Holmes Wilson

The Terre Thaemlitz RA 1000 mix is the best cultural work I've seen on Israel/Gaza by far. Worth checking out and spreading!

This is adorable and wonderful june5.xyz

@xriskology @allTheYud Yes!

@holmesworcester @allTheYud No idea what you're trying to say.

A reminder that people in the EA and Rationalist communities have explicitly talked about using violence -- murdering AI researchers, sending bombs to DeepMind and OpenAI. Yudkowsky himself said he would have bombed Wuhan labs to prevent Covid. Etc.

@nickgrossman omg me too

my typing spelling has gotten so bad since conversing w LLMs so much, since they don't crae

@xriskology @allTheYud Is it even dishonest to just not read or understand things with much depth or clarity, and confuse things that are proximate but distinct?

@allTheYud Perhaps because your ego is the size of Jupiter, you seem constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for your words. Calling me dishonest? Lol. (And yes, a MIRI employee did co-organize a Berkeley workshop in which people talked about bombing DeepMind and OpenAI.)

@KelseyTuoc @matthew_petti "One state solution" boils down to a universal suffrage battle, and these aren't so unwinnable in the kinds of extreme circumstances necessary for any major racial/religious hierarchy configuration to be unraveled.

@KelseyTuoc @matthew_petti Isn't the reliable path to either via pariah status, South Africa-style sanctions, an end to direct flights from Israel to anywhere seemly, consensus that Israel is wrong and hopeless even among friends and family abroad, inevitability, etc? And if so, isn't either imaginable?

A Palestinian once argued to me, if it’s a massive uphill battle to get two sovereign (like actually sovereign) states, then why shouldn’t we just aim for one state? Why settle for less?

And the second most addictive app on my phone is my self-hosted chat bridge to Claude Code.

I love that the Discourse says that we are addicted to apps because of Enshittification and Careless People when actually the most addictive app on my phone is made by an anarchist seapunk hacker, is open source and maintained by a 501(c)3 charitable organization, is obsequiously, meticulously private, gives zero fucks whether I personally use it or not, and is where I share complex thoughts about life and the world with my close friends, colleagues and partners.

For my brain, no existing app is as addictive as an argument about internet politics with a close friend, on Signal. Except long form television, which I had to quit years ago.

I think the discussion around this keeps unhealthily conflating two different things. America was founded by weird Protestant splinter groups fleeing oppression, and protecting religious freedom is in fact fundamental to what it means to be an American. There is very little more American than deciding everyone else is doing religious practice wrong and moving out to the middle of nowhere to do it according to your own deep principles. I think that many American groups that are not specifically Christian (or whose Christian-ness is contested) should be understood as inheritors of this tradition. But this commitment to religious liberty and to pluralistic tolerance of a wide range of different practices only functions if there is a bedrock, shared governing ethos that allows us to navigate these object-level disagreements. That ethos - the defining thing that it means to be American - includes freedom of religion, the commitment that everyone else's right to their beliefs must also be defended, and defended even at significant personal cost; freedom of speech, an understanding that you have the right to offend and no right not to be offended, a deep suspicion of state exercises of power; commitment to equality under the law and to the idea that much of virtue must be defined and pursued outside the law. It makes no sense to demand people assimilate in the food they eat or the clothes they wear. It is downright unAmerican to insist that people assimilate by adopting an existing American church instead of by following in the deep American tradition of freedom of conscience. But it is absolutely necessary that everyone adopt - 'assimilate to', if you'd like - the underlying commitments that make America the world's most successful pluralistic society. Nothing I've said here disagrees with Hamid's column; I think in many ways it's the exact same point he's making. The examples he gives of not assimilating are examples of not secularizing - for example, not accepting gay marriage, or not thinking that it's good for women to work outside the home. Those are the kinds of disagreements the American project can endure and does endure every day. But I think that people often talk past each other when it comes to assimilation, in a way that makes "we should stop expecting assimilation" a statement that'll sow enormous confusion. I think there's some of this confusion in Hamid's observation that Muslims say 'homosexuality should be discouraged by society' at a much higher rate even than Republican Americans. Does every American have the absolute right to practice a faith that teaches their super loving perfect god will torture me eternally because I have a wife? Yes. I will defend their right to do so, whether that faith is Christian or Muslim. Do they have the right to try to use the state to impose that view - say, by making it harder for me and my wife to own property, get custody of our children, leave our possessions to each other, etc.? I would argue that they do not! I know a lot of people opposed to gay marriage. Some of them are deeply and fundamentally committed to the American vision of pluralism, and some are not. The ones who are not are far, far scarier. If someone is a sincere pluralist, it is not threatening at all for them to believe that homosexuality is gravely evil; if they're not, then it's really quite a big deal. So the more that immigrants assimilate on the important stuff - the conviction that they may not use the state to impose their religion and it would be abhorrent to try, that other people have the right to believe differently, that people have the right to deconvert - the less of an issue it is if they have different views from mine on the object-level stuff. But when someone says "immigrants don't need to assimilate", I don't know whether they mean "immigrants do not need to agree that it is the absolute right of every individual to deconvert from Islam and go around vociferously criticizing it in a strident and offensive way" (immigrants, like all Americans, do need to agree on that) or if they mean "immigrants do not need to agree on whether homosexuality is sinful" (certainly true). Or more generally, whether people talk about the importance of assimilation some mean, "you need to have the same views as me", and some mean, "you need to be essentially persuaded of the pluralistic American project and willing to sacrifice to protect it where it protects views you disagree with". The first is bad and the second is just true. Now for the good news: The data says that in fact Muslim-American immigrants are assimilated in the important sense - opposing political violence at higher rates than other groups, believing in freedom of speech and religious liberty. Hamid references that very data! But he should say clearly "this is good" rather than "this is unnecessary", and then point out that this (good) assimilation is why we can all graciously live alongside one another while our views vary greatly, and why we are able to sustain a society in which it is not an emergency that my neighbors think my lifestyle is sinful.

@benlandautaylor Oh man you're in for such a treat. Check out The Confidence Man next.

I finally started reading Moby Dick and I'm blown away, it's absolutely *riveting* and so far he's just ruminating while he wanders towards the port. This is gonna rock once he's actually on the ship.

@krishnanrohit (I regularly point out that self driving cars & alphafold for drug discovery seem great, and that preventing rogue superintelligence need not interfere with those techs.)

@gfodor @Orwelian84 @SamoBurja @soncharm To me it read like you were trying to browbeat him with a trick of re-framing: "omg Iran would have nukes in n years?? then how can this war be a bad idea??" Apologies if this was a misread.

@holmesworcester @Orwelian84 @SamoBurja @soncharm I was simply asking the question about the stated goal since Samo is knowledgable and probably has an opinion about it. Everything else you are stating as an assumption of mine is just reading between lines that are not there.

Some misread this as me saying the war was a good idea. It wasn't. I suspect people have a hard time comprehending that the U.S. might actually lose this war and suffer a strategic defeat. They're not thinking through consequences of that defeat which would be disastrous for America and indeed the Western world. I wish this war never happened. There are no easy choices anymore. Iran won't simply let the U.S. go home if they think they're winning. That's not how wars with regional powers end. We then should take some serious war measures and reforms and the United States of America and any allies it can find might manage to achieve a strategic win. Those difficult wartime reforms are the conversation I'd like to start today rather than day 100 or day 200 of the war.

@Orwelian84 @gfodor @SamoBurja @soncharm There's another assumption in there, which is that a country having the capability to do this means they would choose to, or would create other problems that are worth the cost of whatever this is.

@holmesworcester @gfodor @SamoBurja @soncharm i think the relevant question is time to breakout capabilities with an IRBM of the type they lobbed towards Diego Garcia. Would be super helpful if that briefing from the gang of 8 got made public.

Kanye is in this David Lynch-like career outro since Life of Pablo where all the albums he makes are kind of the same album and they are all good.

@gfodor @SamoBurja @soncharm There's another assumption in there, which is that the stated goal is a worthwhile goal given the costs. It seems the difference of opinion between you and OP is there, not narrowly in the answer to the question you posed to OP, which is a narrower question than the above.

@holmesworcester @SamoBurja @soncharm My assumption is that the stated goal of the war was to subvert the creation of a missile and drone shield which was going to eliminate any ability to deter Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. That this is the stated goal isn't an opinion, obviously, it's the stated goal.

@gfodor @SamoBurja @soncharm Can you state the assumptions you're making that make the answer to this question relevant?

@SamoBurja @soncharm Do you agree or disagree that Iran’s missile and drone shield would have led to them developing a nuclear weapon? If agree, how long did we have?

@apxhard @So8res @jachiam0 Risks to an AI of keeping humans around, e.g.: - they make an even more powerful AI - they learn how to control AI - they learn to detect dangerous AI Mitigation of risks of killing us: - Diversify compute & power - Incrementally reduce our numbers - Control all or some of us

@apxhard @So8res @jachiam0 Doomers are not saying that machines will kill us *before* the risks of killing us are less than the benefits (including the risk of keeping us around). They are saying machines will kill us *after* the risks are less than the benefits.

I didn’t see the doc yet - but I do think the best “don’t panic” people don’t rly do interviews because most of the best arguments against doomers (who I think are very logical except with regards to their own branding) essentially come down to opinions on the nature of life that the vast majority of people will not like or be ok with. Like I’ve had people make very strong arguments to me about why zero care should be spent addressing doomer concerns and it basically comes down to things like human life isn’t particularly special in the context of intelligence, or the philosophies of the people building ai are based on such and such superior cultural approach that I trust more than the current one etc etc obviously that’s extremely basic but - I think the reason we don’t hear these arguments in public is because they tend to end up being lik well a bunch of ppl r gna be poor in the short term and it’ll be awful and it’s gna be a bad bottleneck time or the cybernetic system deserves priority over individuals hence a certain amount of suffering death and merging and possibly even extinction is ok I don’t see these types of arguments ever risking being subjected to actual debate or rigor from the opposition. It’s pretty crazy there aren’t more well documented well planned earnest formal debates between the best doomers and the best optimists with fact checking - and mebe it’s not a totally formal debate cuz I want people to debate their side and I want optimists to have to stand up to the most meticulous scrutiny and if it still stands then awesome, Same for doomers idk It’s insane that it never actually comes down to being person v person. There’s almost no reason to do any more docs or have any more discussions if we can’t do that because it’s just ppl yelling unchallenged arguments back and forth This is too long sorry