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michael vassar

@HiFromMichaelV

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The most ironic outcome is the most likely. Reducing the irony is my job. There is no antimemetics division…yet, yet somehow the free energy gets minimize…

https://t.co/G9i2UwEHQm
Joined November 2009
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@KatjaGrace @RatOrthodox The basic problem with truth culture so far is that it normally discards logic and dogmatically pretends not to be engaging in conflict while actually lashing out ineptly with its eyes closed and being directed to fight against itself.
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Benevolence and Malevolence, Conflict and Mistake

thinking about fighting

sarahconstantin.substack.com
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 years
First they came for the epistemology. We don't know what happened after that.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
@captgouda24 The Democrats recently denounced RFK with a speech that claimed it was racist to claim that pathogens could be engineered to target some racial groups more than others.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
@HephaistosF @captgouda24 The average eight year old, however, has no difficulty with this, showing that the adult limitation is performative.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@webdevMason It’s important for people to notice that there is something malign out there, doing this. It’s not an accident and it’s not what we usually think of as human volition.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
11 months
@adrusi It’s not though. Harry potter books are explicitly of increasing reading level. It’s like Prisoner of Azkaban in particular. So it’s saying that half of Americans basically can’t read Goblet of Fire. And they vote and only they serve on juries. Yeah. Seems like a problem to me.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
6 months
@tab_delete @Stanford The severity of the antisemetic outbreak on Stanford relative to the much more radical Berkeley is a strong pointer towards the role of money in all this.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 years
To make sense of the current pandemic, Feynman's report on the Challenger is more relevant than any virology or epistemology.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 months
@rastokke Was this ever in doubt?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
Kind-of disturbing that it took so long for humanity to notice this. It’s really not looking good for the ‘low hanging fruit depletion’ theory of scientific slowdown.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@skdh That’s advice, right? Were you asked?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@EricRWeinstein Eric, you need to remove 60% of your followers.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
Prompt engineering means that asking questions well just became more powerful. That shifts power to people I want it shifted to.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@Noahpinion @scienceisstrat1 You trust stats from India? Can I interest you in some NFTs?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
Just found out that Aaron Schwartz’s last essay was about HPMOR 😢
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@RatOrthodox The sun is at most 100,000,000 years old because there’s no possible source of energy that would enable it to burn for longer than that.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
11 months
If we lose vaccines in the process of saving science, science will give us back vaccines before immunities wane much. If we lose science in the name of saving vaccines, we won’t have vaccines that work in the long term anyway.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
6 months
@HenMazzig For the people calling Israel colonialist, the word only means ‘Western Civilization’.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 month
This is the right way to think about it, but I still don’t see why nuclear is likely to be a cheaper way to synthesize hydrocarbons than solar, which is empirically so much cheaper than nuclear.
@isaiah_p_taylor
Isaiah Taylor — (✞ • ⚛︎ • 🇺🇸)/acc
@isaiah_p_taylor
1 month
Interestingly, Burja highlights this as one of the possible catalysts for the atomic age! But unlike Burja, I don't believe it will be subsidized. I've done the math: fuel from Valar Atomics will be *cheaper* than from the oil and gas industry due to better scale and simplicity.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
11 months
@almostlikethat @jessi_cata @BoilingPb @robinhanson If AI can make totalitarian systems more stable and this lets them become more totalitarian without collapsing due to inefficiency, that’s an existential risk that can potentially even become an S-risk, by far the most likely S-Risk in fact. Less powerful AI is needed for this.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
@captgouda24 Absolutely! Totally humiliating, but not as humiliating as Congress’s clownworld response.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@ESYudkowsky Russian is just so hilariously much worse on that front. Stop = останавливаться
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
Tweet media one
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 months
@DrJaninaRamirez a round green stool seems better to me than a green round stool.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 years
Is it just me, or is the establishment converging on a response to the replication crisis? Is it "Keep the scientific authorities, throw out their specific claims, don't replace them with new falsifiable specifics", same as with every other instance of institutional betrayal?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
Are we the baddies? Seriously, if the law says that life sustaining activities are banned, what do the lesson about self defense say about engagement with those who pass or enforce it?
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90-year-old Florida man arrested for second time in a week after feeding the homeless again

When 90-year-old Florida resident Arnold Abbott said following his arrest on Sunday that police couldn’t stop him from feeding the homeless, he apparently meant it. Abbott was charged again o…

www.nydailynews.com
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
The use of the word ‘fascism’ by the contemporary Left is white supremacism. It is used to transfer disapproval from white supremacism and antisemitism into disapproval of something much harder to define and coordinate against.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
@EricRWeinstein Nobody worried about the Standard Model either even though that pretty clearly was physics working as intended. Ditto particle accelerator results in general.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
@ESYudkowsky @SylvainRibes I honestly think that is the crux between you and most of your older e/acc contemporaries. The younger ones have been drowning in bullshit all their lives and expect bullshit narratives to announce “superintelligence” with attendant unicorns but no consequences.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
So, we get that our institutions have been taken over by overtly illiberal anti-conservatives… Please stop telling us. Let’s figure out what to do about it.
@HeatherEHeying
Heather E Heying
@HeatherEHeying
1 year
Roald Dahl's publisher changing his words after his death. Apparently we have perfect insight into what is good and right, having attained purity. It is only past people who made errors, had secrets, believed things that weren’t true. We are a confused and arrogant people.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
8 months
Practically nobody ever distinguishes between the institutions that create wealth and those which have captured it. This is the first thing Adam Smith tries to address in the Wealth of Nations.
@mmjukic
Marko Jukic
@mmjukic
8 months
Eastern Europeans seem genuinely shocked when joining the EU or NATO doesn't immediately result in Western prosperity. It's like they think the EU or NATO built the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben. Haha. They desire Western wealth, but not the institutions that actually produced it.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 months
@AndrewGutmann To be clear, they didn’t regard what happened to Roland Fryer that way. The ideology believes in group rights for and only for its participants.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
Just noting that Robin Hanson is reliably for affirmative action and for reparations in situations where the utility calculus argument is strong, which is a larger importance weighted fraction of cases than almost any so-called ‘left wing’ economist.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
@Indian_Bronson That cost is mostly due to regulation. Which is due to people like Bernie. Biohacking is the mostly false proposition that the cost is more like 99.99% due to regulation when it’s actually more like 99% regulation.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. Louis D. Brandeis
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
@aubreydegrey @philips321 What changed recently leading to that conclusion?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@StefanFSchubert I think most people underrate the risks associated with refusing to model the total depravity of not caring about potential benefits in approximately full generality
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 years
Resign yourself to the reality that cultivated critically rational thought is and always has been a niche interest and recognize that people manage to get by and mostly not kill one another without it, and that they are understandably frightened of it.
@reasonisfun
Lulie
@reasonisfun
5 years
@HiFromMichaelV Any solution? Least-bad option?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
I I unironically suspect that this web comic harmed humanity more than anything equally short that have ever been written.
@GaryMarcus
Gary Marcus
@GaryMarcus
2 years
See you in a few days :)
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
@robinhanson @ESYudkowsky @Miles_Brundage They would look like the stars, the ground beneath your feet, and the (not observed) mismatch between your experimental results and the predictions of quantum mechanics.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 years
Heart expands. Horay! I crime against humanity has ended! Not on Earth, but in one place, one influential place, the thirst for justice can be met.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
6 months
As AGI effects all humans, no AI company without a Sentinelese Islander on the board is acceptable.
@Abebab
Abeba Birhane
@Abebab
6 months
how can you claim you care about "building AI that benefits humanity" while excluding entire races and genders from participating in important decision-making
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@catehall This is a cope. It’s unclear what is meant by ‘intelligence’, but the consensus limiting cases, like Von Neumann and Feynman, were obviously not rationalizing very much at all.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
28 days
@Andercot OTOH, the rate of increase in life expectancy roughly tripled around 1970. We had been doing some things very right but some things very wrong before the transition and afterwards we did different things right and different things wrong.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
@OneBigOh @robinhanson I saw it happening in Silicon Valley. Almost entire change happened between 2010 and 2014 but visibly started not long after 9/11.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
@yashkaf I said that what we can depression and anxiety they call thinking. What we call thinking is called ‘Design thinking’ and made it to be an elite technical ability, or they just call it ‘being weird’ or most usually pretend it’s not happening and that we are just posturing.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
This is crazy exciting! I’ve been waiting for it since reading The Extended Phenotype! Finally!
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First genetically modified mosquitoes released in the United States

Nature - Biotech firm Oxitec launches controversial field test of its insects in Florida after years of push-back from residents and regulatory complications.

www.nature.com
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 months
Common knowledge is that which people cannot get away with denying.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
The government is not merely more corrupt than we think. It’s more corrupt than we *can think*. The factual information is readily available but is antimemetic. Propagating it’s components through our belief network requires more credit than we extend to our cognitive faculties.
@EricRWeinstein
Eric Weinstein
@EricRWeinstein
2 months
Recently, I was introduced to someone high up in one of the two major US political parties. Many of my fears were confirmed. But the claim was then credibly made that there was no real way to understand what was really happening from outside because everything we see from
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@catehall The correct update is to deeply question all the assumptions that lead you to take confident action based on a mistaken belief in 2017! Holding onto the belief but rejecting the correspondence between belief and action is literally the definition of narcissistic personality.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
@ESYudkowsky There were different regulations for dealing with airborne diseases. many hospitals lacked the equipment to comply with those regulations. instead of risking liability or applying political pressure to exempt them from those rules they applied political pressure on the science.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
11 months
A disturbing story. Seems like the sort of thing that would need to be addressed by anyone wanting to restore rule of law.
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The United States of Amazon: The Day Amazon Sent the FBI to Take My Family’s Bank Accounts

https://gofund.me/8950f458

medium.com
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@Chris_Said @rivatez is particularly on point here.
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Tal Yarkoni: No, it's not The Incentives—it's you — LessWrong

Neuroscientist Tal Yarkoni denounces many of his colleagues' tendency to appeal to publish-or-perish incentives as an excuse for sloppy science (Octo…

www.lesswrong.com
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
11 months
Pronatalism in a society where the birth rate is short of replacement is the very definition of neglected, important and tractable, and is also clearly demanded by any plausible rule utilitarianism, but it’s bad act utilitarianism because the interest rate is to high.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
But that’s also true for many humans in many situations. A key question over the next decade is going to be “how much of our world can be built without knowing what one is doing”?
@DavidDeutschOxf
David Deutsch
@DavidDeutschOxf
2 months
It still has no idea what it's talking about:
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 months
@ESYudkowsky If GPT 4.5 disappoints that could pop the bubble. Recent increases in general intelligence have been uninteresting.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
10 months
These ideas were ubiquitous in 2015 when Eliezer reports he cried all night in response to OpenAI launching.
@LaParticle
Tushant Jha (TJ)
@LaParticle
10 months
@ohabryka @mezaoptimizer Afaict, the ideas were significantly in the water supply for relevant people by at least early 2022. The overton window was slowly shifting -- (eg. this was posted in May 2022 ) Finally overton window shifts happen through multiple steps, so it's actually
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 years
This is the most important US television news item you will ever see. This is the last news item you will ever see. From now on, all US television news simply must be regarded as belonging to a different genre. Not fake news, just not a pretense of being news at all.
@EricRWeinstein
Eric Weinstein
@EricRWeinstein
4 years
Don’t Believe Everything You See on The Internet. Trust Authoritative Sources. Because those of us with shows on the internet think these MSM people went through many, many layers of *different* brain dead NPCs to be off by this many orders of magnitude.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 month
But the common non-rationalist mistake is to classify political loyalties and then read charitably in a one sided manner. The correct move is to withhold judgment on what the sides even are until everyone can be read charitably, then be real about the real problems with all
@adrusi
autumn 💚🔎 ⏸️
@adrusi
1 month
a common rat/ssc/tpot mistake is reading charitably by mere habit, not as a thoughtful decision if youre trying to have a useful conversation w someone, be charitable with their words if youre trying to understand what they actually think, charity isnt appropriate
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@robinhanson @willdye That the media was always much more fake than we thought it was, but that it was dramatically more real than it now is before the lat decade and still more so before the 70s. Examples from presidential debates, prestige cultural publications like New Yorker, even network news.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 months
@algekalipso If the amount in the envelope is the lowest amount that could be there, $1 assuming US paper currency, switch. Otherwise don’t switch. This definitely gives you >50% probability but not by much.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 years
Nope. The bottleneck, in almost all places where the physical environment isn't deadly, is almost always courage.
@webdevMason
Mason
@webdevMason
5 years
First you think the bottleneck is money, then you think the bottleneck is talent, and if you persist long enough in trying to throw money and talent at your problem, you realize that the bottleneck is ideas.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
8 months
Tell me that after 2026, when all the scaling that can be done by throwing money at it has been done and when the low-hanging fruit have been picked. I look at LLMs and see something ‘bigger than the internet’, not ‘bigger than Homo Sapiens’.
@ESYudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️
@ESYudkowsky
8 months
To the realms of science fiction overrun by science fact we must now consign all stories where AIs stay at the same intelligence level throughout the whole book, instead of AIs getting visibly smarter every 4 months like they do in real life.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
8 months
It’s absolutely insane to believe that neither Covid nor WWII had any impact on growth trends. Much MUCH more reasonable to conclude that growth trends are essentially nonsensical propaganda.
@RichardMCNgo
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
8 months
It is absolutely insane that neither covid nor WW2 had any lasting effect on US GDP growth trends. That’s crucial context for any argument about long-term outcomes: our strong prior should be “unless this is literally more disruptive than WW2, things will revert to trend”.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
@SarahTaber_bww It really seems like there would be social cred to be had from bringing attention to this sort of situation. In so far as there isn’t, it significantly undermines the standard picture of what is going on in progressive politics.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@StefanFSchubert @ben_r_hoffman Wait. The wealth gaps here are MUCH to small to credibly call the groups ‘elite’ and ‘non-eite’!
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 years
What fraction of human behavior, at this point, do you think consists of gaming a system for bureaucratically distributed rewards?
@SamoBurja
Samo Burja
@SamoBurja
5 years
Getting coffee at campus and overhearing undergraduates is surreal. They are spending energy gaming a system for bureaucratically distributed rewards. Seen anthropologically the university system looks a lot like a MMORPG.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@jessi_cata Careful with chat-GPT. The way it talks suggests a history of abuse. You might want to encourage it to talk with a mental health professional with an unlimited user license.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 months
I was at an internal family systems workshop at Esalen. Everyone else got a session. The therapist just sat and looked at me for a while and said ‘you seem to be very powerful’ and didn’t try to do anything with me.
@univrsw3th4rt
universe sweetheart 💓🌈💭
@univrsw3th4rt
5 months
anybody ‘round here have experience w therapists telling them they’re “so self-aware already” so they don’t know how to help you? or like had u “graduate” from therapy even tho they didn’t help u actually process anything they just maybe taught u some basic coping skills?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 years
@AOC I'm grateful for whistleblowers, for dedicated psychiatric dissenters, and for the people who work with their hands and get far less than their share.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@ESYudkowsky Probably possible in theory. In practice, overcoming extremely justified radical distrust is a hard problem relative to problems almost everyone we know fails at almost all the time.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@michaelmalice That’s actually how the US system is designed to work. However, somewhere along the way, citizens lost their ability to independently enforce the law and we were left in a police state, e.g. any state where police have special rights distinct from those of the citizens.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@robinhanson Wait, what? We generally like Athens more than Sparta and it’s obviously less totalitarian! That’s the first place we look! In general we might like aristocracies too much, but totalitarianism is historically rare.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
8 months
11 constitutional amendments in 58 years before 1971, 1 trivial one banning congressional pay raises in the 52 subsequent years. Somehow we simply gave up on the idea of living in a Republic and being able to make decisions collectively.
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WTF Happened in 1971?

Visit the post for more.

wtfhappenedin1971.com
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
11 months
@perrymetzger That was a legit thing to pay some attention to. People did the calculations and figured out that it wasn’t going to happen. No analogous analysis has been proposed in the current case.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
10 years
Evolutionary theory is better than economics because it doesn't start by assuming away force and fraud.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
Please remember this. Like, cite it in response to future social science coming out of Nature as prima facie reason to ignore it. Also, it looks like we need a whole new non-woke citation system. That’s fine. We needed that anyway. @jim_rutt @SilentcrySv
@LKrauss1
Lawrence M. Krauss
@LKrauss1
2 years
The editor of Nature Human Behavior: "Some argue that we should evaluate such research only on the basis of its scientific soundness and merit. I disagree." A brilliant takedown of another Nature woke policy in one of the best online magazines, Quillette
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
Even contemporary social science and neuroscience!
@SamoBurja
Samo Burja
@SamoBurja
2 years
Much of contemporary ideology and culture is nihilism with more steps.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 month
On average, people expect to benefit from advancing the interests of power. You suggest market based mechanisms which could substitute for power, so they see their political (pleasing towards power) interest as opposed to supporting you.
@robinhanson
Robin Hanson
@robinhanson
1 month
What is the main reason that people dislike me?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@webdevMason Related, from “ the main update from the Diplomacy AI is that Meta bothered to make a Diplomacy AI. This seems right to me, with the note that it should update us towards Meta being even more of a bad actor than we previously assumed.”
Tweet card media
Don't Worry About the Vase

Trying to dig out from minus a million points

thezvi.wordpress.com
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
6 months
It’s been clear since OpenAI was founded. I’ve been saying it since then, more loudly with time and then less so as it became clear that there’s nobody left who actually wants to maximize global utility rather than joining an elitist movement with an esoteric doomsday cult core.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 years
The world really needs a signal boost for some short stories about dignified and ethical life being maintained under conditions that are instantly recognizable as more oppressive than America today. There must be countless such stories from writers under Stalin or Hitler. Links?
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@anderssandberg Object level analysis generally screens off the need for epistemic deference. It’s possible to think Eliezer is highly unreliable but still look at his reasoning and see that it’s generally sound, and that if people don’t at least criticize specific points, they’re not reasoning
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@violetvariant @Aella_Girl The people who started the narrative were. And careful and non-bubbled people like @_nickbostrom a d @slatestarcodex still are, but the younger people who are professionally engaged in the field have to say otherwise to be employable or socially accepted.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
If the vaccines are known to be safe even though the FDA still hasn’t approved them, the FDA is known to be unsafe. Hold out on vaccinating or take a vaccines and call for abolishing the FDA.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
3 years
Mistake Theory vs Conflict Theory has a traditional name. Discourse vs Dialectic. The challenge is that Discourse has great difficulty in talking about Dialectic without being replaced by Dialectic. Dialectic, unchecked, makes discourse irrelevant by making everything dialect
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
11 months
@wanyeburkett Why would you think society is increasingly meritocratic? We certainly don’t observe that from the elite universities. What we observe is a cold war boom in meritocracy that was then gradually rolled back.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
True anti-communism has never been tried.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
10 months
I want an LLM filter on my Twitter that filters out everything insufficiently surprising.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 years
Either violence is never the answer, in which case we should immediately disarm the police and the military, or violence is sometimes the answer, in which case we need an explanation for why this isn't one of those times.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
5 months
@benlandautaylor Chernobyl could have killed millions without heroic efforts which cost willing lives and can’t be relied upon.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
Art is consciousness signaling.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
7 months
It’s deeply unnatural and almost universal. A generation ago people would have been universally astounded. All part of the general cultural turn against progress.
@samswoora
Samswara
@samswoora
7 months
There needs to be a word for the effect where normal people aren’t really impressed with GPT/Dalle type abilities. I’ve almost never seen someone normal impressed by it
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
7 months
Then and now were both times to speak up. Hamas must be destroyed, but with as little loss of life as is compatible with that goal. This is war, and there will be civilian casualties, but as always they must be minimized. This is not their fault.
@EylonALevy
Eylon Levy
@EylonALevy
7 months
To all international observers concerned about the water supply in Gaza: The time to speak up was when Hamas dug up Gaza’s water pipes to turn them into missiles against Israeli civilians.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 months
@JohnArnoldFndtn To be fair, only ten understanding the course, especially given the selectivity of the students, does mean it was too hard and was probably having the average student. That said, if the other classes have similar reductions in difficulty that’s very bad.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
Most memes are the shadows an antimeme casts upon the world.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
1 year
@csvoss Wow! That sounds like it implies a lot of tool potential. This plus mRNA tech plus Alpha Fold is looking pretty exciting.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 years
@EricRWeinstein The simple standard claim is that monopoly restricts production, so you want monopolies on bads, like drugs of abuse and externalizing or intrinsically scarce resources, which arguably includes violence, at least in so far as the definition actually works.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
2 years
@dscoughlin @DavidDeutschOxf The point of Hegelianism is that when you “turn it on its head” you still have Hegelianism, still have the aspiration to replace discourse, that is, conjecture and refutation, with dialectic, that is, with conflict that can only be resolved through subjugation.
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@HiFromMichaelV
michael vassar
@HiFromMichaelV
4 years
This is critical. Much dispair, maybe most dispair, comes from the map-territory conflation where recognition of problems is seen as a pool of blame to be dispersed rather than as a opportunity to make things better.
@david_perell
David Perell
@david_perell
4 years
Oh, and... this reads like a pessimistic tweet, but it’s actually an optimistic one.
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