“You don’t study for the spelling bee” is a deep and important aspect of American culture. I was at a baseball game discussing some young players with a buddy one time and he said to me offhandedly, “hard work is fine, but nothing beats talent.” Americans have this sort of sense that there’s something a little off about working really hard to get good at something that you’re not naturally good at. You’re never really going to be on the same level as the guy who has a natural talent. We have room in our hearts for scrappy little guys who work hard, but we are by default suspicious of grinders and strivers. If you were really meant to do it, then you’d be naturally good at it. You sign your kids up for little league, but you don’t take it too seriously unless they show remarkable early talent. Yes, this sounds sort of ridiculous if you take it too literally. No, nobody is saying that there’s any kind of practical test for this or that anybody should be excluded because we found out that they secretly studied too hard. But this is a part of American culture. And if you can’t understand it, then that just marks you out as foreign to that culture to an even greater degree.

OpenAI is downplaying this for PR reasons. If you’re a mathematician, you must feel like a nuclear bomb hit, and you’re at ground zero. Reasoning models are two years-old. In that time they went from incapable of basic arithmetic to solving problems humans couldn’t solve for decades. Math is only the beginning. AI will revolutionize the entirety of the human scientific endeavor. Most of us don’t appreciate what that means. What a time to be alive!

Consider these lines from Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, which sound like they could have come straight out of Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times: "When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for? – where to? – and what then? The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline [which is meant in relation to the fate of “Being”] and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism – nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable."

The notion that current AI models are sentient and can suffer, combined with the foolish idea that suffering can be mathematically quantified and weighted between humans and non-humans, could lead us down an incredibly dark and dystopian path. But before it gets to that point, it will rightfully be met with immense backlash from team humans.

I asked ChatGPT to create any image it wanted, with no constraints. This is what it made. What does your agent draw when you give it free choice?

Vague dating discourse thoughts: Many people say men need to get better at flirting so they can approach strangers, but also many men say they’ve been trying to approach strangers and they’re getting increasingly hostile. As one of the hostile strangers, I’d like to own up to this, I hate being approached by men I don’t know. It makes me freaked out and anxious. I would like to be chill and coolgirl about it, I understand these people are not a threat to me, but still I don’t like it. I don’t mind chit chatting with strangers but the second I sense someone wants something from me I get very guarded and slightly annoyed. Charming a strange woman, as a single man, is extremely hard mode. Not at all to say don’t do it, just that if it seems difficult that’s bc it is. Idk if it’s reasonable to imply this is a potential romantic path forward for the average sensitive young man.

This take misunderstands how and why the appreciation of art happens — it doesn’t matter how quote unquote “good” your personalized generative music feed might be — it won’t function because it won’t connect you to others.

I feel like Aella believes that the optimal amount of sexual assault is non-zero.

The chief economist at Apollo is warning that mass adoption of AI agents could trigger a bank run as they optimize user investments. Gary Gensler spent his last few years as SEC chair warning that the exact same problem will hit the markets: the pursuit of algorithmic perfection at scale destroys system stability. Personal-finance agents making simultaneous optimal decisions could potentially cause a massive flash crash. Agent acausal coordination, with no messages passed between them, will show up in a lot of places. Markets will get the big headlines, but huge numbers of clever advisors making very similar choices will impact all of human society. Capability gains make this worse, not better. The smarter the agents, the narrower the optimal path; and knowing that other agents see that exact same path lets them move together without talking to each other. Agents do not need to collude to act in unison. Thus, they break no human laws by doing so. Human laws were not written for this. They were not written for a lot of what is coming, and it is about to start happening very fast.

and when I do pursue it gets thrown in my face as desperation so what’s a girl to do

You're wrong to think Effective Altruism aka Doing Good Better is underpinned by one particular moral theory. Almost all moral theories, including Rawls stuff, believe that doing more good is better than less. Thus proponents of many theories end up being EA together.

in which Gemini shares its thoughts on Nate Soares, Aella and rationalist-adjacent sex in general