mejsle

stuff

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[CRG @MacroCRG]

Lmao this is a banger 😂😂😂 https://t.co/fAj5JkI0Ho

[meow @weremeow]

Doing a PPP memecoin experiment that might or might not involve airdrops.

To be part of it, QT this w your address (or just RT & reply)

To kick it off, here’s mine:

AS3yMXa5yPRFeLgsdQkFR1KxBowExSY1JUzRGZj8iAMu

If we get enough real participants, the experiment will proceed 🐱

[mejsle @mejsle]

@weremeow HvHKu1qRaHfSg6YLsVtxJtKmbQc8bYAZKVpTEaaYxE6s

[Cambria (坎布里亚) @playcambria]

Excited to announce our Seed fundraise led by @BITKRAFTVC to build a Runescape-inspired risk-to-earn MMO with massive onchain stakes.

[mejsle @mejsle]

@__bleeker algo on point

[gainzy @gainzy222]

the rate at which we’re having black swans is desensitizing me to black swans in general

[mejsle @mejsle]

@jesavatto 🤔

[작전명: 에픽 CMS @cmsholdings]

2017 : “Why does this need a token”

2021 : “Where the fuck is my token”

[mejsle @mejsle]

@MemeMarketNFT @Dexlab_official @degencoinsol @SolApeFinance @beenatitforlong @Crypto_elli @thatfeelyouknow

[Ted @DeFi_Ted]

I dont know who did this but it gets me every time.

[cryptomentalist @cryptomentalist]

@RNR_0 @loomdart

[HotFiwa⁷ ⓥ ⧖ ⇆ ²⁴ʰ @HotFiwa]

I’m having cravings for coffee and I’m like NO you had a cup 3hrs ago you don’t need more. Might just end up drinking tea or milk.

[Nicola Duke @NicTrades]

This is a hard time of year for a lot of folks.

Suicide Hotline 116 123 (@samaritans UK)
USA National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-8255
Australia @beyondblue 1300 22 4636

more here https://t.co/u1HLuXzUH8

A simple copy and paste might save someone's life.

[mejsle @mejsle]

@LBRYio Trick, of course =)

[Shubheksha ✨ @ScribblingOn]

Burnout visualised

[Ciru.ai - Crown 👑 @ciruai]

Who said Bitcoin was expensive to use? How about buying a single penny worth of Bitcoin straight from my bank without a fee?

To a non-custodial wallet.

All without compromising the base layer.

Thanks @sparkswap and @ln_zap

[red @redxbt]

We all see winners here, every home run, every insane call.

I’ve yet to see though, people posting a losing period, how they managed it and what they learned.

This is my current equity curve.

A thread on headspace, fear and some takeways for moving forward.

[Felipe ~ @Felipether]

🌊 A “stock-to-flow debacle” has taken crypto-twitter by storm.

The meme achieved superior performance in nocoiner conversion…

…and flooded your timeline with 🔢math, 💎minerals and 🔥heated opinions you may not understand.

Time to slash FUD and review some of the #stats: