Welcome To The Melting Pot

What about the dopamine hit tho

RT @NotFoodshops: Shoutout to @stale2000 for making this absolute banger fan song for @jstlk_!

Why is it that almost no content creators want to directly use their most valuable asset, which is their community? For like, literally anything. My only theory is that they are lazy and it's cringe to try.

Effective Altruism in practice:

Well well well, its always the people you most expect! Stale2000 wins again!

We aren't fighting EA because they are weirdo narcissists but because they literally want to enact totalitarian world government (for your safety, ofc). You do not, under any circumstances, let these types of people have any power - that's how end up with the gulags.

@TaylorLorenz tagging because you have been delving into this wild world of SF tech bro cultism that is now somehow hitting national politics.

>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

Effective Altruism is the natural enemy of the left and right because the right doesn't believe in altruism and the left doesn't believe in effectiveness.

Effective Altruism is in fact a cult. They do weird sex stuff. They have a theory about how the world will end in their lifetimes. That doesn't make everything they say wrong, but when it comes to cults, what more could you want?

I've been told by EA types, repeatedly, that China was going to fall into line and restrict AI development because their politicians agreed with EA. However, it turns out that Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is not nearly as influential with the Chinese leadership as they seem to believe. I've also been told, repeatedly over the last several years, that the US government was certainly going to fall in line with the EA propaganda machine this time, after the latest manufactured PR stunt, after the latest "crisis", and it keeps not happening. Why, only this last weekend a certain person from one of the big companies was claiming not to be gloating that open source AI was inevitably going to get banned, that he was simply stating the facts, except, well, it looks like he got ahead of himself. I'm going to simply state the facts as I see them. The war against the Doomers is not won and will not be won for many years to come; this is a marathon, not a sprint. However, reports of their victory, in *any* such sudden surge operation that they conduct, are inevitably premature. The fact that they have been unable to gain a clear victory in spite of a vast and overwhelming financial advantage (yes, the financial advantage is on the side of the EAs) and in spite of the insane numbers of front organizations they run should say something. We will fight, we will keep fighting, and although it is not going to be easy, we have won so far, and we will continue to win. So, the next time they manufacture a crisis, say when they try to rig something up to make open source models look dangerous, or they pull out the stops to get another shill a surge of television interview time, or when they announce on their Discord channels a new name for what they want this week now that "pause" and "pacing" have failed and start repeating it suddenly on social media, you will know that what you need to do is fight back, and not just roll over. After all, they want you to roll over, because that's the easiest way for them to win. Refuse to cooperate. Refuse to be psyoped into believing they've already won.

It really is that simple

Goal of Anthropic and OpenAI doomers is to force legislation making it illegal to use open-source models on the grounds they are dangerous, forcing everyone to use only theirs. That is why doomers are coming from inside companies making the models. It is not a contradiction.

The biggest lie in this fandom is mistaking Hermione’s high GPA for actual genius. Actual magical prodigies invent things. Snape was creating original spells and dark curses in his textbook margins at sixteen. The Marauders built an untraceable live-tracking map as teenagers. Fred and George engineered commercial-grade defensive cloaks in their dorm room. Hermione never invented a single charm, potion, or counter-curse in seven entire years. Her meltdown over the Half-Blood Prince told on her so bad. She spent an entire school year whining and calling Harry a cheat simply because an anonymous student figured out that crushing a bean worked better than cutting it. She literally could not cope with someone improving on an official syllabus. Toss in her refusing to believe the Deathly Hallows were real because they weren't in an approved library book, meanwhile Harry is standing right next to her under one of them. She’s not a visionary, she’s just good at doing homework.

I believe destiny is already banned off of twitch and is demonetized on YouTube. So it seems like he's suffered pretty significant consequences to the threats he's made. Which isn't a defense of you, BTW. It merely means that you deserve it as well.

The "ex-OpenAI" safety grifters are on a whole another level. So many people who did nothing of substance for years now launder their former affiliation to sound like technical experts to spread propaganda and disinfo. Beware.