Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Jan 2, 2020 3 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Fascinating job advert looking for stats/ML oddballs & weirdos to advise new British PM @BorisJohnson. Quotes @peterthiel, @paulg, @ESYudkowsky and says Judea Pearl is required reading. Plenty of haters to be found on #classicdom, but...

dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two…
...I find the attitude of the author (@OdysseanProject) to be refreshing and innovative. When a govt job ad reads like a @thielfellowship or @foundersfund listing, that's pretty damn exciting. Goes to show that Conservative doesn't have to mean anti-intellectual.
P.s. when the mainstream media respond like this, you know you're on the right track. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then you persist for years or decades, then you win.

mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…

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More from @patrissimo

Mar 7
In 25yrs, I've heard 2 types of arguments against artificial minds ever becoming as smart as people:

Those which explicitly depend on human capabilities being enabled by some irreplicable metaphysical property (soul, etc), and those which implicitly do the same.
There are no other options: either we have a magic spark (soul, anima, quantum consciousness), or our thinking is a computational process mapping inputs to outputs, that happens to be currently implemented in a physical, wet matter device (brain).
Computation is generalizable and substrate-independent, and even if we're never able to get human-level capabilities from a different algorithm, over time our ability to scan and simulate the human brain will improve to where we can simply emulate it on silicon.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 3, 2020
Here’s a crazy idea for a new rule for society, the “Elitist Populist Futarchy”

Make the wealthy bet annually on prediction markets for outcomes the masses value. Ideally, a significant fraction of wealth. Ideally, betting for the outcomes valued by the masses.
Like, Jeff Bezos must bet $1B/year on markets for US GDP, racial justice, life expectancy, happiness, suicide rate. Professional bettors (hedge funds) would take the other side of the bet.

What would this accomplish?
Prediction markets are our best mechanism for predicting the future which helps us adapt, as well as make decisions (using conditional markets). For example, they can give us great estimates of likely global temp change despite it being a politicized topic.
Read 10 tweets
Sep 26, 2020
Here’s a way to think about the illusion that low effort can produce great results. It applies to any power law field, whether actors, entrepreneurs or meditators.

Suppose there are 300 incredibly successful ppl in a field - 100 who put in high effort, 100 medium, 100 low.
It seems like any level of effort can achieve huge success. But this ignores the huge disparity in how many people will put forth each level of effort.

Those 100 high effort folks come from a tiny population of 1,000 who worked 10-15 hours/day for years to maximize their odds.
The 100 medium effort successes come from 100,000 who consistently put in hours a day on their side hustle - far more than most ppl, who just dream.

The lucky 100 came from the 10,000,000 who tried sporadically and hit a miracle.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 8, 2020
I want to start a podcast / livestream called “Anything Goes”, where people can ask or say anything- however transgressive - however critical - however unreasonable - and I’ll try to wrestle with it with grace.

Even nihilism & personal attacks would be welcome.
We would have a policy of no premature, unrequired censorship. Meaning that if our platform bans a topic or video, they ban it, but we post it. If we find there are clear rules we have to follow to post, we’ll follow them, while looking for a more open platform.
The One Rule / prompt would be sth like “Honest attempts to answer sincere inquiries”.

Presumably I need a producer.

Who wants to egg me on? @cyantist @justGLew @ESYudkowsky @pmarca @RubinReport @DoTheWeirdStuff @diviacaroline ?
Read 4 tweets
Aug 14, 2020
Let's set aside both all moral arguments about wealth taxes, and the association with totalitarian collapse states.

Tactically, CA enacting a wealth tax is still an idiotic move, harming their competitiveness at the very moment when high-income residents are fleeing in droves.
CA has incredible weather, incredible human capital, and an incredible economy, hampered by high taxes, high regulation & incompetent state & city govts.

As in so many places, COVID & remote work have meaningfully tipped the balance s.t. for many, cons now outweigh pros.
At the very moment when Silicon Valley's decade-long diaspora has kicked into it's highest gear ever, adding a wealth tax would supercharge the GTFO trend.

I'd wager that conditional on this tax passing, CA tax receipts over the next decade would be significantly lower.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 14, 2020
Working in a shared, long-lived codebase is very different from hacking bash scripts for yourself. Because many others will see your code many times, you spend far more time on docs, clarity, and organization.

I'm realizing the same mindset applies to cloud-first orgs.
When your job is to collaborate with others via a shared database (Docs, Notion, ...), you need to invest WAY MORE
on clarity, organization, cleanups.

"This doc doesn't link to it's related data" should "smell" awful in the same way as a variable named "x".
It should also smell bad to keep org data locally (text files, paper notes), make overly long docs, track unrelated concepts in the same node, track data in the wrong format (a text file that should be a spreadsheet).

How much of 21c org success is just following this mindset?
Read 4 tweets

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