For God and country
Joined June 2019
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Lawrence Winters retweeted
America is too culturally dominant for other Anglophone countries not to also have First Amendment rights. It’s confusing and unfair for their citizens.
An Irish truck driver has been jailed for two years for calling refugees "rape-fugees" and saying "they're here to rape women and children" during an Instagram livestream.
He made the comments amid protests over the sexual assault of a woman in Dublin.
noticer.news/ireland-graham-…
Lawrence Winters retweeted
Alexander Hamilton rejects the idea of growing the American population with broader European migration
He explains that the American Republic works because the English Constitution is common to its current inhabitants and foreigners would bring with them ingrained beliefs about society that would subvert the governing of the republic
He also states that a homogenous society is preferable and allowing foreigners to come and participate in voting or running for office is a well known mistake that has killed many republics including Rome
Something that feels under discussed in the abortion discourse is the sheer scale of the procedure. If I didn’t know, I’d guess maybe like 1 in 20 pregnancies get aborted. The fact it’s 25% is insane
Lawrence Winters 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
Lawrence Winters retweeted
Civic nationalism creates defect-defect paradigm by reducing the number of iterated games
If nations are something your children inherit you have to care long-term and make sacrifices you will not benefit from
If a nation is something freely chosen there's no reason to sacrifice for something everyone else can abandon at will for a lower tax rate, more generous welfare system, or higher GDP
“America isn’t a people, it’s an idea.”
“Well, can we at least deport the people who openly reject the idea?”
“No, that would be against the ideas!”
This is the game we’ve been playing for over 60 years now.
Civic nationalism inevitably destroys itself because it’s utterly incapable of making literally any value judgements between those who openly reject the civics and those who adhere to it.
Why bother adhering or even learning the civics in the first place if there’s absolutely zero price to pay for betraying them?
Lawrence Winters retweeted
Alright… my turn. I have spent several days reading everyone’s opinions on this photo.
I think both sides of the discussion are not hearing what the other side is saying.
On one side we have people celebrating that they appear assimilated and lecturing about racism.
On the other side we have people arguing that even legally replacing the indigenous white population is wrong. If you replace the entire population of Texas, is it really Texas anymore?
I can see the validity of both arguments, but I definitely lean towards the second.
In the year 2000, 71% of Texas was white. Currently white people only make up 39% of Texas.
If this was any other racial group, this would be considered an ethnic cleansing.
It is not wrong for the native born white population of our majority white country to be alarmed at how quickly we are becoming the minority in our own country.
We are becoming the minority in our own country not because the native born black population was outbreeding us but because we have spent decades importing foreigners by the tens of millions.
We could just stop doing that.
No one says we HAVE to import millions of Indians.
No one says that we HAVE to import millions of Muslims.
We can just stop importing people by the tens of millions.
The crowning accomplishment of the Trump Administration has been the net reduction of millions of foreign born people through immigration controls.
It is not wrong for white people to not want to be ethnically cleansed in their own countries.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
The Heritage American debate isn’t just about severing your connection to the American past.
The more sinister idea is that what you do today carries no inheritance forward.
Serve your country. Build something. Sacrifice. Endure. Die for it.
Then be told your descendants have no special claim to your story, no right to take pride in your sacrifice, no deeper connection because of what you gave.
Once you convince a people that inheritance, lineage, and posterity mean nothing, you’ve weakened one of the oldest reasons men sacrifice for a future they’ll never live to see.
That is fertile ground for any system that wants loyalty transferred from family and inheritance to the state.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
Cool story, bro. But here's the truth.
1. Lincoln never used the word "traitor" in his correspondence--public or private--even when pressed to do so.
2. Grant did use that term during the War but rebuffed Andrew Johnson after the War when Johnson forcefully wanted Southerners treated and labeled as such. He even threatened to resign his commission if Johnson pressed the issue.
3. The fact that there were no convictions had nothing to do with either Lincoln or Grant. Many Northerners, even committed abolitionists, waffled on the issue after the War and thought it was still an unsettled legal issue.
4. But, Southerners did not commit treason by definition. We know this because two Southerners were literally tried in court for treason. Henry Kyd Douglas was found not guilty, and Robert Ould was acquitted by a military commission. That means that according to U.S. common law, secession was not treason. Ould later was part of Jefferson Davis's legal team when Davis was potentially facing trial for treason.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
Full context for this tweet is even more interesting.
There was a totally insane immigration craze spreading outward from /r/neoliberal from around 2017 onward and everyone caught up in it is now trying to memory hole their delusions.
These people --who all have jobs involving policy, etc, and we should take seriously for some reason-- all randomly adopted a delusional idea to permanently remake (disfigure) their own societies because of reddit memes about utilitarianism and some form of pathetic one-upmanship about being a cool liberal on an internetforum.
Proudly showcasting they never once thought about society and literally no know nothing about anything in the process.
Some can't quite escape totally ignoring it like Matty who is now saying he was reasonable considering the "pro-immigration craze" a craze that only existed in one of "The Groups", in this case a Group of really retarded liberals who get too influenced by reddit.
I find it much worse than covid to be honest. Covid at least was temporary. We have to live with the consequences of immigration retardation forever.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
1. The Irish and Italians did assimilate, but only after voting in the New Deal and Great Society and changing America forever (and doing a lot of organized crime)
2. They successfully assimilated because a) we had a pro-American education system and institutions that didn’t pander to “multiculturalism,” b) we stopped nearly all immigration for 50 years, c) they fought a world war alongside the descendants of founding stock Americans, and d) they were still Christians and Westerners
Lawrence Winters retweeted
This is basically true. Christ is only ever invoked anymore in order to tell you that you have to do something for somebody else. That’s it. That’s the entire religion in public life. All religious moralizing is now just your obligations to the poor.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
The team they’re cheering for is the Texas Longhorns. The Texas Longhorn is important to Texas because it built the state's 19th-century cattle industry and is a symbol of the frontier and cowboy culture.
Most of the people in that picture can’t even eat beef. The things that Texas is basically synonymous with wouldn’t exist if the people in that photo had been here and run the state in large enough numbers. Your worldview is calling for the destruction of your state and the destruction of your culture
This is racist. It is wrong. And I condemn it without reservation.
There is absolutely nothing Christian or conservative about looking at a crowd of young Texans at a college football game, seeing the color of their skin, and declaring that they are a “problem.” These are 20-year-old kids cheering for their university—not political props and not targets for racial attacks.
We can have serious debates about our nation’s immigration laws. I have strong views about immigration policy, and Americans have every right to demand changes to federal law. But opposing an immigration policy does not give anyone license to demean people because of their race or ethnicity.
And let’s be clear: the Texas Railroad Commission regulates our oil and gas industry. It does not set federal immigration policy. Texans deserve Railroad Commissioners focused on the responsibilities of that office—not using a statewide campaign as a platform for racial division.
This does not represent my Christian faith. It does not represent my conservative principles. And it does not represent the Republican Party I believe in.
As a Texas Aggie, I’m always happy to take a friendly shot at the Longhorns when the opportunity presents itself. That rivalry is part of what makes these two great universities so special. But this goes far beyond college rivalry. We should be willing to call racism wrong no matter who says it, what party they belong to, or how politically inconvenient it may be. This is wrong, and I want no part of it.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
The difference between me and these people, is I wouldn't wish for a foreign attack on my countrymen that live in states that think differently than me.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
The only constant in this world - Jews fighting over the Levent
I spent much of the weekend talking with the team who did this work. Seb--and everyone else--acted with integrity and generosity throughout.
Initially we believed the other team had also solved the problem. We wanted to collaborate and do a joint release.
When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or coordinate with us anyway. We were open to other solutions.
We would have greatly preferred coordination. We did not rush to publish even though the other team wasn't communicating with us. The team threatened us with unfounded accusations of plagarism.
Now that we can see their work, the approaches appear to be different. It is also worth noting that our latest model can solve many, many other math problems.
It is true that we tried this because there were rumors on the internet last week that Anthropic's models had solved a millennium problem and we were curious if ours could do it too.
Lawrence Winters retweeted
A magnificent character. You're supposed to dislike him because he's fat, ugly, and unsophisticated. But he's also innocent, patriotic, and well-intentioned. And in real life, we all know that that guy is the good guy and that the people who sneer at him are the bad guys.
The problem with reading movie reviews is that film critics couldn’t care less about rating what they watch. It’s all so performative and sterile. It’s painfully obvious that to them the review is merely a vessel for demonstrating their wit and erudition in print
