Bjørn Fesche

Intelligent and well intentioned people can disagree about anything.

@lymanstoneky Aren’t they mostly well within the time of Christian cultural influence?

@Real_Fesche the sagas

Actually, you can read non-Christian Viking/Norse literature and find it is not alien, not alien at all, in fact immediately accessible and totally familiar The Greeks and Romans are alien Vikings didn’t become Christian. Christianity became Scandinavian.

@meaning_enjoyer Say more? I usually share your outlook (based on your tweets) so I’m curious to know why you’d think it’s such a settled case.

if you think ais are conscious you suffer from a deep retardation at the pre-propositional, pre-epistemic level of your cognitive stack. the basement level, called 'metaphysics'

@willccbb @leothecurious Say more?

@leothecurious raw gpt CoT is freaky as hell

i don't follow. why on earth does the CoT need to be gpt-rewritten before publication in such a case?

@willmacaskill Really enjoyed your latest on 80k. Your ideas around making sure we can negotiate with AI struck me as both fresh and hopeful (a rare and welcome combination)

Still probably the best podcast episode ever made.

@lucyfarnik @mattyglesias @NathanpmYoung I mean, to the extent that these people are conflating a set of orgs which mostly gives money to global health and the like with a subset of people/orgs/donation streams which works on other things, I think that’s fair

@Real_Fesche @mattyglesias @NathanpmYoung I agree, but I constantly see situations where someone criticizes EA because of the cult-like behavior of the “end is nigh” crowd, and then EAs respond with “but what about GiveWell, surely you can’t object to GiveWell, therefore EA is good”

@lucyfarnik @mattyglesias @NathanpmYoung Ime there’s a lot of overlap! People who start out by caring about doing good and realizing there might be very different ways of doing so.

@mattyglesias @NathanpmYoung C’mon this is such a motte and bailey. Are you talking about malaria-prevention EAs or the-world-will-end-in-two-years EAs? Pretty different levels of cult-like behavior on different parts of that spectrum

@memeticsisyphus Hell yeah man. Well put.

What if you thought something was evil, granted mercy to people who unwittingly engaged in the behavior knowing the confluence of culture and self interest clouds their moral judgement, and thinks terrorism is counter productive?

@AageB Bra for ham. Akademisk ytringsfrihet er viktig, og en norm som har erodert de siste årene.

Dax18: Sprøtt å høre NTNUs rektor nekte å ta avstand fra ytringene til en ansatt om at Hamas-massakren 7. oktober er det «vakreste som har skjedd dette århundret». Han vil ikke være «meningspoliti»? Det er ikke ytringsfrihet å abdisere fra grunnleggende verdier. Det er feigt

@KelseyTuoc You’ve attracted a staggering amount of vitriol for this, so let me add my bit to the counterbalance and say you’re a uniquely sane and good person.

Piker's views on theft are bad, but they really do pale in comparison to his views on murder: that the important thing about Brian Thompson's murder is that healthcare CEOs are 'engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder' due to 'the structural violence of 'poverty'

@captgouda24 @GhostCoase @my_vallentyne What the fuck man

@GhostCoase @my_vallentyne 1. It is a signal of bad traits. 2. Involves expenditure of effort, not identified. 3. Doesn’t matter, it’s true. 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.

Bill Gates is, I suspect, the greatest man to ever live.

@phl43 I keep trying to explain to my mom that «summoning a genie» is much closer to right than «programming» is.

People say that my views on AI are right or wrong, but I don't know what views they're talking about because my views on AI keep changing. The only thing I'm very confident about is that it's going to have a massive impact on society, but beyond that I don't have any strong views on anything. Recently I finally started to read more seriously on the math behind it, hoping it would help me form more strongly held beliefs about it, but it actually had the opposite effect, because it made me realize the extent to which we fundamentally don't understand why it works and how weird the whole thing is.

@ThomasVLinge Touches the soul, every time

Viktor Orban has been defeated! Let's all rise for the European anthem 🇪🇺🫡

@Not_Gilmore @NLRG_it Bravo!

@NLRG_it no leverage? restrict gulf!

no cards? they have a strait!

@Bob_Somebody021 @darwiniandharma @RichardHanania Fires preferentially for foreigners. And also what seems like a ridiculously costly subsidy for immigrants to you feels like a just distribution of a scarce resource (London housing) in a way that avoids the unjust market, which is always tilted in favor of the rich

@Bob_Somebody021 @darwiniandharma @RichardHanania Spoon (i.e. white Londoners). Like I’ve said many times, I don’t contest that you’re making a solid rhetorical attack with «look how your morals make you discriminate against your own», but that’s different from saying lefty types have an empathy circuit which

This by Scott Alexander is excellent, and it strikes me as a normal pattern with conservatives in the Trump era. 1) Your side is morally awful 2) To make your side seem more defensible, exaggerate or make up traits about the other side. So if you discuss Trump's lies and corruption, they'll pretend that Democrats have had comparable levels of corruption and dishonesty, which is so disconnected from reality it is a sign that a person's entire informational environment is deeply corrupted. In this case, conservatives don't show basic concern for foreigners and non-humans, even at the level of "don't torture and kill them." Instead of acknowledging that's their view, they pretend like liberals only care about foreigners and would let their children starve in order to give a chicken a higher quality of life. When obviously, if you look at liberal priorities, they're spending a lot more time trying to give fellow Americans healthcare than fighting factory farms or increasing the foreign aid budget. This particular conservative trait seems to be most popular with techbros and the angry anonymous twitter accounts they all look to for spiritual guidance.

@Bob_Somebody021 @darwiniandharma @RichardHanania And, granted, far away «in culture»

@Bob_Somebody021 @darwiniandharma @RichardHanania But the thing I care about wrt «telescopic altruism» is how much we owe people far away in time and space.