@paulg I wasn't responding to you (I meant it when I say I don't subtweet single examples), just calling out a general pattern on CT I've found insufferable over the past week. Sigh, I'll explain where I am coming from in more detail.

Basically, there's "a thing" that happens on here where people give out rumors, and many people retweet them, and lots of people start trading on that info...

Anti-malaria, pandemic response, mitigating extreme poverty, life extension research, mitigating existential risks (including AI) and thinking about the multimillion-year future of humanity are all very important and undervalued issues and will continue to be for quite a while. I think the effective altruism community's most underrated weakness is not having a good theory of effectively allocating *social* capital.

Especially if you're well-known, you're not just giving out money, but also reallocating public attention, inspiring the next generation...

Should I publicly blab my opinions about crypto regulation more? Feels unfair to let other people get attacked by CT but never actually poke my own head out. Well actually here's my moderate take on mixers and privacy that I already gave in the @coinbase podcast two months ago:

The big really valuable and necessary thing that ERC-4337 provides for account abstraction is a *decentralized fee market* for user operations going into smart contract wallets.

eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337 You should be able to send an op into a public mempool, and if it pays enough fees, reliably expect it to get included. This should NOT depend on ANY:

* Centralized actors
* Reputation systems for op senders
* ETH held in a separate EOA
* External services for account creation

Second update from Balvi! 🧵

Lots more anti-covid projects funded, thanks to funds from @Shibtoken @CryptoRelief_!

Previous update here:

https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/1522017142320685057?lang=en

First, should you still care about covid?

I've seen the full spectrum of opinions from very smart people. I'd say it's not worth overturning our lives over it, but there are plenty of signs that this thing is a tier more dangerous than the cold/flu and we should not ignore it.

A thread of random polls about myself: What D&D alignment most accurately describes me?

Neural networks as philosophy:

Late 20th century philosophical thought was heavily influenced by intuitions from study of computers and algorithms: *we too* are algorithms, what could those insights say about us?

I wonder if the 21st century will do the same with neural nets. When people say things like "human beings are not algorithms", sometimes they're not literally asserting a spirit world not describable with math and physics, rather they're saying: we're different from *computer programs written by humans*. We're more similar to neural nets.

I continue to find probability distributions with infinite means fascinating. Particularly how their averages *don't converge* as you sample more values.

You can even replicate the behavior deterministically with "tan at integers" as a pseudo-RNG. And if you use tan^2 you get into total crazy land.

I just remembered a conversation with @AnthonyLeeZhang from pre-covid times on the role of ideology in an intellectual's thinking.

The dichotomy of "idea-driven ideas" vs "data-driven ideas". Framed this way, ideology looks bad, but actually it's not so simple... ... because there are other options. A particularly important option is "data-driven choice of idea-driven ideas". Ideology generates hypotheses and provides motivation, but then you check them against reality, and be prepared to dismiss or de-emphasize some as a result.

There are far more honorable ways to burn $50m to impress people than buying a superyacht.

Like becoming a @gitcoin grants matching partner! Here are the matching partners for the current round: @coinbase @0xPolygon @ocelot_labs @UnlockProtocol @graphprotocol @auroraisnear @radicle @anomanetwork @chainlink @Filecoin @ensdomains @blvkhvnd @iearnfinance @kimbal @game7_official @OmidyarNetwork @realMaskNetwork @OPGames_ @0xPARC @AaveAave ...

I've been thinking about *why* this is true, and I might have an explanation. Basically, I think it comes down to a confusion between terminal goals ("the things we ultimately want") and our strategies for achieving them...

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1537777073586155520

By terminal goals I *roughly* mean things like convenience, safety, fun, enjoyment, status, love, health...

Terminal goals aren't "individual" or "collective", they just are. What *is* individual or collective are the strategies for achieving these ends.

"Accountability" is viewed by most people as a virtue, but it's interesting to look at cases where *lack of accountability* is an explicit goal of some system.

Examples:

* Voting (secret ballot)
* Juries
* Tenure
* Anonymous complaints
* Privacy norms/rules/laws Anon culture is about having less accountability, with the goal of allowing people to authentically speak their minds.

As an anon, you don't get negative personal consequences for saying things others dislike, but you also miss out on lots of positive personal consequences.

Some people responded "but technology HAS had few upsides and many downsides!"

I definitely agree there are important problems. But I also think much of the pessimism is narrative, not reality.

[thread] Some amazing technology successes of the last 20y:

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1532151214586048512

* Instant global accessibility of often frontier-level knowledge
* Covid vaccines
* Remote work
* Remote friendship
* Urban navigation (smartphone maps)
* Falling prices of clothing and many other physical items
* Solar power
* Very-low-cost entertainment

A big difference between the "new idealistic movement" scene 10-15 years ago vs today is that back then it felt possible to be on all the good-guy teams at the same time. Today, much more adversarial thinking and conflict.

I've been trying to understand.. where to from here? Many libertarians were excited about direct democracy.

PorcFest (big libertarian event) had lots of carnivore *and* vegan food.

Rick @Falkvinge bridged Bitcoin and the Pirate Party.

Lots of blockchain people and "open source community" people saw each other as natural allies.

One broader sort-of-contradiction I think about is the open-mindedness vs passion tradeoff.

Is it possible to both passionately act on the world based on your current beliefs and be open minded to the possibility that those beliefs are very wrong?

How do yall handle this? It's hard. Eventually you make a mistake in your beliefs, and (especially if you are in politics, but some other domains too) correcting that mistake means acknowledging that a previous version of yourself contributed negative value to the world.

Thread: some still open contradictions in my thoughts and my values, that I have been thinking about but still don't feel like I've fully resolved. Contradiction between my desire to see Ethereum become a more Bitcoin-like system emphasizing long-term stability and stability, including culturally, and my realization that getting there requires quite a lot of active coordinated short-term change.

Update from Balvi! (moonshot anti-covid effort funded by @ShibainuCoin @CryptoRelief_ ). We have our first round of funding recipients: @RADVACproject open-source covid vaccine R&D. Focused on trying to make vaccines:

* Easy to make worldwide, without super-fancy equipment
* Protect against infection and not just severe symptoms
* Self-administerable
* R&D out in the open

https://twitter.com/RADVACproject/status/1521511429634936832

I've been thinking about how to better understand the "there is no neutrality, there's only different inevitably-biased perspectives" viewpoint. Here's an analogy that I found helpful:

What is the "neutral" chess move? If we had an infinitely-powerful supercomputer, we actually could search through all ~10^120 possibilities down the game tree and give a theoretically optimal move.

But in reality we don't have anything close to such capabilities. So what can we do?

1. Thinking about this tweet lately. Here we have someone with a "tech people vs word people" dichotomy, but unlike @balajis and all the others who do this, crypto ends up on the side of... the word people.

This is not my image of what crypto is! So what's going on?

https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1473156331297120256

2. Here's the explainer on "wordcels vs shape rotators". If you're confused, read this first.

roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-sh…

Now, back to the topic...

CryptoRelief sending $100m of the $SHIBA funds back to me. I plan to personally deploy these funds with the help of science advisors to complement CryptoRelief's existing excellent work with some higher-risk higher-reward covid science and relief projects worldwide.

https://twitter.com/sandeepnailwal/status/1487073265319231491

I've cofounded a new org (Balvi) to direct these funds, which is in a better position to make these bets which will are very-high-value and global in nature and bring great benefit to Indians and non-Indians. You can follow funds at this address:

etherscan.io/address/0xa06c…

Happy new year!

Today, a mini-tweetstorm of some of the things I've said and written over the past decade, and what I think about those subjects today. 1. In 2013, I wrote this piece on "how Bitcoin can actually help Iranians and Argentinians". The core point: Bitcoin's key benefit is internationality and censorship resistance, NOT "the 21m limit". I predicted stablecoins will prosper.

bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/how-bi…