Deutsch & Popper’s ideas applied to personal effectiveness 📘 Book: https://xitter.cf/t.co/EOiBNPoXNH 🎙️ Podcast: https://xitter.cf/t.co/38WwGnHY7G 🗓️ Conference: https://xitter.cf/t.co/DtvBoZfdfW
The Netherlands
Joined April 2022
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Edwin retweeted
🛡️Defend the West Conference🛡️
WHEN: 1/13/2027
WHERE: Online
Over 300 people have registered so far.
Speakers include:
@DavidM_Friedman
@sapinker
@SRCHicks
@yaronbrook
@alananewhouse
@johanknorberg
@DeirdreMcClosk
@michaelshermer
@ToKTeacher
@jasoncrawford
Nadine Strossen
Save your spot (link below)
2026 was such a blast, we’re running it back!
After an amazing launch in 2026, Conjecture Con returns to Oxford for a weekend of ideas, conversation and optimism, now at Wolfson College
📅 10–11 July 2027
🎟️ 150 seats: conjecturecon.com/events/con…
Edwin retweeted
"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything"
You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition.
One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them.
A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math?
"Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up.
My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes.
"The social disruption will be enormous!"
Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach.
Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already?
A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up.
Accelerate.
Edwin retweeted
Thanks, Peter! This is the beginning of the end for destructive wildfires. In a country that loses ~$500B every year to wildfires, even tiny gains make for huge savings, to say nothing of the incalculable value of lives and homes.
Congrats to @PalmerLuckey and Anduril for winning the Wildfire XPRIZE - for detecting and suppressing a wildfire within 10 minutes of ignition!
A surge of progress from just the past few years
“We conquer problems by creating knowledge, or they conquer us. … stasis is not available.” —@DavidDeutschOxf
Edwin retweeted
Pointed at other people's systems: "scary hacker"
Pointed at own systems: "noble cybersecurity patcher"
Entirely unserious dialogue.
Greg Brockman says OpenAI pointed Astra at its own systems until it ran out of vulnerabilities to find:
"We took 25% of our production engineers and said, 'Sorry, all your projects are on hold. You are now defending. You are now up-leveling our security architecture. You're going to use the models to find all the holes.' And we found a number of serious issues, and we fixed them."
"We found some new problems, but eventually it saturated. We basically have found, to our knowledge, all of the P0s, all of the critical problems that Astra is smart enough to find. And of course, there will be a new model, there will be a new round."
"You want to be in this tight loop of new cyber capability drops, you deploy it against your systems, you find the new holes, and ideally, you've managed to automate this, what we call defense factory. That's what we're building internally."
"There are ideas, for example, formally verifying all of software, that are possible with AI."
@gdb @bhorowitz
Edwin retweeted
I wrote about Human Computer Interface
“Hmm, sure” is now be a valid instruction to a computer. That is mind blowing.
From Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which looked like factory machinery, to AI that can interpret what we "mean". A leap from syntax to semantics.
Hope you enjoy reading it.
prashanthshankar.com/writing…
Edwin retweeted
Despite the recent progress in AI for mathematics, I don't think AI will replace the role of mathematicians.
Instead, it makes mathematics closer to the natural sciences.
In the natural sciences, we invent theories, comprehensible models, that explain empirical observations.
When an AI answers a mathematical question, it provides humans with an effectively empirical observation about the answer. It is effectively empirical because the answer is a measurement from a system outside of immediate human theoretical understanding. This answer, as with any new glimpse of reality, remains mysterious until humans make sense of its underlying structure and provide an explanation of it in our own frameworks for understanding the world.
An AI proof is stronger than simply an empirical observation, but it may be so complex that it provides little deep or novel insight beyond establishing the answer. The role of human mathematics is then to distill these effectively empirical findings into human-legible explanations. Seen this way, much of human mathematics may begin to look like a branch of interpretability, and AI, a new kind of telescope.
Edwin retweeted
"Stoicism developed among people living close to power and abundance because power and abundance exposed problems scarcity had concealed. The philosophy of an emperor becomes more relevant when ordinary people begin living...like emperors." humanprogress.org/first-worl…
I wouldn’t say so. In my view, coercion occurs when you don’t provide a reasonable way to opt out of a choice. But I do think it’s a fascinating question where the grey areas lie between non-coercion and “nudging,” as Thaler describes it. I asked Sarah Fitzclaridge about this, and I believe her response was that it’s not necessarily coercive to purposefully constrain or design the solution space—or the problem situation, in this example—but that it becomes problematic when you’re disingenuous about it or hide your ulterior motives. It’s fine to do, but the other person should be aware of the nudge; don’t deliberately hide your intentions. Even if you did hide it, I still think I wouldn't call it being coercive, but rather manipulative.
Edwin retweeted
Conjecture Institute's next online conference
Defend the West
January 13th, 2027
Below are confirmed speakers as of today.
More to come.
1. Yaron Brook @yaronbrook
2. Steven Pinker @sapinker
3. Stephen Hicks @SRCHicks
4. David Friedman
5. Alana Newhouse @alananewhouse
6. Johan Norberg @johanknorberg
7. Michael Shermer @michaelshermer
