Dustin Swan

[roon @tszzl]

if we could coordinate a global capabilities slowdown today i would likely press that magic button

[spicylemonade @spicey_lemonade]

“AGI is achieved if AI can do any three of the following” — @GaryMarcus

[Awni Hannun @awnihannun]

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1:

Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight?
Me: Yes they're done.
Partner: Why are they still dirty?
Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

[Alex Kantrowitz @Kantrowitz]

What happens when you stop using Claude

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Wife: You’re not buying new books, are you?

Me: Absolutely not. These books were published years ago.

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

Great example of Simpson's paradox here:

The marriage + homeownership rate has collapsed, but within each marital group, homeownership has increased since 1990!

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Just $1 can help avert 10 years of farmed animal suffering.

I decided to give $250,000 as a donation match to @farmkind_giving after learning about the outsized opportunities to help. FarmKind directs your contributions to the most effective charities in this area.

Please consider contributing, even if it’s a small amount. Together, we can double each other's impact and give a total of $500,000. Use the link below to donate with my match.

Bluntly, there are some listeners who are in a position to give much more. Given how neglected this topic is, one such person could singlehandedly change the game for 10s of billions of animals.

If you’re considering donating $50k or more, please reach out directly to @Lewis_Bollard and his team by DMing him, or emailing [email protected]

[Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ @ESYudkowsky]

how it started / how it's going

[Liv Boeree @Liv_Boeree]

We’re in the last few months of easy discernment between real and AI footage.

After that, we can rely only on our priors and evaluation of source through robust epistemological enquiry. Luckily humans are really good at that.

[Cate Hall @catehall]

it seems likely (or at least not unlikely) that, on average, effective altruists are (considered on a population basis) a bit more prone to hedging & a certain kind of defensiveness in their writing, as compared to many (granted, not all!) relatively comparable intellectual blocs

[Dustin Swan @dustinswan]

@dysinger just saw this on my feed thought i'd pass it along https://t.co/Ovx1ZAeDi7

[Ashley ☀️🌳🌘 Cascade Camp Aug 7th-10th @polyaletheia]

Anyone looking for remote Haskell work? My employer is hiring. Nix also a plus.

[signüll @signulll]

my lord the sesame voice ai is absolutely fucking insane. i knew it was artificial. i knew there wasn’t a real person on the other end. & yet, i still felt like i was talking to a person.

i felt the same social pressure, the same awkwardness when i hesitated, the same discomfort when i misspoke. it wasn’t just convincing, it worked on me in a way i didn’t expect.

i used to think i’d be immune to this.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Economists generally agree that, when it comes to taxes:

- Corporate income taxes are among the worst
- Property taxes are among the best

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Years ago I was shocked by images like this of Korean farmers burying pigs alive during an FMD outbreak.

Right now, US egg factory farms are killing millions of animals by an even crueler method: baking them alive.

Brooke Rollins could end this with the stroke of a pen.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

My wacky theory about the em-dash debate:

Pro writers use em-dashes a lot because many of them, possibly without consciously realizing it, have become elocutionary punctuationists.

That is, they've fallen into the habit of using punctuation not as grammatical phrase structure markers but as indicators of pauses of varying length in the flow of speech.

The most visible difference you see in people who write in this style that their usage of commas becomes somewhat more fluid -- that's the marker for the shortest pause. But they also reach for less commonly used punctuation marks as indicators of longer pauses of varying length.

Em dash is about the second or third longest pause, only an ellipsis or end-of-sentence period being clearly longer.

Historical note: punctuation marks originally evolved as pause or breathing markers in manuscripts to aid recitation. In the 19th century, after silent reading had become normal, they were reinterpreted by grammarians as phrase structure markers and usage rules became much more rigid.

Really capable writers have been quietly rediscovering elocutionary punctuation ever since.

RETVRN!

[Aella @Aella_Girl]

we're all dead. I'm a transhumanist, I love tech, I desperately want aligned AI, but at our current stage of development, this is building the equivalent of a planet-sized nuke. The reason is boring and complicated and technical, so midwits in power don't understand the danger

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network. I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive. I don’t want to download an app to check my car’s fluid levels. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view the restaurant menu. I don’t want to let Google know my location before showing me the search results. I don’t want to include a Teams link on the calendar invite. I don’t want to pay 50 different monthly subscription fees for all my software. I don’t want to upgrade to TurboTax platinum plus audit protection. I don’t want to install the Webex plugin to join the meeting. I don’t want to share my car’s braking data with the actuaries at State Farm. I don’t want to text with your AI chatbot. I don’t want to download the Instagram app to look at your picture. I don’t want to type in my email address to view the content on your company’s website. I don’t want text messages with promo codes. I don’t want to leave your company a five-star Google review in exchange for the chance to win a $20 Starbucks gift card. I don’t want to join your exclusive community in the metaverse. I don’t want AI to help me write my comments on LinkedIn. I don’t even want to be on LinkedIn in the first place.

I just want to pay for a product one time (and only one time), know that it’s going to work flawlessly, press 0 to speak to an operator if I need help, and otherwise be left alone and treated with some small measure of human dignity, if that’s not too much to ask anymore.

[Kevin A. Bryan @Afinetheorem]

On 'very powerful' AI, don't need to be a hypeman or doomer, but you should know OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind leaders all believe that "AI which can do autonomous science research" is 2-5 years away, as do Metaculus and Manifold prediction markets. Is your private info better?

[Liv Boeree @Liv_Boeree]

This is so f*cked. If someone kept a dog or cat like this for even a few hours people would lose their minds. Yet this law would force these animals live like this for YEARS. Unimaginable evil.

[Noah Carl @NoahCarl90]

A prediction from a guy who came in the top 20 in the ACX Prediction Contest three years in a row. (There were more than a thousand entries this year.)