Trying to understand the world
(my relationship to twitter: https://t.co/7UrZIBBeKS…)
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Jul 4 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
My impression of 1950s America, from news reels and ads, is that it was markedly more conformist than today.
All the men wear suits and hats?
I get the vibe that there's high levels of agreement about prestige hierarchies (eg everyone treats doctors with regard).
There's much more uniform adherence to (eg gendered) social roles?
Is that impression correct? Am I just noticing some dimensions of conformity and missing others?
Jul 2 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Interestingly, this gives me a whole different sense of "virtue".
I value being virtuous for its own sake, as something like an aesthetic judgement.
But there's a different way, which is more consequentialist: you just want "straightforward" desirable things like power and respect and sex and happiness, and so you do the things that get you those things.
Jul 2 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I'm thinking about if I was old and cognitively impaired, knowing that I would die in less than 10 years.
But this would be easy for me. I'm signed up for cryonics. I'd probably already be in suspension if I was loosing track of sentences.
...unless maybe I had grandkids or something, and they were bringing me joy everyday. Maybe that would be a reason to stick around?
Jun 25 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I think this view of society comes from a human egalitarian impulse, in two ways.
1) Society is stratified. Some people are in fact much better off and afforded real privileges and opportunities that others have less access to. Those privileges are an existence proof that "society" can be like a beneficent parent to at least some people.
Jun 18 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
So it seems like one way that the world could go is:
- China develops a domestic semiconductor fab industry that's not at the cutting edge, but close, so that it's less dependent on Taiwan's TSMC
- China invades Taiwan, destroying TSMC, ending up with a compute advantage...
...over.the US which translates into a military advantage
- (which might or might not actually be leveraged in a hot war).
May 19 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So, my short summary of planet earth is 1) we're building superintelligence without knowing what we're doing and 2) we're torturing ~100 billion non-human animals every single moment.
The moral scale of those things is so large as to dwarf pretty much everything else.
There are a few other things that matter, but mostly because they impact one of those two things.
But I think maybe I should be seriously considering that training / running ML models is painful, as a third thing on the list?
Apr 23 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Does anyone know what the argument is for the retention breath segment of Wim Hof breathing is?
It seems to me, based on the proposed mechanism, you should get all the benefits (and more so?) from straight up hyperventilating, without any breath hold at all.
Does anyone know the claimed reason why holding your breath helps?
Apr 12 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Has their ever been a human culture that trained it's citizens in virtue, sufficiently, such that transparent flattery doesn't work on them?
This thought prompted by the ads in the airport, many of which have barely relevant flattering slogans.
dath ilani would shocked at that. The slogans are trying to hack your decision process and they're not even logically valid!
But has any real human culture done better?
Mar 21 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
I'm monogamous by nature. I've never wanted to be in a romantic relationship with more than one person.
But I've exclusively dated poly people, since the people I wanted to date were poly. And ~all my friends are poly.
So I've been pretty close to some poly relationships.
I'm exploring strategic "mainstream" dating right now. Seeing about meeting people on bumble, and so on.
I've been surprised by how strong the negative reaction to poly is.
Mar 20 • 21 tweets • 3 min read
I just read @nabeelqu's post on how to use twitter.
I don't get it. This is not my experience with Twitter at all.
nabeelqu.co/twitter
I basically already follow his advice, with regards to tweeting.
Mar 19 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So....it was probably bad that Trump lost in 2020?
Because if he had won, he wouldn't be running again, and neither would Biden (probably).
And it seems likely that the intelligence explosion is going happen in the next presidential term.
If Trump had won, we would at least be seeing different candidates this time around.
And that's not a guarantee that they would be better, than these two, but we at least get a different draw.
Mar 18 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
It's dawning on me how much the incentives of software, and the world, are warped by VC.
The possibility of unicorn returns distorts the whole industry, most of which would probably have more wholesome impacts on the world if they focused on making more revenue than costs.
The whole world is using software, but most (?) of the producers of the software are beholden to something other than their customers: they need to grow, so that they're attractive to the next round of investors, so that they can grow more, so that the founders can exit.
Mar 13 • 31 tweets • 4 min read
Rereading Eliezer's post on wasted motions.
"[Fix] in your mind the scenario where your goal has been achieved, and ask whether a thought will predictably not have contributed to getting there in retrospect."
facebook.com/yudkowsky/post…
This feels like a new insight: this is a two step process. You don't just try and notice wasted motions. You first visualize the world where you succeed, and then, looking back from there, ask if the motions that you're doing are actually helpful.
Mar 11 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
I bet the underlying thing that IQ measures will turn out to be log normally distributed.
It just makes way more sense for it to be a product of (mostly) independent factors than the sum of (mostly) independent factors.
It only looks like a bell curve because we normalize the results of our cognitive ability tests.
Mar 9 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
What's the cutoff point at which I should stop seeking a long term romantic partner, because the singularity is going down and I'm better off just focusing on making it go as well as I can, on my own, instead of investing in a relationship of mutual support?
I think it probably takes 6 months to a year for a relationship to mature to the point that I can really rely on a person in the way that I want and need?
Mar 8 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
So AR and VR has slowly been improving for the past...20 year? Long enough that investors have been hyped about it and other investors are like "no, not this decade."
And so far the later investors have been correct.
But it seems to me that that's about to change? I'm an amateur here, but it looks like we're now like 2 to 5 years away from AR and/or VR being good enough that I use it every day?
Mar 8 • 31 tweets • 5 min read
I can be a lot more concrete here, since I did basically the same thing.
Between 2017 and 2020, I helped run AIRCS workshops, which were a recruiting program for MIRI.
We would invite a bunch of professional programmers to the CFAR venue in Bodega Bay. There were talks on x-risk, some CFAR content, break-out sessions on mathy stuff, and a lot more circling than you would expect.
Mar 7 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
For clarity: There's a much larger group of people who influenced my intellectual trajectory, or who I intellectually respect a lot, but who I'm not affiliated with as strongly.
The first three people on my list above are all people that I've either worked with, or whose projects I've supported, in large part on the basis of my assessment of their judgement.
Mar 7 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I was reflecting on how badly my society let me down with regards to giving me guidance about dating and finding a partner.
Lots of people are happy to give drive-by advice, without bothering to understand my situation. That's not just unhelpful, it's sometimes actively harmful.
In the same way, my college counselors gave me a bunch of advice, most of which I ignored.
In retrospect, I was right to ignore a lot of it, because my situation and life path really actually was atypical.
Mar 7 • 15 tweets • 2 min read
I don't know if this is a bullshit measurement or not.
But I gotta say, if we were coming up with some bright lines for when to pause frontier AI development, "we have AI as smart as the average human" is an extremely strong contender.
We want to strike a balance between getting as much of the material and human benefits of AI tech as we can, while still leaving a sufficient wide safety margin between our tech and existentially dangerous tech.
Mar 6 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I'd like to say this publicly when there's nothing in particular happening:
@willmacaskill does not represent me, personally.
He did not contribute to my intellectual trajectory. I've never read any of his books or, to my knowledge, been influenced by any ideas he originated.
If we were voting for leaders or figureheads for EA, and I got a vote, I wouldn't vote for him.
I have nothing in particular against the guy, but he's not someone I defer to or someone whose choices and actions I would like to reflect on me.
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