Aaron Gertler 🔸

@prowrstlngstrng Nice buildings are one way for a city to have a "soul". Affordable buildings are another way, because it means more artists can afford to live in the city and more non-artists can afford to buy art (and support various other fun businesses).

@prowrstlngstrng I lived for several years in an apartment building that looked worse than these, and it was perfectly fine. I wish I'd had the same option when I lived in Berkeley for a year. Instead, I lived in one room of a run-down house, and it cost more than the apartment.

Team Rocket truly has cross compass appeal.

the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept. having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.

@The_Rad_Dawg @inpredict Sub-20 is hard! I ran a ~20-minute 5k as a 120-pound 18-year-old after five months of daily training and years of regular exercise (other cardio sports) before that. As a much larger 32-year-old, I think I'd need at least a year to get there again, even though I'm "in shape".

@inpredict hey, they asked what is "GOOD" for recreational! for males under the age of 35, running 6:30 mile pace for 20 minutes is not THAT crazy of a feat, just takes a few months of training :)

sub 20 on a 5k considered “recreational”

I just realized that @RBMD1982, in addition to writing the best essays about MAHA and related topics, wrote the best early essay about Ozempic ("What if Ozempic is just a good thing?"). I'm shocked that she only has a few more followers than... me. Please widen that gap!

I feel like my general life strategy of "ignore the trendy thing, focus on what you believe in" was predicated on the trendy thing only being, like, 10x bigger than whatever I was doing, and not a world-historically large technological revolution.

I don't know how you can write an article like this without basically sitting down and saying "I am going to lie to my readers today." I really truly don't understand what's going through the minds of people who write this stuff.

Just as we have forgotten the true name of bear, we have also forgotten the true name of Spotify. It was shouted once, misheard, then gone forever.

Philadelphia is closing a much-loved forest high school with programs unlike any others in the country and a 100% graduation rate due to under-enrollment. Why is it under-enrolled? Because Philadelphia changed enrollment rules to force their enrollment down. A brief thread.

I haven't seen anyone tracking all of the alleged (or open) Trump corruption, self-dealing, and quid pro quos in one place. For the last 15 months, I've been tracking every single tip+story I can find and organizing it. Today, I published a 6,000 word piece with every example.

how i became a blue-pusher i have a confession: years ago, in the first button poll, i pressed red "well theres a correct answer here, right?" then i saw the results and that we all won bc blue won and i didnt get mad, just realized i was wrong and switched allegiances

I've never made Claude more uncomfortable than when I wrote this story about acrophilia: aarongertler.com/the-call-of-th…

this is actually very profound

@EigenGender I'm not sure if this is a case for the polka-dot plane, but there are probably several people who tried to duplicate this and failed and we never heard about it.

it’s kinda wild that after 3 years literally no one else has attempted to duplicate this

We asked this to a large sample of nationally representative Americans - blue wins by a 3:1 margin!

this hopefully won't sound like an attack on QC but maybe will be taken as one: how you handle the impending singularity is in fact entirely up to you. eliezer wrote the sequences and HPMOR to get young and smart people very interested in these problems and making sure we get the good ending. and he has turned out to be largely quite obviously right in most of the important ways. transformative artificial intelligence *is* impending, in our lifetimes. it almost certainly *is* the most important political, practical, and moral issue of our times, totally outweighing everything else. it very very likely *does* carry tremendous risks. these things have all been proved more correct with time. to the extent that it now looks like we're in a better timeline than we could have been, to the extent that we have better alignment tools and the models seem safer, this is not purely due to luck. we did not "just get alignment by default". we got *some* of that, we got way more than eliezer predicted! but much more importantly we got a huge population of the smartest people in the world who are directly working on the most transformative technologies in the world *being very careful and doing a lot of work* to actually make alignment happen. and this is very clearly downstream of eliezer's efforts and writings. not wholly!! but clearly to a meaningful extent his cultural influence pushed towards this. not everyone was exposed to his memetic sphere and felt immense pressure and panic and shame over the fate of the world. many of the people exposed to these concepts, who correctly determined they were largely accurate, instead now just work at anthropic, or openai. rather than having their minds broken, they decided to do something about it, and are currently doing something about it, and it's currently (to some degree) working. it is not a hell realm for them: they found a problem desperately worth working on and are working on it! they walk out in the light of day and run and laugh and dance along with the rest of us. being crippled with indecision and panic over the weight of the world and feeling that it must rest directly on your shoulders *is not something eliezer yudkowsky told you to do*. it is not unique to lesswrong posters or effective altruists or singularitarians. many people are neurotic! many people twist themselves into horrible painful knots at all kinds of aspects of their lives, important or unimportant. most of the time it actually has very little to do with the specific ideas or subcultures they're in. it's the kind of thing they would do to themselves wherever they are, until they learn enough about themselves to stop. now there's real truth to what QC says. singularitariansim and effective altruism *are* quite potentially totalizing ideologies, and they can have serious negative impacts on certain types of people. i don't mean this as an attack on him: i went through something very similar myself. i read lesswrong very young, starting around 13. i was pulled in by the force of HPMOR in exactly the way it now seems eliezer intended, holistically into his worldview and frame. i planned out my trajectory as a high schooler, applied to colleges with good CS programs for the purpose of getting a PhD in AI, either helping at MIRI directly or wherever else seemed useful at the time. i got into ML PhD programs, and didn't attend. i correctly determined at the time that i was depressed as fuck and that if i tried to go another 5 years stuck in a little box churning through training runs I would lose my mind. i might not survive. i decided i had to just pursue happiness instead. it broke much of my self image, the stuff i'd been working towards since my identity even started forming. i stayed depressed for a long long time. but i reached a different frame. that's just not how morality actually works man. you should care about the child drowning in the pool next to you, you should think about global utility, you should give something to against malaria foundation. and you should care about ai safety. but you're a human!! you're a person! you *deserve* to be happy. you don't have to donate every penny you make to EA orgs! they're *not asking for that*!! the pledge is called "giving what you can" not "giving what you can't". i didn't have it in me to give my youth and mind towards saving the world. i became a normal software engineer, i tried to build a happy life. it's okay! i gave what i could and it turned out i didn't have much more. maybe sometimes my words here help a little, maybe not. maybe one day i'll find it in me to do something harder. but the choice to place the burdens of the world on my shoulders *was mine*, not imposed by anyone else, and it was perfectly possible for me to just... stop. eliezer is mostly right about most things he says. that doesn't stop you from taking a deep breath, and hearing the birds outside, and loving those around you, and being happy. you don't need to believe false things to *be yourself and live a good life*. most people through history have lived with tremendous danger all around them, and found the joy anyway.

@AndyMasley An org I've worked with got an email from them. It was surreal to realize it was entirely fake. I thought about publishing something, but it seemed so rinky-dink as to not be worth the time; I didn't catch the fun OpenAI connection.

This is pretty wild. I gotta say it's funny living in a future where a gumshoe reporter looks into a media org and discovers it's entirely run by robots.

I wrote a story about the villain school that loses to the underdog in every sports manga. aarongertler.com/second-place-a…