world destroyar

We are machine-makers. When we have a problem, we make a machine to solve it. When we have many adjacent problems, we make a machine that makes the machine that solves each. And so on. There is nothing more to life.

It should also decrease the effectiveness of propaganda as opium and increase it as self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm not sure. Outlawing assassination markets should increase collateral damage. Unsure whether it would skew violence towards lower or higher profile targets.

Prediction markets will shift power over the future to those who are good at cheaply creating conditions for "unlikely" events to happen. Other participants will react by increasing the (implied) entropy of the joint distribution over all outcomes. Exchanges will invent better and better representations of the state of the world that isolate risks in such a way that new kinds of business will become profitable.

Doesn't your model say that anti-error-correcting orientations are always K-selected? Isn't this a single axis? Also, to clarify, do you think aristocrats are constrained by carrying capacity because they are unwilling (though not unable) to mate with each other unless they own a large enough slice of a fixed pie? They aren't even calculating the energetic cost of raising a child and whether their slice can generate enough Joules to cover it. So they are literally a different species with an entirely different definition of K from r-selected people's K.

@robinhanson High and low is the wrong framework. One needs one axis for r-selected and k-selected, and another for entropy reducing and entropy increasing.

Median estimates: 3.7% of human behavior is explained by the highest possible motives, 11% explained by the lowest. I don't disagree.

deeply revealing exchange here illustrating what the "gervais principle" calls posturetalk and what happens when the general momentarily loses his focus and forgets that he needs to respond back to his clueless interlocutor with the appropriate babytalk ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the…

By volition I mean a particular aspect of nature + nurture that humans may have or (pretend) not (to) have. It's not just a modeling convenience because you can observe its effects. Likewise, chemistry is derivable from physics but you can't meaningfully avoid using it to predict (or even express) 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O as a general feature of reality beyond a singular event involving the orbitals of these specific atoms at this specific time.

@worlddestroyar But it does feel like it might be doing work I'm not appreciating.

Neither disposition/nature, nor circumstance/nurture, but a secret third thing (volition/obsession). Conversely, neither conflict, nor mistake, but a secret third thing (trauma/compulsion/addiction).

A society where it's normal for women to wear high heels is already dead but a society that prohibits it is also already dead. Perhaps there has never been a living society.

It's not enough to say true things. You must also say them in the same language.

The "universal prior" is that we are organisms trying to survive. We still haven't managed to agree on the details (we are evolving mostly by limiting each other's reproduction).

Demanding structural elucidations, uncovering eternal laws, leaving prediction and action to other people (that's just plugging numbers into my formula).

@matthew_pines @getjonwithit @alexwg Gorard, please don't

@getjonwithit @alexwg Would love to chat Jonathan (DMs open). Been a fan of your work for a while! (I even threw your papers with Xerxes up on the screen during a team meeting to rant about infinity groupoids...)

At Physical Superintelligence PBC ("PSI"), the startup I cofounded with @alexwg, we like shipping, not hyping. So here’s the world's first agentic copilot built by physicists, for physicists. What started as an internal tool, we're now releasing open-source: Get Physics Done.

@HiFromMichaelV @JerusalemDemsas Then welfare would solve this?

@JerusalemDemsas And all of that saturates with a given level of intelligence and determination. Both rise with intelligence and determination but earning potential rises more rapidly than the saturation point.

Thiel is a world historic villain. Hard to overstate his negative impact on humanity.

@HiFromMichaelV So, it will look as if there were consensus around $2 but actually there will be two fanatic camps at $1 and $3.

@HiFromMichaelV If 100% of an asset is held by those who uniformly believe that it's worth $1 and a new group comes in that believes $3, they'll trade until the order book is as tight around $2 (or a bit lower or higher depending on the borrowing fee) as it was around $1.

Market prices or dominant vibes on social media are no more consensuses than is a trenchline.

Heuristic: Unironically embody a comic book supervillain.

YES YES YES meduza.io/feature/2024/0…

@petewilz Could you elaborate?

@nabeelqu Modeling languages for state capacity!

Are there any concrete visions/narratives for technology over the next 20-30 years that people have found exciting or interesting? Feels like the last 20 years were obvious (computers in pockets, internet for all) and the next 20 years are a narrative vacuum (AI -> ?).