Recent well liked threads

A content-driven launch strategy for a consumer product we worked on recently:

1. Create and distribute free content about the problem to be solved. Add value upfront to your target customer persona. You will start building an audience while generating & qualifying leads.

3. As a domain expert, use social media to deliver valuable content to build authority.

Tell your story to build trust and authenticity.

Leverage on social proof from your leads and from other domain experts.

Ultimately, grow your audience and your mailing lead list.

4. Engage and learn from your audience to identify their most relevant pains and unmet needs.

5. Since you are exploring an uncertain solution idea, think of a scrappy version of your product and build a minimum set of features into an MVP to test a value prop for these needs.

🧵 como usar o ANKI para IMPULSIONAR suas revisões e OTIMIZAR/SUBSTITUIR suas anotações de aula! 👇🏻📚

♡/↺ para alcançar mais vestibulandos

⌕: #studytwt #studytwtbr

olá #studytwt 👋🏻

eu sou a amanda, e hoje tô trazendo uma dica que impulsionou demais os meus estudos, espero que gostem da thread! 🫶

se quiser ter acesso a mais materiais, dicas, templates de notion e cupons exclusivos, confere aqui! 👇🏻
linktr.ee/amandastudy

1️⃣ vamos ser sinceros, quantas vezes a gente anota tudo no caderno e depois nunca mais lê? ou então tentar revisar e desistir porque era trabalhoso demais?

o anki resolve isso e ainda te ajuda a lembrar do que importa no tempo certo!

Thoughts on future @smart_movesus routes

Overall, I’d say I’m impressed. If we can get Wayne County to opt-in, this would be miraculous.

Michigan and Ford buses going into Canton is good especially with the new Fast Michigan. Haggerty bus is phenomenal. Flat Rock/Rockwood/Grosse Ile coverage is good. Plymouth bus is back and better.

Some improvements would be for the Newburgh and the 7 mile buses to stop at Laurel Park Place. Both are short so a detour there wouldn’t affect much. I would also extend the Warren to Canton and Downtown Allen Park for more coverage.

Sonoma County declared racism a "public health crisis" because, it claims, its black residents (1% of the population) live to a mean of 71 years.

But the county's own website and other sources state they live to a mean of 82 years — one year more than whites.

An advocate for the resolution said, "These [racist] outcomes are the result of centuries of laws, policies, and systems that disadvantage people of color."

Here are the average lifespans of Sonoma County residents by race:

Asians, 88 years
Hispanic, 86
Black, 82
White, 81

So, if there's a racism-fueled "pubic health crisis" — and of course there isn't — it looks like whites are the victims of it.

If you're one of the least-black and most-liberal counties in California, there are only going to be so many opportunities available to morally grandstand, and you gotta grab anything that comes your way.

El «principio de escasez» es lo que hace que las mujeres persigan a un hombre sin descanso.

La psicología demuestra que las mujeres se sienten más atraídas por lo que es raro o difícil de conseguir. Esto crea la dinámica de «persecución» en la atracción.

Aquí tienes 7 tipos de hombres que las mujeres NUNCA abandonan:

1. Un hombre al que no le importa nada:

Esto no significa ser descuidado o irrespetuoso, en absoluto. Significa ser emocionalmente independiente.

La mayoría de los hombres se derrumban ante el silencio, la indiferencia o el retraimiento de una mujer.

Pero el hombre del que no puede alejarse es aquel que no se desvive por complacerla.

Él tiene su propio mundo, sus propias prioridades, ambiciones, su propio código, y se niega a traicionarlo por nadie.

Si ella se aleja, él no la persigue, la deja ir.

Si ella lo pone a prueba, él no reacciona, observa.

There's two ways to think about this.
First, at the level of broad partisan alignment, the diaspora & Iran are closer than they used to be. The old story about wealthy “LA monarchists” as outliers doesn’t hold anymore, especially after the scale of recent migration out of Iran.

https://twitter.com/websterkaroon/status/2042078984285122702

What makes neo-Pahlavism interesting is how often it inversely correlates with class, especially inside Iran. To the extent that any ideology is disproportionately popular in the diaspora, it's the left.

Second, though, it’s still analytically useful to distinguish between the diaspora and people inside Iran. Political affiliation isn’t abstract – it emerges from group interests. And those interests only make sense within a group’s actual environment.

6 dark websites you shouldn't visit without a VPN

Education purpose only

DuckDuckGo:

A preferred alternative to Google on the dark web, DuckDuckGo lets you search the surface web while guaranteeing your privacy.

→ The go-to search engine on Tor browser
→ Private and trace-free web browsing

Facebook:

As surprising as it may sound, the world’s largest social media giant has a .onion address of its own.

→ Get access to Facebook in restricted regions and locations
→ Allows you to create an anonymous Facebook account on the dark web

Your Android phone is sending data to Google every 4.5 minutes.

Even when you're not touching it. Even when the screen is off.

A peer-reviewed study from Trinity College Dublin confirmed it.

12 settings to change right now:

1/ Turn Off WiFi Scanning (it tracks you even when WiFi is OFF)

You turn off WiFi. You think WiFi is off.

It's not. Android keeps scanning for WiFi networks in the background to track your location.

This is confirmed in Google's own developer documentation.

→ Settings → Location → Location Services → Wi-Fi Scanning → Turn OFF

Samsung: Settings → Location → Location Services → Improve Accuracy → Wi-Fi Scanning → Turn OFF

2/ Turn Off Bluetooth Scanning (same problem)

Even when you toggle Bluetooth OFF, Android keeps scanning for Bluetooth beacons to track your location.

Samsung's own settings page says it literally:

"Connect to nearby devices even while Bluetooth is turned off."

→ Settings → Location → Location Services → Bluetooth Scanning → Turn OFF

Samsung: Settings → Location → Location Services → Improve Accuracy → Bluetooth Scanning → Turn OFF

Today, many Eastern Churches celebrate Easter according to the Julian calendar. In communion of faith in the Risen Lord, I extend my heartfelt wishes for peace to all these communities. Let us #PrayTogether for all those suffering due to war, particularly for the dear people of Ukraine. May the light of Christ bring comfort to afflicted hearts and strengthen the hope for peace. May the international community’s attention to the tragedy of this war not waver!

In these days of sorrow, fear, and unwavering hope in God, I feel closer than ever to the beloved people of Lebanon. The principle of humanity, inscribed in the conscience of every person and recognized in international law, entails a moral obligation to protect the civilian population from the horrific effects of war. I call on the parties in the conflict to declare a ceasefire and urgently seek a peaceful solution.

Next Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the start of the bloodstained conflict in Sudan. How much the Sudanese people are suffering, innocent victims of this inhuman tragedy! I renew my fervent appeal to the warring parties to silence their weapons and begin, without preconditions, a sincere dialogue aimed at ending this fratricidal war as soon as possible.

Από eleni G
"Σήμερα στις 4.00 το πρωί "άγνωστοι" επιτέθηκαν και έκαψαν στη μικρή galerie Eclectica στου Ψυρή,
Αγίων Αναργύρων 13.
Ήταν το μονο μαγαζί που στην πόρτα του,
είχε γραμμένο
"This gallery is not genocide friendly".
("Αυτή η γκαλερί δεν δέχεται γενοκτονους")

H ιδιοκτήτρια δεχόταν βρισιές από τους "τουρίστες" που έχουν καταλάβει την περιοχή και περνούσαν από εκεί. Έσπασαν το πίσω τζάμι από τον ακάλυπτο και το τζάμι της πρόσοψης και πέταξαν εύφλεκτο υλικό.

Η φωτιά εξαπλώθηκε γρήγορα, και θα μπορούσε να κινδυνέψει όλο το κτίριο

και οι κάτοικοι των ορόφων,αν δυο κοπέλες δεν περνούσαν εκείνη την ώρα τυχαία και δεν καλούσαν την πυροσβεστική που έφτασε σε 10 λεπτά,
μιας και ο πυροσβεστικός σταθμός είναι πολύ κοντά.

Συμπτωματικά η πίσω πλευρά του τετραγώνου ειναι η gated περιοχή
της Chabad

I continue to stand by my comment and don't see it as "gaslighting".

I've seen people who have dedicated their lives to alignment and good AI policy get told they're sellouts, bootlickers, traitors to humanity, morally equivalent to concentration camp guards, etc. Sometimes these accusations are directed against them by name (while capabilities researchers at Meta or something get off scot-free, because it doesn't serve intra-factional conflicts as much to condemn them). They feel demoralized by this and under siege. You and I are Twitter warriors and used to this kind of stuff, but a lot of these people aren't. Sometimes they're Anthropic employees, but other times they're just random EA staffers, or technical alignment researchers who think technical alignment is a good path, or writers who side with people in the previous groups.

I don't want anyone to overupdate on the exact examples I'm listing here because I'm talking more about a general mood, but I think it would be bad manners not to give any:

x.com/ilex_ulmus/sta…
x.com/wolflovesmelon…
x.com/tombibbys/stat…
x.com/gcolbourn/stat…
x.com/HumanHarlan/st…
x.com/RemmeltE/statu…
x.com/DavidSKrueger/…

I'm not claiming that all of these comments are as bad as each other, or even in the same ballpark of badness, or that Rob's tweet was as bad as any of them.

But for example, I remember a random Lighthaven event, it might've been Manifest or something, where the conversation turned to how we could most effectively "stigmatize" people who worked at Anthropic. Everyone just sort of accepted this framing and started proposing ideas. When I suggested that it wasn't obvious that we should be stigmatizing these people and this was actually a big and dangerous step subject to slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-… , it was treated as an obvious faux pas on my part.

And I keep getting requests for writing advice by random Less Wrong commenters who want me to look over their N versions of the same article about how haven't you heard, technical alignment has now been discredited, Dario has been proven a bad actor, and we all have to switch to PauseAI. It seems like a lot of Less Wrong and Rationalist Twitter are pivoting to this position at once, and it's getting surprisingly (to me) little pushback from within the rationalist community. One explanation is that it's happening because this position is obviously true, and I don't a priori rule this one out, but it doesn't seem compelling to me - partly because the policy switch doesn't feel obviously true *to me*, and partly because lots of people are converging on the same questionable strategic decisions without pushback (eg to use "effective altruism" as the term for the enemy).

Meanwhile, when I publicly speak out against this, even in the most gentle way possible (a neutral-tone reply on Twitter to a specific tweet of Rob's that most people in this discussion now agree was at least slightly badly phrased), I get told that Lighthaven is considering canceling all future ACX meetups in retaliation, and several people Discord me in private saying we urgently need to meet and discuss, and my apparently-former-friends tell me that I can't possibly actually believe this and I must be gaslighting them, and people accuse me of lying to preserve my contacts with Open Phil (whose money I have never taken).

Yes, as you say, I've built up some status and this insulates me from some of the negative dynamics in the community. But that's exactly what I'm worried about. If you guys ban me from Lighthaven, I can find somewhere else to host meetups. But I think the average person whose org depends on Lighthaven support, or who doesn't want to get in a big Twitter war with all of the luminaries of the community, won't be very excited about trying to push back against this narrative and say that maybe Anthropic might be okay.

So the point I'm trying to make with all of this is that the combination of:
--- A few bad actors (who I don't lump Rob, Lighthaven, or anyone else in the same bucket as) saying extremely emotionally-charged things, like that if you haven't 100% switched from the old alignment-at-labs agenda to the new pause agenda, you're a traitor to humanity and a child-murderer and should be consumed with guilt.
--- Lots of discussions at Lighthaven, on Less Wrong, on this part of Twitter, etc, which just sort of assume that everyone agrees that Pause AI activism is the cool new thing we're all switching to, and that anyone who continues to believe the discredited old alignment-at-labs paradigm must just be lying or shilling (a surprising new consensus which happened quickly and with surprisingly little meta-level commentary)
--- Explicit planning about how to stigmatize the alignment-at-labs people.
--- Very direct and visible examples of retaliation and pressure against people within the rationalist community who speak out in favor of the alignment-at-labs plan, even if they also want to pursue pausing AI as a parallel strategy.

...are the sort of conditions that contribute to the possibility of epistemic collapse and dumb-in-retrospect strategic errors.

(example: I now think that the 2023 FLI letter supporting a six-month pause was a strategic error, because the accelerationists are using it as a not-entirely-unfair jab against us - "do you still believe that pausing for six months in 2023 would have solved our problems?" I signed the letter, and I think in retrospect I made that mistake because I didn't want to look like one of the bad people who was "acting strategically" and "playing 11D chess" by not immediately getting on board with the latest loudly-demand-an-immediate-pause initiative - although I probably wouldn't have used those exact words/concepts in 2023).

The rationalist/EA communities in particular are vulnerable to these dynamics. Everyone is so bad at taking their own side of an issue that when a few strong-willed people who are good at performing moral clarity show up and tell them they're wrong and bad, they get hyperscrupulous and fold immediately (see Part I of astralcodexten.com/p/criticism-of… ). I see part of my role as challenging some of these things and giving people permission not to fold.

I acknowlege that there are also dynamics on "the other side" about people being unwilling to disagree with EA/OP/Ant. This isn't contradictory, it's the way these situations always work (eg there are reputational penalties both for being woke at an Alabama church, or for being anti-woke at a California university). If you're wondering why I'm criticizing you and not them, my answers are:

1. I am criticizing them. You can see me criticizing Dario's cringeworthy take on "doomers" in Adolescence of Technology on the last ACX links post, entry #31. I think of posting criticism on ACX as a bigger and more aggressive step than posting it on Twitter (although this is counterbalanced by the fact that I'm less sure Dario reads ACX or cares about what I say). When I visited Anthropic, I asked the people I met there lots of questions about why they weren't supporting pausing AI more (the modal response was an assurance that they were aware of the relevant considerations and agreed with me about everything, but that the answer to my question was secret). I don't claim to be challenging them daily or making it a big part of my work, but I'm also not challenging you daily or making it a big part of my work. I'm focusing mostly on object-level stuff, and trying to challenge bad comms patterns of all types on the rare occasions when I see a good opportunity.

2. The EA/OP/Ant version of this (maybe) doesn't happen in spaces where I can see it and intervene as often. It might be a helpful exercise for you to link me to the top ten tweets / blog posts / other forms of communication where you believe that EA/OP/Ant are pressuring, defecting against, or misbehaving against you. I can't immediately think of what would be in a list like this. If your claim is that they're doing it in private, then I think that's an important difference from you doing it in public!

3. My impression is that EA/OP/Ant usually have specific well-thought-out strategic reasons why they're being jerks to you (eg not funding you because they think it would offend their bigshot political connections) and that these reasons are true and sympathetic. I think this is an important difference from the LW/rat/Twitter community just sort of spontaneously settling into an anti-EA/OP/Ant position.

4. Relatedly, I think the goal of the EA community is to fund good things, and the goal of the rationalist community is to be correct about epistemics. If it's hard to disagree with a consensus in EA, I care about this only indirectly/consequentially in terms of whether it makes their funding decisions worse. If it's hard to disagree with a consensus in the rationalist community, I think it's more of an urgent halt-and-catch-fire moment.

5. I think EA/OP/Ant are doing basically the right thing by their own world-model, whereas I think you're making a mistake even by your own lights. That specific mistake is to focus your criticism on "EA", who I think you're interpreting as something like a few grantmakers who are mean to you, when in fact you're doing collateral damage to eg SFF who fund you, to MIRI/PauseAI/CAIS etc who are part of your movement but who the average guy on the street would group in with "EA", to public EA influencers like me/Kelsey/Eliezer, to random people who like mosquito nets, and to the general concept of trying to donate money effectively.

6. There's an asymmetry here sort of like the asymmetry between big corporations and progressive activists. Big corporations are much more powerful than progressive activists, they do lots of bad/unfair things, and insofar as you want to punch up, they're a better target for criticism. But you hear more criticism about corporations from progressive activists, then vice versa. So it's often more useful, as an intellectual, to explain the big corporation perspective than the progressive activist perspective (example: Andy Masley on data center water usage - in some sense it's bizarre for him to be "siding with" trillion dollar data center companies against random very-earnest people on Twitter, but in fact until he started doing that, nobody was defending them, and the discussion was culpably biased in favor of the very-earnest progressive protesters). I think something like that is going on with EA/OP/Ant. Yes, on a financial level they're ten-thousand-ton gorillas. But also I feel like I constantly see trivially wrong attacks on them getting traction, and they're too busy ruling the world to defend themselves. I am, as usual, astralcodexten.com/p/less-utilita… , and it seems important to call out some of those attacks as unfair.

I'm not asking Rob to change anything in particular. I certainly don't want to silence him or make him stop saying what he believes. I'm very very much not asking him to "disavow" Guido or Holly or whoever. And I'm not asking Oli or Lighthaven to do anything, I literally didn't even mention or address them until they inserted themselves into this discussion (I acknowledge they're on the same "side" as Rob and are right to think that what I'm saying applies to them too, but I choose who I engage with deliberately, and I wanted to stress that I was putting zero pressure on them to change anything). My entire goal in this is to say publicly, one time, "Hey, I partly disagree with the way this is being communicated, and I'd like to give other people social permission to disagree too." This has been finished, I'm backing off for now except to defend myself on tweets like this one, and you should keep pursuing your political strategies in whatever way you think is most effective without expecting me to interfere much.

BTW, I regret that we're having this discussion at the same time the Altman Molotov cocktail thing has other people riled up about anti-AI-activism. I think it's completely unfair to blame you at all for that. I realize some of my discomfort with Guido or Holly about other things comes at an awkward time because other people are (completely unfairly) blaming Guido and Holly for violence they didn't commit or endorse and are 100% against. I didn't know about the Altman attack when I responded to Robby, I don't want to stop this conversation just because today it's especially easy to round off my criticism to other people's unfair criticism, and I'm sorry if I'm accidentally contributing to an unfair pile-on that these people (or you) are experiencing.

Is there a pastor shortage?

This BP story says the average evangelical gives 3.05% to church.

Let’s think about that a little.

baptistpress.com/resource-libra…

At 3.05%, it takes about 33 givers to have one average income - nationally, that’s about $60k.

But normally two thirds of the budget goes to other things. So you need closer to 100 givers to hit $60k.

The average SBC pastor makes $78k. So, that pushes you closer to 125 wage earning givers.

If you go to seminary, even with the SBC’s subsidized rates, you’re looking at $30k in tuition, books, and fees for an MDiv.

If you financed that and paid it off over 20 years, it’d take 4-6 additional, giving adults to pay it off.

So, you’re looking at a church closer to 130 giving adults.

Of course, not everybody at church is a donating adult — kids probably don’t work or donate. Retirees might give, but probably at a smaller rate. Figure 30% nongivers, and now you’re at 185 people to support a typical SBC pastor.

1/10 The U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would cost Iran approximately $276M/day in lost exports and disrupt $159M/day in imports, a combined economic damage of ~$435M/day, or $13B/month.

Over 90% of Iran's $109.7B in annual trade transits the Persian Gulf. Oil/gas accounts for 80% of government export earnings and 23.7% of GDP. Kharg Island alone generates ~$53B/year, or as I noted to @TIME, "$78 billion a year in energy revenue.

2/10 CRUDE OIL: Iran was exporting ~1.5M barrels/day, earning $139M/day at wartime pricing (~$87/barrel), though with minimal proceed repatriation due to banking sanctions. A blockade zeroes this out overnight. Kharg Island, which handles 92% of crude exports, sits deep inside the Gulf with no viable alternative. That's $139M/day, gone.

3/10 PETROCHEMICALS: Iran exported $19.7B in petrochemicals in 9 months of 2024/25, ~$54M/day. Virtually all of it ships through Assaluyeh, Imam Khomeini, and Shahid Rajaee, all inside the blockade zone. No overland route can move these volumes. Another $54M/day, gone.

Within 10 days, parts of the global economy will start running short of critical goods
After 30 years studying economic sanctions and blockades, I don’t say this lightly:
--Not just higher prices
--Shortages.
Markets are not ready for this

Everyone is still talking about oil prices
That’s already outdated
--This is no longer a price shock
--It is the early stage of a system-wide supply shock

Here’s the mechanism:
price spike → physical shortage → economic contraction
We are now crossing into step 2
That’s when things break.

Totally unrelated to the content of the thread:

Why didn't I use a more fun AI generated picture?

Because, somehow, all the image models are unable to draw trains going from DC to SF. It's actually pretty weird (thread)

https://twitter.com/AaronBergman18/status/2043515244639559835

So this didn't work, which was a little weird - Gemini is plenty smart, and every modern image model knows basic geography and directions

Ask it to fix: it doesn't fix, but it stretches the image vertically?

(Cancel me for caring about how hot the caricature is)