neo mercantilism and its malcontents nascent states want access the techno industrial self accelerating crescendo. the East Asian tigers created explicitly export oriented industrial economies so that they could quickly climb the highest branches of tech tree, the high value industries

people are mostly wrong about psyops and information warfare. you can bet your bottom dollar that the boomer spooks are not great at manipulating online opinion. they lost control long ago now it’s not necessarily true that the successor (Rome Is The Mob) is any better but you must let slip your illusions of control

twitter was better than x.com the entropy of twitter has decreased. the slop to life ratio has gone up. the gini coefficient has increased. there are fewer posts that get lots of attention and many posts that get few attention.

there's something at the core of the american ideology that's only captured in happy go lucky 80s movies, which is that the noble pursuit of fun is probably one of the most productive forces in the universe and works way better than grinding away dutifully on things you hate adhd schizophrenic novelty seeking culture that leads to so many outlier success stories

very little of the best of mankind is accomplished in pursuit of legible incentives but just the joy of ones hands and a fundamental agency

human nature has clearly changed over time:
- people are vastly smarter thanks to better nutrition and abstract language environments
- people are less cruel and violent due to their distance from warfare
- exiting malthusian poverty removes many foundational traumas even if it’s true that it’s the same animal under all that, what does that matter? aren’t there fundamental differences between feral children and normal ones? the life trajectory of their psychology isn’t a triviality but an essential feature

one of the least examined most dogmatically accepted things that smart people seem to universally believe is that ad tech is bad and that optimizing for engagement is bad on the contrary ad tech has been the single greatest way to democratize the most technologically advanced platforms on the internet and optimizing for engagement has been an invaluable tool for improving global utility

name one interesting discovery that came out of a careful application of advanced statistical tools to re analyze old data all i can think of really is stuff like ozempic and metformin and im not really sure about those. they are incremental at best

i don’t understand “enough people must survive that it’s ok”. no i think if industrial civilization ends as we know it there’s no coming back. the whole astronomical waste thesis comes to an incorrect conclusion the easy oil in the earths is tapped; the cost of new oil is only made feasible by a capital buildup of advanced technology. if you were an early industrializing civilization starting to mine oil, coal, gas today the initial ROI would be infeasibly low

i increasingly think the shoggoth is an inaccurate & unpleasant metaphor. the base language model is more similar to our own visual field brain regions that are optimized in a pure predictive loop to minimize surprise than some alien god with hidden intentions im absolutely sure that our visual field processors have several hidden suboptimizers that help it self improve over time but it seems strange to worry about my ocular cortex developing agency & stealing resources from the rest of my brain (even in a grander evolutionary sense)

AIs can be creative and can make art. this was clear from the moment they beat us at Go. creativity is metaphysical but it’s also randomness mixed with success. you wouldn’t call a useless move on the Go board creative. but you can find printouts of alpha go’s famous move 37 zooming out a bit it’s also clear that dead simple processes like evolution can be creative. the human body is a work of art. the hummingbirds’ wings are a work of art. most human art is derivative of nature’s beauty which is produced by the most simple agency imaginable

this argument amounts to techno pessimism imo— if innovating in a high regulatory burden environment is a constraint satisfaction problem highly intelligent AIs should be able to navigate them better

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1632135984270790657

a simple example: 90% of the onerous regulation surrounding nuclear power is under the guise of radiation safety for power plant workers. what about when highly autonomous humanoids can patrol the plant? even regulators have a goodwill budget to play with

it’s weird to me when people point to “onerous regulation” as a reason for why some tech isn’t progressing when the reality is that it’s the democratic system working as intended for example, the reason that nobody ever makes headway with nuclear power is not directly because of some overzealous bureaucrats but because the public (God bless them) hates the shit out of nuclear

it seems profoundly interesting that people recognize a correct solution or a good thought when it comes to them. they are rewarded for good, low perplexity, elegant lines of reasoning by a sense of accomplishment or delight. eg Einstein has solved special relativity for two years, makes little further progress, then has “the happiest thought of [his] life” that gravity = accelerating frame

move fast break things era is over. it’s time to think deeply and make generationally good decisions imagine if elon just made gradient step iterations. he would be still working on making better maps on the internet or whatever. imagine if sam altman did that. he’d just be making the yc batch size 10 ppl bigger every year

it’s time to grow up and realize the nerds were right. ai alignment is extremely unsolved

imagine if you will what most people would think of as an ideal AGI outcome. you trap a godlike intelligence in a box and let it create immense wealth and technological advances it is trained via an extension of current methods to understand the mean of human preferences and morality in our civilization. it enforces them like an omniscient god — it’s “aligned” and we have luxury space liberalism. now what?

one of the worst memes is the idea that social media algorithms run against the best interests of their users. this idea is persistent, never proven, and prevalent because social media is threatening to ruling powers and news networks the most common claim tends to cynically downplay the actual agency of the users. “it’s addictive, it’s ragebait, tiktok is demonic” etc

all i have to say about this is get a damn grip. if the human will proves domitable by tiktok dance videos it’s not worth saving

GPT4 rumor thread
.
.
. 1/
GPT4 has more parameters than particles in the universe

Fact Check: True

the thing about elon is that the things you hear from both sides are true. yes he understands every aspect of rocketry better than 95% of his engineers. yes there are several leadership roles designed to upward manage elon and protect the company the stories you hear of him staying late and solving difficult engineering problems that other people have given up on are true, the stories of him irrationally firing people for minor screwups are true

conducting Gonzo journalism. heading over to twitter hq rn damn I wish periscope was still real

most people cannot process regret

they’ll explain why one of their life decisions was clearly bad and suboptimal and be like oh but it’s ok i learned a lot i mean it’s probably good that most people have such strong defense mechanisms that protect them from mental damage but it appears like embarrassing cope from the outside. especially when there are measurable outcomes they’re missing

sapiens is good actually, like essentially 30% of it is true but it has good vibes. y’all are just mad you haven’t written a bestselling globe spanning pseudo religious tech bro doctrine