I had claude write a dating ad for me. It felt like it was trying to hard to be fun and relatable, so I asked Claude to make a "joyless" version, and got this: Another one:

(It's not actually true that I "don't socialize recreationally", but I can see why Claude wrote that.)

The problem here is real, but this analysis is of why it occurs is mistaken.

The AI companies are NOT incentived to maximize engagement the way that social media companies are, because they have a different business model.

🧵

https://twitter.com/atmoio/status/2040069814018883699

Facebook and twitter source their content from users and get their revenue from adds.

It's basically free to serve webpages, and the more time people send scrolling the more ad impression, the more revenue.

Cost is fixed, and revenue is variable.

Some thinking about the ethics around people funding me:

I'm working very hard pushing on projects that seem to me to be moving the world towards a better equilibrium. It feels like it does make sense for the broader ecosystem to pour resources into accelerating my efforts. Wild as it seems, I have more strategic orientation than most, and enough taste to see how a lot of projects could be better, and the energy and agency to make them so.

@deanwball writes that the blocker to AI takeover risk is computational irreducibility. Intelligence can't predict everything, and so superinelligence can't overthrow humans.

This is wrong. This argument misconstrues what superhuman "intelligence" (or if one prefers, superhuman "capability") entails.

Is there a good way to both support Anthropic for their integrity in not caving to the DoD and also loudly criticize Anthropic for walking back their RSP?

I think Ant employees should be reflecting on their company's ethical stance, about as much OAI employees, right now. I would feel better about this week's activism against OAI, if it wasn't also letting Ant off the hook.

They're doing a crazy thing that endangers all our lives. They just took a step towards more risk, with an attitude of "trust us bro". We should pressure them about it.

@ESYudkowsky, you've talked repeatedly about how trying to get safety properties via schemes that depend on utilizing two or more AIs is a red hering.

eg If you knew actually knew how to do it with 2+ AIs, you could do it more simply with only one. Why aren't GANs a counterpoint to this claim? They seem like a central example of getting capabilities out of the interplay of multiple AIs with different objective functions.

One thing that would help me figure out if I should invest a lot more into meditation is knowing in what situations it DOESN'T make sense to cultivate a meditation practice. People who proselytize for meditation practice:

Given you see as the main benefits of meditating, and what diagnostic questions you would ask + what answers someone would give you, that would dampen your recommendation that they meditate?

@sashachapin @nickcammarata

My 31st birthday was a few weeks ago.

If you want to do something nice for my (belated) birthday, the number one thing you can do is suggest people who I might want to date. I’m planning *not* to prioritize active dating until after the singularity.

I’m sad that I didn’t succeed at finding a life partner before crunch time started in earnest, but given my estimates of the tradeoffs involved, it’s not worth it for me to spend my agency on it now.

More generally, something that I've wanted for a long time is a catalogue of meditation practices and their various effects.

https://twitter.com/1240344633013501952/status/1888468580368601246

I care about some impacts of meditation more than others (and for some I might want to specifically avoid them, or move in the opposite direction), and it would be helpful to have some kind of guide of the impacts that different ways that different practices change the mind.

I want to try 5 to 10 different meditation techniques to get a sense of what kind of effect each one has on me, and generally get a good sense of the full landscape of different kinds of meditation.

Which techniques should I try? I think I should have treated learning both math and meditation as exploration.

Instead of picking something I want to learn and grinding on it, I should have tried a lot of different things, and then doubled down on the ones that I found most fun / engaging / interesting.

All this sounds basically right to me, and, comports with my own (not yet published) personal ethics, modulo that (to speak in the language Scott is using here, which is not my usual language) we TOTALLY have implicit obligations to animals.

Why wouldn't we?

https://twitter.com/1526643050/status/1886505797502546326

"If animals are conscious...we probably don't have obligations to them, because we never signed any treaties."

...but also...

This was fascinating (and slightly horrifying). I'd love to read more accounts of the sociological-economic dynamics of "worlds" that I have little exposure to.

aella.substack.com/p/how-onlyfans… This part in particular was thought-provoking.

"Feminine norms" are at least partially rooted in female psychology, but they're also just an adaption to being on the more-in-demand side of a competitive market with non-fixed supply, that thrives on impulsivity.

FYI, humans can learn to notice the feeling of confabulating or rationalizing, with a little bit of practice.

You do have to have an honest interest in noticing when it's happening though.

https://twitter.com/repligate/status/1878565599049367828

It helps for building the habit if you make an unobtrusive but distinct gesture every time you notice it.

In the GTF (if we get there), we'll regularly do mental operations that take thousands of symbols.

We'll think it is utterly bizarre and horrifying that the biological bootloader beings (us) could only only do mental operations on ~4 symbols at a time.

https://twitter.com/liron/status/1877116733242179647

This is an insane bottleneck.

I am very libertarian, but have become somewhat more conservative overtime in this sense:

I think it sensible for "society" to try to set social default norms that are healthy and sustainable.

But there HAVE to be ways for people to opt out of that if it doesn't work for them.

https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1876695092926492739

In fact, those things go together.

If there are ways for people to quietly opt out of the defaults, they don't have to rebel against those norms to create space for themselves to live lives that work for them.

I consider myself to "do philosophy", though what I mean by that has very little to do with academic philosophy or the "great philosophers" who I agree are mostly bad (with a few exceptions), except as examples of how different one’s worldview can be from what I take for granted. By "philosophy" I mean "reflecting on the abstractions we use to make sense of and act in the world."

It's notable how many of the replies are variations of "yeah! Taleb sucks!" or "fuck that guy".

Distinctly in contrast to Bryan's recognizing Taleb's value and meeting-negativity-with-sincere-positivity.

Not all though! Some replies were "yeah, I want to embody that energy!"

https://twitter.com/EpistemicHope/status/1875414107538735199

It's interesting to me that some fraction of people's main takeaway from this interaction is

"Taleb got owned"

not

"fuck yeah, what a cool example of someone responding to social attack with sincere appreciation, by investing energy on what's good."

The central event of the Christian religion is the crucifixion (and subsequent resurrection).

Presumably, it was not part of the actual Jesus of Nazareth's plan to be captured and crucified. It's kind of crazy that the defining theological feature of Christianity (Christ dying for humanity's sins) is a recon of the actual Jesus's teachings, to address the cognitive dissonance of his execution.

Man, it's crazy how much the trajectory of the singularity, and the whole cosmic future, probably hinged on the windspeed in Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024.

I guess that our measure split into two radically different timelines on that day. (I wonder what the ratio was. How much of my measure went down which branch? Is most of me in the other timeline, dealing with a different situation?)

Claude's high-level summary of my date-me page, when I ask it to focus on what's unique and non-cliche :

"Overall, this isn't a typical 'looking for my soulmate' profile - it's more like a detailed technical specification for a collaborative life optimization project." It's a little cringe, but not wholly inaccurate!

I think that summary misses the ways that I'm soulful, in addition to optimizing, which is good to to keep in mind for next drafts of my date-me page.

This is the dreamtime. Human existence as we know it is out of equilibrium, and not long for this world.

In the long run, everything we know and identify with will be eroded away by the crush of incentives, one way or another. (unless humanity becomes unprecedentedly good at coordinating to avoid dispreferred equilibria, and we "get out from underneath" the so far all pervasive pressures of Darwin and Malthus.)