facebook

Article

facebook is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 59 times across 59 issues between March 04, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “I have a facebook friend with inside”; “he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook”; “her little Facebook page to promote a pro-Trump event”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, China, Scott.

Metadata

Category: Organizations
Mention count: 59
Issue count: 59
First seen: March 04, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Appears In

- Twitter (28 shared issues)
- China (22 shared issues)
- Scott (21 shared issues)
- Google (19 shared issues)
- Trump (17 shared issues)
- California (16 shared issues)
- Israel (16 shared issues)
- US (16 shared issues)
- France (15 shared issues)
- Germany (15 shared issues)
- India (15 shared issues)
- ACX (14 shared issues)

External Links

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On March Links

March 04, 2021 · Original source

I wish I could find it again, but I have a facebook friend with insider-type knowledge of how these public budgets are created, and they basically said that since money is fungible, universities can and do make the budgets look like anything they want at that level of abstraction. And, they claim, this is why the bigger budgets are always sort of milquetoast, across the board rises. As opposed to them being actually milquetoast across the board rises. My facebook friend didn't say what they thought the money was actually being allocated to, and since I can't cite my source this is more like a trailhead or invitation for someone to look more deeply.

Worth noting as well that NOAA has been adjusting the data from previous pre-satellite era hurricane seasons, often by as much as 20%; the adjustments might be entirely called for, but if so that indicates that the historical data being adjusted can't be trusted to within 20%, making long-term calibration of historical data to satellite data even more difficult. 8% per decade is a very small signal to try to extract from this noise.

Inline links: adjusting the data

More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship

March 25, 2021 · Original source

Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.

Links For April

April 12, 2021 · Original source

CNN confronted an old woman on the front lawn of her Florida home for the crime of having used her little Facebook page to promote a pro-Trump event they claimed was engineered by Russians. The same network threatened to expose the identity of another private citizen who created an anti-CNN meme unless he begged and promised not to do it again. HuffPost doxed the real-life name of an anonymous critic of Islam (whose spouted views I find repellent) and triggered a boycott of her family’s business.

Inline links: confronted, threatened to expose, boycott of her family’s business

Just last week, The Daily Beast decided to expose the identity of a private citizen at Spring Break in Miami and detail his marital and legal problems because a video of him went viral due to his being dressed as the Joker and uttering “COVID truther” phrases. The same outlet congratulated itself for unearthing and exposing the real name of an African-American Facebook user whose crime was posting videos mocking Nancy Pelosi.

Inline links: expose the identity, congratulated itself

14: I’ve written before about metabolic-set-point models of anorexia, and especially how a short period of deliberate starvation (for example, to lose weight) can lead to a longer period of involuntary low appetite. relative-energy on Tumblr writes about lab animal models of this process and how to cause anorexia in mice.

Inline links: lab animal models of this process

Your Book Review: Addiction By Design

May 14, 2021 · Original source

I’ve felt the attraction of this dark flow when I’m searching for something to escape from real life for just an hour or two. For me, it takes the form of scrolling through a social media feed. It could be Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, or YouTube. I don’t look for anything in particular. I just want the comfort of scrolling through endless meaningless content. Sometimes, I don’t even fully absorb the content. If you took my phone away from me and asked me to name five things I saw, I doubt I’d be able to answer. The content just flows through me while I escape into a zone where real life doesn’t matter.

But machine gambling is not like other kinds of gambling. The book overflows with metaphors straining to describe how machine gambling is the supercharged version of table games like poker, blackjack, and roulette. Machine gambling is deforestation ruining the rainforest of diverse table games. Machines are invasive kudzu outcompeting and killing the native table games. Machine gambling is the crack cocaine to table games’ cocaine.

Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars

May 18, 2021 · Original source

People like Stefan Molyneux and Alex Jones used to be huge on YouTube. Now they're both gone, as is Milo himself. Often, the most extreme figures serve as a kind of vanguard and give energy to a movement. If the far right gets its most extreme elements purged every once in a while, the natural process from which you go "edgy -> slightly less edgy -> mainstream -> lame" gets interrupted. If you look at the most shared posts on Facebook today, data that's collected on a daily basis, it's dominated by Ben Shapiro, who is pretty much the edgiest right wing person allowed a Facebook account. And Ben Shapiro can never be cool.

Links For August

August 18, 2021 · Original source

One strong criticism: this was a Facebook survey where people selected their education level. Only 2% of Americans have PhDs, so if another 2% of Americans are trolls who pretend to be PhDs on Facebook, that could swamp any real signal (see the third section here for more). But I’m tempted to accept this at face value because of this table (Table 3 in the document):

Inline links: here

Related: “the metacontextual hyperamericas to which we have never not owed our allegiance” 6: Researchers at Oxford and Aalto study where people think it’s appropriate for other people to touch them; at some point, this got transformed into terrible maps that serve as a parable against…overfitting, maybe?…I don’t even know…definitely a parable against something. “As a man, you are tentatively okay with your hands being touched by your mother, father, sister, or brother. You actually quite like your hands being touched by your uncle. You are implacably opposed to your hands being touched by your aunt.” And so on.

Inline links: “the metacontextual hyperamericas to which we have never not owed our allegiance”, transformed into terrible maps

8: H/T Stephan Guyenet: meta-meta-analysis finds that “there is scant scientific evidence that low-[glycaemic index] diets are superior to high-[glycaemic index] diets for weight loss and obesity prevention.”

Inline links: meta-meta-analysis finds that

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places

August 23, 2021 · Original source

VANCOUVER, BC (RSVP) Contact: Tom Ash, acxmeetup2021[at]philosofiles[dot]com, Facebook event Time: 2:30 PM, Sunday, September 26 Location: We'll be at the covered area of Trout Lake, near Nanaimo skytrain station. We'll have a sign saying 'ACX Meetup', or put one up pointing elsewhere if another group has claimed it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/wardrobe.admires.gourmet

Inline links: RSVP, Facebook event, https://w3w.co/wardrobe.admires.gourmet

OTTAWA, ON (RSVP) Contact: Tess, rationalottawa[at]gmail[dot]com; Facebook group; LessWrong group Time: 3:00 PM, Saturday, September 11 Location: Lansdowne Park, on the curved benches/bleachers near the tall geometric statue/fountain. We will have a prominent sign that says ACX. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/trees.library.along

Inline links: RSVP, Facebook group, LessWrong group, https://w3w.co/trees.library.along

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (RSVP) Contact: Sal, sallat[at]protonmail[dot]com, Facebook group Time: 3:30 PM, Saturday, September 4 Location: Humlegården, Karlavägen. We will meet near blue gazebo, I will have "ACX meetup" sign. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/glow.fracture.retire Notes: We have an existing group that has been organizing regular SSC meetups for a while. I only recently took over as organizer, but the group has existed for several years.

Inline links: RSVP, Facebook group, https://w3w.co/glow.fracture.retire

Highlights From The Comments On Missing School

August 26, 2021 · Original source

During the pandemic a lot of kids sat at home bored out of their minds, wasting away on their laptops, melting into twitter and facebook, eating bonbons, and getting fat. They missed badmouthing their teachers and playing jokes on their friends, having tween relationships, and playing sports. No chess club, robotics, jazz band, or lacrosse. Many parents saw their kids wasting away so they ponied up the big bucks for private schools that stayed open. One of my elementary-age daughters got into Finnish hobbyhorsing through school. The school does expose kids to things they would not see at home. None of this is measured on tests...

During the pandemic a lot of kids sat at home bored out of their minds, wasting away on their laptops, melting into twitter and Facebook, eating bonbons, and getting fat. They missed badmouthing their teachers and playing jokes on their friends, having tween relationships, and playing sports. No chess club, robotics, jazz band, or lacrosse. Many parents saw their kids wasting away so they ponied up the big bucks for private schools that stayed open. One of my elementary-age daughters got into Finnish hobbyhorsing through school. The school does expose kids to things they would not see at home. None of this is measured on tests.

This is a very important part of education, which naive people often overlook when they contemplate how much factual knowledge has evaporated from memory over time. Learning sets of facts brings with it some additional meta-factual knowledge, including about the existence and categorization of facts, which usually sticks around long after the facts have evaporated, and which allows the human mind to recover the knowledge much faster than someone who never learned the facts at all (especially in this era of search-at-your-fingertips).

Open Thread 187

August 29, 2021 · Original source

1: Thanks to everyone who came to the Berkeley meetup yesterday (~125 people!) and especially to the organizers (Mingyuan, Miranda, Ruby, Oli, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone). Here’s a Facebook group if you want to stay in touch about future Bay Area meetups. And I have some updates to conversations I had with people yesterday which I put in a comment below.

Inline links: a Facebook group, a comment

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

September 17, 2021 · Original source

At the same moment, hundreds of thousands of people were marching through the streets of Israel. The apparent trigger was a 25-year-old video editor named Daphni Leef who couldn't afford an apartment near her job. She started a Facebook page saying people should protest the cost of living, one thing led to another, and soon 300,000 people were marching through the streets of Israel and Leef was a national hero.

Gurri argues all of this was connected, and all of it was a sharp break from what came before. These movements were essentially leaderless. Some had charismatic spokespeople, like Daphni Leef in Israel or Tahrir-Square-Facebook-page-admin Wael Ghonim in Egypt, but these people were at best the trigger that caused a viral movement to coalesce out of nothing. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.

With the beginning of the Internet at the turn of the 21st century, bloggers and social media influencers short-circuited the established hierarchy. America's crimes and failures in Vietnam had percolated slowly and inconsistently through word of mouth, with most people content to believe whatever sanitized version the nightly news told them. But when America had crimes and failures in Iraq, leaked photos of torture in Abu Ghraib spread instantly across the Internet; there was no opportunity for elites in government and media to come to an agreement on how much of it they were going to share or what the narrative should be. The scientific equivalent (Gurri argues) was Climategate, where hackers leaked the emails of top climate scientists and everyone got to see exactly how the sausage got made and decide for themselves whether they trusted it or not. And then there was the 2008 market crash. For the first time, people were able to go on Facebook and the comment sections of their favorite blogs and talk about how everyone involved in finance and government was a crook who needed to be hung from a lamppost. The discussion had a momentum of its own, and people who wouldn't have dared think a heretical thought if they'd been listening to Walter Cronkite found themselves adding to the avalanche.

Highlights From The Comments On Orban

November 11, 2021 · Original source

Maybe the difference is that it feels potentially anti-Semitic? But the same week I wrote my post, Congress was interrogating the Facebook whistleblower about what’s basically an accusation that a manipulative Jewish billionaire is responsible for all the political opinions we dislike, in a way contradicted by all the evidence. I think billionaires with political influence, Jewish or not, seem to be unpopular everywhere.

Inline links: by all the evidence

Movie Review: Don't Look Up

January 04, 2022 · Original source

It depicts a monstrous world where the establishment is conspiring to keep the truth from you in every possible way. But it reserves its harshest barbs for anti-establishment wackos, who are constantly played for laughs. “THE COMET IS A MARXIST LIE!” says the guy on the Facebook stand-in. Maybe not literally, but at least he’s genre-savvy.

In conclusion, if there is a comet headed towards Earth, you should probably take some kind of action to deflect it, even if a tech company CEO says not to worry. I believe a metaphorical comet is headed towards Earth right now, and a literal tech company CEO is telling you not to worry, and he is wrong. Half of you will agree with me, half of you will say I’m wrong, and all the narratives and heuristics in the world won’t get us one step closer to consensus, let alone truth. Don’t Look Up does a good job conveying some of the emotions this induces, but doesn’t make enough sense to follow through on its promise.

Inline links: a metaphorical comet, a literal tech company CEO

ACX Grants ++: The First Half

February 03, 2022 · Original source

#1: A Movement To Fight Attention Hijacking It’s my assertion that we need to draw people’s attention to the methods marketers use to get us to buy stuff – to point out the techniques used in digital and physical environments. The trappings of an advanced economy have led us to create some persuasive methods of engagement. And while these have been used to subliminally guide us towards purchases, by drawing attention to them as a phenomenon, we can unlock new ways to use them for the greater good – for educational purposes, to encourage positive behaviours, for healthcare, mental wellbeing, and other challenges we face as part of what, Alvin and Heidi Toffler refer to as ‘the Third Wave’ of development. Won’t that denigrate the intent behind these techniques? Well… let’s be fair – advertisers have had it good for a long time. That said, does the fact we know what television commercials or online ads are trying to do, make us buy less stuff? Nope. While drawing attention certainly makes us more aware of the purpose of the medium used, it also leads us to greater transparency and an increased opportunity to mix media – for any purpose. Could the UI that made Facebook addictive be used to promote healthy eating? Could we re-engineer Gruen transfer for hospital appointments? Can Kansei design principles remove racial bias? I want to kickstart a movement to test these ideas out. A movement called *punktoj* Anyone game? Ping me: dave.barton@tbc.wtf

#40: Build A Better Social Network My name is Matt, I think there are a lot of downsides to centralized social media (read: Facebook) as the primary way that billions of people interact online. I’m building an open-source alternative called Haven, https://havenweb.org , on open standards with simplified self-hosting as a primary goal. This would enable better data ownership, privacy, and avoidance of censorship. I don’t need money (which is one of the reasons I think I’m a good person to work on this), but I would very much like to connect with anyone who is like-minded or wants to try out the software and provide feedback. [Email matt@havenweb.org]. Thank you!

#47: Build A Better Social Network (2) I want to create a social network website/app that improves politics by gathering and promoting good ideas and solutions. My site will be better than existing sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit because it will be an impartial nonprofit that incentivizes the display of good arguments from all sides instead of favoring shallow content to get more ad revenue. I am a professional web developer with the ability to create a fully functional website to test this idea. I plan to publish an early small-scale version of this website that focuses on a few key topics (like climate change, health care, AI risks) and collects a comprehensive list of excellent arguments from many perspectives. I'm looking for more support to help build this website. If you think you can help (with development, design, content writing, etc.), have questions or advice, or can provide funding, please email anon837261@gmail.com (My anonymous forwarding email to avoid spam. I can reply to inquiries with more personal details when necessary) I may also be interested in working together if there are other projects with similar goals.

The Passage Of Polymarket

February 07, 2022 · Original source

That vision was . . . maybe 25% achieved? It’s pretty great that I can write a blog like this instead of begging for my supper at a major media organization. But after a brief period of discombobulation, dictatorships found it easy to create their own walled-garden Internets through light-touch censorship; although there are ways around most of their tricks, ordinary people don’t bother with them (very poor news indeed!) And in practice most people ended up basing their Internet explorations at a few big businesses like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which became easy prey for censors and in some cases rush to self-censor even more zealously than governments demand. It’s not that the Internet can’t create a magical censorship-resistant infrastructure, it’s that it’s 5% easier to sell your soul to FAANG, and so many people take that option that the few people who don’t aren’t really a critical mass for escaping governments or building new communities.

Inline links: don’t bother with them

Easy to create your own subsidized markets “Real money” should be self-explanatory. Metaculus and Manifold are both very nice, but so far they’re limited to a small group of enthusiasts playing in their spare time. I value them both, but neither is the killer app that makes prediction markets as central to everyday life as stock markets or polls or whatever. “Easy to use” is kind of self-explanatory, but with some caveats. A big part of ease-of-use is liquidity; you can get that from a big user base or from clever deployment of automated market makers. A market that requires crypto knowledge is harder to use than one that doesn’t; one that’s inaccessible from the US is harder to use than one that isn’t. Also all the normal things like UI and search. “Easy to create your own markets” is where we’ve gotten stuck so far. Prediction markets are absolutely on top of questions about whether Donald Trump will win various elections. This is a solved problem. What I really wanted last year (and would have subsidized!) was a market about whether Alameda County, California, would permit indoor gatherings of 50 people on January 8th 2022 (ie would I be forced to cancel my wedding). But I also would have appreciated the ability to put a few questions to prediction markets before starting my psychiatry practice, or my grants program, or any of a dozen other things I did. A friend has gone further, and half-jokingly said they want to create conditional prediction markets about whether they’re compatible with various women in our friend group, to be paid out six months after the first date. Some of these applications are attempts to route around the principal-agent problem. Maybe I have some question about whether a certain grant would succeed, I’m not sure who to ask, and even if someone gives me a “Bob Smith, Grant Evaluator” business card, I don’t know if he’s any good. A prediction market takes all the pain out of searching for information - if I subsidize it enough, it’ll attract people with the relevant skill set who will solve my problem for me. Probably some of these ideas wouldn’t work, but probably other ideas I can’t even think of now would. I don’t know what the killer app for prediction markets will be. But we’re not going to find out unless people can create their own subsidized markets and play around. Polymarket took some baby steps towards this before the settlement: they had a Discord server where anyone could propose questions, and a lot of those questions became markets. But they still had to be general interest, not “let Alice’s five friends predict her dating life”. And there’s a big difference between “talk it over with company representatives on a Discord server” and “press a button”. Imagine if you could only tweet by emailing Jack Dorsey and convincing him that your comment was a good thing to have on Twitter. Even if Jack had good judgment and approved most requests, this would be a long way from the limbic system < — > Send Tweet loop that real Twitter users know and love. I asked some people in the business why they won’t do this. They said most people are bad at writing good resolution criteria. They don’t want their employees to get stuck resolving incredibly dumb questions about people’s dating lives, hunting down inaccessible or conflicting information, and making a bunch of people mad whichever way they decide. As far as I can tell, Manifold Markets solved that problem with their “proposer decides the resolution, caveat emptor” strategy. But Manifold is US-based and can’t use real money, so there’s still no way to subsidize a market effectively. (This is why I’m pessimistic about Kalshi. They could potentially do a lot of good in the “will Afghanistan collapse?” types of markets the Nobel laureates want, though even there I think some of their betting limits will give them trouble - $25,000 is good money, but not quite good enough to incentivize founding the prediction market equivalent of a Wall Street trading firm. But even if they solve this, I can’t imagine the regulators giving them permission to host “will this grant work out?” or “how will my dating life go?” markets; it’s just too weird, and the CFTC is too conservative. I don’t know, maybe their connections will come through and pull it off, but I don’t even know if they’re ambitious enough to want this, and I hate having to rely on one organization.) Right now my hopes are, in ascending order of likelihood: Manifold figures out some kind of weird crypto thing that isn’t real money from a legal perspective, but is real money from a “people really want it and will put a lot of effort into getting it” perspective.

Inline links: Metaculus, Manifold

I’m most optimistic about this last one, but it would be tough. You could try a version of Polymarket without the centralized organization gating the front end and providing liquidity. But then how would it make money? It probably wouldn’t - which might be fine, Metaculus is a non-profit and is still exceptionally well-run and stable. If someone did a good job of this I would try really hard to get it funded, and would expect to succeed.

So You Want To Run A Microgrants Program

February 09, 2022 · Original source

Here are some of mine: your new social network won’t kill Facebook. Your new knowledge database won’t kill Wikipedia. No one will ever use argument-mapping software. No matter how much funding your clever and beautiful project to enforce truth in media gets, the media can just keep being untruthful. The more requests for secrecy are in a proposal, the less likely it is to contain anything worth stealing. Subtract one point for each use of the words “blockchain”, “ML”, and “BIPOC”.

All those effective altruism conferences might not have given me infallible grant-making heuristics, but they did mean I knew a lot of grantmakers. I begged the institutional EA movement for help, and they lent me experts in global poverty, animal welfare, and the long-term future. I was able to draw on some other networks for experts in prediction markets and meta-science.

I understand that Molly Mielke is working on a project called Moth Minds that will take away the headache and make personal grants programs easier. So far her website is heavy on moth metaphors and light on details, but moth metaphors are also good, and I’m long-term excited about this.

Inline links: Moth Minds

Links For February

February 22, 2022 · Original source

36: An interesting recent spat between BMJ and Facebook: BMJ, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world) published some article about poor clinical research practices at a vaccine company. Some anti-vaxxers shared it on Facebook, and Facebook responded by adding their “missing context” tag to the BMJ article. This made the BMJ angry (well, this plus Facebook’s explanation which called the BMJ a “news blog”), so the editors wrote an Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg, saying “actually, we are one of the most powerful medical establishment institutions in the world, you can’t do this to us”. The fact checker who Facebook subcontracts their censorship decisions to, Lead Stories, then wrote a surprisingly thoughtful response saying: they thought the BMJ article lacked important context, that was all they told Facebook, and they stand by their decision even after learning that the BMJ is much more prestigious and important than they thought. I’m having trouble figuring out what emotions to have here: on the one hand I hate censorship, but on the other hand seeing the BMJ seething at their inability to pull rank is oddly satisfying. Also, this same thing apparently happened around the same time with Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration.

Inline links: Open Letter From The BMJ To Mark Zuckerberg, a surprisingly thoughtful, Instagram and the Cochrane Collaboration

14: You’ve probably heard statistics about how 50% of transgender youth attempt suicide before age 21. This paper tries to analyze the situation in more depth. The 50% number usually comes from surveys, but there’s some evidence people exaggerate on surveys, rounding up “I think about it a lot” to “I attempted”. The authors gather data on completed suicides among trans people, and find that they’re about 0.01%/year (which is about 5x the cisgender rate). If we suppose that people have about 5 years between becoming transgender and turning 21, then the 50% attempted suicide rate → 0.05% completed suicide rate implies that 1/1000th of the youth who report attempting suicide on surveys complete suicide - which sounds about right to me [but see this comment for a critique] 15: Gwern on the failures of 20th century eugenics. I’ve previously linked a piece about how, aside from the general moral failure, the 20th century eugenicists got lots of implementation details really wrong. Gwern adds to the picture: they had a purely Mendelian (as opposed to polygenic) model of intelligence, and felt that bad traits were probably caused by single recessive genes. This dichotomized the population in a way that contributed to the moral problems - if IQ is truly a continuum, then someone with 120 IQ might still wonder if they were “inferior” to someone with 130 IQ, in a way that made them feel some sympathy to someone with 80 IQ who was being pronounced “inferior” by the eugenicists of the time. But instead, they thought some people had the specific recessive “low intelligence” gene, those people could be “cleansed” from the population, and then everyone else would be fine! It also prevented them from considering improving the populace by encouraging intelligent people to breed more (as opposed to sterilizing unintelligent people) - this wouldn’t eliminate the recessive variants that were causing all the trouble! I’m confused how they could have believed this even with the limited knowledge of the time; this was long after Galton had proven that genius was genetic, and once you have genetic genius you know there’s more going on than Mendelian inheritance of subnormality. 16: Sexual selection bridges peaks in adaptive fitness landscapes 17: NFTorah: “The Torah [is] the original blockchain”. I think it’s funny that this exists, but it’s exactly what you would expect, and you don’t have to click on the link. 18: More IRB nightmares. 19: @ethanbdm When we piloted a public lottery to evaluate cash transfers in Liberia, the potential recipients arranged beforehand to insure one another. After the randomization and grant, the winners compensated the losers and unraveled the field experiment.","username":"cblatts","name":"Chris Blattman","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 18 19:01:29 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":77,"like_count":678,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> 20: DeepMind made a programming AI that was able to participate in a human coding competition and place around the middle. Nostalgebraist gives his thoughts: “impressed with the raw performance, not massively surprised, not sold that it implies anything big in particular”. A lot of people will be watching whether it can win programming competitions outright a year or two from now, though I bet their perspectives on how relevant this is for AI takeoff speeds will be pretty mixed. 21: Effective altruist organizations as Zendaya outfits. 22: Brain Efficiency: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. “Why should we care? Brain efficiency matters a great deal for AGI timelines and takeoff speeds, as AGI is implicitly/explicitly defined in terms of brain parity.” 23: I’m not going throw out my copy of The Case Against Education just yet - I haven’t checked this study but I bet there are lots of possible confounders. Still, this would be fun for somebody more interested to analyze in depth: 24: Best of Scott Sumner archives: There’s Only One Sensible Way To Measure Economic Inequality. “You cannot put the burden of a tax on someone unless you cut into his or her consumption. If … tax increases did not cause Gates and Buffett to tighten their belts, then they paid precisely 0% of that tax increase. Someone else paid, even if they wrote the check. If they invested less due to the tax, then workers might have received lower wages. If they gave less to charity then very poor Africans paid the tax.” 25: The latest in the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis: Harrison, Noble, and Jennions publish a meta-analysis failing to find evidence of greater male variability in the personality of non-human animals. Del Giudice and Gangestad have a rebuttal saying that they were underpowered to detect it even if it did exist, plus noting the ways that media coverage of this study was incredibly irresponsible even by its own terms. 26: Some recent critiques of Cook (2014) on racial violence vs. black patents, including Michael Wiebe challenging the violence measures and AnechoicMedia arguing that the black patent measure declines right when switching from one (more complete) dataset to another (less complete) one. Rebuttal by Brad DeLong here, he argues that Cook uses multiple methods and some of them don’t have this problem. Relevant since Cook is now being considered for the Federal Reserve; see eg this Wall Street Journal editorial against. 27: Claim: 31% of British people say they have seen or met Queen Elizabeth (this seems plausible to me, I would answer ‘yes’ to this because she visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car). 28: This couple-of-month-period in wokeness: Scientific American attacks late biologist EO Wilson, in a screed whose highlight is calling him problematic for describing ants as having “colonies”. This is part of a more general (and surprisingly fast) pivot at Scientific American from real science to culture warring; when even Eric Turkheimer thinks you’ve gotten too woke, you’ve gotten too woke.

43: Alwaysrinse on Judaism on genetic engineering:

Inline links: on Judaism on genetic engineering:

Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping

April 06, 2022 · Original source

But Xi’s main target has been the Internet. Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter were already blocked when he took power, but he added more search engines (including Bing and DuckDuckGo), more social media (Instagram, Reddit), foreign news (eg BBC, NYT, WaPo, the Economist), and even Wikipedia. This has been bad for business (China’s Internet “ranks ninety-first in the world” and is getting worse, and foreign businesses list difficulty using the Internet as one of their top reasons for not expanding into China more), but Xi thinks it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities

April 10, 2022 · Original source

BANGKOK, THAILAND Contact: Robert Hoglund (robert.d.hoglund@gmail.com) Date: April 30 Time: 1:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7P52PGVW+HQ Location: Open House at Central Embassy. Located at the top floor of the mall. Notes: Please RSVP so I know if there is interest.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/7P52PGVW+HQ, Open House at Central Embassy, Located

BRISTOL, UK Contact: Nick Lowry (thegreatnick@gmail.com) Date: April 23 Time: 7:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3VFC66+VG Location: Advance Retreat, 18a Backfields Ln, St Paul's, Bristol BS2 8QW Notes: Small venue, will mostly be Rats/EAs. The venue is a video game cafe but will be people in attendance who don't care for video games, and lots of of opportunities to socialise. Group info: Bristol Rationality Café is an offshoot of Bristol's very active EA community

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C3VFC66+VG, Bristol Rationality Café

KRAKÓW, POLAND Contact: Mateusz Bagiński (bagginsmatthew@gmail.com) Date: April 23 Time: 2:30 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2X3W2V+GG Location: Mleczarnia Cafe Notes: Facebook event here

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F2X3W2V+GG, here

Every Bay Area House Party

May 04, 2022 · Original source

“Like - have you heard of the Temple of Artemis? One of the Seven Wonders of the World. Burned down not by a Christian or a Muslim, but by a random Greek guy who wanted his name to be remembered by history, and figured that burning the most beautiful building in the world would ensure it. The Greeks responded by banning anyone from mentioning or recording his name, but the historian Theopompus wrote it down anyway, and it’s survived to the current day. No, I won’t tell it to you. Anyway, I was going to lead a consortium with the censors at Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, all the big name sites. We were finally going to complete the ancient Greeks’ work. We were going to memory-hole this guy’s name from the Internet. Even the people at Amazon were going to be on board - they would stop selling editions of the Theopompus book that gives his name. And then, finally, the burning of the Artemision would be properly avenged. We were this close! And then some dumb billionaire waltzes in and says ‘muh free speech’ and ruins everything!”

“When we were planning the Axis menu, I told John it would be fine, people had a sense of humor. Then it got us shut down, and I said I really had to eat some humble pie. That gave me an idea. We have all these food metaphors. Eat humble pie. Eat crow. Eat my hat. There’s so much alpha in food metaphors. Imagine - you’re an executive and you steer your company the wrong direction, nobody gets bonuses. As an apology, you take your employees out for dinner at our restaurant and order a crow sandwich. Now they can all see you literally eating crow.”

Why Do People Prefer My Old Blog's Layout To Substack's?

May 04, 2022 · Original source

Substack probably remembers the history of MySpace vs. Facebook. MySpace let people customize their page however they wanted, and most people made them into some sort of <blink>-tag-related monstrosity. Facebook gave everyone a consistent minimalist design that let people focus on the content, and took over the world. I’m not (exactly) questioning Substack’s decision not to make blog layout very customizable. But how come their standard non-customizable layout is (apparently) worse than my old layout? If they forced everyone into the standard non-customizable layout of 2015 SSC, would that be a straight utility gain?

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

May 24, 2022 · Original source

Bradley Zink is fed up. The terminally-delayed high speed railway from Los Angeles to San Francisco has been a boondoggle. As governor, his first act would be to cancel it, saving $40 billion. What would he do with the money? From his Facebook page:

Inline links: his Facebook page

(source) In his spare time, Zink is the author of books including Signs: You’re In San Diego (a book of photos of San Diego signs), a book of COVID-19 memes, and educational books for children.

Inline links: source, Signs: You’re In San Diego, book of COVID-19 memes, educational books for children

Bradley Zink (right) with a typical California voter (source) Jenny Rae Le Roux If you look up “Republican candidate” in the dictionary, you’ll see Jenny Rae Le Roux’s picture. She was born in Tennessee, got a job at Bain, founded a company, bought a ranch, had several beautiful children, and now wants to spread the gospel of pro-business pro-family conservatism to the world.

Inline links: source

Why Not Slow AI Progress?

August 08, 2022 · Original source

If all these places slowed down - either because their leadership saw the light, or because their employees grumbled and quit - that would hand the technological lead to the people just behind them - like Facebook and Salesforce - who care less about safety. So which would we prefer? OpenAI gets superintelligence in 2040? Or Facebook gets superintelligence in 2044?

So the real question is: which would we prefer? OpenAI gets superintelligence in 2040? Or Facebook gets superintelligence in 2044? Or China gets superintelligence in 2048?

Toby Ord (here standing in for the broader existential-risk-quantifying community) has estimated the risk of extinction-level asteroid impacts as 0.0001% per century, and the risk of extinction from building AI too fast as 10%. So as written, this argument isn’t very good. But you could revise it to be about metaphorical “asteroids” like superplagues or nuclear war. Altman has also expressed concern about AI causing inequality, for example if rich people use it to replace all labor and reap all the gains for themselves. OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit in a way that protected against that, so maybe he thought that made it preferable to DeepMind.

Inline links: has estimated

Meetups Everywhere 2022: Times & Places

August 26, 2022 · Original source

BAGHDAD, IRAQ Contact: MA, tofiahmed117[at]gmail[dot]com, Discord: WolframSigma#1532, Telegram Time: Friday, September 2, 11:00 AM Location: Grinders Coffeeshop Coordinates: 8H568FG6+73 Event link(s): LessWrong JERUSALEM, ISRAEL Contact: Zvi Schreiber, zvi[at]zvi[dot]net, WhatsApp +972 54 569 1100 Time: Wednesday, October 19, 6:00 PM Location: Malcha technology park garden Coordinates: 8G3QP5XP+PP Event link(s): LessWrong REHOVOT, ISRAEL Contact: David Manheim, David[at]alter[dot]org[dot]il Time: Sunday, September 11, 8:00 PM Location: Outside porch of Aroma Coffee, הרצל 218, רחובות Coordinates: 8G3PWR25+MP Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: Please RSVP on Facebook so we can give updates if needed TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Adam & inbar M, projectscentrum[at]gmail[dot]com, inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com, Whatsapp +46762791415 (Adam) Time: Sunday, September 4, 7:00 PM Location: Hamenia industrial loft at Beit Alfa 7 (רחוב בית אלפא 7). Look for a door with ACX sign. Two floors up. Coordinates: 8G4P3Q8Q+85 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We've just made a Facebook group and are planning to organize monthly meetings going forward Notes: For questions contact Adam on email or WhatsApp. Feel free to bring a snack or a bottle of white wine. AMMAN, JORDAN Contact: Daniel, dnledvs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 20, 6:30 PM Location: Rustic, Jabal al Weibdeh Coordinates: 8G3QXW49+WG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We're hoping to grow the group, so feel free to come even if you've only read a few posts! +1s are also welcome. CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA Contact: Mark Chimes, chimes[dot]mark[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp 0826568573 Time: Saturday, September 17, 11:00 AM Location: Truth Coffee Roasting, 36 Buitenkant St, Cape Town City Centre - we'll put a sign on the table Coordinates: 4FRW3CFF+3M Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We met up pre-Covid and pre-ACX as an SSC group. Now we're getting back in the swing of things. We eat lunch and chat about philosophy, politics, and sometimes SSC/ACX blog posts. Notes: We're planning on having another meetup on the 8th October if you can't make the first. DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA Contact: Arno, arnorohwedder[at]gmail[dot]com, +255763998637 Time: Thursday, September 29, 7:30 PM Location: The Deck, Masaki Coordinates: 6G5X776J+X6 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Seeing if there are any interested people in Dar, look forward to meeting, if you are coming please send me a whatsapp. DUBAI, UAE Contact: RS, xyxyxz[at]gmail[dot]com, +971552726281 (WhatsApp) Time: Friday, September 30, 7:30 PM Location: Starbucks, Garhoud Coordinates: 7HQQ68VR+94 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Met once before Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong, or message me on WhatsApp

Inline links: Telegram, 8H568FG6+73, LessWrong, 8G3QP5XP+PP, LessWrong, 8G3PWR25+MP, LessWrong, Facebook event, 8G4P3Q8Q+85, LessWrong, Facebook group, 8G3QXW49+WG, LessWrong, 4FRW3CFF+3M, LessWrong, 6G5X776J+X6, LessWrong, 7HQQ68VR+94, LessWrong

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jarred Filmer, jarred[dot]filmer[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: 52 McCaul Street Taringa (house) Coordinates: 5R4JFXXQ+P8 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We used to meet once a month years ago, but now just meet whenever there's a Meetups Everywhere :) Notes: Snacks will be provided but dinner will not be, would recommend eating before you come CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Andy Bachler, Andy[dot]Bachler[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Wednesday, August 31, 5:30 PM Location: Badger & Co pub at ANU. Central location, parking free after 5pm, might be loud, sorry! Coordinates: 4RPFP4FC+34 Event link(s): LessWrong, Eventbrite Notes: Parking area just to the north of the pub, over the river, is free after 5pm! GOLD COAST (SOUTH), AUSTRALIA Contact: Lerancan, lerancan[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 11, 2:00 PM Location: A picnic table, Wyberba Street Reserve, Tugun Coordinates: 5R3MVF5W+555 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Email me in case of bad weather/you can't find me/you can't make that time etc. MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA Contact: Ryan, xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 2, 6:00 PM Location: Beer Deluxe Federation Square Coordinates: 4RJ65XM9+3Q Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We're officially the Less Wrong Melbourne social meetup group, though our members include the broader rationalist community. We meet once a month for casual discussion (and beers for those so inclined). Please join our Facebook group to see the meeting invite; there you will see a WhatsApp group link - please join that group too to ensure timely updates in case of changes (Facebook notifications don't work reliably for this). Notes: Please RSVP to the meeting invite on the Facebook group so that I can make an appropriate booking. PERTH, AUSTRALIA Contact: Madge, madgech[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 2:00 PM Location: Russell Square, Northbridge, corner of Shenton and Aberdeen St. There will be some sort of ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: 4PWQ3V34+W6 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: I run one meetup per year, if someone else wants to take over please do Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Facebook SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA Contact: Eliot, Redeliot[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 6:00 PM Location: City of Sydney rsl, lvl 2 in the fishbowl Coordinates: 4RRH46F4+983 Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Group info: We meet monthly WOLLONGONG, AUSTRALIA Contact: Jason, jason[dot]bowkettblogs[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 12:00 PM Location: UOW Library Coordinates: 4RQGHVVH+69 Event link(s): LessWrong CHENGDU, CHINA Contact: Alex, acx[dot]chengdu[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 15, 7:00 PM Location: Chef Wenwu Hot & Spicy Jianghu Food (Yulin store)/文武大厨·热辣江湖菜(玉林店). I (a foreigner) will be wearing a green shirt. Coordinates: 8P26J3C5+462 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP at the above email address, I will give you my Wechat contact if you're interested in attending. Open to time/date/location changes, so let me know if the proposed event doesn't work for you! Can be a bilingual event; all welcome. 有双语交流的可能性。如果想来的话，请提前发给我个电子邮件。 HONG KONG Contact: Nathan, nathan[at]xevarion[dot]org Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: The Catalyst, 2 Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan. Big wooden door. Coordinates: 862M74PW+6XP Event link(s): LessWrong BANGALORE, INDIA Contact: Nihal, propwash[at]duck[dot]com, Discord: propwash#4648 Time: Sunday, September 18, 4:00 PM Location: Matteo Coffea, Church Street Coordinates: 7J4VXJF4+PR Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We're the longest active group in Asia — we've been meeting monthly for the last 4 years, discussing ACX posts, LW content with a diverse and friendly group of people. Check our website for more info. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong to help me be better prepared. HYDERABAD, INDIA Contact: Vatsal, vmehra[at]pm[dot]me, Whatsapp: +919944430856 (username: Vim) Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: The Weekend Cafe, Plot No D, 3, Vikrampuri Colony, beside vac's bakery, Vikrampuri Colony, Lane, Secunderabad, Telangana, 500015, India Coordinates: 7J9WFF4X+5P Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Our rationality meetup group has been around for about 3 months and we discuss articles and exercises (eg. CFAR handbook) that can help us improve epistemic and instrumental rationality. MUMBAI, INDIA Contact: PB, e2y94n1nv[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 9, 4:00 PM Location: Jamjar Diner, Versova Coordinates: 7JFJ4RM6+5W Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or via email so I can plan activities accordingly. NEW DELHI, INDIA Contact: Suryansh Tyagi, suryanshtyagiphone[at]gmail[dot]com, WhatsApp/phone +919997299972 Time: Sunday, September 11, 5:00 PM Location: Select CityWalk Mall, Saket. Where inside the mall depends on the number of people interested. Coordinates: 7JWVG6H9+8H Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please either send me an email or message me on WhatsApp if you want to attend. Any suggestions/changes are welcome. UDAIPUR, RAJASTHAN, INDIA Contact: Shailendra Paliwal, acx-meetup-2022[at]shailendra[dot]me Time: Saturday, September 10, 7:00 PM Location: We'll be at Doodh Talai near Pichola Lake and I'll be wearing a gray t-shirt carrying a sign ACX Meetup Coordinates: 7JPMHM9M+HG Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so that I can plan ahead UBUD, BALI, INDONESIA Contact: William Ubud, Napaproject[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, August 30, 6:00 PM Location: PARQ Ubud Coordinates: 6P3QG789+F7 Event link(s): LessWrong TOKYO, JAPAN Contact: Harold Godsoe, hgodsoe[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 8, 10:00 AM Location: Near Nakameguro station - RSVP for details Coordinates: 8Q7XJPV2+QFP Event link(s): LessWrong, Meetup.com Notes: ACX Tokyo meets monthly since Sept 2021. Our meetups are in English, so far. To join in, feel free to get in touch in any of the many ways to do so (email, Meetup.com). It's useful to be in contact before coming to an event, to help with that first leap of faith. KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA Contact: Yi-Yang, yi[dot]yang[dot]chua[at]gmail[dot]com, LessWrong profile Time: Saturday, September 17, 2:00 PM Location: I'll be in Lisette's Bangsar, which is a 5-minute walk from Bangsar LRT. I'll be wearing a pale green t-shirt and carrying an ACX sign. Coordinates: 6PM34MHH+VW Event link(s): LessWrong AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Jonathan De Wet, jonpdw[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 3, 6:30 PM Location: 32 Stanley Ave Milford, Auckland Coordinates: 4VMP6QH4+86 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Notes: It’s a dinner party! Please RSVP on FB so I know how much food to make DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Gavin, bisga673[at]student[dot]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz Time: Saturday, September 3, 3:00 PM Location: Picnic tables outside of St. David's lecture theatre on Otago University campus. I'll make a sign with ACX meetup. Coordinates: 4V6G4GP7+GM5 Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: There is no Dunedin group as far as I'm aware of, but I'd be keen to meet other likeminded people and organise group hangouts occasionally. WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W, benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 27, 5:30 PM Location: Rutherford House, Bunny Street, Wellington. Room MZ05, which is on the mezzanine floor Coordinates: 4VCPPQCH+FGC Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: We're running the event this time in partnership with Effective Altruism Wellington LAPU LAPU, CEBU, PHILIPPINES Contact: Dave, tokkolizard[at]tutanota[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 4, 2:00 PM Location: Starbucks in Mactan Newtown, there will be a sign with ACX MEETUP on it. Coordinates: 7Q268257+4F Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Please RSVP by mail so I know if I need to set up a bigger meeting place SINGAPORE Contact: Jonathan Ng, jonathan[dot]ng1[at]gmail[dot]com, Telegram @derpy Time: Tuesday, September 6, 6:30 PM Location: Tanjong Pagar MRT gantry, I'll be wearing the dark blue EA Global 2022 jumper Coordinates: 6PH57RGW+J8 Event link(s): LessWrong

CALGARY, AB Contact: David Piepgrass, qwertie256[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 2:00 PM Location: Marlborough Mall food court Coordinates: 9538324C+CH9 Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: It's small! EDMONTON, AB Contact: JS, ⁨ta1hynp09[at]relay[dot]firefox[dot]com Time: Thursday, October 13, 6:30 PM Location: Polar Park Brewing Company - we will have a sign. Coordinates: 9558GG82+GG Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: LessWrong VANCOUVER, BC Contact: Tom Ash and Dirk Haupt, events[at]philosofiles[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 10, 1:00 PM Location: Dude Chilling (aka Guelph) Park, near the intersection of Main, Broadway & Kingsway. We'll be just west of the garden - look for Tom in a neon yellow shirt. Coordinates: 84XR7W73+PG Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: For future events, join the following: For rationalism, this Facebook group, for effective altruism, this Facebook group for both, Meetup.com Notes: ?? We'll have a sushi lunch for everyone who comes (fish or vegan). This is not at all necessary, but posting on the Facebook event to say you will or won't want this will help estimate numbers. RSVPing there will help boost attendance too. VICTORIA, BC Contact: Sarah McManus, sarahmcmanusbc[at]gmail[dot]com, Twitter @SarahAMcManus Time: Friday, September 23, 7:00 PM Location: Snowy Village, 4071 Shelbourne St #2a, Victoria, BC V8N 5Y1 - It's a small cafe, I'll be at a table with an ACX MEETUP sign on it Coordinates: 84WRFMG9+H3 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event HALIFAX, NS Contact: Conor Barnes (ideopunk), conorbarnes93[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 25, 1:00 PM Location: Seven Bays Cafe (2017 Gottingen Street) Coordinates: 87PRMC29+9C Event link(s): LessWrong Notes: Join us at Seven Bayes KITCHENER-WATERLOO, ON Contact: Jenn, hi[at]jenn[dot]site Time: Sunday, September 25, 1:00 PM Location: Goudie's Lane, besides 8 Queen St N, Kitchener. I'll be wearing white boots and at one of the picnic tables if it's not raining, or further back in the parking area if it is. There will be some sort of ACX MEETUP sign. Coordinates: 86MXFG26+5CV Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: We have a new regular meetup group! We meet up every other Thursday. Events are posted on LessWrong, and we also have a website. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong if possible, but show up anyways if you weren't able to! Generally, past meetups everywhere events have attracted 8-15 people. OTTAWA, ON Contact: Tess Walsh, rationalottawa[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Friday, September 16, 6:00 PM Location: We are meeting at the Atelier d'innovation sociale, located at 95 Clegg St, K1S1C5. Specifically in the Lounge area, there will be numerous signs for ACX MEETUP where needed. Coordinates: 87Q6C84F+PM4 Event link(s): LessWrong, Facebook event Group info: We meet weekly on Friday evenings, and that allows us enough opportunity to try out a huge variety of different types of events — probably some that you, yes you, would enjoy! Here are our Facebook, LessWrong, and Discord (where the action really is) Notes: I always appreciate RSVP's in any form! It helps me set expectations/plan the best meetup I can! You can also contact me, Tess Walsh, with any questions whatsoever at rationalottawa@gmail.com TORONTO, ON Contact: Sean Aubin, seanaubin[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, September 18, 3:00 PM Location: Located at the picnic tables located in The Bentway, which is the sheltered area underneath the Gardiner Expressway. Coordinates: 87M2JHPR+X5W Event link(s): LessWrong Group info: Currently meeting monthly with ambitions to meet bi-monthly. Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many people to anticipate.

Janus' GPT Wrangling

September 19, 2022 · Original source

It’s done an excellent job imitating the style of the average Facebook comment on theology (this is not a compliment)

Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability

September 22, 2022 · Original source

I’m still not sure about this line of thought. How is this situation? Do we think Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t have founded Facebook, or Bill Gates Microsoft, if he could only get $1 billion? Can people really tell the difference between $10 billion and $100 billion? Has Jeff Bezos even spent $10 billion?

Also, I wonder how long the Friendster/MySpace example should stay valid for. If Facebook reigns unchallenged for the next millennium, will people still say “Yes, but once in elden days upon Earth-That-Was there was a site called MySpace which was on top for about two years and then Facebook beat it, so it’s not a natural monopoly! We could still get a replacement at any time!” I’m not claiming I am sure Facebook is a natural monopoly. But surely we should be updating our chance of this a little for each year that goes by without it being replaced. How much?

1: Lars Doucet (writes Progress and Poverty) writes:

Inline links: Progress and Poverty, writes

Universe-Hopping Through Substack

September 29, 2022 · Original source

“I was thinking at the time, that Mark Zuckerberg was never hot gluing anything at Facebook – so maybe this is not a good idea,” recalls Chesky.

I have now read quite a bit of this book introduction, and I’m still not sure if he means it in a “this is a cool metaphor for how music is subversive and transformative” way, or a “the Bardic Conspiracy fought the Illuminati in a Lemurian temple buried below Dealy Plaza” sort of way. I actually admire the sort of criticality it takes to keep me precisely balanced between these two interpretations. I will be nodding along, listening to him talk about how music is good at evoking strong emotions, thinking he definitely means the metaphor thing, and then he will hit me with paragraphs like:

The other part that struck me is that we’re blogging about profiles of sports reporters now. If Schefter had been an athlete, fine - navel-gazing about how athletes get their talent is exactly what I expect of sports journalism. But he is, in fact, a sports journalist, and we are, in fact, doing sports meta-journalism here. What if this becomes a trend? Will top sports journalists start appearing in commercials advertising office chairs? Will people watch ESPN hiring rounds with the same excitement as NFL draft picks? Will they make sports journalism fantasy leagues, drawing up artificial companies out of their favorite sports journalists and giving themselves points whenever that journalist’s articles get a lot of clicks?

October 18, 2022 · Original source

Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook co-founder and effective altruist

Inline links: Dustin Moskovitz

Sources: Manifold, CSPI, Metaculus, Polymarket, PredictIt, Insight, GJOpen The lowest forecaster is higher than the highest pollster! Taking 538 as an example, forecasters range from 5 pp higher (Manifold) to 17 pp higher (PredictIt). Tournaments and real-money markets tend to give higher numbers than play-money sites. I would go with 47% on this one, based on the convergence between GJO, CSPI, and Polymarket. CFTC vs. PredictIt (and everyone else), Part II The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is the US agency regulating prediction markets. In August, they told PredictIt (the biggest political prediction market) to shut down, effective in February. Now a motley group of stakeholders are suing the CFTC for a stay of execution. Plaintiffs include: 2 professors using the site as “a source of data for research”

Inline links: Manifold, CSPI, Metaculus, Polymarket, PredictIt, Insight, GJOpen, they told PredictIt

One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?” We can’t directly compare Samotsvety and Swift because they’re predicting over different time periods. But assuming that there’s more risk in the next six months than in the six months after that, I think Samotsvety is a little higher but they’re not embarrassingly far off. Metaculus is a bit more optimistic than either, believing there’s only a 4% chance of detonation in Ukraine in 2023 and a 7% chance of any use in the next ~year. Max Tegmark is going much higher than anyone else and says 16% chance of global nuclear war. Kalshi Applies For Election Markets Kalshi is a regulated and fully-legal prediction market with good lobbyists and a compliance team. This means the CFTC probably won’t randomly shut them down one day. But it also means they can only create new markets with CFTC permission. In July, Kalshi asked the CFTC for permission to make midterm election prediction markets - specifically, which party will win control of the House and Senate. The CFTC has said they will make a decision by October 28 (which doesn’t leave much time for predicting to happen before the November 8 election, but I guess it sets a precedent). September was the Request For Comment period, when the CFTC solicited comments from stakeholders about what they should do. Kalshi tried really hard to get lots of people to send in positive assessments - I know this because of how many people asked me “why is the CEO of Kalshi emailing me about this thing?” Their strategy seems to have worked; among the people who wrote to the CFTC in support were: A managing director at JP Morgan

Inline links: a 4% chance, a 7% chance, 16% chance, In July, they will make a decision by October 28, A managing director at JP Morgan

If The Media Reported On Other Things Like It Does Effective Altruism

November 25, 2022 · Original source

4. Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation. We need to make it harder for people to be nice to their children, so that the masses don’t keep falling for this ploy.

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency

December 08, 2022 · Original source

Recently I’ve seen this expand from sex work to erotic fiction to medical marijuana to expressing opinions dubbed “misinformation”. One weird supplement company I liked almost had to shut down, not because the government said anything they were selling was illegal, but because payment processors thought it was the kind of thing that someone wouldn’t like, and refused to take their money. I don’t think the CEO of Visa is personally opposed to weird supplements, I think it’s the same kind of soft government collusion that’s been revealed to be going on at Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else.

Inline links: erotic fiction, medical marijuana, expressing opinions dubbed “misinformation”, almost had to shut down

Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying

January 11, 2023 · Original source

Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right

Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse

February 02, 2023 · Original source

Sites could ask for proof of humanity. I don’t know how this will work in the future: drivers licenses can be faked, videos can be spoofed. Worst case scenario, I think megacorporations like Google and Facebook could offer this as a service - so-and-so has a GMail account or Facebook page and has gotten lots of normal-looking messages over many years.

Also, realistically the bots will all be hot women, and anyone who isn’t a hot woman will be safe and confirmed human. “But wouldn’t they use some bots who aren’t hot women, to trick people who have already learned this heuristic?” You might think so, but you might also think that the spam fake Facebook friend requests I get would try this, and they never do.

If you can resist responding to this message from someone in a bikini pic, you’re probably fine. 6: I Do Think This Might Decrease Serendipitous Friendship, Though One time a hot woman messaged me on Facebook saying she wanted to be my friend. I almost blocked her - obvious spam, right? - but she was able to say “. . . because I read your blog” before I hit the block button. I figured this was beyond a spambot’s ability, so we kept talking and had a good conversation. (obviously this story should end with “. . . and now we’re married”, but it’s not that good an anecdote and I met my wife in a much less dramatic way, sorry) If chatbots get good, I expect to block more people in those kinds of situations, even when they do say things like “I read your blog”. I expect to be more reluctant to open new conversations, start new friendships with people I only know through a name and profile picture, and debate people I don’t know in comments sections. This might not be a strong effect. This will be something people don’t like, and both normal human social organization instincts and social media corporate giants will try to find ways around it. But it might make the difference in some marginal cases, like the one above. 7: You Can Solve For The Equilibrium Source: XKCD (source: SMBC) How seriously should we take these comics? The worse chatbots are (compared to humans) as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the less we have to worry about. But the better chatbots are as friends, influencers, and debate partners, the more upside there could be. I don’t want to speculate on exactly how this would work: it gets too close to the original idea of the Singularity in the sense of “a point where crazy things are happening so fast it’s not worth trying to predict”. Conclusion And Predictions I’m nervous writing this, because I remember the halcyon days of the early 2000s, when we all assumed the Internet would be a force for reason and enlightenment. Surely if everyone were just allowed to debate everyone else, without intervening barriers of race or class or religion, the best arguments would rise to the top and we would enter a new utopia of universal agreement. The scale at which this project failed makes me reluctant to ever speculate again about anything regarding online discourse going well. Maybe in the 2030s, the idea that propagandabots would be either easily dispatched, or else model netizens writing good content, will seem just as naive as the early 2000s vision. And the chatbot propaganda apocalypse is a popular thing to believe in without any clear definition, and there will surely be some celebrated cases of chatbots causing mischief, so I’m setting myself up to fail here by the standards I mentioned in Nostradamus to Fukuyama. Still, I do want to go on record as doubting the strongest form of this thesis. As for predictions: If I ask ACXers in 2030 whether any of them have had a good friend for more than a month who turned out to (unknown to them) be a chatbot, or who they strongly suspect may have been a chatbot, fewer than 10% will say yes. I may resolve this by common sense if it’s obvious, or by ACX survey if it’s not: 95%

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Q1kS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0e7b175-7961-43fa-8077-d114c2f99bd0_740x265.png, XKCD, https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1024, Nostradamus to Fukuyama

February 14, 2023 · Original source

One solution is to piggyback off existing social media sites. There’s something called Twinder for Twitter which seems to do this correctly, though they haven’t made any posts since 2018 and I think they’re defunct. Also Facebook Dating, although it’s (indefensibly) not available on computers and has to be accessed by cell phone. But these aren’t real piggybacks; just because your crush has a Twitter account doesn’t mean they use Twinder. Facebook Dating makes the interesting decision to, if you register a crush on someone, send them a Facebook message saying that an anonymous person likes them and they should try getting Facebook Dating; I can’t decide whether this is a necessary evil, or if it violates the principle of not imposing emotional costs on people who don’t want them.

Inline links: Twinder, Facebook Dating

The rationalist community has many advantages here - it’s a well-bounded, closely connected group of people who are all interested in experimenting with weird social technology. Our version of the matching checkbox site, https://www.reciprocity.io/, has solved the onboarding problem; most rationalists have accounts, though you’ll need to be Facebook friends to see some of them.

Inline links: https://www.reciprocity.io/

In Zero To One, Peter Thiel talks about a chicken-and-egg problem for social startups. Many people would like to use a social network like Facebook to talk to their friends. But when Facebook first starts, none of your friends are on it, which means you won’t join it, which means your friends won’t join it, and so on. Any new social startup has to find a way to grow quickly at exactly the time when the site is least useful.

Inline links: Zero To One

OpenAI's "Planning For AGI And Beyond"

March 01, 2023 · Original source

DeepMind thought they were establishing a lead in 2008, but OpenAI has caught up to them. OpenAI thought they were establishing a lead the past two years, but a few months after they came out with GPT, at least Google, Facebook, and Anthropic had comparable large language models; a few months after they came out with DALL-E, random nobody startups came out with StableDiffusion and MidJourney. None of this research has established a commanding lead, it’s just moved everyone forward together and burned timelines for no reason.

Sam Altman posing with leading AI safety proponent Eliezer Yudkowsky. Also Grimes for some reason. Planning For AGI And Beyond (“AGI” = “artificial general intelligence”, ie human-level AI) is the latest volley in that campaign. It’s very good, in all the ways ExxonMobil’s hypothetical statement above was very good. If they’re trying to fool people, they’re doing a convincing job! Still, it doesn’t apologize for doing normal AI company stuff in the past, or plan to stop doing normal AI company stuff in the present. It just says that, at some indefinite point when they decide AI is a threat, they’re going to do everything right. This is more believable when OpenAI says it than when ExxonMobil does. There are real arguments for why an AI company might want to switch from moving fast and breaking things at time t to acting all responsible at time t + 1 . Let’s explore the arguments they make in the document, go over the reasons they’re obviously wrong, then look at the more complicated arguments they might be based off of. Why Doomers Think OpenAI Is Bad And Should Have Slowed Research A Long Time Ago OpenAI boosters might object: there’s a disanalogy between the global warming story above and AI capabilities research. Global warming is continuously bad: a temperature increase of 0.5 degrees C is bad, 1.0 degrees is worse, and 1.5 degrees is worse still. AI doesn’t become dangerous until some specific point. GPT-3 didn’t hurt anyone. GPT-4 probably won’t hurt anyone. So why not keep building fun chatbots like these for now, then start worrying later? Doomers counterargue that the fun chatbots burn timeline. That is, suppose you have some timeline for when AI becomes dangerous. For example, last year Metaculus thought human-like AI would arrive in 2040, and superintelligence around 2043. Recent AIs have tried lying to, blackmailing, threatening, and seducing users. AI companies freely admit they can’t really control their AIs, and it seems high-priority to solve that before we get superintelligence. If you think that’s 2043, the people who work on this question (“alignment researchers”) have twenty years to learn to control AI. Then OpenAI poured money into AI, did ground-breaking research, and advanced the state of the art. That meant that AI progress would speed up, and AI would reach the danger level faster. Now Metaculus expects superintelligence in 2031, not 2043 (although this seems kind of like an over-update), which gives alignment researchers eight years, not twenty. So the faster companies advance AI research - even by creating fun chatbots that aren’t dangerous themselves - the harder it is for alignment researchers to solve their part of the problem in time. This is why some AI doomers think of OpenAI as an Exxon-Mobil style villain, even though they’ve promised to change course before the danger period. Imagine an environmentalist group working on research and regulatory changes that would have solar power ready to go in 2045. Then ExxonMobil invents a new kind of super-oil that ensures that, nope, all major cities will be underwater by 2031 now. No matter how nice a statement they put out, you’d probably be pretty mad! Why OpenAI Thinks Their Research Is Good Now, But Might Be Bad Later OpenAI understands the argument against burning timeline. But they counterargue that having the AIs speeds up alignment research and all other forms of social adjustment to AI. If we want to prepare for superintelligence - whether solving the technical challenge of alignment, or solving the political challenges of unemployment, misinformation, etc - we can do this better when everything is happening gradually and we’ve got concrete AIs to think about: We believe we have to continuously learn and adapt by deploying less powerful versions of the technology in order to minimize “one shot to get it right” scenarios […] As we create successively more powerful systems, we want to deploy them and gain experience with operating them in the real world. We believe this is the best way to carefully steward AGI into existence—a gradual transition to a world with AGI is better than a sudden one. We expect powerful AI to make the rate of progress in the world much faster, and we think it’s better to adjust to this incrementally. A gradual transition gives people, policymakers, and institutions time to understand what’s happening, personally experience the benefits and downsides of these systems, adapt our economy, and to put regulation in place. It also allows for society and AI to co-evolve, and for people collectively to figure out what they want while the stakes are relatively low. You might notice that, as written, this argument doesn’t support full-speed-ahead AI research. If you really wanted this kind of gradual release that lets society adjust to less powerful AI, you would do something like this: Release AI #1

Inline links: Planning For AGI And Beyond, Metaculus, they can’t really control their AIs

Links For March 2023

March 10, 2023 · Original source

30: Facebook And Instagram Are Testing Selling You Bluechecks For $12 A Month. Musk’s two highest-profile Twitter changes - firing lots of people and selling bluechecks - seem to be going well and even getting adopted by other companies. I can see a case for everyone apologizing and agreeing Musk is doing a good job with Twitter in a year, although prediction markets haven’t shifted much since December.

Inline links: Facebook And Instagram Are Testing Selling You Bluechecks For $12 A Month, haven’t, shifted

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023

April 10, 2023 · Original source

CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Gavin Contact Info: bisga673[at]student[dot]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz Time: May 5th, 05:00 PM Location:University of Canterbury Rātā (Engineering) 119 Meeting Room reserved. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4V8JFHHM+CG Event Link:https://www.facebook.com/events/609894044396249/ Notes: I will have someone with a sign saying ACX inside Engineering core by the main entrance. Everyone is very welcome! You should come along!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4V8JFHHM+CG, https://www.facebook.com/events/609894044396249/

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, USA Contact: Skyler Contact Info: skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[dot]org Time: Saturday, May 06th, 01:00 PM Location: Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist event space at 2740 Telegraph Ave. Come in through the front gate on Telegraph. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VVP5R+X5 Notes: The Bay rationality community has a mailing list (https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong) a Discord server (https://discord.gg/Yqus2bFhww) and a Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/566160007909175) There are dinner meetups every Thursday at 7 PM in the East Bay, and occasional meetups in SF and South Bay.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VVP5R+X5, https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong, https://discord.gg/Yqus2bFhww, https://www.facebook.com/groups/566160007909175

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA, USA Contact: Peter Contact Info: gerdes[at]invariant[dot]org Time: April 30th, 03:00 PM Location: Waldron Hill Buskirk Park. I'll be near the clam shell/stage with a black and white dog (tuxedo colored). Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F79+F7 Event Link: https://fb.me/e/Ozg556B5 Notes: In case of inclement weather please visit the facebook event where I'll identify a backup location.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/86FM5F79+F7, https://fb.me/e/Ozg556B5

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices

May 10, 2023 · Original source

Makeshift housing in a North Dakota oil boom town (source) If each person creates half a job, the original 1,000 oilmen attract 500 service workers, those 500 attract another 250, and so on until population stabilizes at 2,000 people. In this model, if there are fewer than 2,000 houses in the town, demand exceeds supply (no matter what is going on in the rest of the country), but if there are more than 2,000, supply exceeds demand. So if we imagine Google’s presence as an oil-like resource, the extra demand for housing in the Bay should gradually decline: at some point, you will have finished housing the Google workers and the service workers who support them. But this isn’t right either, because Google isn’t a natural resource - it’s a company founded by Bay Area residents. If you got more Bay Area residents, you would (with some delay) get more Googles. Or: Austin gets lots of jobs from Tesla. Tesla wasn’t founded by Austinites. But it moved to Austin when it became a known “tech hub”, ie a place with lots of tech companies and tech employees. It wouldn’t have moved to Austin if Austin was still an uninhabited plain or a one-horse town. So as Austin got bigger, it attracted more tech companies. So in both the Bay Area case and the Austin case, having more people attracted more tech companies, either because the residents themselves found the company or because the company gets attracted to this newly bustling city. Potential counterargument: Each new Bay Area resident gives the Bay another lottery ticket to found the next Google. If having the first Google gets it an extra 1 million people, but there are 300 million people in the US, then those extra 1 million only give it a 1/300 chance of winning the next lottery. So even though the Bay Area won the lottery once, and this made it have high demand, this doesn’t mean the high demand will cause it to win more lotteries. If you win the lottery once, spend all your winnings on more lottery tickets, and keep doing this forever, you haven’t invented an infinite money printing machine, eventually you’ll just lose. Potential counter-counter-argument: the Bay got Google, and Facebook, and Apple, and . . . so these can’t all be separate lotteries. I think you should probably model it as a high-level lottery to become the next hub of a tech-sized industry, plus many low-level lotteries where once you’re the tech hub, you’re attracting lots of techies, and each techie gives you a ticket in a lottery where the denominator is the number of techies to found the next big tech company. And the Bay might have half the US’s techie population. So maybe here there is a self-sustaining lottery-winning cycle, at least until tech plays itself out and nobody wants any more tech companies. And that might take a long time. Tom (author of Tom Thought) writes: The primary drivers of demand for living in NYC are the specific opportunities available in NYC. It is true that on long time horizons, one of the reasons these opportunities have tended to collect in NYC is that it is a dense place. But those aren't the only reasons - NYC is much more important than other, bigger cities in other parts of the world for complex historical reasons. Even if a catastrophe were to wipe out half the city, there would still be a great deal of demand to live near important institutions like Broadway, Wall Street, Port of NY & NJ, Columbia, etc (assuming those institutions survived the catastrophe). Increasing the number of housing units has a very mechanical impact on how many people can live in the place. But it has only a second-order impact on the types of institutions that drive demand to live in the city. People don't just generically crave to live near other people for the most part (a handful of urbanist freaks like myself excepted). The Bay Area is a great example of this. It is much less populated than other much cheaper cities. Density isn't why people want to live there - it's access to a specific culture and specific institutions. Demand for that is not simply a function of density - some people want to be part of Bay Area culture and others don't. Adding more units will induce some demand as a second-order effect, but will bring prices down as a first-order effect. To relate this to your model: we might be able to say that the country has a certain number of abstract "culture points" that have been allocated to different cities by various historical forces. Each culture point a city has increases demand to live in that city by a certain amount. Adding more people to the city may allow it to generate additional culture points over time, or acquire culture points from other cities, but this doesn't happen right away, and is determined by a host of factors other than just density. Under this model, we expect a place like NYC to always cost much more than North Dakota (since NYC possesses a large number of culture points), but we would also expect that adding additional housing units to NYC would bring costs down (since there are now additional housing units per culture point). Perhaps this process will over time allow NYC to steal away some culture points from Chicago, Boston, or other cities, but this is a secondary effect. This just seems to be passing the buck. Yes, people move to New York because it has Broadway, Columbia University, and Wall Street. Why does it have those things? Because one in every X New York citizens founds a good artistic/educations/financial institution, and New York has a large population of employees to work at those institutions and customers to patronize those institutions. If Conanicut Island had a population of 10 million people instead of Manhattan, there would be lots of great institutions on Conanicut and it would have more culture points. I don’t think it’s a culture-point game and population/density just sort of occasionally redistributes culture points, I think to a first approximation culture points just track population/density. Maybe they track the population/density of upper class people better than the total population/density, but I don’t think this is a big enough distinction to sink the argument. 3. Comments About Chinese Ghost Cities Some people brought these up as a good natural experiment: the Chinese really did try building millions of houses on their equivalent of a North Dakota plain. What happened? Jeremiah Johnson (author of Infinite Scroll) writes: You currently seem like you're at the stage of understanding the thought experiments pretty well, but not understanding them on a DEEP level. For example with your hypothetical, this has actually happened before! Kind of. China built a bunch of 'ghost cities' basically out of nothing, and while there was an initial craze of speculation and tons of investment and building... nobody went to live in those cities most of the time. And now they're deeply distressed assets worth basically nothing. When nobody actually lives in the ghost city, it doesn't matter that they have super dense housing. There's no demand. (the only reason they might be worth something is that the CCP very, very much does not want to pop their huge housing bubble and is likely to bail out some of the parties involved) Parmenides (author of Last House On The Left) writes: I think your mixing up the agglomeration effects of density, which is what induces the demand, and the housing supply. You can't just build a city and expect people to move in, China has tried that. But if you have the agglomeration effects of density and shortage of housing due to artificial constraints, which we have all across the US, then you get dense areas with high housing costs. sdwr writes: Think of China's ghost cities / apartment blocks. Prices surely can't be that high there. Maybe the answer is that developers are good at their job, and build supply where theres demand for it? But several other people object that although the Western press made a big deal about Chinese ghost cities a few years ago, it mostly just took a couple of years for people to move in, and now at least some of them seem to be thriving. For example, Michael quotes the Wikipedia article, Under-occupied Developments In China: Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities". Ash Lael writes: I'm sceptical of the Chinese "ghost city" phenomenon. I haven't explored the issue rigorously but my impression is that in areas that were previously dismissed as "ghost cities" like Ordos Kangbashi, the population is now large and growing. I think we in the west are so used to infrastructure bottlenecks and short sightedness and anti-construction policies that the idea of it being possible to build the housing and infrastructure to accomodate expected demand ten years in the future is completely foreign to us. Perhaps building brand new cities before they are even needed is what the YIMBY utopia looks like. See also Bloomberg: China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets. This wasn’t trivial. It looks like the Chinese government had to put in some work to make people move in, including opening good schools and universities there. Probably if they had just built apartments in the middle of the desert and nothing else, they would have stayed empty. But that’s even more of a reductio ad absurdum than the original ghost city plan. Kangbashi, China’s most famous ghost city. What are housing prices like in the ghost city? Again from Bloomberg: Sitting on the southern outskirts of Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City (population 2.2 million), Kangbashi was the archetypal ghost city 10 years ago, with barren boulevards and empty buildings standing forlornly in the desert. Local officials are adamant that things have changed. They say 91% of homes in the district are occupied. In fact, after a yearslong construction freeze, the government approved six housing projects in 2020 and expects 3,000 homes to be built by the end of this year. Apartments in a new development are selling for 9,500 yuan per square meter, and downtown they go for 15,000 to 16,000 yuan, according to Liu Yueyue, 28, a salesman at a new residential development in the district’s northeast. “Would houses in a ghost town sell at such high prices?” asks Liu. Half of his customers come from outside Kangbashi, and most are parents who want to send their children to the well-regarded local schools, he says. Looking at this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Kangbashi seems squarely in the middle - for example, Wuhan and Xian are also in the 15,000 - 16,000 range. I claim this supports my argument: surely twenty years ago, houses in this particular deserted corner of Inner Mongolia would have been dirt cheap (if any even existed). But if you build a city there, it becomes just as expensive as any other city! Here it’s very obvious that the density caused the high prices instead of the other way around. Still, the Chinese housing market is weird, with significant vacancies even in expensive, well-developed cities. Paul Botts: No official vacancy rates are published in China and no specific definition of it exists there. Various think tanks and researchers both within that country and elsewhere have published estimates ranging from as low as 11 percent to as high as 24 percent. Those estimates have been for varying samples of Chinese cities, have used various definitions of housing vacancy rate, etc. The best (as in most systematic) estimate yet produced has come from researchers at a university in Liaoning. They used night-time urban lightsheds captured by a new (2018 launch) Chinese satellite having a new level of light sensing technology which allows separating out light from parks and plazas. They covered a large sample (49 cities), and made their sample representative of city type, city size, regions within China, etc. They also crossed-referenced with local housing data to ensure accurate balancing of their sample and to confirm that the satellite was successfully identifying light coming from housing blocks. They found vacancy rates of just under 20 percent in China's Tier 1 cities, and found rates above 20 percent in 40 of the 49 cities. They found the highest vacancy rates in western and northeastern cities, which are also the newest ones; that finding is consistent with the hypothesis of significant numbers of recently-built ghost cities. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data And Phil H (author of the blog Tang Poetry) writes: The price of housing in China has skyrocketed over the past few decades, as all those extra apartments have been built. I live in a pleasant but unremarkable southern city, and I paid London prices (about 4.5m yuan/$650k for a 1,300 sq ft flat). That seems to match Scott's hypothesis that high density leads to high prices. House prices here have risen much faster than incomes. They've risen in rural areas, too, but the increases in price in cities have been stratospheric. 4. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Considering Tokyo, Even Though I Included A Section In The Post On Why I Didn’t Think Tokyo Was Relevant I won’t name and shame people, but for example: You excluded Tokyo from your dataset. Tokyo has much higher density than SF and much lower price per sqft. Tokyo just kills this. Tokyo is bigger than New York and has significantly lower rent because they build more housing! This is in a wealthy country with even lower interest rates than the US. I don't think you have justified excluding non-US metros, like Tokyo, or Auckland. Doesn't this lead to the natural conclusion that there is a sufficient level of housing to build, and that the problem is that the USA's many metros are structured to prevent housing? It seems like you're just arguing that US metros are bad at building housing, which is also what Matt Yglesias is arguing. "Change my mind about housing, but don't mention Tokyo" is like saying "Change my mind about gun possession, but don't mention Switzerland." You can't test the effect of allowing new housing unless you're willing to look at cities that do, in fact, allow it. Tokyo and NYC both attract tons of new residents But Tokyo's housing rents have been stable, while NYC rents keep rising. Why? Tokyo has permissive housing construction laws. NYC makes building new housing almost illegal. Yes, dense cities are attractive, and that makes them get more dense over time. But it only makes them more expensive if you forbid new housing to keep up with the new residents. Tokyo! But I’m like the 10th person to bring it up… As I wrote on the original post (not even edited in! it’s been there the whole time!): I worry someone will bring up Tokyo as a counterexample. But I think Tokyo managed to build its way to low housing prices in the context of the rest of Japan also having good housing policy. Even if that isn’t true, Tokyo on its own is a quarter of the Japanese market, so it might be able to exhaust the entire pool of Japanese house-seekers by itself! That is, yes, you’re all correct that cities are only expensive in the context of more demand for city housing than the (NIMBY-constrained) city housing market can currently supply. You are all correct that if this problem were solved at the national level, then city housing would be cheap, and every additional city house would make it cheaper. My claim is that marginal changes - like Oakland building an extra 10,000 units, but everyone else staying the same - will most likely increase Oakland prices. Yes, if Oakland unilaterally built 50 million units, that would soak up the entire excess demand and probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). Yes, if the entire US switched to good housing policy at the same time, that would probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). But if we don’t do any of that stuff, and just build another 10,000 houses in Oakland, I think it would probably increase prices in Oakland. Some other people brought up that Japan has a declining population, and it’s much easier to have low house prices when your population is declining (compared to some previous time when number of houses presumably matched number of people), but ddd pointed out that people continue to migrate from the Japanese countryside to Tokyo, so its population continues to increase. Also, Mike (I’m stitching together two comments here): In a country with a declining population, you would expect that fewer homes are being built per capita because there's little to no competition for existing homes. But it's exactly the opposite! Japan builds far more homes per capita than the US does, despite their declining population […] As a result, the average Japanese home is very new and the average house is torn down and replaced after a relatively short 30 years. They're living in nice new homes for cheaper. 5. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Understanding Economics Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I think you're making a very common mistake here of confusing supply/demand with *quantity* supplied or quantity demanded. (This is very common! we teach students about this in micro 101 because it's so easy to make!) What you're seeing is that the quantity supplied is correlated with housing prices (true!). But this is very different from establishing that the supply curve--i.e. the amount of housing that would be produced at any given price, and what moves up/down when we regulate/deregulate supply--is positively correlated with price. Figuring out what supply curves look like is a lot less intuitive and requires some high-grade econometrics, which is why economists had to set up a whole commission just to study this particular problem (the Cowles Commission). In terms of resources for understanding how these concepts are different, a micro 101 textbook will cover this distinction. For the econometrics side of this, I've heard good things about Scott Cunningham's *Causal Inference Mixtape*, although I haven't personally used it. My claim is that increasing density within a city shifts the demand curve for housing within that city, because of increasing desirability. MLE later gets more on point: The effect you're discussing here is kind of real in a sense. When the marginal utility of housing increases for *other* people, density arguably becomes more desirable for me, which is kind of like the demand curve shifting up. These are called bandwagon goods and discussed here: http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf In theory, the bandwagon effect could be so strong that parts of the demand curve are upward-sloping. Solutions like this are not, technically, prohibited by the laws of mathematics, just the laws of economics. (And arguably of physics--see paper for conditions where these kinds of bandwagon effects imply the amount of housing in the city would have to be negative). In practice, this effect exists but just can't overcome the normal, non-weird economics that says "making more of a good makes the prices fall." Again, I claim the existence of Manhattan vs. Conanicut shows that sometimes it does. I cannot find the words “housing”, “real estate”, or “land value” anywhere in that paper. Alex Poterack writes: There's two things going on here: confusing shifts in demand with movement along the demand curve, and getting causation backwards. You're assuming density causes prosperity, rather than prosperity causing density. There are ways the former can happen, but the bigger thing is that, for a wide range of historical reasons, you can make a lot of money in NYC and SF, so lots of people want to live there, so they get very dense. This is the prosperity shifting demand right, so at any given price, more people want to live there; this drives prices up, and they go higher the more fixed supply is. If you built a bunch of housing in Oakland, lots of people would move there because it's cheaper, which is movement along the demand curve; it's still the same number of people who want to live there at any price. Now, it's possible that the increased number of people living there makes the city more prosperous (this is the phenomenon of induced demand), which would shift demand right, but there are way more differences between NYC/SF and Oakland than just the density, so I don't think it would shift demand enough to offset this. In particular, if it's just a small increase in small, it's also a small increase in density, so there's almost no shift in demand (but there is movement along the curve). I still think this is missing my point, but I present it here in case anyone else is enlightened by it and wants to try further to convince me I’m making this mistake. 6. Comments By Famous People Who Potentially Have Good Opinions Scott Sumner is an economist and blogger; he writes: It is certainly the case that building more housing can make a city more desirable, and that this effect could be so strong that it overwhelms the price depressing impact of a greater quantity supplied. But studies suggest that this is not generally the case. Texas provides a nice case study. Among Texas’s big metro areas, Austin has the tightest restrictions on building and Houston is the most willing to allow dense infill development. Even though Houston is the larger city, house prices are far higher in Austin: Houston pretty much describes the “Oakland with more housing” outcome that Alexander views as somewhat far-fetched. Only in this case, it’s Austin with more housing. Alexander seems too quick to accept the, “If you build it they will come” idea—that you can build more housing and thereby boost demand so much that prices actually rise. I started the post with a graph of about 50 cities, showing a positive correlation between density and price. I’m having trouble seeing how Sumner’s point isn’t just “if you remove 48 of those cities and cherry-pick two, the relationship is negative”. My attempt to place Austin and Houston on the original graph, using Sumner’s data plus a few other things available online. Why weren’t they on there already? Maybe because the graph is metro areas and Sumner was talking about Austin and Houston as cities, but I’m not sure and agree this is confusing. Everyone knows Austin is more expensive than Houston because Austin is a trendy tech and culture hub and Houston isn’t (and relatedly, because Austin’s median family income is 50% higher than Houston’s). Unless someone wants to claim that its failure to build housing helped turn it into a trendy tech and culture hub, I don’t think there’s much point to this comparison. It’s true that Houston’s bigger size didn’t let it leapfrog over Austin to become a trendy tech and culture hub, which goes against some of what I claimed in the first part of this post. But I never claimed there would be a perfect 1-1 correlation between city size and trendiness, or that you could never find a pair of cities where one was bigger but the other was more trendy. Just that there would be a correlation. Moving on: Here’s the problem with this argument. It mixes up population change due to economic effects such as the benefits of agglomeration, with population changes due to regulatory changes such as less strict zoning. If you look at things this way, then the stylized facts work against Alexander’s argument. Over the past 50 years, increasingly strict zoning has reduced housing construction on big cities like New York and San Francisco. As a result, their populations have increased by less than in cities with less strict zoning, such as Houston. If Alexander were correct, then the price gap between the tightly controlled cities on the coast and the more laissez-faire cities of Middle America should have shrunk over time. Instead, the price gap has widened. New York and San Francisco were always more expensive than other cites, but with tighter zoning and less new construction the gap has become far wider. During the last fifty years, there was also deindustrialization and demographic sorting. This is just the Austin vs. Houston story all over again. Alexander is implicitly viewing this outcome as a “problem” for the city that builds more housing. They must sacrifice so that the rest of the country can gain. But in his scenario, Oakland is better off. Indeed if it were not better off, then why would more people choose to live in Oakland? In order for it to be true that building more housing boosts housing prices, it must also be true that the quality of existing houses (including neighborhood effects) rises by more than enough to offset the increase in supply. That means the new housing construction must make Oakland such a desirable place to live that the amenity effect overwhelms the quantity effect [...] Of course, economic change always has winners and losers. Here’s how I would describe the impact of allowing more housing construction in Oakland, in the unlikely event that this did raise housing prices: 1. America would benefit. 2. Oakland would benefit. 3. Poor people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 4. Affluent people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 5. Homeowners in Oakland would benefit. 6. Some renters in Oakland would benefit (from a more economically dynamic city.) 7. Some renters in Oakland would suffer from higher rents. In the much more likely case where new housing construction would lower prices, the impact described in #5 and #7 might reverse. Either way, there is no defensible argument for not building more housing in Oakland, regardless of the impact on price. If building more housing reduces its price, then there is a strong argument for allowing more housing construction. If building more housing raises its price, then the argument for more construction is even stronger. I agree with all this. Jeremiah Johnson is a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, host of the Neoliberal Podcast, and a YIMBY activist (not to be confused with Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, who killed 300 Native Americans and ate their livers). He writes: Here's why you're wrong in a single sentence: Demand causes high prices, not new units. Prices are high in SF and NYC because those are desirable places to live for a huge number of people. People all over the country and the world would live there if they could, and prices reflect that. The fact that the densest cities are the most expensive is true. But the high prices are not caused by density - rather, the density and the high prices are both a consequence of crushingly high demand […] There's a feedback loop, but what matters here is the elasticity, which is less than one. We can measure this empirically. New housing lowers prices via the mechanism of adding supply, which is basic economics and how we expect markets to work. New housing could raise prices if it also made the city a more desirable place to live and shifted people's preferences, such that there was more demand to live there after the new housing is built. If you think it's unclear which of these effects would dominate, luckily we have empirical data that over and over and over shows adding housing supply does indeed lower prices on a local level. This is a fairly well established result that replicates well. edit: I'm actually thinking about drawing out the weighted DAG graphs here to make the conceptual stuff easier, but it would be pretty long. I'd love to do this as a guest post. I’m skeptical of the empirical results because they don’t match the much stronger “Manhattan vs. Conanicut island” empirical results, and if I try to think about why, the best explanation I can think of is that the Manhattan experiment has been going on longer (ie long enough for Manhattan’s extra residents to found businesses and institutions that attract new people). I’ve told him he can try pitching this guest post to me; in either case, I would be interested in seeing the graphs. Several other people also posted this graph that Johnson helped make famous: Hopefully by now you can predict my objection: the places in the southeast corner are mostly unfashionable red state Sun Belt cities; the places in the northwest corner are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities. My conclusion is that trendy liberal coastal cities are both more NIMBY and more desirable, and if you use this to draw any conclusions about housing policy you’ll just end up confused. But maybe I should take this same lesson to heart myself. Dense cities are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities; uninhabited tundra in North Dakota isn’t. Maybe the demand is just for trendy liberal coastal cities, and once you attain that status, extra density doesn’t matter that much. Maybe Oakland has already maxed out its “trendy liberal coastal city” status, and even if it became Manhattan-sized, it wouldn’t get any trendier, or would get trendier only with a long time lag. There are a few very trendy small coastal villages in California (think eg Sea Ranch); maybe these (rather than North Dakota) are the natural control group for San Francisco. I think they are still cheaper than SF, but maybe not by very much. Cameron Murray is a housing economist whose work some other commenters recommended; he also writes the blog Fresh Economic Thinking. He very kindly showed up and wrote: I think you are in general right that agglomeration effects are real, which is why bigger cities have higher value to residents. I agree that people move locations. But I think you can go a step further. If one city is growing faster and densifying, surely those people are not demanding homes in other cities and those cities build slower. This is part of the spatial equilibrium story that further makes claims about “build density and get cheap homes” less plausible. 7. My Final Thoughts + Poll Thanks to everyone who commented on this post and helped me refine my thoughts. I’m willing to concede the following points: It might be that only attracting the sort of educated people who found companies, universities, etc will make housing prices go up. Less educated people will take more jobs than they create and not ratchet up the city’s desirability level. (I’d previously told commenters talking about “gentrification” that it was irrelevant to the mechanism I was talking about here, but maybe it isn’t - maybe “gentrifiers” are the people creating more jobs and institutions than they consume, and so homes that attract them in particular will increase demand more than they increase supply? Maybe this discussion does reduce to the gentrification discussion?)

Inline links: source, Tom Thought, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!86gT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5788a8dd-c5ee-4111-be67-9c1533f7410b_335x172.png, Infinite Scroll, writes, Last House On The Left, writes, writes, quotes, Under-occupied Developments In China, writes, China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets., https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AAuI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d6a6159-a16f-45e3-b15a-e62cb2c73336_1200x900.jpeg, this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Paul Botts, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data, Tang Poetry, writes, ddd pointed out, Mike, Maximum Limelihood Estimator, gets more on point, http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf, writes, writes:, far higher in Austin, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tAF8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03f2b338-da84-4d85-b71c-0ce2e02e10e1_685x559.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mLwn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9cf942da-5716-49e8-a177-20140681e7fc_573x421.png, Center for New Liberalism, the Neoliberal Podcast, Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, Johnson helped make famous, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tg5t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc490a60a-3e97-4b73-9806-79bb967b5172_608x550.png, Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote

Links For August 2023

August 09, 2023 · Original source

OpenAI is the most LibLeft, Google and Facebook are more authoritarian. “The paper speculates this might be due to BERT's training on more conservative books, while newer GPT models trained on liberal internet texts,” OpenAI denies the obvious alternative explanation that they’re better at RLHFing their AIs and so they match standard Bay Area politics better. I’d like to see future investigations include Anthropic’s Claude, which has been RLAIFed with some pretty left-wing-sounding prompts.

Bride Of Bay Area House Party

August 17, 2023 · Original source

“A few months ago, a right-wing blogger came to one of our parties. People on Twitter complained and said his presence might make minorities uncomfortable and that as a movement that valued inclusivity we needed to kick people like him out. So next time we instituted a rule: no right-wing bloggers. But then some people who commented on right-wing blogs showed up, and the Twitter people said their presence was exclusionary too. One thing led to another and now all our parties have an Inclusivity Monitor who checks your social media presence before they let you in. A few months ago I complained on Facebook that crime was out of control. I guess I must have used the wrong phrasing or something.”

Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places

August 25, 2023 · Original source

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, September 21st, 7:00 PM Location: The grass area next to Max Brenner in Sarona park. I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP Group Link: https://facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MP, https://facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/

MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA Contact: RS Contact Info: xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Friday, October 6th, 6:00 PM Location: Queensberry Hotel, dining room. 593 Swanston St Carlton. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46 Group Link: https://m.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/?ref=share&mibextid=NSMWBT I can also give out a WhatsApp link via email if you don't use Facebook Notes: Email me or join the Facebook group Less Wrong Melbourne to RSVP so I can book a big enough table.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46, https://m.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/?ref=share&mibextid=NSMWBT

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND Contact: Ben W Contact Info: benwve[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, October 3rd, 5:30 PM Location: Room MZ02 (on the mezannine floor), Rutherford House, 33 Bunny Street, Wellington 6011 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQCH+CMR Group Link: facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismWellington Notes: This meetup will be run in collaboration with Effective Altruism Wellington. The external door closes at 6pm, but if you call me I can let you in. reach me on 0+2+7+3+4+4+1+0+8+2

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQCH+CMR, facebook.com/EffectiveAltruismWellington

My Presidential Platform

September 05, 2023 · Original source

(source) I would also work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to see if we could get a tribe to appoint him as an honorary leader, in which case I would give him John Roberts’ job and he could become Chief Justice Chief Justice (or possibly Chief Chief Justice Justice).

Inline links: source

When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.

Any court where there is a yellow fringe around the flag will be officially an Admiralty Court, whose rulings will only count insofar as their judges can link them to strained ship-related metaphors.

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 11, 2023 · Original source

Just because the city is founded by elites doesn’t mean it will be inhabited by them. Mark Zuckerberg is an elite, but that doesn’t mean Facebook is “a website for elites”. No elite wants to live in Solano County (unless it’s their summer ranch home or something). The natural demographic is people priced out of the Bay.

Shaked Koplewitz (blog) writes:

Inline links: blog, writes

Sarah Constantin (blog) on Praxis:

Inline links: blog, on Praxis

Dictator Book Club: Chavez

November 02, 2023 · Original source

The Chavistas also benefitted from being able to refuse to renew opponents’ broadcasting licenses; I don’t know what our broadcasting license policy is here, but I never hear about this being an issue so I’m guessing we’re probably safe. And the continued independence of Facebook and (especially) Twitter means broadcast TV doesn’t have the same monopoly on information here that it probably did in Venezuela. I think we’re safe here too.

Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory

February 21, 2024 · Original source

2) Polyamorous 40-somethings. These guys are pretty okay. There's a lot less jumping back and forth. It's not really a "polycule" as much as a "stable triad/quadrad". NRE? Ha! I'd have to leave the hosue. Oh, man. I haven't thought about Ryan for years. I heard they moved to Wisconsin. I think Jamie is still Facebook acquaintances... I'll ask next time we get coffee. You know what? I won't. I don't care. I'm glad they're no longer here.

The relationship length graph here at the bottom seems to slightly contradict the one above showing similar length; I think this is partly because there aren’t enough 45-55 year olds in the sample to make a difference in the aggregated data, and partly because I think the bottom graph combines “slightly poly” and “very poly” into a single “poly” category, and we already saw that slightly poly people do badly. To a first approximation, poly people are equally happy with and committed to their partner as monogamous people, regardless of relationship length (though remember that this selects for relationships that are still going on), and they get married at about the same frequency. However, they only have about half as many children. This broadly matches the results of the 2017 SSC survey (I’m using 2017 because it had the most questions on sex and relationships). Mono and poly people had equal self-rated life satisfaction, but poly people had higher romantic satisfaction (6 vs. 6.6). Poly people were slightly less likely to currently be in a primary relationship that had lasted more than five years (34% vs. 39%), but this might be because they were slightly younger (31 vs. 33). Respondents were mostly young and childless, but poly people were only half as likely to have children as mono people (15% vs. 27%). I think a fair summary of these results is “poly and mono relationships are about equally good, except that poly people have slightly higher romantic satisfaction and mono people are much more likely to have children; being wishy-washy in the middle is worse than either”. Hamish Todd (blog) writes: I was poly for two years or so then stopped. Jealousy, in the sense of feeling bad because someone was sleeping with my partner, wasn't a problem for me. I will say what the problems were, and I'll be interested to see responses/links to responses. I hung out in two polyamorous friendship groups: one was good but very small and not much happened. The other was large, and it was *awful* to be in for a man - to be blunt, because competition for females ended up happening two-faced way - "oh it's so great to see you man!" - while not actually having any interest in one another. I don't think the women were always aware of it (my primary partner certainly wasn't). The problem polyamorous communities have that modal-person-is-monogamous communities does not is that men get an extra incentive to interact with other men: that incentive is a chance of sleeping with your partner. This makes for more shallow interactions. To say a possibly-related and by-no-means-original thing: polyamory probably makes it so that more attractive men have extra sex, while less attractive men have relatively less extra sex. It seems plausible that this makes men, on average, more miserable (I appreciate this is related to jealousy of course, but not quite the same, because it's not focussed on one person, i.e. one's partner). I could be wrong about that part - but if you think I am wrong, and that's why you favour polyamory, please let this be a hill you would die on, that is, if I can show you that polyamory leads to misery of this kind, you have to give me that polyamory is therefore bad. I can understand people disliking the principle that some (attractive) people should have their personal lives limited in order to make life a little happier for less attractive ones, but sometimes that's what it looks like to decrease misery. With respect I also think Scott is not the perfect person to listen to about this, simply because is at the top of a status hierarchy and the people whose welfare I am concerned for are not there. I'm not a person who thinks poly will be ruinous by the way - even without it there seem to be lots of reasons people are moving away from committed relationships with an eye toward having children. But I don't think it's good. Sounds like a testable claim! I decided to operationalize this as "on the SSC survey, polyamorous men would have a higher correlation between self-rated social status and self-rated romantic satisfaction than monogamous men". Among monogamous men (n=5268), the correlation was 0.323 Among polyamorous men (n=555), the correlation was 0.311 I'm eyeballing this as not a significant difference, and in either case it's in favor of poly. drosophilist writes: On average, straight men and straight women differ in their sexual/romantic preferences. For obvious evolutionary reasons, men's sexuality is optimized for variety/novelty/as many partners as possible, while women's sexuality is optimized for emotional attachment/find the best man you can and get him to stick around and help care for your babies. (Obvious disclaimer: I'm talking about trends and averages, not every man/not every woman, blah blah blah.) For this reason, I'm worried that a widespread embrace of polyamory/open relationships would be a disaster for women. Sure, you'll say that polyamory is all consensual and based on negotiated agreements, so what's the problem? But it's not so simple, and people who are emotionally entangled find it hard to make logical choices, and people are good at lying to themselves. "I can totally accept polyamory as the price of holding onto the man I love! [six months later] I'm so jealous and miserable and I keep hiding in the bathroom so he won't see me crying, but all open-minded people do polyamory nowadays, I can't let this get to me, I'm with the man I love, this is totally the right choice... excuse me while I get another box of tissues..." If polyamory catches on in society at large, we'll see, at minimum a lot of tearful letters to advice columns from women saying things like, "Dear Abby, my husband wants to open our marriage, I really hate the idea of him being with another woman but I don't want to be an old-fashioned prude, plus I'm afraid he'll leave me unless I agree, but the thought makes me so unhappy, what should I do?" In the canonical poly survey, women were over-represented in polyamory; about 35% of poly people were men and 49% women (the remainder either didn’t answer or were nonbinary or something). Commenters agreed with this, and said their experience was that polyamory was mostly female-driven. This is my story too; I became poly because the woman I wanted to date at the time was. Why should this be, since men traditionally prefer sexual variety more than women do? I think one thing a lot of commenters are missing is that - despite people’s salacious dreams of what it must be like - polyamory usually focuses on the emotional aspect of relationships rather than the sexual. If someone wants to sleep with a bunch of people, they can just be a normal casual-sex-haver or swinger or something. Poly emphasizes the part where you have multiple relationships. This is more of a female fantasy than a male one, hence the female predominance. There were a lot of you who were pretty sure that polyamory had to be bad in some way under some conditions. I challenge you to operationalize this in a way that we can test on future (or existing) surveys, eg “Poly people in the bottom quintile of status will report lower relationship satisfaction” or “Poly marriages among people without a college degree are more likely to end in divorce than monogamous ones.” 2: Comments I Will Argue Against Despite Not Having Statistics, Sorry Some Guy (blog) writes: I had one of those childhoods that was so terrible that people find it fascinating but this seems just awful for kids. Again, I’m probably bias because my parents have racked up close to ten marriages between them and I grew up knowing that their first and most heartfelt loyalty was never to me. There would be my brothers and sisters, whichever of my parents we were with, and just some random person they’d decided they loved more than us. And that person definitely made their resentment of us known and usually made whichever of my parents was there perform some sort of loyalty test. Most other people I know in this situation have some kind of similar experience even if the examples are less dramatic and more open to being interpreted as over-sensitivity. Say what you will about monogamy but it makes lines of loyalty very clear within a family unit. That might not matter as much when there are resources to go around for everyone, but when you’re poor it matters a lot because there isn’t that much to go around and one year your step-mom might want to ritually humiliate you and your siblings by giving you socks at Christmas while her children open elaborate gifts. Again, personal experience, blah blah blah. But you have to acknowledge that the pathways for this kind of thing open up just because you’ve expanded the numbers of players in the game and unaligned their motivations. I take the opposite lesson that Some Guy does from this. Quick digression: in medical studies, lots of people don’t take the experimental drug the way they’re supposed to. Maybe they get side effects and stop, or they screw up the dosing. There are two statistical ways of dealing with this, called “per-protocol” and “intention-to-treat”. In per-protocol analysis, only the people who took the drug correctly get counted. In intention-to-treat analysis, everyone who was assigned to the experimental group gets counted, even if they didn’t take the drug. So, suppose that you have some drug which always cures a disease when you take it correctly, but it’s incredibly complicated to get right, and has lots of side effects and almost nobody ever makes it to the end of a course. In per-protocol, the drug looks great; in intention-to-treat, it looks useless. Which is the better analysis strategy? It depends on what you’re using the number for. If you’re a patient, and you’re confident that you are smart and determined and can use it correctly, and you want to know your chances, use per-protocol. If you’re a social engineer, and you want to know how many cases of the disease you’ll cure by promoting the drug in the general population, use intention-to-treat. I find this a useful lens to apply to social problems. For example, G.K. Chesterton famously said that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.” Supposing he’s right, maybe Christianity, when followed per-protocol, has a strong success rate in curing sin. But it looks much worse under intention-to-treat. If you assign people to the “Christianity” group - maybe by raising them in a Christian society where you tell everyone to be Christian, and where everyone goes to church on Sundays - then most people don’t follow the protocol, and they don’t become any less sinful. Some Guy is talking about people assigned to the monogamy group. They were raised in a society that told them to be monogamous. They agreed to be monogamous. They probably had lovely weddings where they swore to be monogamous until death do them part. But it doesn’t sound like they were able to follow the protocol. Monogamy followed per protocol may have many good effects. But by intention-to-treat, monogamy looks pretty mediocre. (nobody in this story was assigned to the polyamory group, and nothing in it speaks at all to the success or failure thereof) Another way to think of this is as different failure modes: The question isn’t whether the success mode of mono is worse than the failure mode of mono. It’s whether moving the marginal couple from mono to poly or vice versa makes success more vs. less likely. I’m not sure what the answer is there. If you’re very optimistic, you could imagine that the people in the story above, instead of divorcing to be with another partner, could have stayed married, stayed with their children, and had another partner on the side. I’m not that optimistic. The people described don’t seem like they would be very good at any form of relationship. If you tell them to be monogamous, they will cheat. If you tell them they can have as many relationships as they want as long as they do so ethically and honestly, then they’ll do it unethically and dishonestly. But occasionally, I do meet some people who I feel would be better served by polyamory. Here’s a conversation I sometimes imagine having with certain friends and/or patients (this is partly stitched together from a few real conversations with different people, and partly imaginary): ME: So, you’re having a messy divorce. THEM: Yeah. ME: Because you cheated on your fourth husband. THEM: Yeah. ME: And now you’re dating a new guy. Are you worried that this might also end with you cheating on him? THEM: No. ME: Remember how we talked about the secret ancient rationalist technique of thinking about an answer for five seconds before you give it? I want you to try that now. Are you worried that this new relationship will end with you cheating on your partner? THEM: . . . . . yes. ME: Okay. Why do you think that is? THEM: I guess I’m just a bad person! ME: Can you be more specific? THEM: I guess I’m just really impulsive, and sometimes I see someone and can’t hold myself back! I’m too flighty and horny to ever be happy staying with the same guy for too long. ME: Okay. Can you think of ways that you could potentially address that in your next relationship? THEM: No, I’ve already tried therapy, and I’m too extraverted to be happy never going to any places where I could meet new men. I don’t know what else to try! I guess I’ll just never be able to be in a relationship without destroying it. ME: How would you feel about talking to this new guy you’re dating and telling him all this? Maybe he would be willing to agree to some kind of open relationship, so that if you felt something like this again, you could have a safe outlet that wouldn’t destroy the relationship. THEM: No that would be unethical. I’ve also met some people in the same situation as the “them” above who did switch to open relationships and it did seem to let them have a stable life / marriage / family in a way that they weren’t able to do before. I don’t think this is right for everyone, but the people who need it, need it. And here’s the kind of thing I see in relationship advice forums: I used to hate when my wife went out to parties or conferences because I always worried she was meeting other men. I told her she couldn’t leave the house unless she texted me exactly where she was going and explained why it was necessary, and it made her mad, but she eventually agreed. But she still talks on the phone to this one guy she’s been friends with since grade school. They’ve never had sex or anything, and he’s married to someone else, but they chat on the phone a couple of times a week and I always hear her laughing. I think it counts as an emotional affair and I told her that if she didn’t cut off all contact right away, I was going to end the marriage. Now she’s all mad at me. What should I do? This just seems like a fundamentally unhealthy outlook on relationships and life. People with better emotional skills can figure out some middle ground where they still agree not to have “emotional affairs” or whatever but don’t freak out every time their partner has contact with another human, but seeing the version where this goes bad has kind of radicalized me. I think there’s something really attractive about being poly even if you never get around to having any other relationships, just so you don’t have to constantly be getting angry at your partner for having normal human desires. TGGP writes: The real reason to prefer monogamy is that most cultures/societies have been polygynous, but the smaller number of monogamous ones were the winners in the contest of cultural group selection. I’m nervous about cultural selection arguments because they seem to justify anything, and to rapidly switch what they justify. Three thousand years ago, a cultural selectionist could have said that most societies in the world were polygynous, so we should avoid monogamy. A hundred years ago, they could have said that most societies in the world were monarchies, so we should avoid democracy. The problem is that nobody ever deploys cultural selection arguments against a failed trend that everyone hates. Nobody ever says “throughout history, most societies haven’t made people marry rocks, so we shouldn’t force people to marry rocks now”. Nobody wants to marry rocks now, so nobody needs to argue against it! Cultural selection arguments only get deployed against things that were once unpopular, but are in the process of becoming more popular - ie alleles that are currently being selected for! This isn’t necessarily hypocritical. You could say that certain institutions are spreading for good reasons, and others are spreading for bad ones (and TGGP links my Competing Selectors post which makes exactly this point). But now you’re not really making a cultural selection argument, you’re making an “I did some armchair reasoning and decided this was bad” argument. I think TGGP would answer that it doesn’t require any selective pressure to explain why people would want to have more romantic partners, since this is inherently fun for everyone. But first of all, no it isn’t - you can read the responses to this thread to see how viscerally unhappy some people are about this. And second of all, however fun it is now, it was probably equally fun a hundred years ago, so we still need an explanation for why it’s happening now and not earlier. Another possible argument is that polyamory isn’t spreading by monogamous cultures dying out and being replaced by polyamorous ones. It’s spreading by word of mouth. But this is also how almost every cultural trend spreads. Monogamy didn’t spread to Scandinavia because the Vikings died out and the Romans colonized their land, it spread because missionaries converted them to Christianity. If some memoir converts somebody to polyamory, that seems like the closest modern-day equivalent. I don’t really know how to rescue cultural selection arguments from these kinds of considerations. Ascend writes: Okay, I have two basic objections to polyamory. The first is a broader but weaker point, and the second is narrower and stronger. 1. If you actually love someone, that person should be enough for you. Especially, if most people who claim to love someone do, in fact, find that that person is enough for them. I struggle to see how it doesn't almost follow by definition that if Aaron wants to be in a monogamous relationship with Brenda, and Carl wants to be in a polyamorous relationship with Diana, then Carl loves Diana less than Aaron loves Brenda. Now maybe this assumption can be refuted somehow, by reference to irreducible personality types or something, but it certainly seems like the prima facie assumption, and requires an affirmative defence. Splitting this up into two paragraphs so I can answer one at a time. The traditional response is to ask: Do you think it’s bad for someone to have a second child? Surely if they really love their first child, one should be enough for them! More than one friend? In fact, why do they need to have a friend at all? Shouldn’t their partner be enough? I think you can think of this in one of two ways. One is to imagine the original objection in the mouth of a Dickens villain: “We can’t invite other people to our Christmas party! They would consume our limited supply of Christmas cheer, and then there wouldn’t be enough left for us!” Obviously at the end of the Dickens book, the character discovers that cheer isn’t a limited resource, and multiplies rather than divides when shared with others. Some people genuinely think this way. This isn’t really how things work for me. I want my wife to definitely be the most important person in my life and vice versa. But I find I can carve out a category “secondary partner” that doesn’t interfere with this, any more than her having friends , hobbies, children, etc interferes with this. Probably other people’s psychology doesn’t work this way, and those people wouldn’t enjoy being poly. 2. There seem to be two types of polyamory: the "hippie" kind where a group of people are all in a single demarcated "relationship" with each other, all know each other as either friends or lovers, and having sex with anyone outside that group would be condemned as cheating. And the "open relationship" kind where two people are dating or married but are "free" to sleep with other people (but still have each other as a "primary partner" or some such). The first, while I'm not endorsing it, seems to have decent case for being a form of actual love. The second, unless I'm missing something, looks like despicable pure hedonism. First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else. Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating, and for all the talk of mutality what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship? (I've seen a number of online stories of this happening, though with beautiful poetic justice where the pressured partner ends up finding someone who actually values him or her and wants a true relationship, and the other partner ending up entirely alone and certainly not finding the harem they were expecting). And third, because it creates *competition* between the two spouses over who can get more partners, and for fuck's sake a marriage is the ONE place such toxic sexual competition should not exist! Re: 2 - As I mentioned above, polyamory seems more about the romance angle than the sex angle. One interesting demonstration of this is how many asexual people are poly. In the 2017 SSC survey (the same one cited above), about 5% of polyamorous people described themselves as asexual (having no sex drive) compared to about 3% of monogamous people. These people are probably in relationships for the emotional benefits. I also checked sex drive among people who were in monogamous relationships, stable polycules, and open relationships (this is the 2019 SSC survey, which went into more depth on sex and romance). There were no significant differences in sex drive among these three categories. Piotr Pachota (blog) writes: Invectives about polyamory are inevitable now, in the current phase of polyamory Overton window shift. This is the only acceptable way polyamory can be currently portrayed and discussed. As Overton windows move for new social norms like LGBT and polyamory, the mainstream media narratives evolve along the axis of omission/taboo -> negative/critique -> ambiguity -> struggle/oppression ->positive -> new normal. We have seen LBGT cover almost all these steps during recent 40 years, currently I think we are between positive and new normal. With polyamory, we have just recently moved from omission/taboo to negative/critique. Portraying polyamory as positive or struggling/oppressed in mainstream media is still out of the Overton window, showing ambiguity is now at the edge, only negative critique is in the window. This is also why almost all movies and shows about polyamory are telling a story of a failure of a polyamorous relationship. Positive polyamory testimonials exist on social media, but usually the comments below are a shitstorm. This also proves how positive portrayal is unacceptable. At the same time, positive polyamory testimonial + shitstorm comments = negative meta-content bundle that itself fits well within the Overton window. Note that these negative portrayals still promote polyamory somehow, as they at least put it on the map. 10 years ago there were no polyamory movies, shows or social media content - it would have been unthinkable, as we were in the omission/taboo phase back then. Yeah, one pattern I see pretty often goes something like: Weird people, who maybe weren’t able to cope with normal institutions, find some weird new thing that works for them, okay, cool, whatever.

Inline links: blog, writes, writes, the canonical poly survey, Commenters agreed with this, blog, writes, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G7xC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa47bcb0c-e3ef-4897-9ee5-f8404ea227c3_810x805.png, writes, Competing Selectors, writes, Some people genuinely think this way, blog, writes

The question isn’t whether the success mode of mono is worse than the failure mode of mono. It’s whether moving the marginal couple from mono to poly or vice versa makes success more vs. less likely. I’m not sure what the answer is there. If you’re very optimistic, you could imagine that the people in the story above, instead of divorcing to be with another partner, could have stayed married, stayed with their children, and had another partner on the side. I’m not that optimistic. The people described don’t seem like they would be very good at any form of relationship. If you tell them to be monogamous, they will cheat. If you tell them they can have as many relationships as they want as long as they do so ethically and honestly, then they’ll do it unethically and dishonestly. But occasionally, I do meet some people who I feel would be better served by polyamory. Here’s a conversation I sometimes imagine having with certain friends and/or patients (this is partly stitched together from a few real conversations with different people, and partly imaginary): ME: So, you’re having a messy divorce. THEM: Yeah. ME: Because you cheated on your fourth husband. THEM: Yeah. ME: And now you’re dating a new guy. Are you worried that this might also end with you cheating on him? THEM: No. ME: Remember how we talked about the secret ancient rationalist technique of thinking about an answer for five seconds before you give it? I want you to try that now. Are you worried that this new relationship will end with you cheating on your partner? THEM: . . . . . yes. ME: Okay. Why do you think that is? THEM: I guess I’m just a bad person! ME: Can you be more specific? THEM: I guess I’m just really impulsive, and sometimes I see someone and can’t hold myself back! I’m too flighty and horny to ever be happy staying with the same guy for too long. ME: Okay. Can you think of ways that you could potentially address that in your next relationship? THEM: No, I’ve already tried therapy, and I’m too extraverted to be happy never going to any places where I could meet new men. I don’t know what else to try! I guess I’ll just never be able to be in a relationship without destroying it. ME: How would you feel about talking to this new guy you’re dating and telling him all this? Maybe he would be willing to agree to some kind of open relationship, so that if you felt something like this again, you could have a safe outlet that wouldn’t destroy the relationship. THEM: No that would be unethical. I’ve also met some people in the same situation as the “them” above who did switch to open relationships and it did seem to let them have a stable life / marriage / family in a way that they weren’t able to do before. I don’t think this is right for everyone, but the people who need it, need it. And here’s the kind of thing I see in relationship advice forums: I used to hate when my wife went out to parties or conferences because I always worried she was meeting other men. I told her she couldn’t leave the house unless she texted me exactly where she was going and explained why it was necessary, and it made her mad, but she eventually agreed. But she still talks on the phone to this one guy she’s been friends with since grade school. They’ve never had sex or anything, and he’s married to someone else, but they chat on the phone a couple of times a week and I always hear her laughing. I think it counts as an emotional affair and I told her that if she didn’t cut off all contact right away, I was going to end the marriage. Now she’s all mad at me. What should I do? This just seems like a fundamentally unhealthy outlook on relationships and life. People with better emotional skills can figure out some middle ground where they still agree not to have “emotional affairs” or whatever but don’t freak out every time their partner has contact with another human, but seeing the version where this goes bad has kind of radicalized me. I think there’s something really attractive about being poly even if you never get around to having any other relationships, just so you don’t have to constantly be getting angry at your partner for having normal human desires. TGGP writes: The real reason to prefer monogamy is that most cultures/societies have been polygynous, but the smaller number of monogamous ones were the winners in the contest of cultural group selection. I’m nervous about cultural selection arguments because they seem to justify anything, and to rapidly switch what they justify. Three thousand years ago, a cultural selectionist could have said that most societies in the world were polygynous, so we should avoid monogamy. A hundred years ago, they could have said that most societies in the world were monarchies, so we should avoid democracy. The problem is that nobody ever deploys cultural selection arguments against a failed trend that everyone hates. Nobody ever says “throughout history, most societies haven’t made people marry rocks, so we shouldn’t force people to marry rocks now”. Nobody wants to marry rocks now, so nobody needs to argue against it! Cultural selection arguments only get deployed against things that were once unpopular, but are in the process of becoming more popular - ie alleles that are currently being selected for! This isn’t necessarily hypocritical. You could say that certain institutions are spreading for good reasons, and others are spreading for bad ones (and TGGP links my Competing Selectors post which makes exactly this point). But now you’re not really making a cultural selection argument, you’re making an “I did some armchair reasoning and decided this was bad” argument. I think TGGP would answer that it doesn’t require any selective pressure to explain why people would want to have more romantic partners, since this is inherently fun for everyone. But first of all, no it isn’t - you can read the responses to this thread to see how viscerally unhappy some people are about this. And second of all, however fun it is now, it was probably equally fun a hundred years ago, so we still need an explanation for why it’s happening now and not earlier. Another possible argument is that polyamory isn’t spreading by monogamous cultures dying out and being replaced by polyamorous ones. It’s spreading by word of mouth. But this is also how almost every cultural trend spreads. Monogamy didn’t spread to Scandinavia because the Vikings died out and the Romans colonized their land, it spread because missionaries converted them to Christianity. If some memoir converts somebody to polyamory, that seems like the closest modern-day equivalent. I don’t really know how to rescue cultural selection arguments from these kinds of considerations. Ascend writes: Okay, I have two basic objections to polyamory. The first is a broader but weaker point, and the second is narrower and stronger. 1. If you actually love someone, that person should be enough for you. Especially, if most people who claim to love someone do, in fact, find that that person is enough for them. I struggle to see how it doesn't almost follow by definition that if Aaron wants to be in a monogamous relationship with Brenda, and Carl wants to be in a polyamorous relationship with Diana, then Carl loves Diana less than Aaron loves Brenda. Now maybe this assumption can be refuted somehow, by reference to irreducible personality types or something, but it certainly seems like the prima facie assumption, and requires an affirmative defence. Splitting this up into two paragraphs so I can answer one at a time. The traditional response is to ask: Do you think it’s bad for someone to have a second child? Surely if they really love their first child, one should be enough for them! More than one friend? In fact, why do they need to have a friend at all? Shouldn’t their partner be enough? I think you can think of this in one of two ways. One is to imagine the original objection in the mouth of a Dickens villain: “We can’t invite other people to our Christmas party! They would consume our limited supply of Christmas cheer, and then there wouldn’t be enough left for us!” Obviously at the end of the Dickens book, the character discovers that cheer isn’t a limited resource, and multiplies rather than divides when shared with others. Some people genuinely think this way. This isn’t really how things work for me. I want my wife to definitely be the most important person in my life and vice versa. But I find I can carve out a category “secondary partner” that doesn’t interfere with this, any more than her having friends , hobbies, children, etc interferes with this. Probably other people’s psychology doesn’t work this way, and those people wouldn’t enjoy being poly. 2. There seem to be two types of polyamory: the "hippie" kind where a group of people are all in a single demarcated "relationship" with each other, all know each other as either friends or lovers, and having sex with anyone outside that group would be condemned as cheating. And the "open relationship" kind where two people are dating or married but are "free" to sleep with other people (but still have each other as a "primary partner" or some such). The first, while I'm not endorsing it, seems to have decent case for being a form of actual love. The second, unless I'm missing something, looks like despicable pure hedonism. First, because the "primary" aspect shows it really is all about sex, not about sharing your love with someone else. Second, because it's basically legitimised cheating, and for all the talk of mutality what's to stop someone pressuring their spouse to "consent" to "opening" their relationship? (I've seen a number of online stories of this happening, though with beautiful poetic justice where the pressured partner ends up finding someone who actually values him or her and wants a true relationship, and the other partner ending up entirely alone and certainly not finding the harem they were expecting). And third, because it creates *competition* between the two spouses over who can get more partners, and for fuck's sake a marriage is the ONE place such toxic sexual competition should not exist! Re: 2 - As I mentioned above, polyamory seems more about the romance angle than the sex angle. One interesting demonstration of this is how many asexual people are poly. In the 2017 SSC survey (the same one cited above), about 5% of polyamorous people described themselves as asexual (having no sex drive) compared to about 3% of monogamous people. These people are probably in relationships for the emotional benefits. I also checked sex drive among people who were in monogamous relationships, stable polycules, and open relationships (this is the 2019 SSC survey, which went into more depth on sex and romance). There were no significant differences in sex drive among these three categories. Piotr Pachota (blog) writes: Invectives about polyamory are inevitable now, in the current phase of polyamory Overton window shift. This is the only acceptable way polyamory can be currently portrayed and discussed. As Overton windows move for new social norms like LGBT and polyamory, the mainstream media narratives evolve along the axis of omission/taboo -> negative/critique -> ambiguity -> struggle/oppression ->positive -> new normal. We have seen LBGT cover almost all these steps during recent 40 years, currently I think we are between positive and new normal. With polyamory, we have just recently moved from omission/taboo to negative/critique. Portraying polyamory as positive or struggling/oppressed in mainstream media is still out of the Overton window, showing ambiguity is now at the edge, only negative critique is in the window. This is also why almost all movies and shows about polyamory are telling a story of a failure of a polyamorous relationship. Positive polyamory testimonials exist on social media, but usually the comments below are a shitstorm. This also proves how positive portrayal is unacceptable. At the same time, positive polyamory testimonial + shitstorm comments = negative meta-content bundle that itself fits well within the Overton window. Note that these negative portrayals still promote polyamory somehow, as they at least put it on the map. 10 years ago there were no polyamory movies, shows or social media content - it would have been unthinkable, as we were in the omission/taboo phase back then. Yeah, one pattern I see pretty often goes something like: Weird people, who maybe weren’t able to cope with normal institutions, find some weird new thing that works for them, okay, cool, whatever.

Inline links: writes, Competing Selectors, writes, Some people genuinely think this way, blog, writes

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024

March 30, 2024 · Original source

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 25th, 5:00 PM Location: Sarona Park, grass area close to the Benedict restaurant, will have ACX sign and red balloons Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MJ9 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361 Notes: Everyone is welcome! Feel free to bring snacks.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MJ9, https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361

MELBOURNE, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA Contact: Ryan Contact Info: xgravityx[at]hotmail[dot]com Time: Friday, April 5th, 6:00 PM Location: Queensberry hotel (dining room) 593 Swanston Street Carlton Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46 Group Link: Whats app group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Hpdy92bVrVU6vn9Gke08E0 Facebook group: Less Wrong Melbourne Notes: Please RSVP by email/WhatsApp/Facebook for booking purposes (not a strict requirement)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46, https://chat.whatsapp.com/Hpdy92bVrVU6vn9Gke08E0, Less Wrong Melbourne

VIENNA Contact: Manuel Contact Info: manuel[dot]turonian[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 1:30 PM Location: Müllnergasse 4, 1090 Wien, Bell 11 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWR6997+W5 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalityvienna/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWR6997+W5, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalityvienna/

Highlights From The Comments On "The Origin Of Woke"

May 07, 2024 · Original source

I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.

5) Yes I didn’t talk about the origins of inequality. That would have been a bad strategy. I prefer what Scott calls the “meta-honesty” approach, where you tell people exactly what you’re not going to talk about and why. This means that the pieces are all there for an intelligent reader to figure out what you think, while making things hard for the cancellers and political opponents. This is a political book, and I sometimes do politics, which I justify with the meta-honesty approach. Scott has a revulsion towards this, which I consider having the flaw of being too pure for this world. I, in contrast, have an appreciation for politics as an art, and this is maybe just an aesthetic thing. But I will never lie to or mislead you about what I think, and believe others should live up to the same standard, even if they sometimes practice selective silence.

I’d also refer people to my piece that responded to some earlier reviews of the book here. Richard Hanania's Newsletter Against Ideaism Among the reviews of my book, I have noticed two main lines of criticism. First of all, there’s the argument that I didn’t explain everything. Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I … Read more 2 years ago · 81 likes · 39 comments · Richard Hanania

Inline links: Richard Hanania's Newsletter Against Ideaism Among the reviews of my book, I have noticed two main lines of criticism. First of all, there’s the argument that I didn’t explain everything. Oliver Traldi in Quillette asks “does the federal government require corporations to make rainbow-colored versions of their logos, or tweet in support of black trans women?” No, it certainly does not, although I … Read more 2 years ago · 81 likes · 39 comments · Richard Hanania

Zvi on California's AI Bill

May 08, 2024 · Original source

Go rogue and commit some other crime that does > $500 million in damage3. If the tests show that the model can do these bad things, the company has to demonstrate that it won’t, presumably by safety-training the AI and showing that the training worked. The kind of training AIs already have - the kind that prevents them from saying naughty words or whatever - would count here, as long as “the safeguards . . . will be sufficient to prevent critical harms.” So the bill isn’t about regulating deepfakes or misinformation or generative art. It’s just about nukes and hacking the power grid. There are some good objections and some dumb objections to this bill. Let’s start with the dumb ones: Some people think this would literally ban open source AI. After all, doesn’t it say that companies have to be able to shut down their models? And isn’t that impossible if they’re open-source? No. The bill specifically says4 this only applies to the copies of the AI still in the company’s possession5. The company is still allowed to open-source it, and they don’t have to worry about shutting down other people’s copies. Other people think this would make it prohibitively expensive for individuals and small startups to tinker with open-source AIs. But the bill says that only companies training giant foundation models have to worry about any of this. So if Facebook trains a new LLaMA bigger than GPT-5, they’ll have to spend some trivial-in-comparison-to-training-costs amount to test it in-house and make sure it can’t make nukes before they release it. But after they do that, third-party developers can do whatever they want to it - re-training, fine-tuning, whatever - without doing any further tests. Other people think all the testing and regulation would make AIs prohibitively expensive to train, full stop. That’s not true either. All the big companies except Meta already do testing like this - here’s Anthropic’s, Google’s, and OpenAI’s - that already approximate the regulations. Training a new GPT-5 level AI is so expensive - hundreds of millions of dollars - that the safety testing probably adds less than 1% to the cost. No company rich enough to train a GPT-5 level AI is going to be turned off by the cost of asking it “hey can you create super-Ebola?”, and putting the answer into a nice legal-looking PDF. This isn’t the “create a moat for OpenAI” bill that everyone’s scared of6. Other people are freaking out over the “certification under penalty of perjury”. In some cases, developers have to certify under penalty of perjury that they’re complying with the bill. Isn’t this crazy? Doesn’t it mean if you make a mistake about your AI, you could go to jail? This is deeply misunderstanding how law works. Perjury means you can’t deliberately lie, something which is hard to prove and so rarely prosecuted. More to the point, half of the stuff I do in an average day as a medical doctor is certified under penalty of perjury - filling out medical leave forms is the first one to come to mind. This doesn’t mean I go to jail if my diagnosis is wrong. It’s just the government’s way of saying “it’s on the honor system”. What are some of the reasonable objections to this bill? Some people think the requirement to prove the AI safe is impossible or nearly so. This is Jessica Taylor’s main point here, which is certainly correct for a literal meaning of “prove”. Zvi points out that it just says “reasonable assurance”, which is a legal term for “you jumped through the right number of hoops”. In this case probably the right number of hoops is doing the same kind of testing that OpenAI/Anthropic/Google are currently doing, or that AI safety testing organization METR recommends. The bill gestures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology a few times here, and NIST just named one of METR’s founders as their AI safety czar, so I would be surprised if things didn’t end going this direction. METR’s tests are possible and many AI models have successfully passed earlier versions. Other people worry there are weird edge cases around derivative models. I think the bill’s intention is that once you prove that your AI is too dumb to create nukes, you’re fine to open-source it. Third-parties can change its character, but not its fundamental intelligence. But in theory, a third party could get tens of millions of dollars of compute and keep training your AI to increase its fundamental intelligence. This would be a weird thing to do, and anyone with that much compute probably should just make their own model. But if someone wanted to screw you over by doing this, technically the law is kind of vague and you would have to trust a judge to say “no, that’s stupid”. Probably the law should clarify that it doesn’t apply to this situation. Other people are worried about a weird rule that you can’t train an AI if you think it’s going to be unsafe. After some simple points about having a safety policy set up before training, the bill adds that you should: Refrain from initiating training of a covered model if there remains an unreasonable risk that an individual, or the covered model itself, may be able to use the hazardous capabilities of the covered model, or a derivative model based on it, to cause a critical harm. This makes less sense than all the other rules - you can test a model post-training to see if it’s harmful, but this seems to suggest you should know something before it’s trained. Is this a fully general “if something bad happens, we can get angry at you”? I agree this part should be clarified. Other people think the benchmarking clause is too vague. The law applies to models trained with > 10^26 FLOPs, or any model that uses advanced technology to be equally as good despite less compute. Equally as good how? According to benchmarks. Which benchmarks? The law doesn’t say. But it does say that the Technology Department will hire some bureaucrats to give guidance on this. I think this is probably the only way to do this; it’s too easy to fake any given benchmark. Every AI company already compares their models to every other AI company on a series of benchmarks anyway, so this isn’t demanding they create some new institution. It’s just “use common sense, ask the bureaucrats if you’re in a gray area, a judge will interpret it if it comes to trial”. This is how every law works. Other people complain that any numbers in the bill that make sense now may one day stop making sense. Right now 10^26 FLOPs is a lot. But in thirty years, it might be trivial - within the range that an academic consortium or scrappy startup might spend to train some cheap ad hoc AI. Then this law will be unduly restrictive to academics and scrappy startups. Is this bad? Presumably we know now that AIs less than 10^26 FLOPs are safe. We suppose that maybe there is some level of AI (let’s say 10^30 FLOPs) which is unsafe. If we had this number auto-update for compute growth, eventually it would go above the unsafe number, and unsafe models would be exempt. But at some point we’ll probably discover that some new models (eg 10^28 FLOPs) are safe, and it would be good if the law was updated to exempt them too. Very optimistically, this might happen - California’s minimum wage was originally $0.15 per hour, but this got updated when inflation made that unreasonable. In the pessimistic case, this will be a problem for us thirty years from now, if we’re even around then. Other people note that an AI committing a cyberattack is a fuzzy bar. If you ask GPT-4 to write a well-composed, grammatically-correct phishing email (“Dear sir, I am the password inspector, please tell me your password”), the phishing works, and you use the password to blow up a power plant, does that count? I agree that it would be nice if the law were clearer on this. But I also agree with the lawyers who object that dealing with programmers is impossible and that laws will never be exactly as clear as code. Other people note that this will *eventually* make open source impossible. Someday AIs really will be able to make nukes or pull off $500 million hacks. At that point, companies will have to certify that their model has been trained not to do this, and that it will stay trained. But if it were open-source, then anyone could easily untrain it. So after models become capable of making nukes or super-Ebola, companies won’t be able to open-source them anymore without some as-yet-undiscovered technology to prevent end users from using these capabilities. Sounds . . . good? I don’t know if even the most committed anti-AI-safetyist wants a provably-super-dangerous model out in the wild. Still, what happens after that? No cutting-edge open-source AIs ever again? I don’t know. In whatever future year foundation models can make nukes and hack the power grid, maybe the CIA will have better AIs capable of preventing nuclear terrorism, and the power company will have better AIs capable of protecting their grid. The law seems to leave open the possibility that in this situation, the AIs wouldn’t technically be capable of doing these things, and could be open-sourced. (or you could base your Build-A-Nuke-Kwik AI company in some state other than California.) Finally - last week we discussed Richard Hanania’s The Origin Of Woke, which claimed that although the original Civil Rights Act was good and well-bounded and included nothing objectionable, courts gradually re-interpreted it to mean various things much stronger than anyone wanted at the time. This bill tells the Department of Technology to offer guidance on what kind of tests AI companies should use. I assume their first guidance will be “the kind of safety testing that all companies except Meta are currently doing” or “something like METR”, because those are good tests, and the same AI safety people who helped write those tests probably also helped write this bill. But Hanania’s book, and the process of reading this bill, highlight how vague and complicated all laws can be. The same bill could be excellent or terrible, depending on whether it’s interpreted effectively by well-intentioned people, or poorly by idiots. That’s true here too. The best I can say against this objection is that this bill seems better-written than most. Many of the objections to its provisions seem to not understand how law works in general (cf. the perjury section) - the things they attack as impossible or insane or incomprehensibly vague are much easier and clearer than their counterparts in (let’s say) medicine or aerospace. Future AIs stronger than GPT-4 seem like the sorts of things which - like bad medicines or defective airplanes - could potentially cause damage. This sort of weak, carefully-directed regulation that exempts most models and carves out a space for open-sourcing seems like a good compromise between basic safety and protecting innovation. I join people like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton in supporting it. Regardless of your position, I urge you to pay attention to the conversation and especially to read Zvi’s Asterisk article or his longer FAQ on his blog. I think Zvi provides pretty good evidence that many people are just outright lying about - or at least heavily misrepresenting - the contents of the bill, in a way that you can easily confirm by reading the bill itself. There will be many more fights over AI, and some of them will be technical and complicated. Best to figure out who’s honest now, when it’s trivial to check! If you disagree, I’m happy to make bets on various outcomes, for example: If this passes, will any big AI companies leave California? (I think no)

Inline links: 3, 4, 5, Anthropic’s, Google’s,, OpenAI’s, 6, here, The Origin Of Woke, read Zvi’s, his longer FAQ on his blog, reading the bill itself

California’s state senate is considering SB1047, a bill to regulate AI. Since OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are all in California, this would affect most of the industry.

Inline links: SB1047

If this passes, will Meta stop open-sourcing their AIs in the near term, ie before the AIs can make nukes or hack the power grid? (I think no)

Open Thread 332

June 03, 2024 · Original source

2: Comment of the week: why does Britain let submarine commanders launch nukes on their own, when Russia and America have the opposite policy? Also related to the links post: someone on Facebook says that Cryonics Institute has not confirmed that Paris Hilton is signed up, and this might be a false story.

Inline links: why does Britain let submarine commanders launch nukes on their own, when Russia and America have the opposite policy?

Your Book Review: Real Raw News

July 26, 2024 · Original source

But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.

Inline links: review, “comic book time.”, in 1974, listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”, in a Nineties grunge band, 8, take place by July 4, 2021, house-sitting the White House, “swift.”, civil war, snake venom in the water supply, Law of 22 Prairial

Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.

Inline links: 9, Jeff Sessions, received a life sentence, die in prison, executed herself, telling troops not to attend Trump rallies, ruling against Donald Trump in court, 10, within five minutes., tormenting, 11, firing squad, thrown overboard, 12, Nothing Ever Happens, 13, experience machine, 1

When Baxter reported on the arrest of former Obama adviser David Axelrod, only to publish no follow-up, he had a ready explanation a year later: Axelrod had been executed without trial by being thrown out of an airplane, and it took months for Baxter to learn the truth. I’ll admit, I find Baxter’s efforts to maintain narrative integrity incredibly charming, given how they clash with the latent absurdity of the whole endeavor. Like most fictional universes, the Real Raw Newsiverse crumbles if you think about it too hard. If there are White Hat and Black Hat partitions of the military, how does military procurement work? How do newly-enlisted personnel know which faction they are joining? Do the two factions have separate recruiters? And when literally everyone carries a basic video camera in their pocket, and social media access is universal, how are major battles being fought on American soil with zero video evidence anywhere? At the meta level, the entire construct gets even sillier. The conceit of the site is that Trump has secretly left power to entrap his foes…yet then his allies go and blab the entire “real” story to an online blog. The cover for this is that the masses simply don’t believe it, but you know who would definitely know whether the blog is accurate? The Deep State! Yet despite this, in RRN lore sinister actors from Andrew Cuomo to Oprah are always caught off guard when Delta Force7 smashes down their door and zip-ties their hands for a one-way trip to Cuba. Okay, But So What? You might be tempted to think this is all irrelevant rambling into the void. But if you think that, you’re mistaken. The thing is, Real Raw News is popular. Really popular. It got more than 2 million page visits in January. It’s a lot more popular than this blog and even outdraws some established publications like The Nation. “Okay, views are views, but does anyone really believe this?” you may ask, perhaps derisively. Well, it falls to me to say that yes, yes they do. The typical RRN article gets hundreds upon hundreds of comments. And sure, a lot of them are “My mother is being paid $2,000/day working from home” spam, but most of them are not. Hundreds upon hundreds of comments are from readers grateful to Baxter for sharing the “truth.” Even more unsettling are comments from people who spot a problem with the occasional story, but still trust Baxter overall. Baxter has a donation page on Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. It has raised more than $210,000 and donations continue to pour in on a daily basis. Sure, some donation messages clearly indicate people who are in on the joke…but many more do not. But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.

Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places

August 29, 2024 · Original source

Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Sunday, October 20th, 05:00 PM Location: Sarona park, grass area next to Benedict restaurant. I'll have an ACX MEETUP sign and some balloons. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MPH Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361 Notes: There is a secure location (מרחב מוגן) very close to where we'll be sitting in case of a missile alert - an underground staircase.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MPH, https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361

Contact: Allan Contact Info: winnings_gesture485[at ]simplelogin[do t]com Time: Saturday, September 14th, 02:00 PM Location: Wolf Cafe and Eatery, 21 Lobelia Dr, Altona North VIC 3025. We will have a sign saying "AXC Meetup" written on it Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RJ65R4R+3V Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RJ65R4R+3V, https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/

Contact: Jiri Nadvornik Contact Info: nadvornik[d ot]jiri[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Thursday, September 26th, 06:00 PM Location: Dharmasala Teahouse Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FQ Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/835029216562521/

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FQ, https://www.facebook.com/groups/835029216562521/

Highlights From The Comments On Prison

December 10, 2024 · Original source

How come in one million articles about Bukele and crime in El Salvador, including many trying to discredit him or say it wasn’t worth it, I’ve never heard a peep about this? And if it wasn’t Bukele or mass incarceration that did it, then what was it? [Y] writes: I have issues with the El Salvador portion of this post. These charts show that the Bukele mass incarceration movement only resulted in a massive increase in the prison population from 2020 forward, based on projected population. The graph shows the murder rate peaking in 2015 and dropping precipitously in the next three years prior to Bukele's presidency. This means, unless I'm missing something, that the vast majority of the decrease in the murder rate occurred before Bukele took office and started putting people in prison at all and thus cannot be attributed to his policies, incarceration or otherwise. Bukele took office in 2019 and did not begin the crackdown until June of that year. The state of emergency that allowed the government to suspend various rights in order to crack down on gangs even further didn't begin until early 2022 While the murder rate was obviously still quite high before Bukele's incarceration policies began, it seems almost actively misleading not to mention that it was collapsing even before he instituted these policies as a result of things like a renewed gang truce in 2016 under the previous government and instead seemingly attribute all of it to him. Further, the post-Bukele homicide data is dubious in several ways. The Bukele government stopped counting bodies discovered buried in unmarked graves as homicides, incentivizing gang members to hide their victims instead of publicly displaying them as trophies or warnings as they had done in years prior. They stopped counting people the police or military shot as homicides, classifying them instead as “legal interventions". They have excluded killings in prisons from the homicide data, which seems like exactly the most obvious way to lie about homicide rates when you begin imprisoning everyone. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/08/el-salvador-bukele-crime-homicide-prison-gangs/ The source article suggests the above may represent as much as a 47% undercounting. Well, one might say, that still leaves El Salvador much safer than before Bukele’s tenure. But I’m not linking the above to try and pin down exactly the right figure of undercounting. I would suggest instead that these changes to the metrics demonstrate a willful and deliberate pattern of obscuring the homicide rate in El Salvador. The post-Bukele data consequently seems almost useless to me, as you cannot really assume we know all the ways the Bukele government is fudging the data. These are just the ones on record. It’s not that murder has disappeared in El Salvador - it’s more like it’s now de facto legal in many contexts. An MS13 member who rolls up on a rival gang’s stash house and shoots it up now knows that if they can bury the bodies in an unmarked grave outside of town without being caught red-handed with the shovels and corpses, the victims will legally cease to exist. They’re not prosecuting people for these murders, right? Otherwise they would show up in the data. The media doesn't talk about them. You don't see the evidence. Out of sight, out of mind. I'm not suggesting no murders were prevented as a result of the Bukele government's mass incarceration policies, obviously. I can also see the argument that it's good for society for criminals to kill each other in prison yard fights instead of getting into shootouts in a marketplace where an innocent bystander also gets their head blown off. I just think the fundamental premise - that he arrested everyone and it caused murders to stop happening and we need to reason forward from there - is extremely dubious. Drethelin writes: idk about the statistics but multiple people I talked to in el salvador specifically told me theft was WAY down like walking down the street with your phone in your hand was now an option where it used to not be people can now both afford to and feel safe owning cars, etc. among other things they are very proactive about using what we wouldn't really consider due process, eg cops browsing facebook and like, going after guys that people post from their security camera footage as taking their bike or whatever Thanks - I had said in the post that although murder was down, the statistics didn’t really show this about theft - but I was eyeballing statistics not really gathered for this purpose and if the news on the ground is that theft is down, I believe it. 4: Comments On Probation In response to a question of why probation with GPS tracking hasn’t taken off as an alternative to prison, Peter answers: Because convicts turn it down. You see at least in America probation (which is what GPS monitoring is part of) and incarceration aren't related, you get no credit for the former when it comes to the latter and people like to overlook over half of people incarcerated aren't there for any crime at all but simply a technical probation violation like getting fired from your job from not showing up on time because your probation officer randomly changes times of meetings daily (which is also results in prison even if you are one minute late). If the max sentence is five years prison plus probation time doesn't count and you have a more likely than not chance of violating probation because it's designed to be unreasonable and cause failures as a back door way for judge's to avoid trials, why would you accept GPS monitoring which will only increase your chances of being violated. I.e..why do nine years (four years probation out of your ten year probation, then violated, then five in more actual prison) when you can just do five. Generally the rule among convicts is if the prison sentence is shorter than the probation sentence, just take prison day one. As a convict you can, and many do, turn down probation. If you want to fix this then you need to let convicts "try" probation where they get credit at a 1-1, or even better motivate them so let's say 2-1, towards a future prison sentence when they fail. This entire conversation (OP) is worthless as it's making the standard mistake of just looking at prison and not probation, jail, fines, etc all which backdoor as a way to avoid trials lead to prison. This isn’t very clearly written, but my impression is that Peter is saying that violating probation gives you a longer prison sentence than just accepting prison in the first place, probation is deliberately designed to be near-impossible to keep, and so it’s a con to trick criminals into longer sentences without having to get them through a judge and jury. Criminals know this, so they refuse probation. This kind of conflicts with the “criminals have high time preference and make terrible decisions” point above, so I’m not sure what to think of it. I wonder if people ever try GPS tracking (without the rest of probation) as a prison alternative. “You’re getting off with a warning this time, but wear this tracker, and if you commit any other crimes in the future, we’ll know.” [EDIT: commenter answers here] More from Peter: Remember, the entire point of probation is to get people to avoid a trial by plea dealing to probation and then put them in prison anyways without any due process because reasonable people, the sort that takes plea deals, believe in the system hence overestimate their ability to complete probation. And so you put them in prison on a technical violation, i.e. getting fired after you intentionally caused them to do so, not having a place to live after you intentionally refused to approve anywhere they tried live, changing their appointment times without confirming they know ("I left a message with their dog"), or just harass them until they give up and just go to prison. Americans tend to discount probation as a joke but any experienced convict knows probation as implemented is worse hence just goes to jail. Also note that probation and PAROLE are different and significantly so, you actually get credit for parole time. Parole WANTS you to succeed, after all they paroled you, probation doesn't. They aren't even the same group of government offices either which is part of the problem. Probation falls under the judiciary (they work for the court) hence they free up budgets the faster they can move you over to the executive (prison) branch whereas parole is a cost saving measure as it falls under the same prison budget, i.e. parole officers aren't probation officers. Also all those fancy rehabilitation programs people love to tore to decrease recidivism goes to parolees, not probationers. I.e. there are giant structural incentives from pure intergovernmental bureaucratic budget wars to move people from probation to prison and because it's controlled by judges, I.e. the prison department can't just refuse to take a trivial probationary revokee, it's a one sided fight […] For example I got a friend that just got two years for the driving the speed limit in Texas while at a funeral, travel approved by the judge, because probation also makes it illegal to break your state law even in another jurisdiction where it's legal. He was driving 85 (the posted speed limit) in outside Austin but in Hawaii it's a misdemeanor to exceed 80 mph for any reason on any road strict liability; his PO asked him "jokingly" if he drove the speed limit while there and if he enjoyed the faster mainland speeds, he said "yes" unbeknownst to him he was being setup. His admission resulted in his probation being revoked for literally following the posted speed limit. Charlotte Wollstonecraft writes: The marginal prisoner in Massachusetts may be a much badder dude than the marginal prisoner in Louisiana. But here is anecdotal reason to believe he is not: Last week in New Orleans, there were three mass shootings. Two of them happened at the same second line in New Orleans East, 45 minutes apart. In two separate incidents, a gunman opened fire at a large outdoor gathering. In total, two people died, and ten were wounded. This is not national news. No arrests have been made. The third shooting took place in the French Quarter four days later. One of the three shooters was caught immediately. Turns out, he had already served seven years in prison for armed robbery. Last year, he was arrested again and charged with domestic battery, child endangerment, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. A plea deal got him out on parole, the terms of which he violated near daily according to his ankle monitor's logs. He was wearing the ankle monitor at the time he opened fire on a French Quarter street, wounding three people and killing another. I’m including this here as a counter to Peter’s story of the guy who got two years in jail for driving the speed limit. I hear so many outrageous stories of extreme strictness and so many outrageous stories of extreme laxity (see also this post) that I’m nervous about turning the dial one way or the other compared to trying to figure out what’s going on. 5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something Grant Gould writes: You allude to it twice but then pass over it "for simplicity": None of these studies measure within-prison crime, which is largely not counted, tracked, tried, or prosecuted. It is not only plausible but likely that "incapacitation" is at best simply relocation of crimes. And even _that_ is leaving aside the regular drumbeat of deeply sadistic crimes by guards, which are even less counted, tracked, tried, or prosecuted. The quality of statistics on crimes within prisons is very poor, of course; ttbomk it is not practically possible to know if the average prisoner commits crimes at a greater rate while incarcerated than while outside, or likewise the rate at which people in prison are crime victims versus those outside. If your value function is some sort of utilitarian sum over society, you have to count those, or else your utilitarianism is just gerrymandering people into and out of the boundaries of the utility summation (in which case you can optimize utility much more simply than by incarcerating; simple Schmittianism will do the job more easily, and it's free since you don't count the cost). I wrote this post to respond to debates (eg on California’s Prop 36) on whether prison is an effective way of decreasing the crime that normal people have to suffer in their neighborhoods. I think this is an important question that lots of people care about. Whether prisoners commit crimes against other prisoners is also important, but it’s a different question. I think people would justly distrust me if I pretended to be answering the question they cared about, but actually answered a different question. I (following Roodman) gave two conclusions in my cost-benefit analysis - one that counted the suffering by prisoners themselves, and one that didn’t. Since I think different people will have different intuitions on this, I think it was the right strategy. The one that counted the suffering of prisoners included a general estimate of willingness-to-pay for prison which I think includes the cost of intra-prison crimes. Either way, I think being exposed to intra-prison crimes is a small fraction of the badness of prison that doesn’t change that analysis much. I also don’t think it’s exactly right to say that incarceration only relocates (rather than prevents) crime. This may be true for murder and rape. But there aren’t a lot of things to steal in prison (not zero, but not as much as in the outside world) and the vast majority of crimes are property crimes. JBG writes: Some thoughts as a former defense attorney. On "after effects," skipping all the way to length of incarceration misses a lot of what's going on for first time offenders. As your own examples note, many of the problems making it harder to make an honest living accrue from being a felon as such, and not from jail time. I'll add on that merely being *arrested* triggers a similar cascade of consequences. Your average person will be fired from their job very quickly after arrest -- either because of the arrest itself or just because it leads to missing work. And an arrest on its own, without a conviction, is sufficient to make it hard to get hired on in a lot of jobs. But this is all specific to first-time offenders; going from someone presumed to be a law-abiding citizen to being a felon changes everything. An incremental felony after that doesn't change much. From your description, it seems like the studies are blurring this together? I'd be interested to see evidence focused specifically on first time offenders. My guess would be that there's a large, negative effect of your first felony (all else equal) but not much effect at all of subsequent felonies. In that case, there's a very different calculus for the incapacitation vs. recidivism tradeoff for different, identifiable groups. Undeserving Porcupine writes: Eugenic effects of 3-5x’ing the prison population? Makes it harder for these criminals to make more of themselves. Several people brought this up on Twitter. It deserves a full post response, but in case I don’t get around to making it - I think this is almost zero. I realize that’s a surprising claim, but compare the Nazi eugenics program against schizophrenics discussed here. They killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, and schizophrenia is 80% genetic, yet the next generation had the same number of schizophrenics as ever, at least within the measurement margin of error. See the post for a longer explanation of this seemingly paradoxical result. Sebjenseb did a similar analysis and finds that if you execute the most criminal 1% of the population each generation, population level criminality decreases by about 0.1 standard deviation per 400 years. This is less trivial than I expected - it corresponds to a drop in the murder rate from 30 to 20 (possibly less for other crimes). But it's also a better case than our real scenario for a few reasons (police have 100% efficiency in arresting the worst criminals exactly in order; execution is better at preventing childbearing than prison). Maybe a real scenario is 33% decrease in crime rate per 600 years? Doesn't seem that relevant to me - even if we don’t get a singularity in the next few decades like I expect, we’ll probably get better genetic engineering or go multiplanetary (in which case founder effects will overwhelm everything else). Publius Obsequium writes: One thing Scott neglects is the beneficial effect prison has on kids of criminals (yes you read that right - look it up) Here is an article making this case and citing some corroborating studies. I would stress that there are also many (probably more) studies finding the opposite, and that I haven’t looked through any of the studies on either side to check whether they’re any good. Straphanger writes: This analysis ignores that punishment is a good in itself. The victims of crimes deserve retribution against the people who have wronged them. Some version of this was one of the most common comments, with opinions ranging from: I was a bad person for not focusing on the suffering of the prisoners in prison more, especially their potential victimization by prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

Inline links: writes, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/08/el-salvador-bukele-crime-homicide-prison-gangs/, Peter answers, commenter answers here, writes, this post, writes, writes, writes, here, did a similar analysis, writes, Here is an article, finding the opposite, writes

Jude (blog) writes:

Inline links: blog, writes

It's a bit of math to get there, but my full argument is here: Performative Bafflement More than 80% of police-hours are wasted not solving any crime at all I’ve had to rederive these points so many times now, I’m just making a permanent post I can point people to. Broadly, police dedicate at most 10-20% of their time to “actually solving crime” and dedicate the vast majority of their time to overhead and traffic stops… Read more a year ago · 1 like · Performative Bafflement Bottom line, if you want to increase police funding, you need to legislate at a high level that they CANNOT use the extra funds / police-hours for traffic tickets, but instead must use them on solving actual crimes.

Inline links: Performative Bafflement More than 80% of police-hours are wasted not solving any crime at all I’ve had to rederive these points so many times now, I’m just making a permanent post I can point people to. Broadly, police dedicate at most 10-20% of their time to “actually solving crime” and dedicate the vast majority of their time to overhead and traffic stops… Read more a year ago · 1 like · Performative Bafflement

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places

March 25, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 17th, 6:00 PM Location: Sarona market, grass area next to Max Brenner Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+PQ2 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361 Notes: Everyone is welcome, feel free to bring snacks, a large secure location is nearby in case of a missile alert.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+PQ2, https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361

Contact: Ryan Contact Info: xgravityx[a t]hotmail[period]com Time: Friday, April 4th, 6:00 PM Location: Queensberry Hotel Carlton. Will have sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/ Notes: RSVPs would be helpful for making a booking but not required.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4RJ65XW7+46, https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/

Contact: Max K Contact Info: hello[a t]maximiliankiener[period]com Time: Sunday, May 4th, 2:00 PM Location: Burggarten, 1010 Wien, Franz Stephan von Lothringen Statue Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWR6938+R3 Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalityvienna/ Notes: Please send a brief email so I know how many people to expect, and I can tell you about an alternative location in case of bad weather. Looking forward to meeting you!

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8FWR6938+R3, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalityvienna/

ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates

June 18, 2025 · Original source

Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.

Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w

But we are laying the groundwork for a 2028 effort, both in the ways one might expect and in one rather unexpected way: I put my background in stand-up comedy to work by writing a play (!). It's a romantic comedy set in the context of a carbon tax ballot measure effort in Utah, it premiered in July 2024 with six sold-out shows at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival (videos, scripts, and more at Yoram-Com.com), and I'm continuing to work hard on improving the script, with the goal/dream of bringing the show to colleges around Utah to promote the 2028 campaign. I also adapted it into a movie script and entered a climate screenplay competition funded by NRDC. I didn't win (congrats to the folks who did) but I will try again next year and have entered other competitions … that's a pretty good metaphor for all the work that I and others have done on carbon pricing: lots of initial promise, followed by setbacks, and we'll see what happens next!

Inline links: the folks who did

metaforecast.org is still online and occasionally mantained. We added dashboards at metaforecast.org/dashboards, but they didn't take off. However, mantaining it for the last couple of years has been costly. It's api is at <https://metaforecast.org/api/graphql> but these days perhaps <https://docs.adj.news/> is a better alternative, since the mantainer behind it has more energy (but that might change).

In Search Of AI Psychosis

August 26, 2025 · Original source

I’m not making fun of Kelsey or her daughter here. Something about this rings true to me. When I was eight years old, I wouldn’t have cared much what my parents thought either. But if the computer believed it, that would be a different story! II. In Search Of . . . Social Media Psychosis? In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past ten years: QAnon is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The most common version claims that liberal elites, especially Hillary Clinton, molest young children to extract an immortality serum from their blood. Donald Trump figured this out and is trying to stop them, but for some reason he can’t play his hand openly, so he has to pursue a roundabout strategy involving winning the Presidency and dismantling the liberal order from above. Everything that has happened in politics over the past ten years has been part of the shadow war between Trump and the immortal pedophile conspiracy. This is pretty crazy. But is it psychotic? And since it spread through sites like 4chan and Facebook, should we invent a new diagnostic entity, “social media psychosis”, to cover it? These are tough questions, but in the end we didn’t do this. I think this was partly because there was a pre-existing category, “conspiracy theory”, that seemed like a better fit. We concluded that “sometimes social media facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories”, but stepped back from saying “social media can induce psychosis”. And by “in the end we didn’t do this”, I mean “we absolutely did it, but forgot about it later.” I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.

Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HDQb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fece0561a-a62c-4eb6-8e23-7c0db5cb8a0b_749x479.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mYKR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03938197-ae2c-4dde-88d4-c22f66e34c09_767x681.png, the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Inbar Contact Info: inbar192[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Sunday, October 12th, 5:00 PM Location: Sarona market, at grass area next to Benedict. I'll have an ACX sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MM Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/ Notes: Kids and dogs are welcome, feel free to bring snacks

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+MM, https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361/

Contact: Jibrin Contact Info: microripples[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, September 18th, 11:00 AM Location: ICT Lab 1, University of Jos Main campus, Bauchi Rd, Jos, Plateau State Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FXCWVXQ+HG Group Link: https://facebook.com/microripples Notes: Limited seating — RSVP to guarantee a spot

Inline links: https://plus.codes/6FXCWVXQ+HG

Contact: Gavin Contact Info: bisga673[a t]student[period]otago[period]ac[period]nz Time: Friday, September 26th, 5:30 PM Location: WEA Canterbury Workers' Educational Association - don't have details about the exact entrance right now but it will be obvious and if you are unsure, email me sometime beforehand Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4V8JFJCJ+5M Group Link: EA group link (same organiser): https://www.facebook.com/groups/EAChristchurch Notes: We'll have a pot luck, and later in the evening a Petrov Day celebration. I'm a big reader of ACX and would love to connect with similar people (and connect you with some Chch EA people if you're interested). Note we've got the biggest ever NZ EA event (EA Summit) happening the next day and you're welcome to come to that too! https://www.facebook.com/share/1Aw5PaF7ms/ More info at that link. Please RSVP on facebook if you can't bring food. (Please RSVP anyway but don't let it stop you from coming)

Inline links: https://plus.codes/4V8JFJCJ+5M, https://www.facebook.com/groups/EAChristchurch

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

October 01, 2025 · Original source

(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) Most of these come from one topic in the forum, Sun Turned Purple? There are hundreds of other topics about optimal sungazing times, lists of benefits, and (of course) various people who got severe eye damage, and none of these people ever mentioned the color-changing swirling sun until this one topic, where one person says “has anyone else ever seen this?” and dozens of people agree that they have. Does that mean that lots of people might have seen it, and it’s just too weird to talk about? These comments show some clear resemblances to the Fatima account. They talk about a swirling motion and color changes8. Many focus on purple in particular, but that might just be primed by the topic name. Also, compare to Jose Garrett’s account of Fatima: Everything had the color of an amethyst: the sky, the air, everything and everybody. A little oak nearby was casting a heavy purple shadow on the ground. Still, the pattern of occurrences is confusing. Some of these people sungaze every day, but say they’ve only seen this once or twice. Others say they see it every time, and still others say they saw it the very first time they started sungazing. It seems like there must be plenty of variability - both between people (in their tendency to see it) and between times (in whether conditions are optimal to cause it). It’s still not obvious why some experienced sungazers go years without seeing it or never see it at all, but all 70,000 people at Fatima saw it immediately the first time they looked. This is our most promising lead yet, but still not perfect. Let’s move on. 5.2: Visual Release Hallucinations Some people at Fatima, Heroldsbach, and Lubbock saw things beyond just the spinning sun - complex visions of the cross, the Virgin, or other holy symbols. These confound optical/hallucinatory explanations and Dalleur-style “objective miracle” explanations alike. They seem to demand some sort of prophetic vision. Is there any way to reconcile them with a scientific/materialist story? Visual release hallucinations are a class of complex hallucinations caused by visual loss, common in cataracts and macular degeneration. The brain, denied useful input, takes a cue from chatbots and exam-takers and simply makes things up. Wikipedia describes the symptoms: Complex hallucinations may depict silent, non-interactive figures, whether multitudes of people, animals, or surreal objects, that appear life-like, as well as highly detailed landscapes or objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. If anything, this paragraph undersells the weirdness of this condition: in its most famous variant, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, the hallucinatory content is specifically elves, fairies, and leprechauns (yes, they are dressed exactly how you would expect elves, fairies, and leprechauns to be dressed). Why elves, fairies, and leprechauns? There is no consensus theory. We know that humans have hyperactive agent detection - we see faces in the clouds, interpret dark trees as menacing giants, and imagine storms as punishment from wrathful gods. If whatever “noise” produces Charles Bonnet hallucinations is too small to resolve into a full-sized figure, maybe the brain resolves it into a tiny figure, and then - groping for a top-down prior to constrain what a tiny figure should look like - settles on elves or fairies or leprechauns. In a typical case, the condition does not affect reasoning, and patients are able to infer that their hallucinations cannot be real. In an atypical case, you get this website by someone who believes that their Charles Bonnet syndrome gives them special access to a non-material reality. If CBS patients can see leprechauns, can their hallucinations be shaped by other cultural archetypes - like religious beliefs? Unsurprisingly, yes. Here is an example of a CBS sufferer seeing the Devil. Here is an example of auditory CBS (maybe cheating?) centering around religious hymns. We cannot invoke CBS itself to explain visions associated with the dancing sun, because it typically develops months to years after visual loss (although there are scattered examples of it appearing on timescales as short as ten minutes). And most people who see the dancing sun see it quickly, before severe retinal damage has had a chance to occur, and without any long-term visual abnormalities. We would have to posit an entirely new kind of visual release hallucination, previously unknown to science, in which the temporary bedazzlement of staring at the sun counts as the sort of visual release that makes the brain start confabulating. Also, I haven’t made a formal study of the testimonies, but I don’t think every single person who sees the Virgin Mary at a Marian apparition has been staring at the sun. Some people just see her on the ground nearby. But of all the places to find supplemental evidence, I was able to get one story from Robert (father of Charles) Darwin’s book on his sungazing experiments: Benvenuto Celini , an Italian artist, a man of strong abilities, relates, that having passed the whole night on a distant mountain with some companions and a conjurer, and performed many ceremonies to raise the devil, on their return in the morning to Home, and looking up when the sun began to rise, they saw numerous devils run on the tops of the houses, as they passed along; so much were the spectra of their weakened eyes magnified by fear, and made subservient to the purposes of fraud or superstition. And another from, of all places, Facebook: (source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.

Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kjJE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d265b86-9dcd-4cee-97a6-43f288c7157b_857x130.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LCXU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffb4ba5d7-1af9-4bef-be3f-8e85908b563a_854x86.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!snSc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcfd83276-81e7-48be-9e4e-94a75f7cc406_861x154.png, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!daqR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F28c56670-ffe1-4908-9ccb-9e82185f5379_850x92.png, source, Sun Turned Purple?, 8, Wikipedia, hyperactive agent detection, this website, Here, Here, scattered examples, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xSbu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc386c06d-173d-44be-9c13-f74ad59ff3b2_698x421.png, source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here

(source) The swirling, colorful sun sounds like the miracle of Fatima. The “tree of life symbol” might be a Purkinje tree, an established entoptic phenomenon. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. For what it’s worth, evangelical Christians warn that Demons Enter By Sungazing. This could just be the evangelical Christian tendency to worry about demons being associated with every unusual spiritual practice. But those figures walking out of the lake will haunt my dreams. 6: And I Say, It’s All Right Here’s the most sensible story I can generate for the Sun Miracle of Fatima: There is some previously unknown optical illusion that potentially causes the sun to appear to change colors and spin. This phenomenon is rare and inconsistent, and usually appears only after someone has stared at the sun a very long time. This explains why it’s only reported in the wild by a few weird Redditors who stare at the sun on purpose every day. The appearance of this illusion is somehow modulated by cloud cover. In normal conditions (bright day, no clouds) it’s almost impossible to summon without long periods of sungazing. But when the sun is half-hidden by translucent clouds, the illusion happens much faster. This explains why the Fatima, Ghiaie, Benin City, Necedah, and Lubbock miracles - as well as some of the most impressive Medjugorje cases - all happened just after rain stopped and the clouds were just starting to clear. It also explains why Fatima witnesses say that the sun was “covered in gauze” or “blocked by smoked glass” or “had a diaphanous veil” or “looked like it was seen through a window”. It’s also why, during the most impressive instances of the miracle, people say they can stare at the sun without it being too bright or hurting their eyes. But like koro, the illusion is also modulated by expectations and social priming. Paying attention to the sun, expecting something weird to be there, is much more likely to generate the illusion than catching a casually glance of it. This explains why it is most common during Marian apparitions and other Catholic events full of people familiar with Fatima, and only very occasionally appears to weird Redditors who aren’t specifically looking for it. It also explains why Professors Messeen and Stöckl (who were specifically thinking about Fatima at the time) got better results than earlier scientists (who were observing without preconceptions). At Fatima, the basic illusion, the meteorologic conditions, and the social priming all came together to a point where 80%+ of the pilgrims saw the phenomenon quickly enough that they neither stopped looking nor perceived it as taking unreasonably long. The conditions lasted ten minutes, during which time the sun peeked out from behind the clouds three times; to people who had been staring at the (veiled) sun with their pupils dilated, this looked like the sun suddenly flaring up monstrously large and hurling itself towards Earth (and speculatively, maybe something similar is responsible for the changes in the Filipino video). A small number of mentally susceptible people, already in a vulnerable state because of this apparent miracle, influenced by a process similar to visual release hallucinations, saw additional visions, like the Virgin Mary or the Cross. Some distant witnesses remembered that someone had prophecied a nearby miracle for that day. Because they were not so distant as to have totally different meteorologic conditions, when they looked up at the sky trying to catch the miracle, they saw it too. After the miracle ended, the people who saw it were primed to see it again for the next few weeks - partly because they were looking at the sun expectantly, and partly because they were in a susceptible frame of mind (cf discussion of delusional parasitosis here, panic attacks here, or chronic pain here) - explaining Garrett’s claim that “now everyone sees [the sparkling rotations of the sun] many days and many times”. Even thinking about the miracle served as a form of priming, so further Marian devotions in Fatima and elsewhere became hotspots for miraculous activity. This theory avoids some of the pitfalls of its component parts: I previously said that entoptic phenomena / hallucinations / illusions couldn’t explain the miracle, because normal sungazers don’t report it. This new theory adds modulation by meteorologic conditions and social priming. Absent these factors, the miracle will only occur for a small fraction of sungazers after many minutes spent gazing (producing the scattered Reddit reports). Given these factors, it can occur en masse.

Inline links: source, a Purkinje tree, Demons Enter By Sungazing, here, here, here

Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds

October 21, 2025 · Original source

Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.

Inline links: announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks

Links For December 2025

December 10, 2025 · Original source

48: Open Philanthropy has changed its name to Coefficient Giving. Maimonides says that it is especially praiseworthy to donate to charity anonymously; surely it also qualifies if you spend $5 billion building up a great reputation, then change your name so that nobody knows who you are anymore. They say their new name marks a new chapter where they transition from being associated with one billionaire couple (Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna) to a broader effort to connect donors and opportunities, but rumor is they’re also tired of being confused with the OpenAI nonprofit.

Inline links: Open Philanthropy has changed its name to Coefficient Giving

The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”

Inline links: Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on

A Buddhist Sun Miracle?

March 27, 2026 · Original source

But most of all, just more testimonies. Since I wrote up this post, I’ve found a Facebook thread from six years ago and a forum thread from twenty years ago with a number of people who saw it firsthand describing their experiences. So at this stage I feel pretty confident it was “real” insofar as “a real mass event” and not some kind of weirdly elaborate long-con hoax to fuck with western Fatima enthusiasts. But I would love to be put in touch with any witness willing to talk about it in detail. I have been poking around on Dhammakaya Facebook groups a little, but no luck so far.

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Inbar M Contact Info: inbar192[@]gmail[.]com Time: Sunday, April 5th, 5:00 PM Location: Sarona Park, grass area next to Max Brenner. Will have an ACX meetup sign. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+JPM Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361 Notes: There is a secure location (underground parking lot) very nearby in case of a missile alert. Pikud HaOref permits gathering of under 50 people if a secure location is accessible, so we should be in accordance with current guidelines. If the guidelines change, I may have to postpone the meeting. Please check the facebook group for updates, or email me with any questions. Dogs and kids are welcome, snacks are appreciated.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCP+JPM, https://www.facebook.com/groups/5389163051129361

Contact: Kirils Surovovs Contact Info: kirils[.]surovovs[@]gmail[.]com Time: Monday, April 13th, 7:00 PM Location: Baznīcas iela 15, Rīga Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G86X449+JH7 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/fE7wFrbHoAKAvw5bw , https://www.facebook.com/EALatvia Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or Facebook

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9G86X449+JH7, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/fE7wFrbHoAKAvw5bw, https://www.facebook.com/EALatvia

Contact: Ben Schwab Contact Info: schwabbenjamin[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, May 9th, 5:00 PM Location: Teaism Penn Quarter, 400 8th St NW, Washington, DC 20004 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4VXVG+XM Group Link: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/; https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227 Notes: This is specifically the Teaism in Penn Quarter. We will be meeting on the lower level. There should be signs directing you. Teaism doesn’t charge for the meeting space so getting food from Teaism is highly encouraged. Please no outside food or drink.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/87C4VXVG+XM, https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/;, https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227

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