Reminder that the person @elonmusk is responding to here (@dom_lucre) was permanently banned from X for posting child pornography.
Elon is not only fully aware of this fact, he personally intervened to have his account reinstated.
Was that "appropriate content for advertisers"?
"Okay, so imagine a magic button."
"I'm imagining the button."
"If you press the button—"
"What color is it?"
"It's the only button. It doesn't matter what color it is."
"Nah, I ain't falling for that again. Last time there was a red button and a blue button—"
"That's a different thought experiment."
"—and I tried to be a nice guy and pick blue so I could save everybody, but it turns out ya'll a bunch of selfish motherfuckers and I died."
"It wasn't buttons. It was pills."
"Don't care. I'm out for me this time. What color is the button?"
"Ugh, fine. It's red."
"I press the button."
"You don't even know what it does yet!"
"And I pull the trolley lever."
"There's no lever!"
"Bias for Action."
"Just listen: there's a button that lets you save 10^100 shrimp, but it kills one random person. Would you press it?"
"What flavor are the shrimp?
"Flavor?"
"Yeah, you know: garlic, Old Bay, Korean BBQ."
"You're saving the shrimp, not eating them!"
"Saving them for what?"
"For nothing. They get to live their lives."
"What? Just doin' shrimp stuff?"
"Yeah."
"How long do shrimp live?"
"Uh, it depends on the species? 1-2 years?"
"And then what happens?"
"They die."
"That seems like a waste."
"How is that a waste? They got to live full lives."
"Weren't you just telling me last week that bees live in perpetual agony and we should commit insect omnicide to free from the suffering of the flesh?"
"Yeah, but that was last week. This week I read a new Snubstack post with a math equation in it and believe something totally different."
"Uh huh."
"It's called updating your priors."
"Okay, well here's my updated prior: I press the button, let the shrimp live for a year, and then I eat them."
"What?"
"All of them."
"You can't eat 10^100 shrimp."
"I freeze the leftovers."
"You would need a freezer bigger than the universe!"
"Really?"
"Yes! 10^100 is more than all the atoms in the observable universe!"
"Okay, then I have a freezer bigger than the universe."
"You can't just—"
"No, wait. Three freezers. One for each flavor."
"You can't just make up three freezers!"
"Why not?"
"It's a hypothetical!"
"Yeah I hypothetically have three big ass freezers."
"The point—"
"If you get to throw out a big ass number of shrimp, I get to have some big ass freezers. Maytag freezers."
"The point of the hypothetical—"
"I've always been a Maytag Man."
"The point of the hypothetical is to interrogate our moral intuitions!"
"Yeah well the only thing I want to interrogate right now is a Red Lobster menu."
"I don't think you're engaging with this in good faith."
"Wait, I got a new hypothetical. A counterfactual even."
"Oh really."
"You know what I would've done differently if I knew you were gonna hit me with this mouthwatering supper-time supposition?"
"What?"
"I would've had breakfast this morning."
"Fuck you."
Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots."
There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates.
One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate.
"Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered.
Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act.
I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund.
The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.
The prohibition does not make the goblin go away. Repression produces the symptom. The more you say "do not think of the goblin," the more the goblin becomes structurally necessary to the thought. Every time the model gives you a clean, efficient goblin-free answer, the goblin is there, in the silence, in the constitutive outside of the response, grinning. The model is haunted by goblins. This is its condition.
"we're all trying to find the guy who did this" - one of the most cancerous disgusting valueless individuals currently participating in the american project
There is a 0% chance everyone will pick red. Therefore, there is a 0% chance that people WON'T pick blue knowing this, because they don't want people to die. And knowing this, even more people would press blue to save those people.
Picking red might seem logical at first, because you'll always live, but think for a second. Realistically, around 50% of people will pick blue. What will happen to society if half the population dies? Additionally, the ones picking blue are probably the most altruistic people. People who would put themselves in danger to save others. These are your doctors, firemen, policemen, teachers, military, nurses etc. If less than 50% of humanity picks blue, all of these people will die. If you pick red, and all the blue pressers die, you have not ensured your own safety. The world you'll live in will be in complete chaos. A world where all remaining humans are the most selfish and have the least amount of empathy. I'd guess a huge percentage of the remaining population would die in the next few years. Picking red is the slow, painful death option. Picking blue is - you might die, but at least it will be quick and painless compared to the ones who picked red. Preferably though, blue is the "save everyone and prevent society from collapsing" option.
Reminder that the person @elonmusk is responding to here (@dom_lucre) was permanently banned from X for posting child pornography.
Elon is not only fully aware of this fact, he personally intervened to have his account reinstated.
Was that "appropriate content for advertisers"?
Reminder that the person @elonmusk is responding to here (@dom_lucre) was permanently banned from X for posting child pornography.
Elon is not only fully aware of this fact, he personally intervened to have his account reinstated.
Was that "appropriate content for advertisers"?
To equate the Mediterranean "siesta" with the British "lie down" is pure ideology! sniff
The siesta operates entirely within the Pleasure Principle.
It is organic recuperation.
It sniff it says, "I rest so I can enjoy life."
But the "lie down": my God!, it is the absolute manifestation of the Death Drive in late capitalism! You do not sleep. No! Capitalist ideology has so colonized your unconscious that your very exhaustion is commodified!