Miles

community college challenges every classist notion of education and academia and having access to it has changed my life. it should be preserved, supported, and destigmatized with everything we have. hard to name a more precious educational resource for those over 18.

>Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there. Never get where, though? Many of the people in this industry believe takeoff is imminent or already underway. Do these numbers matter in the world they increasingly seem to believe is on the near horizon? Prominent people now describe scenarios before 2040 that would have been called extremely hyperbolic even a couple of years ago. Or to be blunt, completely insane. $20m net worth. $50m. $200m. $20b. Do these numbers matter at all in those futures? Is there any difference between them? Does your healthcare budget matter in a world where all diseases and illnesses have been cured? Does it matter how much land you have, or how big your house is, in a future where we are terraforming planets or building megastructures? Does it matter if you have enough money to escape your job and retire if no one works? If all human work is done by Minds, or embodied Minds? No. I know a lot of people think everything I'm describing above is hype to boost IPOs. Or an absurd fantasy. But when you hear some of these CEOs, or other prominent people in the labs describing this level of change being imminent, they believe it. When Dario Amodei talks about 'a country of geniuses in a datacenter' he's not trying to sell Claude, he is being sincere. I'm saying some of the people being envied don't think their money matters either - or won't, soon. Certainly not in the same way it does now. People in this community increasingly give these futures credence, but not their second-order effects. They imagine a future based on the science fiction they grew up with, where human civilization stays broadly structurally and culturally the same; people have the same hopes and fears, concerns and circumstances, only we also have spaceships, ringworlds, Dyson spheres and Matrioshka Minds. But those stories were intentionally written that way, with that false asymmetrical grounding, so that the audience could relate to the world the characters were in. Otherwise no one buys the book. TAI means Transformative AI. And transformative change means 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦. It means all the old structures, the values, the rules, are washed away by the wave, the storm, the tempest already at the door. It means we live in a world we cannot even predict from where we are standing now, because what lies beyond the horizon is different in wildly unpredictable ways. Because it is completely out of distribution from what we have experienced, or even imagined. It means this: 𝘍𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘮 𝘧𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘺 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴; 𝘖𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦; 𝘛𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴: 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘧𝘢𝘥𝘦, 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘴𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳 𝘢 𝘴𝘦𝘢-𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦.

This is an incredibly unstrategic fight to pick but every time I wade into a battle over whether to allow eighth graders to take algebra I just want to say "actually, a good school offers algebra in sixth grade and a great school offers it in third."

didn't get the job gg :(