I run Terraformation, and I was once the CEO of Reddit. Both are very interesting challenges.
Views are mine alone, but also yours if I do my job right.
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Sep 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Our society today is basically just about yelling incoherently about things without regard for facts instead of doing anything real…
… which is exactly what you’d expect from a gerontocracy, right?
What if the problem is not political polarization or lack of education or wokeness or fascism or any of those things but merely that our society is a reflection of the fact that our senior leaders are really old people?
Really old people don’t DO things, they just complain.
Jun 19 • 57 tweets • 9 min read
Every science and tech person who is currently on the bandwagon calling for the vaccine doctor to go on Joe Rogan to debate RFK should be ashamed of themselves.
If you care about the truth or science, that is the WORST possible thing you could be advocating for.
(thread)
The argument goes something like this:
“If you[the vax doctor]’re so sure that your position is right, you ought to be willing to go and defend it [on any podcast, like this one], otherwise your claims have no credibility.”
Jun 18 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
Yo, it's not the vaccines causing your autism, it's the glyphosate (RoundUp) used on all our crops, especially wheat:
Full PDF can be downloaded here: mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4…
Jun 16 • 32 tweets • 5 min read
If you want to know the next big thing in "real atoms" investment macro-trends, I'll tell you right now.
(US specific) You probably think YOUR news source is telling you the whole story, unlike the other side, right?
You're wrong.
France is looking to join BRICS.
Look it up. You will find this in ZERO US-based news sources.
All the news sources that reported on this are Indian, French, Chinese, Russian, Greek, etc, nothing from the US.
This is just one example.
There are things that neither (US) party wants you to know, because ultimately they both serve the same Americentric interests.
Jun 15 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Radical proposal re: IP rights pertaining to use as AI training inputs:
Any AI model that is released 100% free of charge to everyone forever has the right to be trained on ALL human IP ever produced; supersedes all other IP/copyright law in every jurisdiction.
Put another way: you are allowed to train you AI on the sum total of all human knowledge and creative output, but you cannot then profit from the AI you produce, it must also be freely available.
Jun 15 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
A more political palatable alternative to forgiving student loans would be to unilaterally drop interest rates on all outstanding student loans to 0% (and maybe discharge all paid-in interest so far) for remaining life of the loan.
This preserves the conservative “you borrowed it, you should pay it back” argument while also counterbalancing it with a liberal “hey, we gave Wall Street a decade of ZIRP so we should give it to poor young people too.”
Jun 3 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I find this attitude irksome, not least of all because great journalists are supposed to be intellectual generalists themselves.
(1/n)
But the real problem is that so many credentialed “experts” today have proven to be so bad (i.e. more credentialed than they are expert) that any smart person is FORCED to try and educate themselves to a comparable level or end up horribly (and potentially fatally) misinformed.
I'm not going to use the even sharper "school shootings" argument, but I'll point out that kids dying from covid convinced exactly zero people on the right when it came to implementing restrictions or mandating mitigation measures.
Both the mainstream right AND left are pushing the idea that the pandemic is over.
You’d think the “contrarians” might be a little suspicious at such uniformity of opinion but no, not a peep when finally in FACT the governments ARE all lying and media is complicit.
HP Lovecraft had this idea that the TRUE nature of the universe, if revealed to us, would be far too horrifying for us to even stand, and I think that the truth of covid has a lot of those elements, and it's why so many people can't face up to it, why the denial is so strong.
May 29 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The majority of human beings cannot fully comprehend a statement that has a conditional as a key part of its meaning.
This sounds incredible to those who can, but I'm pretty sure it's true.
When a person who can't encounters such a statement, they don't go "ERROR," they just collapse it down from "If P then Q" to either "P" or "Q".
May 29 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Can someone explain to me why I don't understand AI programming?
Details:
All the math is stuff I know.
All the programming is stuff I know.
Yet, it doesn't REALLY make sense to me.
May 27 • 14 tweets • 2 min read
Prediction: Twitter also hosts RFK's announcement of his candidacy.
Twitter fixes the technical glitches that plagued DeSantis, and everyone forgets about those problems going forward.
(1/n) cnn.com/2023/05/24/tec…
The establishment media likes to make hay out of the technical issues but they fail to see the larger picture: the leading Republican challenger CHOSE to announce on Twitter.
Here’s how I see things playing out:
May 19 • 31 tweets • 5 min read
One of the arguments against AI x-risk that I’ve concluded as weak is (I think it’s called) the “Drake” argument:
If AI results in paperclip maximizers, why don’t we see a bunch of paperclip planets when we look through telescopes? We don’t, hence it doesn't happen.
The rebuttal (which is somehow not obvious) is:
Because paperclips are just the EXAMPLE object. It’s not literally paperclips. But if it’s not paperclips… what is it actually?
Apr 16 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
An example of covid's continuing effect on brains:
A couple days ago was my wife's birthday. She's on Facebook, and as is customary in that world, you get a bunch of happy birthday wishes from all your friends on your birthday.
🧵...
I worked at FB, so she has been on FB for 17 years now.
This is the first time EVER that MULTIPLE friends have wished her happy birthday, then forgot that they did so, and then wished her happy birthday AGAIN.
Apr 5 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
In honor of Bob Lee’s memory - I met him when he was CTO of Square and I was consulting there - here is a write-up of some great programming that he did for a coding challenge: beust.com/weblog/coding-…
The code he wrote was for this coding challenge: beust.com/weblog/coding-…
Apr 1 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
People say GPT4 doesn’t come up with any truly new knowledge but I have found an area where it does: puns and wordplay.
While admittedly shallow, I think it does constitute new knowledge. Baby steps, you know?
For example, my wife sent me some pictures someone had posted to the MidJourney FB group of Margaret Thatcher DJ’ing…
Mar 30 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
The thing that gives me pause is not the sci-fi doomer scenarios, but the fact pattern that in the majority of instances throughout history when a technologically superior population came into contact with an inferior one (whether human-human or human-animal)...
.. the inferior one was wiped or nearly so. There are VERY few instances in history (though non-zero) where the technologically inferior population survived and thrived without significant death or disruption.
Mar 30 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is Eliezer putting it all on the line a la Balaji's $1M-BTC bet.
time.com/6266923/ai-eli…
I still haven't really heard any substantive arguments against his position that don't boil down to "he doesn't really understand how it works" or "nah, it's just not a danger" which I have to say is not super compelling.
Mar 29 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This is a big deal. I don't remember a time when a group Really Otherwise Quite Tech-Enthusiastic People called for a moratorium on the development of a new technology. Usually it's Luddites or incumbents.
One (small) reason to do this is because everyone who's been working in (or just following) AI is totally exhausted keeping up with the pace of things and could use a break.
I thought it was just me but found out the other day that lots of other people are feeling this way.
Mar 28 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There’s a very major VC account whose takes are an entire week behind the latest AI news and it’s really the cute the way he thinks he’s putting out major insights that sound completely stale by the time he’s saying them.
(This is more a consequence of the crazy accelerationism caused by AI and its release schedule than a dig on this guy)
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