ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics. @ElissaSlotkin

All of them 👀

You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor, He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure, Must have made foes. If you have none, Small is the work that you have done. You've hit no traitor on the hip, You've dashed no cup from perjured lip, You've never set the wrong to right. You've been a coward in the fight. "No Enemies" by Charles Mackay

RT @XudongWu: @MarcosV49553574 @kumadanko_001 共产党概念下的左派和现在这些欧美左翼根本不是一个东西了。共产党讲的是无产者团结，工农团结，世界革命，现在欧美哪里还有旧时代定义下的工农。现在的欧美左翼就是LGBT女权移民的混合体，本质都…

Elle Cordova simply does not miss.

And imagine their disappointment as they slept in the cottage they built with their own two hands. “this is OK, I guess,” they would say to themselves, “but is it really much of an accomplishment? After all, there was only one other local buyer for this farm plot. I barely had to compete with anybody to own it. And, yes, my son Industry has done fairly well in his school…which alas contains precisely zero international math Olympians. Sure, he will graduate and do just fine in business — he will marry and have many children of his own and enjoy a safe and comfortable life — but the whole time he will know that he did so the easy way — surrounded only by his own countrymen, average as they are by world standards.

Draco Malfoy

US-China joint statement after the Trump-Xi visit. Quite interesting that Beijing agreed to the following wording about the Strait of Hormuz. Full statement here: fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyxw/202…

Bring back insane asylums, workhouses, and vagrancy laws. There's nothing kind or compassionate about letting mentally-ill drug addicts roam the streets like 28 Days Later. And it makes for a terrible city experience for everyone else too.

“Our system of government is built to service the ultra wealthy!” 70% of our budget is giving poor people successful people’s money.

Reminder: US schools serving low-income and non-white communities get more money per pupil not less and have for a long time

Am sure that US taxpayers are happy that Yemen is the largest recipient of free US wheat, which even the furiously anti-American Houthis consent to eat . Narcotic qat requires 40% of the country's agricultural water supply, making free wheat essential

Doomers: No, we're not making a global surveillance state lol. We're just banning big training clusters. Me: Ok, so now all the money goes into efficiency. What happens when smaller models become risky? Doomers: Unfortunately, we'll have to ban those too. Me: Ok, but our brains run on 20W. So what happens when someone finds a way to train and run risky AI models on consumer hardware? Doomers: Ofc by then we’d already have a global surveillance state.

These are leading figures in Effective Altruism saying that putting criminals in prison is a moral horror. If we're going to protect ourselves from criminals, then they will have to suffer harm. Our self-protection is the priority. The instincts of EA here are way off.

When ActBlue's own legal counsel Zain Ahmad tried to report this, IT deleted his messages in real time. This one says "Please stop deleting my requests. You are violating the laws and policies of our company." Deleted 5 seconds later.

A paciente tem uma raba gigante. O raio-X deixa bem clara a silhueta dos glúteos bem volumosos na região pélvica.

>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me