Tom Chivers

A small announcement: my next book, Everything is Predictable, about how Bayes' theorem is the most important little equation in the world, is out in April and will look like this! If you'd like to pre-order, you can do so here geni.us/EIPBook and I will be very grateful

@jessesingal France were rubbish

pretty disappointing game as a neutral tbh, especially in light of a lot of recent epicness

You never hear this talk in a NICU

@Robspiked @alexmassie @rowlsmanthorpe english system is AWFUL. Staggeringly bad. On top of everything else that's bad about the housing market in England (ie not enough houses, stamp duty, and probably the conveyancing thing but I don't really understand that)

@alexmassie @TomChivers @rowlsmanthorpe My only quibble is that you've got bugger all right to redress as a buyer if the home report is inaccurate, but no seller would sell to you if your offer was 'subject to another report'. (Personal experience.) Otherwise, Scotland wins hands down. English system is bizarre.

Lots of talk about eliminating stamp duty but a much bigger win if you wanted to free up the housing market would be automating conveyancing

@Pbornsch @StuartJRitchie you can throw sugar and a splash of milk into Boston harbour

It looks like @TomChivers and @StuartJRitchie are commemorating America's 250th with an episode on sugar taxes!

@alexmassie @rowlsmanthorpe yes! Formal offers must be submitted by a solicitor and you can't pull out without suffering financial consequences, something like that?

@TomChivers @rowlsmanthorpe Just copy our system. Job done.

@RobElliot266 @SkyCricket I gather Jeremy clarkson said something similar! I understand the motives but I do wish people realised how bad it is (often for the patient, not just the health service)

Be quite interested in @TomChivers take on the advice currently being broadcast by @SkyCricket to lie to your GP if they are reluctant to give you a PSA test. Not much mention of Bayes' Theorem.

@Birdyword subscribe

You can see it coming now: England wins the World Cup on July 19th, a day before Starmer is meant to leave office. He grabs the trophy and mic from Kane on the pitch, claims the victory as an endorsement of his leadership. Burnham arrested.

@sazza_jay @J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z I think if, say, Jamaica was still British-ruled, and Jamaicans universally wanted that state of affairs, and Venezuela tried to claim it as theirs, the British public would still want to defend it. I may be wrong, but I think it’s less about race than about defending territory

@TomChivers @J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z More interrogating what the differences are, or what people perceive them to be. For a lot of people, it seems comes down to race but it takes some questioning to get them to admit that.

The fighting over The Falklands always reads like if a British Imperialist invented a scenario to morally justify a war over a colony.

@sazza_jay @J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z I'd say the Falklands is a genuine case in which Britain is right, there's no real moral ambiguity, and those who disagree, in this case Argentina, are wrong. But (and maybe this is what you're saying?) we can't really draw lessons from it to other cases because they're different

@TomChivers @J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z I’m simply interrogating modern British imperialism and how we justify it. The Falklands is extremely convenient for us in ways other countries where we arguably owe similar responsibility would not be, Nothing wrong with being honest about that.

@sazza_jay @J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z you may feel that Britain now has an obligation to Palestine in perpetuity and if Gazans vote to be part of Britain we're obligated to accept, and that's a perfectly OK argument to make, but you can't smuggle it in with the Falklands thing because it's just a different situation.

@sazza_jay @J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z I don't imagine you'd say it was legitimate control with the consent of the people, though, would you? I see what you're trying to do, but like you just said, the Falklands is an ideal case of OK colonialism, and I'd be surprised if you felt the British Mandate of Palestine was

@sazza_jay @J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z I think the difference here would be that it would be adding Gaza to the British state, and thus Britain would have to have a say on the merger as well (a referendum or at least a vote in Parliament). The Falklands were ALREADY part of the British state so that bit's been done

@J_K_Chesterton @dz76_z They would be if we accepted a referendum result where they self determined as such, as we did with the Falkland Islanders.

i gave fable access to a bunch of random always-on devices around my house last week and told him he can do whatever he wants and today i found out he has been monitoring my air quality and room temp thru the dyson air purifier. i feel like a beloved gecko

One thing I find striking in the discourse between AI 2040 and its detractors is that the two seem to be locked in to totally incompatible worldviews of how fast and how much of a big deal AI progress is: * In AI 2040, every scenario sees superintelligence of some kind emerging by 2040, unless a herculean effort is made to completely stop it * Detractors say things like "AI 2040 is naive about human coordination ability and a threat to freedom", but don't seem to see any naivety in assuming that the ASI transition will just go well by default, don't seem to see ASI itself as a massive power concentrator risk, and don't seem to feel fear of humanity's "hard power" dropping to zero if ASIs can do literally every task better than we can. This stance makes total sense in a "AI is normal technology" world, zero sense in a world where superintelligence is possible by 2030 and almost guaranteed by 2040 I think my beliefs are: - If I was confident that (present-day-style) AI is normal technology, I would be in the detractor camp - If I was confident that superintelligence is coming in 2030 by default, I would be closer to the AI 2040 camp - it's naive, but every other option is naive squared? But my problem is that I feel great uncertainty and have no idea which of the two worlds (or some other third thing) we're living in? Hence why I continue to be open-minded about slowdowns/pauses, but also I feel very uncomfortable with the "open source bad, the good outcome is the one where our guys have controlling global dominance" push coming from some major AI companies and intellectuals - in a "normal" world that's the sort of thing that triggers every political alarm bell at the same time. A big reason why I have been advocating and trying my best to support the d/acc platform (rapid up-skilling in formal verification, cryptography, secure and open hardware, pandemic resistance and other defensive biotech, food and basic resource security, public epistemics, non-power-concentrating versions of physical security) is that these things are clearly worth doing in both worlds. The 2040 plan is already much more open source friendly (even mandating it! yay). It also includes "mutually assured compute destruction" ideas which (if they work) effectively give one of 2-5 actors the ability to trigger a global compute winter - as opposed to giving 1-5 actors the ability to selectively disenfranchise people they consider baddies while exempting themselves. This is also a big improvement. So I can see the earnest attempts to improve along the dimensions detractors criticize on ("does this concentrate power in big AI labs and superpower governments?"), and I appreciate this. I think many people don't appreciate enough the differences between different "kinds" of pause buttons, and how some concentrate power far more than others. Probably we can think harder and improve even more here. But on the "slowdown/pause or not" topic, there isn't a magic "escape the tradeoff" button. The Hansonian in me says: the winning deal is a deal which, from the perspective of both sides' present-day beliefs and knowledge, both sides would accept, though for different reasons. If the crux is AI progress speed, then identify a set of pre-agreed triggers for "okay, serious shit is happening" [super-pandemics? >25% unemployment? something involving slaughterbots?], and pre-agree that we become much more open-minded to the slowdown or pause thing if enough triggers come to pass within some timeframe. 2040 detractors (who clearly implicitly think that we'll see amazing speedup of progress from AI but think that what I call the "serious shit" category is overhyped) will accept expecting that the triggers don't come to pass, and AI worriers will accept expecting that they will. Pre-agreeing on the specific triggers means that once the triggers either hit or don't hit, there is stronger legitimacy around the idea that one side's worldview turned out more correct and we should be more inclined toward their program. If I were @elonmusk (or zuck, or...) I would re-tool twitter much more heavily into being a platform for helping to identify and make these kinds of grand win-win deals, so that we can bypass big-country governments and big-company CEOs and big nonprofit intellectuals and give more people a voice in the discussion. It's possibly one of the best things that social media _could_ do for humanity if it wanted to. But again, maybe this is also naive. Actually, probably it's naive. But currently, I see zero plans for how to deal with an ASI transition that are not naive. Perhaps humanity is stuck with a choice between naive and naive squared (or maybe even naive squared and naive cubed), so I feel inclined to cut some slack to people who are trying.

Very sad to see this type of colonial behaviour from Gary Lineker.

every now and then I look back on this video

As someone who defines capitalism as an economic system where goods are distributed by markets rather than governments, it is so jarring to log on to this site and see people who clearly think capitalism means "evil cultural force behind everything I don't like."

Com a eliminação da Colômbia, só sobraram dois países sul-americanos pra torcer.

@Agus_HQ @th_greenlight @Milo_Edwards everyone who lives there considers themselves British and wants to remain under British sovereignty. The dispute over whether Britain's 1690 colonial claim should take precedence over Spain's 1770 one (and whether Argentina can rightly claim to be heir to Spain's) is irrelevant

@th_greenlight @Milo_Edwards Our claim to the islands didn't start with the military dictatorship.

argentina players TAUNT england with chants about when their army UNCONDITIONALLY SURRENDERED