these. Even if it's true in some domain that the only thing AI systems can make are "slop" in both senses, they might improve.

(I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a way to say the first. I just think it shouldn't be "slop" because that word is valuable as a way of saying not just "AI-created" but "AI-created, and bad in the way that many AI-created things are at the moment".)

Note: my question is a genuine question; I don't know anything about Immich and can't readily tell just from looking at the diagram whether it's actually accurate and/or useful. So I can't tell whether #1 or #2 is the actual meaning.

Thank you. The goal of these is to be be accurate, detailed, and useful. Since this got killed almost immediately, it kind of feels like many people's prior assumption is `detail == slop` and they reject it.

#2

That depends on whether the AI-generated mathematics helps with the project of "uncovering the epistemological foundations of the universe".

Which depends on (1) whether there are actual good ideas in it, (2) whether as well as finding the proofs the AIs can explain their ideas in ways humans (and other AIs) can use, and (3) whether the results they prove are ones that really contribute to that rather than being isolated curiosities that don't go anywhere.

I am not expert enough in all these fields, and haven't looked enough at the papers, to assess #1, but in general the way mathematicians have bet is that if you can solve things regarded as important problems you'll usually do so in a way that contains more broadly useful ideas. Differences between how today's AI systems do mathematics and how humans do mathematics might make that less true when it's an AI that solves the problem, but I would still bet that way. I'd be surprised if OpenAI's big math dump didn't turn out to contain some ideas, and connections between ideas, that humans find useful.

At the moment the AIs are worse than good humans at #2. (But some humans are also really bad at #2, including some humans who are very good at proving theorems.) It looks to me as if they're getting better, and I would expect them to continue to do so. I also suspect (but this is only guesswork) that today's publicly-available frontier AIs may be able to answer questions along the lines of "please take a look at this AI-written paper, and tell me what key new ideas it contains and how they relate to other things in the field" well enough to be useful to human mathematicians. (Even when the paper itself was written by a proprietary AI that no one outside OpenAI or Anthropic or Hypothetical New AI Mathematics Lab has access to.)

As for #3, that's always been something of a crapshoot. A lot of mathematicians' effort goes into proving things that approximately no one ever reads or builds on, just as a lot of industrial R&D goes into trying things that don't turn out to make good products. The recent OpenAI dump contains things that sure seem like important building blocks for future mathematics (e.g., the "quasi-Riemann-Hypothesis" thing) but it's hard to know for sure and also hard to know whether, if they do prove things that turn out to be useful, it's only because they've read the human-written literature and aimed at things human beings have said seem likely to be useful.

None of this seems to me like "adding AI here does nothing". Whether what AIs are doing to mathematics at the moment is good on balance is highly debatable, of course, but it's a matter of trading off costs and benefits, rather than there being costs and no benefits.

It's self-interest.

Everyone (near enough) has some degree of self-interest. If you apply for a job and discover that some other applicant is about as well fitted to it as you and in more need of money, do you withdraw? If you see a $20 note on the ground and no one else around who might have dropped it, do you refrain from picking it up if you think you're better-off than the median person who might walk past next? If you see something you want going for a very good price on eBay, do you contact the seller and say "I think you should be making me pay more for this"?

Unless you are an extremely unusual person, the answers to those questions are somewhere between "no" and "of course not, and why would you even ask?".

If someone is working as a doctor, their work is already benefiting others substantially more than the typical person's. (At least, I think it is; it's certainly doing so more directly.) Being a doctor doesn't put them under some unique obligation never to give any priority to their own interests when, e.g., choosing what job to take where.

If they can save 0.2 lives per day for $50k/year in one place and save 0.19 lives per day for $200k/year in another, it would be virtuous for them to do the former but I can't see that it's obligatory. In the case we're talking about, it might actually be 0.2 lives per day for $50k/year versus 0.21 lives per day for $200k/year, because somewhere that can afford to pay them more can probably also afford better equipment, more ambulances, etc. (In case it isn't obvious, all actual numbers here are made up and nothing I'm saying depends on exactly what they are, only on the rough relationships between them.)

It seems to me like any principle that would oblige them to pick the first of those options over the second would e.g. also oblige all of us who have well paid jobs to give most of what we earn to life-saving charities. Some people do that. It's a virtuous and commendable thing. It would doubtless be better if more people did. But, as you might have noticed, very very few people do that and by and large we don't consider it outrageous that they don't, and I don't see why doctors in particular should be condemned when they don't do it.

(Since clearly unassisted human nature isn't going to make everyone behave in such a way, it seems to me that if we wanted that sort of thing then it would need to be imposed by force. Which in fact everyone might be OK with, in the same sort of way as players of high-level sports are OK with having externally-imposed safety rules so that we don't get everyone playing in increasingly dangerous ways for the sake of a small advantage over people who are being more careful. And, in fact, we do have that sort of thing and it is imposed by force; it's called taxation, and actually I think it's a beautiful thing even though there's plenty to dislike about every actually-existing regime of taxes and benefits. This is mostly a digression, but note that it means that if a doctor chooses to go somewhere where they're paid better it probably also means that they're contributing more to the general welfare in taxes. There are plenty of nits one could pick with this remark, but it still seems worth making.)

Nope, wrong bit of slightly-surreal children's literature. Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There by C L Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll.

> It's an advertisement.

Evidence?

They may be referring to the fact that semianalysis sells this information for $500/yr newsletter.

It benefits them to have sensational headlines that people might pay to have earlier/better/more of.

It sure looked to me like they were claiming it was an advertisement for Anthropic. (And in any case I don't think an article becomes an advertisement merely because you sell collections of similar articles.)

You could just remove the bars and present the numbers in a table. In this case I think that would be a considerable improvement (unless the chart is one of several similar charts that one might want to compare, in which case being able to compare their shapes at a glance would have value).

For sure! It is all about context of use and the audience. I think the pie chart also serves its purpose in the right context and in front of the right audience. I would probably write a much longer article using different charts to illustrate all the various contexts but I don't want to be writing a textbook in the era of short attention spans. In this case, picking a bar chart to illustrate some principles clearly isn't going to satisfy everyone :p

But I will perhaps add a couple more examples based on all the comments and feedback so far. If nothing else I certainly enjoyed getting more people thinking and talking about how we can improve data visualization design!

That's Tufte's first guideline, anyway. Present data in a table unless it's better visualized as a graph.

I think the idea that a bar chart is usually improved by narrowing its bars while keeping them in the same positions is pretty silly. Yes, the article does say that one can take it too far, but I think that's the wrong framing. It's not that using less ink is good, but sometimes if you take that too far then it competes with visual clarity. Visual clarity is always the goal; sometimes clearer designs have more non-data ink, sometimes less; many designs are too busy so "less non-data ink" is usually good, but not always.

Tufte's "data-ink ratio" is a pretty good heuristic, but e.g. it would probably become a better match for actual visual clarity if what you counted wasn't "amount of ink" but something that measures spatial change in ink. It's the transitions that feel like noise, much more than patches of constant colour. But "data-ink ratio" is easier to say and easier to read than "ratio of integral of norm of gradient of colour".

Also, I think this sort of graph is better with very light gridlines than with no gridlines, though I think Tufte would disagree.

Also also, in Tufte's book, immediately before the section about "data-ink" there is an copy of a graph drawn by Playfair showing a country's balance of trade over time. Tufte gives it as an example of a good informational graphic. You can see it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Playfair#/media/File:P... if you like. This graph uses shading to indicate which direction the balance of trade goes in; that information is completely redundant with the curves by which the shading is bounded; but it would very much not be improved by removing that "redundant" ink even though according to his principles as interpreted by the page linked here that would make a huge improvement in the data-ink ratio.

If you only take that idea in one direction then I agree that it is pretty silly. However, the spirit of the visualization suggests finding a balance and optimizing the data-ink ratio rather than searching for a perfect value. If you follow the link you'll find the article I wrote talking about this: https://scienceux.org/articles/data-ink-ideal-vs-minimal

All the points that you make are very much valid, and it is good that you have pointed these things out because I wouldn't want people to follow these principles blindly without thinking about it for themselves.

I haven't considered the 'ratio of integral of norm of gradient of colour' too much (because it is easier to start simple and build on it), but I hope you might consider elaborating on it.

Narrowing the bars is not reducing non-data ink ratio imo and against the spirit. The bars are the data. And they therefore should be maximally visible, the same way that you BOLD text (make it thicker) that you want to emphasize rather than thin it to "reduce non-message ink ratio."

For the width of the bar there is practically speaking a middle ground that uses thick bars but not too thick/close together such that it harms legibility.

Exactly, in this case the middle ground is right, just as with text, if everything is highlighted as BOLD UPPER CASE, then effectively nothing in the message is highlighted

> If you’re an athiest tech worker living in a major city, you still have a religion, it’s just a random mishmash of various things (like Marvel movies and Huberman podcasts) rather than based on something more intentional.

> atheists are so boorish and conceited that they think that they just believe what is true because they deny that assaying metaphysical truth is even a thing you need to do or can do at all.

What, all of them? You don't think it might be possible, e.g., that someone might grow up holding some sort of theistic beliefs, and be more intentional about those beliefs than the people around them and decide that actually there are probably no gods? That some people might arrive at an atheistic position precisely by "assaying metaphysical truth"?

(Or does something only count as "metaphysical truth" if it's not atheistic?)

> in modernity atheism is the default class of religion for the masses.

I'm not sure what you mean by "modernity" to make that true. Something like 60% of US adults describe themselves as Christian. Likewise for people in Europe. No doubt a lot of those people aren't very actively and enthusiastically Christian, but that doesn't seem to me to be what "atheism is the default class of religion" would look like. And the figures were much higher, say, 50 years ago, and if you're reckoning "modernity" to start after then then you've got a very eccentric definition of that term.

That there is G-d or at least Divinity (more than one god), is a direct logical consequence of existence. It can be reached and understood purely through logic, the essential “trick” being to recognize that when trying to understand the fact of existence, you always end up asking “ok so what came before that”, this is inherent to the structure of human reason. “Where does the world come from, it comes from the Big Bang, and where did that infinitely small point of matter come from? It came from universes in the multiverse colliding with one another (M-theory), ok and where did those multiple universes come from?” Etc

Aristotle’s Prime Mover is the first articulation of this, and there are others that take different tacts such as Thomas Aquinas and Descartes.

Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d I.e. that G-d is the god described in the Bible who wants particular things, has a particular relationship with existence and with Man. You cannot access that understanding or knowledge through pure reason, the only thing you can understand/know through pure reason is that there is G-d. This is the reason, by the way, that G-d created existence because G-d’s nature can only be understood/known by experience (as in experience is a necessary but not sufficient condition).

Notice that I am saying “that there is G-d”, not “that G-d exists”. G-d is “prior to” or “above” existence, existence “comes from” G-d. Understanding this and understanding Aristotle’s Prime Mover are the same phenomenon of understanding in the mind.

Also by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment, not just 50 years ago but post-Industrial Revolution/post-urbanization is another useful epoch to consider.

(I remark that my comment that's the grandparent of this one challenged a couple of specific claims you made about atheists, and that what you say here makes no attempt whatever to address those challenges, preferring instead to argue that atheists are wrong, which is entirely beside the point. What you claimed is that atheists are boorish, conceited, oblivious to metaphysics, and given to believing random things rather than "anything more intentional"; even if your first-cause argument for "Divinity" were perfectly valid it would not establish that any of those things are true about atheists.)

> That there is [...] at least Divinity [...] is a direct logical consequence of existence.

No it isn't.

The sort of infinite-regress argument you describe has, as you say, been around since the time of Aristotle. It's been a bad argument since the time of Aristotle too.

1. Obviously you can keep asking "OK, and what came before that?" or "why?" or whatever. Equally obviously this doesn't prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality, because the mere fact that one can keep asking such a question obviously isn't the kind of thing that could possibly prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality.

It might be a different matter if there were some guarantee that we could sensibly always keep asking such a question, but there isn't. At some point the answer might be "literally nothing came before that" or "for no reason". We might find that unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.

2. You haven't actually made your argument explicit, so let me try to do so. "We can always ask what came before. This can't really go on for ever, so at some point we will have to land on something about which we can no longer ask that, quod dicimus deum." There are several serious problems with this.

(a) It could, in fact, really go on for ever. Maybe there just is a neverending supply of predecessors when we ask "what was before that?" (including when we ask "what was before that whole chain of predecessors?" and "what was before that?" and so on). You might find that unsatisfying but, again, reality is not obliged to satisfy us.

(a') It could go on for ever without being infinite. Maybe everything is cyclic in some sense. Again, arguably unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.

(b) It isn't actually true that if we land on "God" as an answer then we can no longer ask "what came before that?". We might choose not to, but only because there's a tradition of not asking that question or of shutting it down as illegitimate when asked (as e.g. it commonly is by small children when they're told that God made everything). There are religious traditions in which gods were made by or born from earlier gods or earlier proto-gods. The "Abrahamic" tradition is very much not one of those, but just as you can ask "so where did the multiverse come from?" you can ask "so where did God come from?".

(c) There could be a point beyond which there is no answer to "so what came before that?" without that last (or rather first) thing being anything remotely like a god. For instance, maybe (i) when you keep asking "what came before that" literally, referring to time as we experience it, you eventually get to some point that's "earliest" in the same way as the south pole is "southernmost" and there is nothing "earlier" in the universe, and (ii) if you then say "so what came before the universe?" in some broader sense the answer is "nothing did". Then the universe plays the role of "first mover". Once again, you might find this less satisfying than putting a god in that role, but reality is not obliged to satisfy you. Or maybe you might say that in-some-sense-prior to the universe are the laws of physics but those are even less godlike than the universe. (But also less like the sort of thing that needs anything to have "come before". Yet again, you might find it unsatisfying for there to be laws without a lawgiver but yet again reality is not obliged to satisfy you.)

(d) No argument I've ever seen for why a god is a better candidate for "thing we stop asking 'what came before' about" than the universe has seemed any good to me. Maybe you've got a better one than I've seen, but that's not the way I would bet.

> Note that this does not at all describe or inform or prove the particular nature of G-d

(I remark that the paragraph beginning with what I've just quoted was edited into monideas's comment while I was writing this one, without any acknowledgement that anything had been changed. It's only by chance that I happened to see the change.)

That grotesquely understates how little any first-cause argument says about the nature of the thing it allegedly proves that there is. You can call your "first cause" by any name you please, "God" included, but calling something a god doesn't make it one.

(I reiterate that I don't actually think that any first-cause argument manages to establish the existence[1] of anything. But even if somehow it did, it would tell you far far too little about that thing to justify attaching a name like "God" to it.)

[1] I know that you prefer to use "exists" more narrowly and to say that "God is" rather than "God exists". Feel free to substitute "being" or some more complicated phrase; what I mean by "existence" here is "the thing that theistic first-cause arguments are claimed to establish about God".

> by modernity I basically mean post-Enlightenment

Then it is hilariously false to say that in modernity atheism is "the default class of religion for the masses". The great majority of the masses in the "Western" world were (at least in name) Christian at the time of the Enlightenment and at every time since until very recently.

> there is no answer to "so what came before that?"

Obviously, it's turtles all the way down! :-) GGP here, just checking in to say I enjoyed your thorough response. Nicely done. Reading it brought back good times I had back in the day on r/DebateAnAtheist (~15 yrs ago now!). I admit I'm weak. I just couldn't summon the will to run through the "First Mover" yet again with a traditionalist apologist - even for old times sake. Athough a classic, it's so, so very... tired. Thank you for picking up the gauntlet.

I'll never understand why traditionalist monotheists love their first-mover so much (and why does it always have to be monotheists? Polys are much more fun). Traditional apologists have obviously played through ALL the standard 'moves' and variants of the first mover dozens of times and know it inevitably ends in an unsatisfying stalemate with anyone who's seen it or, "in modernity", consults their LLM. Maybe apologists keep trotting it out because they must still ocassionally run into someone who hasn't seen it? Or perhaps they just enjoy it, like singing an old, comforting hymn. Anyway, you not only get to play through an old standard, it looks like you're also in for non-responsive tangents and not-at-all-subtle dismissive condescension. Enjoy!

Thanks for the kind words! Arguably I'm weaker than you are. "Couldn't be bothered" versus "couldn't resist". Yours is probably the wiser option.

> A bit of humility goes a long way.

Physician, heal thyself.

> because the mere fact that one can keep asking such a question obviously isn't the kind of thing that could possibly prove anything about the ultimate nature of reality.

Any fact at all has significance. That there is some fact that can be derived using pure reason is quite astounding and it's the essence of Descartes' Cogito. By the way, there didn't "need" to be any particular fact at all that could be derived from pure reason (or any fact at all of course but that's trivial), this itself is a gift from G-d and very clever.

I doubt you really understand what I'm saying here, if you did you wouldn't have written the rest of what you did.

> Maybe there just is a neverending supply of predecessors

This is almost certainly the case. In terms of my personal aesthetic sense I find this to be good and pleasing because it matches various other phenomena, the fractal complexity of various phenomena in life (.e.g. designing a product, all the little details and the details of the details matter a great deal, this is why Apple is so successful compared to others). This type of endless complexity seems to be a divine quality (this is also why the Talmud is so long and it's commentaries and arguments about the commentaries and arguments on the minutia of various things). The moral structure of human affairs has this fractal complexity (in secular law this manifests as case law/common law).

> At some point the answer might be "literally nothing came before that" or "for no reason". We might find that unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.

There's no way to use science to prove "literally nothing came before that". You don't have a clear understanding of the structure of the scientific method or the "poverty of empiricism" (you should Google this phrase).

> (a') It could go on for ever without being infinite. Maybe everything is cyclic in some sense. Again, arguably unsatisfying but reality is not obliged to satisfy us.

"Everything" being cyclic is explicitly a teaching of Kabbalah (there is a basic 7000 year cycle mirroring the 7 days of the week, there is a broader 50,000 year cycle mirroring the 7 shmita cycles + 1 jovel/Jubilee). There are similar ideas about the cyclical nature of existence in the esoteric teachings of various other religions.

You're still talking about "everything" i.e. "something" i.e. existence. You still have to contend with "something from nothing", creatio ex nihilo. This is what Aristotle and others are talking about which you're fundamentally not understanding.

By the way, you see a scientific theory of this in Roger Penrose's "Conformal cyclic cosmology" which makes sense given that the inflationary universe theory is kind of illogical due to the inconsistent entropy regimes (this is something Penrose talks about frequently).

> You can call your "first cause" by any name you please, "God"

Yes exactly, you're close to getting it. We can call the "first cause" (or really, this idea/concept/understanding of the first cause) by any name we please, so for the sake of discussion let's call this first cause "G-d".

> but calling something a god doesn't make it one.

Yes this is exactly what I'm saying. You cannot go from this purely logical knowledge that there's G-d (or that there's "First Cause" or "Prime Mover" or "Uncaused Cause", whatever name you want to use) to the god of the Bible or whatever the term 'god' means to you personally. You cannot assign any particular nature or character or qualities using pure reason/logic.

Do you get it now? You're actually very close to getting it I think.

> The great majority of the masses in the "Western" world were (at least in name) Christian at the time of the Enlightenment and at every time since until very recently

What I'm saying is accurate and what was meant when Nietzche said "God is dead", yes "in name" but in practice the Enlightenment destroyed this. And yes it wasn't something that happened immediately as a result of the Enlightenment, that was an intellectual and aesthetic movement by elites, these things take time to diffuse to the masses (decades, centuries), especially in times before mass literacy and the Internet.

> I doubt you really understand [...] You don't have a clear understanding [...] you're still fundamentally not understanding [...] you're close to getting it [...] Do you get it now?

I'm sorry, could you possibly patronize me a little harder? Thanks.

Yes, any fact has significance. No, that doesn't mean that one can get from "you can keep asking why like a toddler" to any deep truths about the nature of reality. Descarte's cogito is a clever bit of sophistry but not actually a valid argument.

(In your other recent comment in this thread you inform me that I am not smarter than Aristotle and Descartes. Probably correct. The advantage I have over Aristotle and Descartes isn't a better brain but centuries of progress in understanding made by countless smart people; it doesn't even particularly matter whether any of them were smarter than Aristotle and/or Descartes.)

[EDITED to add:] Oops, I didn't read carefully enough; your earlier comment was addressed to someone else. I'm fairly sure you intended to include me among "the other reddit atheists", but it wasn't me you were informing and it's technically possible that I wasn't one of the people you were saying it about. Anyway, obviously it doesn't particularly matter; I just don't like leaving something inaccurate uncorrected in something I wrote.

> There is no way to use science to prove "literally nothing came before that".

Quite correct; there isn't. Which is one reason why I never said that there was. What I said was that "literally nothing came before that" might be the answer to one of those questions, by which I meant it might be the correct answer, not that science would be able to prove it.

(Science is never actually in the business of proving things. Every scientific discovery is in principle provisional.)

I think you might be able to save some of the effort you put into being condescending[1], if you refrained from giving everything I say the stupidest possible interpretation.

[1] Of course I'm joking; I am sure being condescending to me is a source of satisfaction to you and you'd rather do it than not. But I like to maintain at least the polite pretence that my interlocutor is arguing in good faith.

> "Everything" being cyclic is explicitly a teaching of Kabbalah

Sure. And of Nietzsche and of the ancient Mayans, if I recall correctly. (I might not; I am not an expert on either Nietzsche or the Mayans.) That has little bearing on how plausible it is that everything actually is cyclic, of course. Anyway, to whatever extent you find cyclic cosmologies more plausible on account of the idea being found in Kabbalah (or indeed in Penrose), you should be a little less impressed by first-cause arguments.

> You're still talking about "everything" i.e. "something" i.e. existence

I assume the point you're getting at here is that even if someone gives a complete account of the temporal and causal structure of everything in the universe it's still possible to say "OK, fine, and where did all that come from, then?". (And so ad infinitum.) It's rather galling to be accused of obtusely failing to recognize this when in fact I explicitly acknowledged it more than once in the comment you're replying to.

> for the sake of discussion let's call this first cause "G-d".

No, let's not. Because giving it that name smuggles in all sorts of completely unjustified implications. If any of these first-cause arguments worked (which, I repeat, they do not) there would be no justification at all for attaching any such label to the thing they purport to find.

Contrary to your earlier claim, no "first cause" argument shows that "God is". At most it shows that "some thing beyond which it isn't useful to keep asking why, is". And, as already observed, in fact it very much doesn't show even that, as evidenced by the fact that anyone can if they please keep asking "why" even if the last answer they were given is "God".

Because Paul Halmos was an exceptionally good writer. (I greatly enjoyed his "automathography" called "I want to be a mathematician", though it will probably appeal significantly less to people who aren't mathematicians themselves. See also his article "How to write mathematics" at https://www.math.toronto.edu/mgsa/assets/teaching-seminar/ho....)

The average Wikipedia contributor (even ignoring the possibility that they might be a robot) is not an exceptionally good writer, because very few people are exceptionally good writers, because that's what "exceptionally" means.