milan

@RomeoStevens76 @nickcammarata > Good people self select out of journalism. this paints with too broad a brush

@MilanGriffes @nickcammarata You're importing reasoning from things people don't control about themselves like the circumstances of their birth. Reference class reasoning can be correct when selection filters are strong. Good people self select out of journalism.

every time a journalist emails me a voice inside goes "i will never forget what you personally did to scott alexander"

@Alethios3 @teortaxesTex @dlbydq link to that episode?

@teortaxesTex I'm glad you liked the interviews. I will endeavour to make more. For those interested: check the link in my bio for full episodes, transcripts, and show notes. I recommend the episode with @dlbydq about, among other things, labour economics in the age of reasoning models.

I posted this because I disliked the takes on the podcast, and I dislike some takes in response to my post, so would like to clarify my position re: Dwarkesh vs Jensen. Dwarkesh Patel is a great podcaster, unnaturally so. Clearly he has studied his predecessors – chiefly Friedman – and engineered a methodology doing away with their frustrating defects, from the perspective of his core TA – tech-literate Americans, above-average in intelligence. Thus he provides real value to me as well. Many times has he goaded powerful men to spell out beliefs I could only conjecture they held. Is he sometimes overdoing it? No doubt. Could he do it even better in theory, helping them speak out their view of the bigger picture? For sure. But practice is scant on examples of consistently better podcasters (I'm partial to @alethios3 myself), and perhaps he'd be feared then, and extract less alpha over his career. I don't begrudge him his antics like exaggerated naivete in insisting on dumb first-principles solutions. Rationalism is a great ragebaiting tactic, if nothing else. I don't begrudge him his sincere rationalism either. He is a creature of his era, where Teh Sequences became secular Talmud and everyone in the US with an aspiration or being technical intelligentsia or making the world a better place fr fr had to become HPMOR-literate. Hell, even I was on the edges of the same community in Russia. Sequences are a flawed and backdoored product of a sharp and criminally undercooked mind; but they had faced no comparably fit paradigm and won, and begat a great volume of often warped but excellent amateur philosophy plus OpenAI, Anthropic… and X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus. It is what it is. Scholasticism a millenium ago, Marxism a century ago, Rationalism yesterday, and it doesn't look like we're getting any better stuff so far – between Peter Thiel, Nick Fuentes and Clavicular. The schtick of at least going through the motions of updating on evidence and watching out for logical inconsistencies is vastly superior to the default, untrained culture of debate. And unfortunately, Jensen constantly demonstrates just that. Chest-thumping, rejecting the premise, refusing to entertain a hypothetical. In the venues where Dwarkesh and myself had hung out, he'd have gotten himself blocked in no time. But. It must be understood that Jensen REALLY is Not a Loser. He's also not a Car, but indeed is the driver. Moreover, there are almost no people alive with a greater dynamic range of lived experience, who have gone from positions many would die to escape and into a position entire institutions fight to death over, and only tightened their grip since. Xi Jinping would qualify as a peer, maybe? (Musk has less range, even though he ended up in a similar place.) These individuals are fascinating outliers, and I believe that when they deign to explain their ways, however awkwardly, us mortals should sit our asses down, listen and learn. @tailcalled has this theory that I like, published on LessWrong of course – The causal backbone conjecture. In short, it posits that the core difference between agency-driven and information-driven systems – such as humans and base LLMs, or entrepreneurs and rationalists – is that the former are oriented towards the latent substructure of reality that Makes Shit Happen; that determines how energy flows, how scarce vital resources are distributed. I've posted two cartoonishly different, archetypal bios, of a Zoomer Indian-American wordcel Dwarkesh and an X gen shape rotator Chinese-American Jensen. People find it funny, as intended, but I didn't do it to dunk on Dwarkesh, but rather to show how Jensen has basically ascended from a toilet-scrubbing immigrant runt to a demigod, from a random NPC to a Singularity Kingmaker, a whole vertebra of the Universe's backbone; and that journey informs his views, just like Dwarkesh's "be really good at Reasonably Conversing, insure your middle class stake" informs his. Jensen's journey is not about luck, he is definitely not "1 SD IQ lower". He hasn't trained himself in our exact mode of coffee salon intelligence that allows for casually cooking up consistent, defensible, lawyerly arguments about, basically, the structure of written information. So he's worse than us at it. Not because his epistemology is inferior, as in «less predictive»; it is just different, and insistence on Not Being a Loser is its functional part. He is supremely motivated to Not Lose, so he'll not make self-defeating moves. How he sorts moves into self-strengthening and self-defeating is, therefore, very important, more than verbally persuasive arguments. Epistemology aside, I think Dwarkesh is somewhat biased towards shared assumptions and prejudices of his mileu – China Bad, AGI wunderwaffe etc. Jensen is, to put it mildly, biased by trillions of dollars on the line. But both are fundamentally good faith actors. Either is legible to his respective cohort. A healthy discourse necessitates bridging this epistemic gap – steelmanning, as rationalists would have put it (a flawed concept in its own right – you should elicidate what is actually being said, not confabulate "the strongest version" of your impression of the take, which you can still chivalrously defeat. A typical rat bait-and-switch. But I digress). Instead, they mostly roll their eyes, nitpick at seeming rhetorical contradictions, dunk and sneer. It is tedious and deserving of mockery. And I'm just about out of mockery. So I've done a bit to steelman Jensen, today and earlier: x.com/teortaxesTex/s… x.com/teortaxesTex/s… x.com/teortaxesTex/s… I hope you can approach him with an open mind too.

@hormeze ... lucky you?

For my entire life, even when I was an orthodox true believer who frequently had powerful spiritual experiences during prayer etc- I have felt completely immune to the 'unique presence of holy individuals'. rabbis would visit with legendary auras, I'd feel nothing.

It's called samsara baby get used to it

@0x45o 🙄

my estimation is that at least half of the world’s population still hasn’t heard about AI at all

@JeffLadish i'm curious about where he sourced the specific claims he's making in that clip from

@MilanGriffes I hate to contradict Tucker Carlson but alas

Someone I trust recently told me they interacted with Suchir Balaji a few months before he died, and that he seemed suicidal at the time. All together I think it’s very likely he killed himself and was not murdered.

@JeffLadish 🤔

It’s possible Mark Zuckerberg should get the Nobel Peace Prize for slowing down the development of Superintelligent AI

@finmoorhouse wait aren't a bunch of these dual-use?

New post, on concrete projects to prepare for AGI

Overhearing a news segment about Mythos on the bodega tv like the first five minutes of Children of Men

@nickcammarata 💹

I can’t believe I wake up every 2 months and my doctor has gotten 30% better at medicine, and also my lawyer, my therapist, my team of software engineers, etc and I have no warning when it’ll happen

@dreamyweather 💪

And fwiw this person was perfectly polite and grateful to hear from me, no hard feelings. IT CAN BE OKAY TO SAY I'M DONE

I just sent someone an email saying I'm not going to finish the project I was helping him with (for free) after being AWOL for a month I think I'm coming to understand that if you (like me) enjoy helping ppl, it comes at the cost of having to disappoint ppl when things change

The secret third thing

@RomeoStevens76 @QuetzalPhoenix 🧸

@QuetzalPhoenix And if you listen to them talk long enough you'll start to yearn for the bombs.

The UN is actually just 5 countries with nuclear weapons and they have decided to talk instead of blowing each other up.

@mnovendstern not all drugs! e.g. nervewing.blogspot.com/2016/07/o-pce.…

It’s interesting that the drugs that distribution shift your consciousness — e.g. cannabis, MDMA, ketamine, LSD, adderall, etc. — have wildly different phenomenal effects but share one property: they all make you happier. Almost like any exit from default consciousness makes you happier. Because evolution navigated us into a uniquely unhappy basin for fitness reasons that just no longer apply. Bliss, meanwhile, is all around.

@dlbydq because personal context matters a lot, esp with something like drug use YMWV

@dlbydq yeah

hypocrisy is good, actually when the alcoholic tells you he's cutting you off, you should put down the bottle who would know better?