Fun revelations that SBF was going to try and invest in Elon buying twitter because he thought it would make money (lol), and was seriously proposing “put twitter on the blockchain” as his pitch. One of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard, right behind every other “X on blockchain” proposal
I feel this makes it an unlikely great filter though. Surely some aliens would be less stupid than humanity?
Or they could be on a planet with far less fossil fuels reserves, so they don’t have the opportunity to kill themselves.
I feel really bad for the person behind the “notkilleveryonism” account. They’ve been completely taken in by AI doomerism and are clearly terrified by it. They’ll either be terrified for their entire life even as the predicted doom fails to appear, or realise at some point that they wasted an entire portion of their life and their entire system of belief is a lie.
False doomerism is really harming people, and that sucks.
Yeah, the fermi paradox really doesn’t work here, an AI that was motivated and smart enough to wipe out humanity would be unlikely to just immediately off itself. Most of the doomerism relies on “tile the universe” scenarios, which would be extremely noticeable.
I enjoyed the takedowns (wow, this guy really hates Macaskill), but the overall conclusions of the article seem a bit lost. If malaria nets are like a medicine with side-effects, then the solution is not to throw away the medicine. (Giving away free nets to people probably does not have a signficant death toll!). At the end they seem to suggest, like, voluntourism as the preferred alternative? I don’t think Africa needs to be flooded with dorky software engineers personally going to villages to “help out”.
Apparently there’s a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and… solve cold fusion?
James: You can just ‘feel’ the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You’re literally going to ask it to ‘solve cold fusion’ and walk away for 6 months.
…
Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?
Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.
Good to see the Yud tradition of ridiculous strawmanning of science continue.
In this case, the strawscientist falls for a ponzi scheme because “it always outputted the same returns”. So scientific!
The “malaria nets” side of it has done legitimate good, because they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel from scratch, stuck to actual science and existing, well performing charitable organisations.
global poverty still gets a good portion of the EA funding, but is slowly falling out of the movement because it’s boring to discuss and you can’t make any dubiously effective startups out of it.
The sole funder is the founder, Saar Wilf. The whole thing seems like a vanity project for him and friends he hired to give their opinion on random controversial topics.
If you post on EA forum or LW, you can crosspost automatically to the other one by clicking one button on the publishing page. The sites are run by essentially the same people.
Hmmm, I wonder who benefits from keeping EA chained to an Eliezer Yudkowsky fan forum…
Hidden away in the appendix:
A quick note on how we use quotation marks: we sometimes use them for direct quotes and sometimes use them to paraphrase. If you want to find out if they’re a direct quote, just ctrl-f in the original post and see if it is or not.
This is some real slimy shit. You can compare the “quotes” to Chloe’s account, and see how much of a hitjob this is.
Oxford instituted a fundraising freeze. They knew the org could have gotten oodles funding from any number of strange tech people, they disliked it so much they didn’t care.