Ezra @Revan

>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

I don't know who needs to hear it but a tech ceo winning a power struggle for moral authority over the State would not actually be good and it's much better for the long term stability of civilization that we not open that particular can of worms for as long as possible.

NIK @ns123abc

8 months ago

🚨BREAKING: Pentagon is now calling Claude a threat to national security >pentagon embeds claude in military systems via palantir >january: claude used in maduro extraction, people got smoked >anthropic exec calls palantir like “hey did our AI help kill people” Defense

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The transitive property of frame mogging

Kylie Cheung @kylietcheung

8 months ago

I don't think this is how frame mogging works you can't avenge someone.... if you frame mog the person who frame mogged your friend (brutally) then you frame mogged both of them

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Got my answer. Full body chills.

KickChamp @Kick_Champ

8 months ago

#2 ranked CHAD Androgenic has LANDED in AMERICA and is actively SEARCHING for the ASU FRAT LEADER who FRAME MOGGED Clavicular 👀

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Knew a dude who emailed the IT guy directly instead of submitting a ticket and they blew his shit smoove off

@MurrayHillGuy1 Until dating services have financial incentives that align with partnering people instead of maximizing screen time for lonely men, none of these or other well intentioned ideas will be implemented. As it is, you're the guy politely requesting a thermostat adjustment in hell.

Maybe sit this one out

Bill Clinton @BillClinton

9 months ago

Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come.  This is one of them.

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@fleshsimulator Not that two things can't be true at the same time but I'm not interested in hearing about federal jackboots from people who never gave a shit about Vicki Weaver

@bencroyderived @Landeur All guns will D if you are N enough

@9mmsmg If sig making a striker fire fulfills a prophecy just imagine the butterfly effect if keltec made something useful

@KelTecOfficial I mean. Yeah I believe you when you said you didn't ask a focus group.

looksmatched couple

@Bricktop_NAFO Did you think there's like an Indiana Jones warehouse full of every car somebody's died in, preserved for future generations? Or, what, are you not convinced she's dead?

@utacult The other thing captured well here, surely just a coincidence, is the total indifference and narcissism of doctors in the face of people with serious medical problems more difficult to diagnose than a broken arm. Hmm.

This is largely my experience both with using AI for software development and for personal work. Getting good results usually happens within the first 3 prompts or not at all, and depends heavily on narrowly defining success criteria, and usually brevity.

Robert Youssef @rryssf

10 months ago

This paper quietly explains why so many people feel like LLMs are “almost smart, but somehow wrong.” The core claim in this paper is very uncomfortable: most failures are not about missing information. They are about misreading intent even when all the relevant context is

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@RichardHanania You should seriously reckon with the fact that your inability to understand fundamental moral intuitions felt by 99% of humabity disqualifies you from making recommendations for how those people organize their societies

@DJSnM That would be meaningful and helpful though

@BowTiedNiners @TheBigCigar1906 Attempting that turn on a B52 with ~800 ft agl...

@WizardGoesBoom I don't know if I can really articulate this but there was something about the vibe of magic and spells in the AD&D books that just isn't there anymore. Maybe it was the inaccessiblity of the system itself enhancing the feel of "magic".

@jxnlco Honestly don't try to help these animals.