Rationalist, radical centrist, inventor of the world's greatest infohazard. Early to AI, late to crypto. Truth above virtue.
7 added to My Authors
May 14 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Recent progress in #AI has made me update towards cutting off the right tail of AI timelines.
AI will rule the planet by 2100 with say 99.5% certainty.
The middle for superintelligence is still say 2050, but obviously there's some spread either side.
I define superintelligence to be an AI that's vastly superior to any human or group of humans at all cognitive tasks, including persuasion, strategy, etc.
Governments need to regulate crypto. Without regulation, you get ponzi schemes.
IMO the ideal balance is to allow legitimate exchanges like Coinbase to only offer established cryptos like Ethereum and Bitcoin than have a decent price history
Given that the supply of these two is mostly no longer held by the teams, it's reasonable to treat them like commodities.
If people want to take their Ether and Bitcoin off exchanges and do stuff onchain, that acts as a filter for the idiots.
In general, we vastly underestimate the importance of social parasites. And I don't mean people on welfare. I mean organizations that exist to extract some kind of rent from us and do a lot pf harm in the process.
A technological society creates massive amounts of surplus that in theory should be shared out equally between everyone - but in practice there's a huge incentive to do anything you possibly can to steal all of that surplus for yourself and your associates, even at the cost...
Apr 23 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Mijic's law of cynicism: however cynical you are isn't enough, even when you take this law into account.
2022 has been a good year - a bumper year - for extreme cynicism.
The left just call everyone they disagree with "Nazis" in an entirely cynical and opportunistic way?
Doesn't go far enough. They will literally send weapons to modern neonazis and feel good about it if the NPC puppet masters tell them to.
Apr 22 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A reasonable question here from @StruanCurtis: human population is quite large, why do we need to worry about population collapse?
(1) Dysgenics: reduced fertility tends to hit people with high human capital.
Apr 21 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
LGBT advocates want equality over teaching children about sexuality.
The problem with this is that LGBT people mostly don't produce children. Each child that gets diverted from a "cis-straight" life-path to an LGBT life path is an evolutionary dead end as they won't reproduce.
However, after concentrating military power onto a single front, Russia will have strong local superiority and that will probably get them some results.
Apr 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I wouldn't be surprised if #Russia takes most of the remainder of Donbas now. All that combat power that was spread out across northern Ukraine has focused in on Donbas.
1. women shouldn't have a political voice 2. Everything about modern liberal society is wrong and should be replaced
Apr 6 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
This is an important question of tactics. Left wing gender ideology directed at children is not the same thing as pedophilia, though they are historically related.
The goal of a pedophile is his own sexual gratification.
The goal of a "gender indoctrinator" is ideological.
@ConceptualJames and others are "preaching to the choir" when they deliberately mix up pedophilia with gender indoctrination, rather than really trying to win the war.
It's like Kadyrov posting Instagram photos of himself in prada boots with but not actually in Ukraine.
Apr 4 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
If you want a very simple model of why insane leftism is winning so hard at politics, I think it goes like this:
Political power is controlled by elites, not by commoners. Commoners lile #Maga don't have the intelligence or competence to win any kind of sophisticated conflict.
So, elite populations get to decide what happens.
OK, but why have the elites gone crazy? I think this is partially a product of increasing wealth. When people are rich and happy, they are *desperate* to virtue signal. This has upsides: it makes people more kind and cooperative.
Apr 3 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I am not going to claim that Russia only kills civilians "by accident" at this stage. The situation on the ground is fluid and many claims are being made.
If there have been large-scale atrocities committed, we'll probably have plenty of time to condemn them.
At the same time, I wouldn't deny that atrocities happened. At this stage it's too early to be sure and the information environment is extremely rough.
What we have seen so far *looks* like mass killings of civilians by Russian soldiers at a scale of say a few hundred people.
Mar 31 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Game theory to the rescue: the reason that people frequently ghost people rather than explicitly reject them is that by rejecting someone you create a dangerous, vengeful person, but if you just ignore them then that sliver of hope keeps them safe.
An interesting point in a rather in-depth debate about stores of value: does jewelery demand cause gold to be a store of value, or does gold as a store of value cause jewelry demand?
Luckily there's a natural experiment: aluminium jewelry from the 1860s!
The official lines that we're getting about escalation risks from MiGs flying across the border are bullshit, the real reason we're not giving that kind of assistance is that it would work too well and therefore precipitate escalation.
Mar 24 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
☭ RETVRN TO TRADITION ☭
I wonder whether this is true though. It would be pretty significant if it was; maybe this is what the plan for all of Ukraine was?
Intersectionality at work: Sunak knows exactly what a woman is, but he's in the 🏳️🌈 coalition because he's nonwhite in a white-majority country, so he's willing to indulge the gender woke.
The conservative party as a whole is like this. They're 🏳️🌈 diverse, their electorate is diverse, so because of the way power in a democracy works, they have to be woke, or at least somewhat woke.
Biopolitics is relentless.
Mar 23 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ukrainians elected a Jewish person to lead their country but Israel won't even sell them spyware.
Why?
Loyalty again: Israel is a nuclear power with a lot of political influence, it doesn't owe Ukraine anything.
At the same time, Azov neonazis are fighting to the death for a Jewish leader.
Why?
Azov are football hooligans with AK-47s, they can't be choosy.
Mar 23 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Much of the dissident right's pro-#Putin stance is a political mistake, and it's a rather predictable one that I think we see far too much of.
What's the specific problem with supporting Putin?
(🧵)
First of all, what is the goal of politics? Seriously, if politics was a computer game with a score board, what would the score be tracking?
It would be tracking loyalty. The more people (weighted according to importance and power) who are loyal to you, the more power you have.
Mar 12 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
I think a lot of people who are bullish on Russia winning in #Ukraine are bullish because of what they're seeing on the map: Russia is grabbing Ukrainian territory.
Territory on the map is nice to look at because it's by far the most legible part of the balance of power.