Eclectic moderate. Pursuing truth.
Joined August 2009
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Dahveed retweeted
Senator Cotton is right. Permanent Daylight Savings has been tried and Americans didn’t like it. The better way is permanent Standard Time because it’s based on science. No dark mornings, it keeps our time in sync with the Sun, and no more changing the clocks. Arizona has been on Standard Time year round since 1968 without issue.
No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter. Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.
Dahveed retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Dahveed retweeted
The more nonsensical and obviously absurd a belief is, the more people who hold it (or pretend to) will resist recanting. The potential for humiliation rises in direct proportion to the ridiculousness of what they've publicly swallowed. They see no choice but to double down.
Dahveed retweeted
Woke." It destroyed or distorted or deranged lives, careers, relationships, professions, academic fields, businesses, media, the arts -- and now its disfavored proponents would like to say: Sorry, wow, we overplayed that.
Thus the perpetrators come forth robed as their own judges.
They are rather lenient with themselves, of course. They have sentenced themselves to -- doing better next time! And they believe, truly, that they deserve the chance. Have they not won our trust by acknowledging they lost it? And admitting that they, in their haste or their excitement, perhaps deserved to lose it? For a time? A time which they hope is over now, just as it was getting started.
As for those who judged them harshly and long ago, the ex-woke admit these people had a point -- but they made it prematurely, on poor evidence, well before the suspects had confessed. Which smacks of intolerance. Of prejudice. But the ex-woke feel generous now, conciliatory, and they will let this uglyness pass.
For all their faults -- and see, they have them! Look! -- they're finally a conscientious bunch. It might take time, but they police themselves. Now that's a mafia you can trust! A self-correcting, self-debugging gang! And isn't that so much better than the alternative? A cartel you have to fight?
See what trouble we're saving you?they say. All you had to do was show some patience. You might even want to be grateful to us now. For our humility, belated as it may be. (It's hard to stop a train.) And as for the casualties of our excessive phase...
Well, enjoy a moment of quasi- victory. Here, as the gift of your gracious persecutors who now stand guilty by our own judgment, we offer you, our victims, a peace medallion of shining symbolic gold-toned plastic, totally yours to keep.
So please accept the terms of our marginal, fractional surrender and our bestowal on you of semi-respect. We think you should. Because you can be sure we'll remember if you don't--and you know what we're capable of.
This thing's not over yet.
Dahveed retweeted
It's like waking up from a long nightmare.
The gaslighting, intimidation, and coercion that kept the world's no. 1 female tennis player, and every other female athlete in the world, silent for a decade as a mindless mania was enshrined as the next phase of human progress, is finally starting to unravel.
🚨Aryna Sabalenka on newly introduced sex testing by the WTA:
“I support it. If they want to test us all, I'm happy to do that."
Boom. 💥
Thank you @SabalenkaA
Dahveed retweeted
One of the main guilty acts of Fauci is not the claim that he got the COVID origin wrong at first. It's that he and his Lancet crew fabricated a certainty about COVID's origins they plainly did not possess -- due to entirely self-interested reasons (namely, their careers and reputations would be endangered if COVID had been caused by gain-of-function and other Wuhan research they funded and participated it).
They then weaponized that fake, deceitful certainty to label anyone who suggested a lab leak as a racist (which never made sense, since the "wet market" theory was always the more racist one), and then also used that non-existent certainty to bully and coerce media outlets and Big Tech to aggressively censor anyone questioning or dissenting from their proclamation.
The complete shutdown of debate, discussion and dissent over some of the this century's most consequential policies was one of the main crimes. That they did this not out of good faith error but crass self-advancement and self-protection made it all the worse.
Dahveed retweeted
En 1979, un presentador de TV le preguntó a Milton Friedman si no le daba vergüenza defender un sistema basado en la codicia.
La respuesta se estudia hasta hoy:
«—Cuando ves la mala distribución de la riqueza, tan pocos que tienen tanto y tantos que no tienen nada… ¿nunca has dudado del capitalismo, de si la codicia es una buena idea?
—Primero dime: ¿conoces alguna sociedad que NO funcione con codicia? ¿Crees que Rusia no funciona con codicia? ¿Que China no?
¿Y qué es la codicia? Ninguno de nosotros es codicioso, claro. El codicioso siempre es el otro.
Los grandes logros de la civilización no salieron de despachos del gobierno. Einstein no construyó su teoría por orden de un burócrata. Ford no revolucionó el automóvil así.
Los únicos casos en la historia en los que las masas escaparon de la pobreza son aquellos donde hubo capitalismo y libre comercio.
—Pero parece premiar la habilidad de manipular el sistema, no la virtud.
—¿Y qué premia la virtud? ¿Crees que un comisario comunista premia la virtud? ¿Un Hitler? ¿Crees que los presidentes americanos eligen sus cargos por virtud… o por peso político?
Dime: ¿dónde están esos ángeles que van a organizar la sociedad por nosotros?
Yo ni siquiera confío en ti para hacerlo.»
Dahveed retweeted
Trump lost fair and square in 2020. Only women can get pregnant. The Trump assassination attempts were real. Mitch McConnell is alive. Michelle Obama is not a man. Barack Obama is a citizen. America is less racist than most countries. Police stop crime. Tariffs hurt the economy.
Dahveed retweeted
Notice the pattern between Biden and Platner, because it is the whole story. In both cases, the primary voters made a choice. In both cases, the party decided, after the fact, that the voters had chosen wrong. And in both cases, the same institution that lectures America about authoritarianism and “threats to democracy” moved heaven and earth to override the expressed will of its own electorate the moment that will became inconvenient. The people who cannot stop saying democracy is on the ballot keep discovering, at the decisive moment, that they trust themselves more than the demos.
open.substack.com/pub/eweric…
Dahveed retweeted
Happy Birthday to the greatest nation on earth. It is an incredible privilege and joy to be an American and to benefit from the ingenuity and generosity of all the creators, inventors, visionaries and weirdoes who produced an incredibly resilient and forward-looking society — and so much great music. May God bless America for another 250 years.
Dahveed retweeted
Terrible old ideas that have been forgotten, or were never known, for a generation and seen as new and exciting by young, often affluent activists. Meanwhile, the one group you can be certain despises socialism is made up of everyone who has ever lived under it.
Love or hate the DSA agenda, the one thing you can't say about is they're bringing "new ideas" to the conversation. thedispatch.com/article/mamd…
Dahveed retweeted
“Protect the children” too often becomes “show me your papers.”
Britain’s age-verification push and Washington’s online-safety bargain risk building speech-control infrastructure in the name of safety.
Dahveed retweeted
Project Hail Mary writer Andy Weir on social commentary in books:
"I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that."
"I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that."
"To that end, I also don’t talk about my personal political opinions publicly. I don’t want readers to even know, honestly. I don’t want that in the back of their minds as they read my stuff."
Is this why he has the #1 sci-fi movie in decades?
Dahveed retweeted
The Afroman Trial.
-Cops raid Afromans house for bullshit reasons.
-Steal money, break his door, fuck his house up.
-No criminality found whatsoever, no charges at all pressed on Afroman.
-Afroman spends the next 3 years making songs that make fun of all the officers involved by name, even using footage of the raid from his own CCTV cameras.
-Songs had titles like "Randy Walters is a son of a bitch" and "Lick Em Low Lisa" accusing one of the officers of being a lesbian and sleeping with the other officers wives.
-During the raid one officer looked like he was about to eat some lemon pound cake sitting on Afromans counter, Afroman made a whole album calling the officer fat.
-The cops get mad and file a lawsuit for defamation.
-Afroman turns up to court in a whole American flag suit.
-Officers performatively mald and cry while listening to the songs really trying to oversell how badly the songs upset them.
-One officer was suing because Afroman made a whole song about him saying he was fucking the officers wife. When the officer was asked if Afroman was really fucking his wife, he said "I don't know". Nuking his own case and establishing that there is a non-zero chance that Afroman might actually be fucking his wife.
-As his only witness for the trial, Afroman brought a deputies EX FUCKING WIFE.
-The jury ruled completely in favour of Afroman.
This entire thing has been a great win for free speech and absolutely fucking hilarious.
