Henry Shevlin

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Henry Shevlin

Henry Shevlin

@dioscuri

Associate Director @LeverhulmeCFI, University of Cambridge. Philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist. Consciousness, social AI, and human AI-coexistence

Cambridge, England Katılım Kasım 2008
8K Takip Edilen16.3K Takipçiler
Scheler's Ghost
Scheler's Ghost@b_schuppli·
@dioscuri On point, goddamn! « Step away, you’re blocking my view of the sun », the cynic said, hobbled up in a barrel.
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
Excellent satire, highly recommended
Peter Girnus 🦅@gothburz

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
@divya_venn How about for asymmetry correction? The person I know who was happiest about her breast augmentation had it done for that reason. Made her life a lot easier in terms of bras and well fitting clothes.
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
@NathanpmYoung @Aria_Babu I suspect there are toupee effects here, ie men associate boob jobs with unnatural looking breasts, because those are the main times when they can tell a woman has had a boob job.
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Nathan 🔎
Nathan 🔎@NathanpmYoung·
@Aria_Babu A lot of men say they disagree with the boob job advice. I'm curious if that will hold up in an anonymous poll.
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Aria Schrecker
Aria Schrecker@Aria_Babu·
Most women underrate how much men care about looks. And when they do try to get more attractive they waste time and effort on tanning, contouring their face, getting their nails done. Instead, almost everyone could be considered attractive if they lost weight, grew their hair long, and cleared up their skin. All these things are within your control. There's other basic advice that should be obvious. Wear makeup everyday and go for a youthful, dewy look. Remove your body hair. Ditch your glasses. For the extreme looksmaxxers, focus on your body. Your face is probably fine and hard to change. Get a boob job, precisely control your weight, and do hourglass-enhancing exercises. You are no longer stuck with the looks God gave you. ariababu.co.uk/p/get-sexier
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
The funny thing is, for all the Manosphere’s pretensions towards male vitalism, there’s no Faustian spirit there. “What’s something worth dying for?” “What are your greatest hopes for the future of civilisation?” These are not questions they seem remotely concerned with.
Carl@HistoryBoomer

The manosphere is depressingly shallow. They sell a fantasy of eating steaks, driving fast cars (with a woman in a bikini), having big houses with stereos and a sauna (filled with women in bikinis), eating more steaks, and dying. No art, no life of the mind, just animal grunts.

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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
Scrolling back to 2011 and every single photo looks like it was taken inside a glass of sepia-tinged orange juice.
Henry Shevlin tweet mediaHenry Shevlin tweet mediaHenry Shevlin tweet media
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
There is no fucking way you’d ever guess whose Wikipedia page this is from.
Henry Shevlin tweet media
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
@AlmakkiDeputy @Polymarket Hadn't seen @willdepue's tweet when I posted mine, though it looks like @growing_daniel had a similar idea before him? Great minds and all that. Still, Polymarket used my suggested name and the press release borrows my phrasing, so I think I can claim (some) of the credit!
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
Idea: a bar called The Situation Room. Like a sports bar but for politics. Cable news and live feeds on the screens instead of football. Atlases and copies of Jane’s Defence Weekly on every table. Multiple sets of Risk and Diplomacy behind the bar.
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Peter Hague
Peter Hague@peterrhague·
@dioscuri Tell me when this is opening and I will be there for a pint.
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Henry Shevlin
Henry Shevlin@dioscuri·
@Polymarket @Polymarket I am incredibly excited you're running with this but @shayne_coplan I think this calls for a free bar tab. Hell, fly me out for the opening and I will give a speech extoling the virtues of Monitoring Situations.
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