Hussam

25. Optimistic, liberal, and kind. I like climbing, live theatre, animals, and smoothies. EA-adjacent. Mostly tweet about Politics and Culture.

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@alz_zyd_ Helping a surgeon save an hour is worth more than helping a fast food worker save an hour.

The person that mows the lawn of a person who builds an AI contributed to the building of the AI. The person that mows the lawn of an unemployed person doesn’t do the same.

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@ylecun @paulg @ZhugeEX Or much of European wealth is in the form of inheritance and there is no real path to get there through employment.

Always interesting to see how much disdain some otherwise progressive people have for people earning their way to an upper-middle class life rather than inheriting

[𝗙𝗜𝗔𝗚𝗢 🇩🇪 @fiago7]

I want a country to win the World Cup this year that‘s never won it.

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@shoottheducks @worstall That would reduce the percentage of Americans that would survive brain cancer, as only the more severe cases would be diagnosed.

Also America tends to have some of the highest cancer diagnosis rates (mostly bc they test more) so that seems unlikely.

[vivian🌐 @vivian39_]

:(

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@soulfasho @UsingLyft This is not what you were initially arguing.

I mean, if that was the original argument, where do you think the 40mil figure comes from?

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@rocketalignment The crazy part is Brown doesn’t even grade really.

You can choose to not receive grade for any class, but people still choose to cheat.

[funplings (berlin: 7/1-7/7 ➡️ prague: 7/8-7/12) @funplings]

the main reason i'm an ally is that the only women who will fuck me are bisexual

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

Usha Vance: I didn’t need to convert to Catholicism and try to be someone I’m not like JD because I grew up in a happy, stable household.

I love this woman. JD can rewrite every aspect of his own identity in order to gain power. But he can’t change Usha.

[Dan Nouement @nomanautomata]

The problem with rationalists is that their natural predators, humanities majors, became too weak to bully them

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@liminalMarch @JJ_McCullough @Noahpinion This is so funny bc the majority of Canadians that insist on a distinct, Franco-Anglo Canadian identity are white.

As a person of colour myself, I can tell you that most people, especially in western Canada are culturally far more American than white people.

[J.J. McCullough @JJ_McCullough]

I am sick of this narrow framing that posits Canadians as "importing" US ideas. Canada and the US are part of a shared continental culture where ideas spread organically. This is like saying Texas conservatism is an import from New York because that's where Bill Buckley was from.

[Heinz @Snowmannequin]

bit of an epidemic of people who basically only work and exercise

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@JJ_McCullough The guy is delusional. He wants to limit interprovincial mobility by making University education subsidies conditional on staying in the province.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Animal welfare is one of the most important issues in the world today - and so we should focus *less* on veganism and vegetarianism.

That was Lewis Bollard's argument when he came on the podcast:

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Hussam @ShaooSky]

@JimDMiller In a US singularity scenario, what do you think happens to Canada?

Do you think Canada gets absorbed into the US in some sense?

[Joshua Tindall @jd_tindall]

Recursive self-improvement going from being a ridicule-worthy fringe sci-fi concept to a completely normalized part of the discourse which is “obviously the plan” is one of the more dramatic Overton window shifts I’ve experienced

There’s something disorienting about it, like if the sky suddenly turned red, and everyone acted like it had been that way all along

[Tsung Xu @tsungxu]

Many of the most ambitious and capable people had no idea what they would do after college or even high school.

They may already have been 99.999th percentile in one or more areas already. If not, and they did the thing they were obsessed with, they quickly became that good.

Credentialism just misses how much obsession matters in anything worth doing man. These people will outwork you because they are more hungry, they will outlast you because they are zealots on a mission that maybe only they can achieve.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Land acknowledgments presuppose a theory of real property ownership developed through English Common Law that we then map onto Native populations who had no such system.

By imposing English property theory on them, we subjugate Native populations to Western ways of thinking.