Coleman Hughes

Conversations w/Coleman Podcast | Forbes 30 Under 30 | @theFP | Speaking Inquiries: [email protected]

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

Today is the day!

My first book, "The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America," is now out in fine bookstores everywhere!

The Audiobook is read by yours truly!

https://t.co/61VkZ3ooM2

[Bradford G Smith (Brad) @ALScyborg]

Coleman Hughes sits down with Daryl Davis. Forty years of befriending Klansmen — one conversation at a time — until more than 200 walked away. He has the robes to prove it.

The method isn’t a speech. Sit with them. Let them say the worst thing to your face. Answer with a question. Family lasts longer than a presidency. Kids notice skin color; adults teach them what to hate. And the thing that gets through isn’t rage — it’s that he doesn’t hate them back.

This one stays with you. Watch it.

@coldxman @DarylDavis

https://t.co/hKlUibmDF6

[Liza Libes @pensandpoison]

A disturbing amount of contemporary literary fiction can be summarized as “a highly educated person in a major city is vaguely unhappy about something.”

[Amsal @MadhaniAmsal]

ayn here. even a heroic dose of amphetamines would not make me valorize this woman, but open to reconsidering if she goes into construction or metallurgy

[Brendan May @bmay]

This morning’s chat with Claude hasn’t exactly filled me with confidence.

[Steve Jurvetson @FutureJurvetson]

Foreign accounts can drive the conversation on American AI policy.

We have the data. Coxon's resignation post from Anthropic received 165M views and sparked a "groundswell of urgency over AI regulation in Congress" (per today's front page WSJ)

Coxon's post reveals some interesting hidden patterns about who is amplifying our political debates online. It drew 76% of its reposts (spreading the news) from foreign countries. The top two were India and Indonesia.

In contrast, when @ParkerThayer, an investigative researcher, posted his own analysis (expressing serious skepticism about the circumstances of the post and alleging that its amplification was coordinated), he got 6.6M views and drew most of its engagement from the U.S., with only 34% from foreign countries, led by Canada and the UK.

Sure, people overseas have a stake in what the U.S. chooses to do on AI. But ultimately it is us Americans who will decide our own public policy. Don't be fooled by what's trending.

A big thank you to @ElonMusk and X for making country of origin visible, which makes analyses like this even possible. Last year's “Great Unmasking" on X was the first time anyone shined a spotlight onto this subject. As much of our political conversation shifts online, it will be increasingly important to understand where engagement is coming from.

Source (with more analyses of foreign influence): https://t.co/GduSKImETi

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

One major reason I’m not an AI doomer is that I have a much lower estimate of the direct power of intelligence.

This might seem odd, given some of my other content, but let me explain:

All the achievements of the human mind only arrive when we cooperate at scale, and involve a lot of iteration and real-world bottlenecks. Newton’s discoveries ultimately enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give Newton the power to fly. If he were isolated, his physics would be almost entirely useless to him.

And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an airplane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Powered flight was the result of tons of iteration, which is to say evolutionary computation. So was the car. Very few of the inventions that revolutionized the world were “one-shotted”. To be sure, having smart nodes in your evolutionary computation makes it faster. Rather than random search as in biological evolution, intelligence at least modestly concentrates mutation probabilities towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t magic.

Fundamentally, the world is just not that compressible. Golden motes of compressibility are the treasured exceptions in thingspace, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iterative, cooperative, and bottlenecked by the messy incompressibility of physical reality.

Doom makes sense in a world with magic. If intelligence *alone* allowed you to move mountains, I would share the worries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved gradually, iteratively, and cooperatively. Pure IQ does not allow you to levitate or hypnotize or teleport. It makes you a better node in the distributed evolutionary process which is the layer where most of the thinking happens.

If I were to psychologize, I’d say people who define themselves by their intelligence overestimate the (direct) power of intelligence.

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

Life comes at you fast

[Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) @TheMilkBarTV]

TUCKER CARLSON ON ALGEBRA: THEN vs. NOW

2021: Laughing at the idea that algebra is a tool of white supremacy. “This idea that math is a white discipline is monumentally absurd.”

2026: Laughing and saying “That’s amazing” as his guest pushes the idea that algebra is a Jewish conspiracy to create “goy slaves.”

[Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) @TheMilkBarTV]

TUCKER CARLSON ON ALGEBRA: THEN vs. NOW

2021: Laughing at the idea that algebra is a tool of white supremacy. “This idea that math is a white discipline is monumentally absurd.”

2026: Laughing and saying “That’s amazing” as his guest pushes the idea that algebra is a Jewish conspiracy to create “goy slaves.”

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

50th anniversary of Mao’s death today. It’s all my cats have been talking about.

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

I had actually forgotten how key Charlie Kirk was to Stop the Steal.

This was a watershed on the right, since it made actively affirming an absurd conspiracy into a litmus test, allowing cultists and authoritarians to take over. https://t.co/ZTQzEmNuYk

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

He's like the fentanyl of stupidity: pure, uncut, unmixed with anything even resembling insight.

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

Tucker Carlson asks why algebra puts letters into numbers.

Jess Elofson explains: "I think just to fuck with you."

They discuss how they've never met anyone in their life who uses algebra, which is "fake math" for people "in the matrix."

They conclude that caring about algebra is something that only "good little goy slaves" do.

[trading places @TradingVCs]

3 REASONS WHY AI IS NOT A BUBBLE

Aman Verjee points to three major differences between today's AI boom and the dot-com era:

- AI investment is being driven by profitable hyperscalers with massive cash reserves.
- Valuations remain far below the extremes of 1999.
- Perhaps most importantly: the demand is already here.

"It's demand-driven not supply-driven. I think, just the overall business, the technology, the value of it is incredible. There are a lot of things that AI is going to enable us to do that we haven't yet figured out, but that will leave a lasting and generally positive impact in what we do."

- @AmanVerjee on @ConvoswColeman with @coldxman

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

This is pretty cool. I drew a 36-year old West African woman living on $5 a day.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Fun game, draw a random life out of what we know about the entire history of human population statistics.

I died at six months old in Bronze Age Southeast Asia.

https://t.co/3WUkfzKquy

[primordial soup kitchen @fernbirg]

I’m the opposite of a flat earther. This planet is far rounder than we’ve been led to believe.

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
https://t.co/lyveuFJ7Xn

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

Stop anthropomorphizing this human you're talking to, it's just a bunch of cells and electric current, it doesn't genuinely "want" things or have "beliefs."

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

Many such cases: https://t.co/Hh42Lhb8We

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

@marclamonthill What did he say that’s untrue?

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

Source: https://t.co/RQlSroTuhl

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

🎯

[Ian Miller @ianmSC]

My goodness Kmele Foster just absolutely dismantled Jemele Hill here. What an obliteration.

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

"people scoring highest on the measure of narcissism were at first the most popular people in the group. By the end of several months, they were the least popular. People who love themselves the most do not make the best friends." https://t.co/2yQXvudCzL