Daniel Reeves

Co-founder of Beeminder (@bmndr).

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@ClarissaAdjoint Amen. Another way I like to put it, embellishing from @TheZvi: AI is the greatest tool for learning since the printing press. It's also the greatest tool for avoiding learning since the diploma mill.

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@JThornbull @waitbutwhy That tilde's doing so much work. As you say, not just dumb people but those willing to risk their life to save dumb ppl. And also those willing to risk their life to save those willing to risk their life to... Etc. The "dumb people" part vanishes in a tunnel of infinite recursion

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

PS, found it! https://t.co/AVgpP56M7X

[nicolas, 30 ans @nic_carter]

as a sidenote, one reason I really like Leo is because he maintains a kind of "pragmatic cautious optimism" around AI. he thinks it's a civilizationally important project and a matter of urgent national security. he thinks AGI and maybe ASI is possible, but he isn't a doomer. in fact, he's helping bring this future about (more on this later).

most "AI futurists" in silicon valley are doomers, unfortunately. they unhelpfully think AI is going to literally kill us all. I'm not going to try to "debunk" the doomer mentality here but I think it's far fetched and more of a spiritual/metaphysical position than an empirical one. (secular doomsday cults are the main thrust of religion-without-religion these days, whether climate or now AI.) the doomers also don't really have good suggestions for dealing with the apocalypse they foresee. they just want us to collectively stop building AI, or something. this isn't a very practical suggestion but they are very good at making noise, so they get disproportionate attention. there's a very big market for prophecies of doom and these people take advantage of that.

the second camp is the skeptics mainly found on the left that intone things like "AI is just a stochastic parrot" camp which we can trivially dismiss since they are just obviously wrong. these people tend to think all tech and markets are bad and wrong and think AI is a bubble. not much to say here, they are just wrong.

the other major camp is the e/accs that are kind of the inverse of the doomers; they want to push forward AI no matter what as a kind of political statement. they tend to be a little cavalier with regards to genuine AI safety risks and seem more motivated by owning the libs.

the last camp is simply the people building AI that have a strong economic incentive to downplay the risks. Leo isn't in this camp either. he's sanguine about the risks and the fact that this technology deserves a sort of manhattan project of its own. our ability to deal with it IS existential and he acknowledges that.

daniel reeves describes Leo's philosophy as "AGI realism" and it's the same camp that I subscribe to (even after reading every piece of doomer literature ever written).

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

First-world problem: dozens of people are suddenly signing up for AGI Friday, seemingly largely from Twitter, and I can't figure out how to find the tweet that's doing it 😭

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

Oh yeah, I started a weekly newsletter about AGI timelines called AGI Friday. https://t.co/shmlu0iyY9

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@nic_carter Amen. And speaking of things that could've/should've been obvious at the time, I don't think the Deepseek market panic in January made any sense, even at the time. I talk about that here: https://t.co/FeGa4GaWd9 (see the tiny "One more Jevons example" section)

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@nic_carter Thanks so much for this, Nic! One clarification, that AGI Realism is Aschenbrenner's term, not mine. And I guess "doomer" is a loaded term but Aschenbrenner himself talks at length about how we have to take this dead seriously, and not just for geopolitical reasons.

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

The word "the" in phrases like "the faster we go, the sooner we'll get there" is not the word "the" as we know it. It's a homophone! It used to be spelled "tha" or "þa" and is basically used for if-then statements. "Tha more tha merrier" is "more ⟹ merrier" or "more ∝ merrier".

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@matthen2 Delightful! Any chance you could throw this on GitHub or https://t.co/U7IclghUA1 or somewhere? My son is working on something slightly related to this and seeing your code would be pretty great.

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@tlbtlbtlb @mhartl ...achieve that is to permanently redefine time itself rather than tamper with the apparently greater sanctity that is "Nine To Five". Maybe it's the Dolly Parton movie by that name that really locked us in there. 2/2

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@tlbtlbtlb @mhartl You're not wrong but I agree with @mhartl about how philosophically fugly it is. If the public consensus is "business hours should just always start earlier, even before dawn, so we have more daylight after work" then it's almost tragically hilarious that the best way to 1/

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

6 years later and I think Tesla is predicting 1 more year? Still over-optimistic but Waymo can now do this at least in Phoenix. We're getting there!

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

It’s been 2 years. I’m still ridiculously excited about self-driving cars, just that @elonmusk’s timeline here was fairly fantastical.

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@elonmusk Now 4 years and a baby step taken (summoning from across a parking lot). I'm still rooting for this and don't want to sound all snarky about it or anything.

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@ESYudkowsky Yay Shapley! My notes on it: https://t.co/I1jO0FXeEe

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@patio11 @jamesmadelin As a friend of mine put it, the whole point of betting is that you're offering a costly signal that you believe what you say. Settlement to charity spoils that!

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@patio11 @jamesmadelin Your implied probability (at least 33% chance the drug works) sounds low, ie, we agree. But to pick something we disagree about, I sure hate the "settlement to charity" norm! It should be understood that one spends one's winnings from wagering as self-indulgently as possible!

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@dggoldst Ooh ooh, amazing series by @welchlabs on imaginary numbers: https://t.co/TOGnZgG2mO

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@replyallguy @yashkaf Oh, nice! See also https://t.co/atKaQ0Y7oJ

[Daniel Reeves @dreev]

@patio11 Love it! Here's Bart and Lisa Simpson playing out exactly that: https://t.co/gNpnbKkkLE

[Timothy Bramlett @TimothyBramlett]

Last week we fixed an issue that was causing our feedback pop up to pop up too often! 😅 On the brightside we did get some feedback from a customer that our "user support is stunning and second only to beeminder"! #buildinpublic

[David Rothschild 🌻 @DavMicRot]

New paper with R. Freeman, @pennockd, @dreev, B. Waggoner https://t.co/NrKyOq4SGL "Towards a Theory of Confidence in Market-Based Predictions": can you create a margin-of-error for a probability? How does that relate to volatility? Paper asks as many questions as it solves!