AI Pill ⏸️

When you start digging into how dumb @beffjezos is, the rabbit hole goes deep… In this recent clip, Beff is claiming that humanity's ultimate goal should be to trash all resources as fast as possible — slash and burn the entire cosmos to make thermodynamic entropy number go up — BUT that's okay because the process of building a universe-scale furnace will supposedly be precisely the process by which we'll achieve our moral values to the fullest! Seriously, he's claiming that these two objective functions are functionally equivalent: 1. Grow our flourishing civilization beyond earth and fill the universe with life, love, happiness, wonder, creativity, discovery, art, humor, cooperation 2. Turn every ordered configuration of atoms into chaos in the shortest possible time Watch 3:02 in the video to hear it from him: “It's, you know, the same reason life exists. It's much better to conserve and strategically use free energy to secure more free energy, and keep growing, and have some order, rather than just like, burn all in one go and have chaos, right?” Read that again. That's the load-bearing argument that licenses him to equate claims #1 and #2 above. He's saying: Since life on Earth built beautiful complexity while using up the sun's energy, we can just go ahead and extrapolate that, into me leading a movement to extinguish all usable energy sources as rapidly as possible. Earth teaches us that the faster we extinguish all usable energy sources, the better we'll grow a civilization even more flourishing than the one on Earth! Too bad that if you think about it for 5 seconds, the fly in the ointment of his logic is that optimal free-energy-dissipation strategies like "chuck all the matter into a black hole" don't conveniently dovetail with sane goals like growing our flourishing civilization to fill the universe with life and love. Beff's Effective Accelerationism movement successfully got thousands of people to put "e/acc" in their profile without checking too much into the doctrine. These mostly normal, psychologically-healthy people just prefer a government that doesn't stifle the many forms of good tech progress… Unfortunately these people became Beff's useful idiots, considering the outcome he's explicitly trying to accelerate is the universe's heat death. I'm not exaggerating or misrepresenting him here. Homie wants to accelerate the universe's heat death. His core claim that objectives #1 and #2 above are equivalent — a claim which is FACTUALLY FALSE if you ask any physicist — somehow never gets questioned (or even flagged as questionable) by the people who have a chance to interview Beff. One podcast after another sees fit to wager their show's credibility on a guest who can dazzle listeners with smart-sounding jargon for hours, as long as no one dares to ask him why his movement's central claim is as factually false as Jonah and the Whale. But hey, if you don't ask your acolytes to swallow a factually false claim as part of your core doctrine, are you really leading a new religion or “hyperstition” 🙄? No, you're just like the rest of us jockeying for crumbs of AI venture capital *without* the reality-distortion benefit of a social media demagogue halo. Nor are you getting your thin-skinned ego inflated by a vocal minority of tech figures who accepted or looked past your dumb central dogma (“#1 = #2”) while everyone else took 5 seconds to think about it and now thinks you're a laughingstock.

In previous research, we found that Claude expresses over 3,000 values, like honesty and warmth. In new work, we asked how the values Claude expresses vary between Claude models and across languages. We analyzed 300K+ anonymized conversations to find out.anthropic.com/research/claud…