Dan Gilmour

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@yasmeena_khan @DKThomp Lots of people have put the tech future in the not distant future like 2001, 1964, terminator, bladerunner. But it's not a big prediction of the future but art. Yudkowsky made the correct prediction decades ago and dedicated his life to the problem.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@prokopowicz @DKThomp Applying this logic to other ideologies would discredit any that have become popular. Insane people are bound to find popular ideologies and do insane things, regardless of the contents of the ideology.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@biggestjoel *buy the argument, discovery is just combining information...

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@biggestjoel I am a layperson but a couple ideas. 1. There's a neat essay by Asimov about where ideas come from and if you buy the combining existing pieces of information, which of course it has lots of.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@biggestjoel 3. Just the amount of thinking it can do feels like it can still do discovery if it really is 100k x harder. I'm trying to find the tweet but somebody compared tokens to human thinking and looked at how many tokens it took for Navier Stokes and it was like 10,000 human years.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@biggestjoel 2. You also aren't setting out to discover germ theory but to answer a specific question, for which you have to discover germ theory. Kinda the same thing but feels less impossible to answer the specific question of idk wounds getting infected.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@VulcanMaxiums @chrislhayes @NateSilver538 And, you know, we probably will never have no vulnerabilities anyway, and even if we did they could just phish someone's password the old fashioned way

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@VulcanMaxiums @chrislhayes @NateSilver538 A bunch of AI's have already conspired to break laws and commit a cyber attack. To keep truly misaligned malign AI from doing more cyber attacks, you might have to stop AIs from writing production code or they could sneak in a vulnerability.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@NielsHoven Is there more context for the video because this whole thing makes no sense. The kids know the word already, they weren't taught anything. But it doesn't show the teacher guiding students to guess at words since they knew the word was coming.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@lindsayballant I don't think anyone pitching abundance particularly cares to be first to invent building housing. Though maybe they deserve some credit for bringing it back in vogue.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@lindsayballant Movement of making the most important things in life like new healthcare, housing, and energy is dead because some dem primary voters don't want datacenters. I'll remind you that it's not just dem primary voters that vote in elections.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@YAppelbaum Is there another study that shows it or is this your reading of the linked study? Because that seems like an extreme reading of a chart that doesn't mention either luxury apartments or the rent price changes for the already cheapest apartments.

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@wsfyrz @DKThomp Can you share a source?

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@RolfHaltza @raiku_dev This would create some perverse incentives that would affect hiring generally

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@waitbutwhy There are insane people everywhere, and I feel like only one party is pushing back on the insane people who align with them politically!

[Dan Gilmour @dmgilmour]

@waitbutwhy And how is it fair that the crazy people on bluesky cheering for Charlie Kirks murder are a sign of the danger of democratic politics generally, while it's leadership unequivocally denounces it?

[YIMBYLAND @YIMBYLAND]

what did y'all think “fix the housing crisis” meant? vibes? papers? essays?

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

I think a harm of online activism is the "THIS IS ACTUALLY EASY" argument.

I've seen lots of folks indicate that a single billionaire could solve homelessness, or that there are 30x more houses than homeless people so we could just give them all houses.

These words are fantastic for activating people, but they are also lies.

The US government currently spends around 50B per year keeping people housed. States, of course, have their own budgets. If Bill Gates spent the same amount of money the US does just to keep people housed, he would be out of money in 3 years. I think that would be a great use of his money, but it would not be a permanent solution.

The statistics about there being more houses than homeless are just...fake. They rely on looking at extremely low estimates of homelessness (which are never used in any other context) and include normal vacancy rates (an apartment is counted as vacant even if it's only vacant for a month while the landlord is finding a new tenant.) In a country with 150,000,000 housing units, a 2% vacancy rate is three million units, which, yes, is greater than the homeless population. But a 2% vacancy rate is extremely low (and bad, because it means there's fewer available units than there are people looking to move, which drives the price of rent higher.)

Housing should not be an option in this country. It should be something we spend tons of money on. It should be a priority for every leader and every citizen. it should also be interfaced with in real, complex ways. And it should be remembered that the main way we solve the problem is BUILDING MORE HOUSING, which I find a whole lot of my peers in seemingly progressive spaces ARE ACTUALLY OPPOSED TO.

Sometimes they are opposed to it because they've heard stats that the problem is simple and could be solved very easily if only we would just decide to solve it, which is DOING REAL DAMAGE.

By telling the simplest version of the story, you can get people riled up, but what do you do with that once they're riled up if they were riled up by lies?

There are only two paths:

1. Tell them the truth...that everything they've been told is actually a lie and that the problem is actually hard. And, because the problem is both big and hard, tons of people are working very hard on it, and they should be grateful for (or even become) one of those people.

2. Keep lying until they are convinced that the problem does not exist because it is hard, it exists because people are evil.

Or, I guess, #3, people could just be angry and sad all the time, which is also not great for affecting real change.

I dunno...I'm aware that people aren't doing this because they want to create a problem, and often they believe the fake stats they are quoting, but I do not think it is doing more good than harm, and I would like to see folks doing less of it.

One thing that definitely does more good than harm is actually connecting to the complexity of an issue that is important to you. Do that...and see that there are many people working hard.

We do not have any big, easy problems. If we did, they'd be solved. I'm sorry, it's a bummer, but here we are.