Pablo Villalobos 🔸

@xwanyex @tracewoodgrains Reclining is not binary, you can recline a little! And it's not a small amount of comfort, reclining my seat about 20% of the way is the difference between me being able to sleep and not

My view on this is that it's pretty low stakes and when I've been especially tired or cranky, I've reclined my seat. But none of this, no argument, changes that it *is* selfish. It *is* -- however we got in this situation or whoever paid for what -- just simply the case that you are choosing a very small amount of comfort for yourself at potentially large expense to the person behind you. That fact is suspended in the air, untouchable, true no matter what else either of us says.

I deleted my earlier, more forceful take, but maybe I’ll just reframe it this way: what else in public life has the same characteristics as seat reclining where the benefit to you for reclining is very small but the downside to the person behind you is very large? Can you think of anything else that has this property and for which we wouldn’t describe engaging in the behavior as antisocial?

@hsu_steve Yes, just like we stopped building houses and saw the endogenous house-saving response of technology take care of the problem. And thank god for the endogenous nuclear-power-plant-saving response!

YAWN 🥱🙄🤥 Topics such as free trade and mass (low-skill) immigration are too complex and important to be left to social scientists. Anyone who aspires to epistemic rigor should study the record of "experts" on these issues, over timescales of decades. From the FT: ft.com/content/1b934a… Economists generally assume that a decline in available workers will mean stagnation and contraction and make the case for high levels of immigration on those grounds. Acemoglu and colleagues found the opposite: “In contrast to the prevailing wisdom, we find that lower birth rates so far have led to higher growth in GDP per worker across countries and higher wage growth across local labour markets in the US.” Their explanation? “The endogenous, labour-saving response of technology to the scarcity of younger workers.” Simply put, less available labour led to technological innovation and investment, leaving the economy intact and, by boosting productivity and wages, improving outcomes for workers.

Fair enough. My FAANG friends are also doing way better than me, and I've also felt some regret over that. And yet there are hundreds of thousands of ex-FAANG in their 30s and most often their income stays flat or declines when they leave. You may be observing the moment of highest divergence

> top 10% in those terms among people in your circles over the past decade? Looked at a reference class that's meaningful to me: - Dropped out - No info online - Unclear, perhaps I'm doing a bit better with my life, solid normie career path - Academia, I'm probably doing better? - JaneStreet, I'm clearly worse - In China, can't track - Went to MIT but then worked at a bakery or smth? - Probably more successful normal software engineering career - Perhaps more succesful normal software engineering career - Unclear from his internet presence - Rich VC, maybe 6x richer, but slower growth rat e? also a bit of a nepo baby, but played his hand well? - Working at AI company, probably more succesful? - Just finished a PhD, academia - Probably more successful software engineering career - Quieter life - Definitely more than $10M, probably more than >$50M, possibly more than >$100M. Donated a bunch though - Crypto millionnaire, might have gone down since then - Academic career, probably better life but idk - Goldman Sachs, Cambridge, probably more successful - Academic life - Definitely worse than me - Academic life - UKAISI, worse than me - Academic? Overall 6 academia of unclear valence, 9 doing better than me, 4 I'm doing better, 3 I can't track, 2 dropped out of life.

I was so beautiful as a kid, so earnest

@liminal_warmth People can exert influence over outcomes. Yes writing the best plan (or any plan for that matter) does not mean it will be adopted but constantly pushing in better directions does have a cumulative positive effect

I’m not sure you guys have been paying attention while you’ve been alive but it sure looks to me like no one is actually in control of anything It’s cute that anyone believes we could execute a plan at scale to influence whatever is gonna happen with AI but no one has this power

@NunoSempere Do you think forecasting is a bad method of understanding the world or merely that the sociopolitics of it are screwed? Or maybe that the binding constraint for making better choices is who makes the choices and not knowing what they are?

I got obsessed about forecasting because I wanted to understand the world, and again make better choices

@NunoSempere What has changed for you? Seeing your peers amass vast wealth and power? But I bet you're still what, top 10% in those terms among people in your circles over the past decade? Do you no longer feel like the future will be much better than the past?

I was so idealistic, even a few years after FTX, even in 2024, I was still hoping that the game was to do the most good we could, together

This is pass the torch of operational control of the security apparatus under the assumption that doing so is proven to be safe, humans remain in control of global policy and very much alive and still biological. If alignment was a solved problem would still want to have nukes controlled by a small group of humans?

From the director of Epoch AI, an organization explicitly affiliated with EA and funded by Open Phil: "Good parts of this plan: [...] Ambition to pass off the torch to AIs by the 2040s" The EAs are not our friends. They are every bit as anti-human as the outright accelerationists. Do not forget this.

@luke__emberson publications.kon.org/urc/v9/bailey.… nytimes.com/2009/01/08/bus… @akhivae/the-amish-industrial-revolution-and-its-impact-on-future-population-growth-b6f936e17620" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@akhivae/the-a…

@pvllss Source for that? Very interesting.

Today I Learned that increasing land prices over the past few decades have caused some Amish communities to undergo an "industrial revolution": most families now earn income primarily via trades and small businesses rather than farming

@vince_d_boer It's still ChatControl 1.0 though so it's not mandatory and it does not cover E2EE

This is seriously fucked up 😮

@Ancapta That's a bit surprising. Although male-brained women tend to be pretty cool so maybe it's not that bad?

it's really funny how oozingly male-brained i am that half my followers and people that interact with me think i'm a cıs man 😕 i don't even know what i'm doing wrong

This might be a confusion that stems from reasoning about how people will reason in the future when we only have information from the present. Right now Plan A might be described as an improvement over the default because the default is that nobody has a well articulated positive plan. In 2030 there will probably be alternative positive plans and legitimate disagreements

brilliant rhetorical trick here. disagreement self-incriminating before anyone has disagreed; dissent is evidence of corrupt motive!

This post is about AGI

Wow this is great! I have imagined for a long time a dual regime in which at least some people can opt out of some of the "protection" of the state (at-will employment, no mandatory collective bargaining, forfeit your public pension/social security, etc). It would be interesting to see how the market prices such protection once it is possible to opt out

Earlier this year, we suggested that Germany could pass labor market reforms by making "workers above a certain income threshold face Danish labor rules". This morning, Merz announced that Germany is introducing at-will employment for anyone earning over €180,000.

Italia, Portugal y Grecia no tuvieron Plan de Estabilización, son culturalmente similares y han tenido una senda de crecimiento similar no? No es un poco raro que en España la única manera fuera una dictadura con ministros tecnócratas mientas que en países culturamente similares pero políticamente muy distintos en ese periodo se produjera la misma convergencia?

Un amigo, @lm_guirola, me pasa esta encuesta sobre la opinión de los españoles con respecto al sistema de seguridad social: cis.es/es/estudios/op… El 49,4% de los españoles cree que gastamos demasiado poco en pensiones y el 42,1% que gastamos lo necesario. Es decir, un 91,5% piensa que no hay que reducir el 60% de excesiva generosidad del sistema contributivo. Cualquier ley electoral, sea la que sea, va a generar partidos que respetan el deseo insensato e irresponsable de ese 91,5% de los españoles. Todos los que creen que el problema de España es la ley electoral o que las televisiones nos cuentan solo una parte de la verdad se hacen trampas al solitario. El problema de España es que llevamos décadas implementando las políticas que una mayoría abrumadora de los españoles quiere. Y cuando no sale bien, buscamos algo, en un ejercicio de infantilismo, a lo que echar la culpa (“¡Las listas cerradas!”, “¡la corrupción!”). España salió del desastre de la autarquía franquista gracias al Plan de Estabilización de 1959. Sin ese plan, hoy seríamos económicamente como Marruecos o Turquía. Si en 1959 hubiésemos tenido un referéndum sobre el Plan de Estabilización, con todas y cada una de las garantías democráticas, con partidos legalizados, etc., habría ganado el NO de manera abrumadora. Ni los dirigentes de la dictadura, fuera de los ministros económicos, querían el plan, que se tuvieron que tragar por una crisis de reservas y porque EE.UU. y el FMI nos dijeron que hasta aquí habíamos llegado. ¿Sirven para algo mejores instituciones? Sí. Fundamentalmente, para que al sistema político le resulte más fácil ignorar lo que quiere el 91,5% de los votantes.

@dieworkwear @user260611 Honestly I think it is, or at least I struggle to name a better one. What I meant is that every country can look like the temporarily embarrassed greatest country in all of human history in the eyes of its citizens

@pvllss @user260611 i personally don't think the US is the greatest country in the world or all of human history, so this is not a position for me to defend.

do people outside the US say their country is the best in the world or is it mostly an american thing? like, do swedes say "sweden is the best country in all of human history?"

@dieworkwear @user260611 ...wouldn't the best country in the world not lose a war they started against a much weaker power? You can believe the nation is the best but it is governed by corrupt incompetents or something. Or that it has other benefits that make up for the mediocre economy

@user260611 i say this with no disrespect, but how can someone say argentina is the best country in the world when it's had a prolonged monetary crisis? by definition, wouldn't the best country not be in that kind of crisis?

@Aella_Girl @bstract_thot Just have several events with different norms?

maaan something about this philosophically i disagree with so hard. like if a bunch of muslims came to vibecamp and were like 'we're uncomfortable with seeing your legs' and like. it's extremely trivial for me to wear a longer skirt, only 5% less enjoyment, i would still feel some strong sense that no i should absolutely not wear a longer skirt

as much as i personally love being naked, i agree. it's way more important that the majority of ppl feel baseline comfortable & safe than that i specifically get my extra 5% enjoyment from daytime skinny dipping

@RickPalaciosJr @patrissimo @NunoSempere see, Berkeley is almost fairly priced, no need to go to Paraguay

#Austin is now the only big housing market ‘fairly priced’ according to our under/overpriced index. Historically, housing markets rarely hit this threshold. You’d have to rewind the clock to the post-GFC period (2009-2012) to see ‘fairly priced’ across various housing markets.