Quinn Barry

Historically 2/3rds of the economy has gone to labor. Seems like a highly leveraged bet on biological neural networks. Is that sustainable? What happens when the bubble pops?

@judgeglock the 'good war' is afghanistan?

I think many people have still not fully assimilated that we effectively won the "bad war" that everybody came to oppose and that we lost the "good war" that everybody agreed on.

brilliant piece

@lfschiavo the constitution walked so Lil B could run

@quinnmbarry Better than BasedGod?

1. Artificial intelligence 2. The Internet 3. Bell Labs 4. Wikipedia 5. California 6. Textual literalism 7. Star Trek 8. Corporate personhood 9. Datacenters 10. The ADA 11. Private arbitration 12. Thomas Pynchon 13. Lil B

@poastmilque @mattparlmer banger

sigmund freud be like so the hope is born that by influencing these impulses one may escape some measure of suffering. this type of defence against pain no longer relates to the sensory apparatus; it seeks to control the internal sources of our needs themselves. an extreme form of it consists in annihilation of the instincts, as taught by the wisdom of the East and practised by the Yogi

Meditation is just disassociating with better branding

i think you are correctly highlighting time horizons as the the issue. there's some new center-left orgs (WelcomeFest, Searchlight) but they're focused on 2026 senate races and the 2028 primary. you want an institution with a 20 yr time horizon here (complicated by AI timelines). something like the federalist society but for moderate dems, focused instead on elected office candidates vs judges.

It seems plausible, with the latter as a major disincentive for the latter. Still, isn't there enough money in Dem-aligned super-PAC coffers -- and ultimately DCCC/DNC accounts -- to be allocated toward these campaigns? That still requires elite institutional leadership and coordination, to be fair. I guess it also depends on what time horizon your strategy operates on: if your primary objective is seeding Dems into State executive offices or legislative institutions in the next 5 years to lay the groundwork for Dem dominance in the next 10, then those races are cheaper but maybe there's less national money?

Are there centrist Democratic political organizations that are actively trying to identify prospective Jared Goldens in key purple/light red states (e.g., Michigan, Georgia, Iowa, Wisconsin)? It seems plausible that $20-30 million could fund headhunting, career transition, and political uplift of novice mid-career political candidates. One would want to prioritize ambitious lawyers, mayors, C-suite executives, church leaders, professors, etc., who are: - native to a given state; - reasonably attractive; - are gregarious and capable public speakers; - are under 45; and - have ideological priors/policy preferences that are closer to the electorate's median. If the Democratic party persuades these people to run for various state and national offices, it could eventually make itself more competitive in these states and head off risks associated with anti-social outsider candidates (e.g., Platner, Fetterman) playing fake-centrist to control light blue seats. It seems like the party needs a Run for Something optimized for making itself competitive in Missouri: the DCCC, EMILY's List, and VoteVets don't really do this today.

@GuiveAssadi @Benthamsbulldog i feel like its significantly better for EA policy goals to have Dems in power than a marginally better Dem in a back-bench congressional seat its possible EAs had other goals here, but I don't think they were acting rationally

@quinnmbarry @Benthamsbulldog It might help dems more but they aren’t trying to help dems generically, they’re trying to buy influence for their specific religious-political movement

The view that I had, along with a lot of other EAs (and still have, even if he's sometimes snarky about us on Twitter) was that Lasher was unusually good on AI. It was just that: 1. Bores was even more unusually good on AI. He seemed to be the single politician most on the ball with respect to the issue. 2. Given massive LTF funding, the election had important precedent-setting effects for AI. 3. Bores might have a long and fruitful political career ahead of him. He might run for higher office one day. Lasher is less likely to do that. For this reason, while Lasher is a very unusually good politician--the kind of person I'd have supported in basically any other election--it made sense to strongly support Bores.

@GuiveAssadi @Benthamsbulldog hillary raised 2x trump in '16, becerra used steyer's spending in ca gov race against him. similar John Brown vs. Coakley in '09. your dollar goes further in IA, ME, NE, etc where Dems need to win senate races than NYC (senate control matters for AI policy unlike NY-12 primary)

@quinnmbarry @Benthamsbulldog What is the evidence that the returns to buying influence for a political movement are concave in the relevant range? I’m not convinced of that.

@webmasterdave @danfaggella interesting - thank you! I appreciate your honesty in discussing limits of language / appealing to moral intuitions

Fair question. :-) IF value can be naturalized - and ethics is not the equivalent of supporting your favourite football team - then the obvious route, and perhaps the only route, to naturalisation is classical utilitarianism. The disvalue of agonised despair is self-intimating: a normative aspect is built into the very nature of the ghastly experience. But so too is the value of sublime bliss. Pleasure has a built in normative aspect too. Adopting the God’s-eye-view of modern science dictates not “just” ending suffering, but also cosmologically maximising bliss. And that’s the Hedonistic Imperative in a nutshell, though I focus more on genetically creating intelligent, information-sensitive gradients of superhuman bliss rather than engineering a utilitronium shockwave. In HI, I argued that (dis)value in a distinctively moral sense attaches only to minimising suffering. Maximising bliss is instrumentally valuable, but not obligatory in any moral sense. But I worry that this might be a mere stipulative definition on the use of language - no more than an empty verbalism. Perhaps perfect symmetry is the correct theory of (dis)value after all - straight Benthamite utilitarianism. However, some of the implications of CU are beyond horrific. I’m not just thinking of well-known fables like “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. How much pleasure is enough morally to outweigh the abuse of child? My example of a rebuttal to CU is a genie who offers me a super-exponential growth in my pleasure in exchange for an exponential growth in your suffering. Am I really morally obliged to accept the genie’s offer, as CU dictates? Intuitively, this offer strikes me as morally _obscene_, though if I tasted super-exponential bliss, I’d presumably find it warranted (and yes, I’m aware of the intellectual lameness of appealing to moral intuitions, but even so…) In practice, I don’t spend much time defending strict NU. Global hedonic uplift by hedonic recalibration potentially improves everyone’s default quality of life while dodging the ultimate metaphysics of value. All football supporters worldwide can enjoy _empirically_ (super)valuable lives while leaving the question of which team is really best entirely open.

Update: philosopher David Pearce is recording a Worthy Successor episode this weekend he's best known for focusing on ending suffering in nature and replacing pain with "gradients of bliss." we're gunna get VERY cosmic in this episode I'm sure of it :) what should I ask David?

most people despise writing. this will age well

@imtirthpatell @HughLangley can't he just move to CA?

@quinnmbarry @HughLangley London

Some new reporting in here from me: John Jumper has to serve a year of garden leave before he can start at Anthropic. That’s a long time in the AI world!!!!

@danfaggella definitely. it would be beneficial to hear the steel man of NU. e.g., in the linked article, reason #1 (pain matters more than pleasure) doesn't really defend NU as long as pleasure has *some* value.

@quinnmbarry yeah we'll definitely be going there I disagree staunchly with NU, though I can clearly see where its coming from danfaggella.com/nu But I'm sure David's responses will be rather nuanced / it'll be interesting to see how he approaches WS ideas from an NU lens

@theojaffee @elleweavr29 thank you for monitoring this situation

@elleweavr29 Worst most obvious bait of all time

@Curranjans @AaronBergman18 you should write the post with @AaronBergman18 !

@quinnmbarry @AaronBergman18 Might be the biggest problem in medicine. Many of the worst diseases have incredibly effective treatments limited only by chronic use. Yet highly effective means of treating tolerance exist, several with phase 3 evidence. We’re developing drugs based on some of these mechanisms.

If I was an equitied Ant(hropic employee) I’d at least seriously look into somehow funding anti-tolerance (to drugs) interventions

@AaronBergman18 cc @Curranjans

“Merely” decreasing tolerance by 15% or whatever might not result in a *visibly* very different world, but just rather billions of people living substantially better lives