Ezra retweeted
>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
Ezra retweeted
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
Ezra retweeted
I am all for cutting government spending, but this DOGE vanity project will get nowhere if it just dishonestly lies for updoots on the internet. The government did not spend 7 million on studying magic, one click of the link below reveals that. The page on magic reveals that 6 and a half million of the “7 million studying magic” was funding for an interactive children’s museum that was created to get kids interested in STEM fields. The only “magic” involved is the museums title, The Magic City Discovery Center. Isn’t “interest in STEM” the cultural change Vivek is pushing for?
How the U.S. Government Spent your Tax Dollars in 2024:
-$7 million on various projects studying magic
-$1,513,299 to use kittens in a study to analyze motion sickness.
-$419,470 to determine if lonely rats sought cocaine at a greater frequency than happy rats
-$123,000 teaching children in Kyrgyzstan how to go viral on social media
-The State Department spent $4,840,082 on "influencers"
Source:
hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
See reference "xcii" in festivus document.
$6.3 million of $7 million figure allocated to "magic" went to a kid's science museum in Minot, North Dakota
magiccitydiscoverycenter.com
Minot is known as "The Magic City"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minot,_No…
Proximity to Minot Airforce Base may explain ties to DoD as source of funds
usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON…
Ezra retweeted
Zoomers react to seeing hand-drawn animation like a prison convict eating a homecooked meal for the first time in 20 years.
Ezra retweeted
The stupid but predictable response will be to litigate the details (different towns, African not Haitian) but not only does that miss the point, it just sets them up for a bigger face-plant later.
(1/?)
This quoted post is unavailable.
Ezra retweeted
Whenever I'm away for an extended period of time, I begin to miss my butcher shop back home. There are countless skilled butchers whose meat I enjoy on the road, but there's just something special about the relationship between a man and HIS butcher that just can't be replicated.
My butcher, Mario, and I have a kinship most carnivores could only dream of. I always tip at the butcher shop because he knows exactly what I like and what I don't like. I always get advanced notice when he has exceptional steaks coming in so I can have my pick of the bunch. It's so much more than just a transactional business relationship.
Late last night, I got a text from Mario, "u up?" it said. We began conversing. He knew I was nearing the end of my trip and would be chomping at the bit for some of his high-quality, grass-fed meats as soon as I set foot back home. He told me he was at the shop late, working the grinder alone long after his apprentices had gone home. He said he had something special to show me if I was interested.
Naturally, I was intrigued. "Pics incoming. Are you around people?" he asked. "I would rather you keep these to yourself..." My anticipation was reaching a fever pitch as I waited for his images to load. I could hardly contain my excitement as I opened a stunning HD photo of a massive yet beautifully-marbled bison ribeye slab. As more photos arrived, I saw this gorgeous cut of meat in varying stages of dress until it reached its climax as a 62oz bone-in tomahawk steak.
"Do you like what you see?" he asked a few moments after the last photo had been delivered. It was a silly question because, obviously, I did. Alpha males like me are carnivores. We always enjoy a good piece of meat.
"This is what's waiting for you here when you return," he said. "I'll hide them away in the back with your name on the package until you get here 😏."
There's no relationship more important than a man and his butcher and this shows exactly why. Take care of your butcher, and your butcher will take care of you.
I'll be thinking about that meat until the moment I toss it on the grill.
Ezra retweeted
Hey, Deus Ex is one of my favorite games ever that I think everyone should play, but when it comes to running it on modern systems I always see people having issues.
So I've made a small compilation of mods that solves this and put them into one download, link on tweet bellow:
Ezra retweeted
Hmmmm looking over the new guys at work trying to decide who I will groom (non sexual) into being my new "Morty" - a hapless idiot helpless in the face of my superior intellect, a cringing man servant willing to do anything to please me. Again I mean in a non sexual context
