Wayne Fung

@Romy_Holland Not wanting to face the fear that their thoughts and attitudes, born from a more stable culture that had more common assumptions, may be getting less relatable as today's culture of deconstruction continues to change, lead by the accelerating pace of technological change.

okay so i think the boomer conversational trait at the root of many problems is a total failure to even attempt to model whether the people around them care about what they’re saying. they tell the same old stories 100x and deep down they definitely know you’ve heard it, but it just feels so good to be talking that they go for it. in the absence of the thought process “would this person enjoy hearing this story?” the only factor that matters is how it feels for them to talk. same thing for the constant narration of everything that’s happening and the constant questions about tiny stuff and the random pieces of mundane information about ppl you don’t know. toddlers do the same thing before they develop complete theory of mind. idk if this is the consequence of some sort of old age cognitive regression or if boomers were just socialized really poorly.

@jazzraptor @cremieuxrecueil @Mankosmash That said, the existence of a correlation doesn't mean blue is the right choice. x.com/WayneFung6/sta…

@jazzraptor @cremieuxrecueil @Mankosmash The lack of a pile-up at 10 makes perfect uniform cheating less likely. Cremieux's invariance tests on loadings/residuals make imperfect cheating less likely. So the data supports a blue-IQ correlation in *this* particular sample (which skews higher-IQ, engaged, etc.).

Red and blue button pushers: who's smarter? In a mostly-subscriber sample who took a brief verbal IQ test, the answer is... Blue pushers! If the whole population has an IQ of 100 with an SD of 15, their mean IQ would be 101.9, versus 97.0 for reds.

@cremieuxrecueil In other words: Occam's razor may happen to hold and support Red-pressers here.

@cremieuxrecueil The correlation could be because the logic for group preservation, which requires more careful simulation of mindsets, is more complex than the logic for self preservation; the pool of potential blues is limited to those who *bother* to do the blue logic (easier for higher IQ).

@jazzraptor @cremieuxrecueil @Mankosmash Your proposed mechanism would cause a pile-up at the maximum score of 10, but what is observed is a hump at ~9.6 which declines from 9.6 to 10.

@cremieuxrecueil @Mankosmash This might be true if cheating was pattern breaking. (Miss easy questions, gets hard questions right.) What about uniform cheating: a cheater looks up all answers and gets 10/10 and raises the mean without wrecking item patterns? The model just sees a "very smart" person.

@Clara_Gold I learned the hard way that confidence should come from betting that you have something valuable, even if they don't see it. They balk, but you're convinced you're right so you stay patient. The struggle is actually *being* right (e.g. Elizabeth Holmes had misplaced confidence).

I realized fundraising was the first time in my life I got rejected at scale. And honestly, as a woman, I was not emotionally trained for it. Before the feminists come for me, let me make my point. I think the first real arena where most people experience power, desire, status, and rejection is dating. And dating trains men brutally. A lot of men learn very early that if they want someone, they have to walk across the room, risk looking stupid, get rejected, survive it, and do it again. They learn that rejection is volume, timing, targeting. It’s a numbers game. A lot of women are trained very differently. Especially if you’re a pretty girl, you don’t usually walk into a bar looking at a guy thinking: “Can I have him?” You only think: “Do I want him?”. You don’t build your identity around shooting your shot 100 times and surviving 99 no’s. You don’t get trained to ask directly, get rejected publicly, and act normal 5 minutes later. You get trained to be “chosen”. To be impressive enough that the opportunity comes to you. And then you start building a company. And the whole paradigm changes. Suddenly, everyone can say no to you. Investors say no. Candidates say no. Customers say no. And when your rejection muscle is weak, your brain does the dumbest thing possible: it makes the “no” mean something about you. That you’re not smart enough. Not compelling enough. I think this is one of the most underrated gender differences in fundraising. Not that men are inherently better at it. But a lot of them have built thicker rejection scar tissue earlier. They know how to hear no and keep moving. They know how to make it less personal. They know how to treat it like volume, timing, targeting, iteration. I didn’t. I’ve raised 3 rounds. On the surface, the story looks great: I raised with Sequoia, OpenAI, Khosla. Woohoo. The real story is less sexy: every round wrecked me. I lost 5kg each time. I probably donated a few years of life expectancy to the cap table. Because every round, I only got 1 term sheet. One. EVERYONE else said no. And when almost everyone says no, your body does not care about the intellectually correct explanation. It only hears: Maybe they’re right. Maybe you’re not that compelling. Maybe you’re not the founder you thought you were. For a long time, I thought confidence meant learning not to take the no personally. I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe some people are built like that. I’m not. 30 years of being trained to be chosen does not turn into resilience because someone in a Patagonia vest says fundraising is a numbers game. So now I think confidence is something less glamorous. Confidence is taking the no very personally. Letting it ruin your day, losing your appetite, spiraling for hours… And still taking the next meeting. Confidence is just being bothered as f*** and not letting it make you smaller. I still don’t fully believe my own BS as I’m writing this, but I guess that’s the point. Can’t wait for the next round to find out.

@Romy_Holland Half the general population have IQ < 100. I suspect that the high IQ people on X have a hard time emotionally relating to being dumb. (Even as a relative midwit among you, I've found that it's definitely a separate skill)

I've only talked to maybe a dozen friends about whether they're red or blue button pushers, but within that group there's an obvious correlation between being worse at modeling others and pushing the red button. I think it's easy to paint it as an empathy thing, and that's true in some instances, but I think for many people it might be about an inability to grasp that other people think in radically different ways.

@Gfilche @grok Utopia is more about feeling than it is about logic. Also the point of reading a novel is to experience the feelings it evokes. Otherwise, if you just want a dry explanation of the philosophy, tech and economy of the Culture, Banks wrote an essay detailing exactly that.

Ok. I tried to read the Ian M. Banks Culture books to get a preview of the future Elon is building 📚 He mentions them all the time But honestly, they were super boring and I gave up 😂 Has anyone read them fully? What can we learn? @grok help us summarize them 🙏

@_Void_Apostle_ @Aella_Girl It has to do with whether you think there are good people (children, mom) who would be tricked by simple scams.

@Aella_Girl I am once again asking, why would anyone press the blue button? Imagine there's a button that if you press you get a 99.9999% chance of survival, and if you don't press you get 100% chance of survival. Would you choose to press it?

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 20% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 20% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

@varien The question is not whether it is an extinction event, but whether the causes of it are projected to persist given the current (accelerating) momentum of technological development moving male and female psyches into environments ever more remote from the ancestral environment.

has anyone considered the declining birth rate statistics as a rebalancing and not an extinction event

@GulyanAlen @matthewgson @wholemars Elon comes across as giving his honest assessment of probabilities, which has made it easier for me to assess the company for investment purposes. Jensen smacks of PR from which one has to extract the grain of truth; this extra guesswork muddles the assessment.

@matthewgson @wholemars Yes I’m complaining not on the difficulty of invention but by the horrible messaging . Don’t tell me you’re happy with the messaging . Yes Elon is the man , prefer messaging like Jenson Huang . Don’t launch Robotaxi in July 2025 if your product is not ready.

"We expect negative free cash flow for the rest of the year" — Tesla CFO

@DaveShapi The issue is comfort vs the species' difficulty adapting to that comfort. Birthrates are plummeting around the globe due to rising standard of living, which puts male and female psyches in an environment way out of distribution of the ancestral environment.

UBI DEBATE Give my your best arguments for or against

@Zigmanfreud The basic game theory (see e.g. Bostrom's book) is that AI will either result in utopia or doom, that no middle ground is possible. Faced with this logic, Elon at first warned about doom but convinced no one, people wanted to gamble, so with a sigh he decided to join the effort.

My current theory on Musk/AI is at 1st he understood the dangers but then he became literally invested in it & now wants to sell/win the race, so he has rationalized that this magical massive rising tide will somehow lift all the boats super high, without causing any to capsize.

@alex_avoigt @elonmusk Temporary. All birthrates in Europe (as well as US, Asia, India, Russia, Latin America) are below replacement. Even in Africa and the Middle East, the birthrates are projected to fall below replacement by 2050.

@elonmusk Facts: The 🇪🇺 European Union (EU) population is growing, reaching 450.4 million by January 2025. There is no such thing as population collapse because the opposite is happening and its called growth.

Children are the future

@Simberg_Space @gmiller Well, it would be nice to undergo all the physical changes to at least feel what that's like (go through menstrual cycle / erections easily stimulated visually, etc.)

@WayneFung6 @gmiller I don't think the robots will be able to do the latter. Understanding gender involves a lot of life experience, and hormonal development.

Imagine you're living in the hypothetical 'Post-Scarcity Utopia of Limitless Abundance'. The supersmart AIs and robots will build you anything you ask for. What's the most wildly extravagant thing you would want them to create for you? (The more specific, the better.)

@sopharicks UHI is just "dividends from the people-owned, near-independent and self-sustaining AI labor force, via the govt." But what you're alluding to is the psychological impact on a human psyche born in ancestral times, which has already been collapsing global birthrates for decades.

A significant chunk of people would be happy with universal high income and would be consumers on steroids: social media, gaming, and entertainment would flourish as never before. But those who value their agency would want more and would find ways to create capital in the post-singularity era. I hope it would be possible

@gfodor Forgot to add that the friend was one of those people who happened to have invested in AI.

@gfodor Have your friend spot you the $100 you'd need to buy a house. You could make up for it with good conversation and small favors, then go off to live your freewheeling hippie life.

Imagine the prices of all goods and services were slashed by 1000x, but if you tried to find a job, raise money for a startup, or sell anything yourself you’d find no counterparty whatsoever. Now imagine that’s true for most people. What’s the logical solution to this?