Dave-Thinking

High-effort conversation for truth-maximizing and FUN!

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

Spend less time listening to people talk about people, and more time listening to the people being talked about

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

Thread reminding falling birth rates aren't for the reasons bandied about

[Roko 🐉 @RokoMijic]

There's also the point that as society becomes more capable and more complex, the opportunity cost for everything goes up.

Think of all the things that people did 2000 years ago: riding horses, manual farming, praying, archery practice on Sunday. We've stopped doing almost all of them, because of opportunity costs.

You could grow potatoes in your garden to eat. But that's rare nowadays.

Most of what we do has been heavily upgraded by technology, and getting a given result got much easier and we had more time to spend on other stuff.

Child-bearing and rearing is somewhat exceptional. The real-terms cost of creating a human child has not been meaningfully reduced by technology.

Partly this is because biology is hard but it's also partly a result of moral squeemishness around "eugenics" and vast over-regulation and over-taxation of things like private schools and childcare.

Children also haven't gotten better. Again, we ignored eugenic breeding for "moral" reasons and the results are that people don't actually want to have children.

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

https://t.co/naEpY35W4d

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

Woah, just learned that in higher dimensions, circles and spheres end up taking less and less of the area/volume of the square/cubes they occupy. Like 1/n kind of disappear! From @3blue1brown
https://t.co/TveZNcO1d0

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

makes me think of token embeddings/vectors in llms and how similar concepts align and unrelated or extremely orthogonal

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

I grew up in a commercial fishing family in Alaska.
My dad is loving the help ai provides doing all the things it takes to keep a fishing operation going.
This story of farmers using @ChatGPTapp is heartwarming and also true for my dad.
https://t.co/UvLl7VHIj1

[Adeo Ressi @adeoressi]

I organized an intervention to stop Elon from starting SpaceX. Here is the story...

Twenty five years ago, Elon and I sat in a car on a dark stretch of Long Island highway, two neurodiverse geeks staring at the night sky and wondering what came next. We had both experienced substantial exits and felt the weight of possibility ahead of us.

When I joked about 'space' while gazing upward, neither of us imagined we were planting the seed for what would become the largest IPO in history. We spent the next two hours debating why space was so hard. In the end, rockets are fuel and metal. We also debated where to go, and it was crystal clear that Mars was the only real destination.

Upon returning to NYC, we embarked on a global tour of space, meeting space agencies and luminaries worldwide. This opened our eyes to an industry stuck in bureaucratic thinking. If things continued at that pace, it was clear that we would never explore space in our lifetime.

So, we launched Life to Mars to show the world that two ambitious young men (29 and 30 years old), could send life to Mars without any government backing or support. We planned to send and grow plants on Mars, though some were pushing us to send mice.

We had a $50 MM budget that rested on our purchase of two Russian ICBMs for $7 MM each. We assumed one ICBM would fail, and we would learn and fix everything before launching again. When Elon went back to actually buy the ICBMs, the Russians tripled the price, bringing out launch costs from a total of $14 MM to $42 MM.

Our ambitious Life to Mars plan was no longer viable.

As you might imagine, Elon was not pleased. So, he decided to start SpaceX and create his own Mars rockets. Now, this is a crazy idea, both now and at the time, so I organized a large panel of top space experts, and we ambushed him at the Georgian Hotel one morning. It was set up like an intervention for an alcoholic, but for space.

Elon looked me in the eye when leaving the room and said, "I am going to do this." The intervention failed. Elon was committed. The rest is history.

I am excited to see this IPO after 25 years of hard work. What SpaceX has done is a testament to human will and overcoming insurmountable obstacles. It's nothing short of amazing.

Congratulations, E. Amazing.

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

@isaacfrench_ The interstate killed small town short term tourism but the extra 15-minutes to charge vs fuel brings it back, cool!

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

@Scivf4 and meat/neuron/animal brains too

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

Jamie Dimon, CEO of @jpmorgan , seems like a stand-up guy

[bodila @51bodila]

JPMorgan CEO was fired from a bank after predicting it would go bankrupt - and he was right

- now he controls $700B as CEO of the largest bank in the US - JPMorgan

35-min Harvard talk the most important rules from the world's best banker - only this video by Jamie Dimon worth to save

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

@tylercowen is based

[Noam Dworman @noam_dworman]

Second for second, @tylercowen packs more substance into a talk than anyone I'm aware of. This is a clear, non-hysterical, and somewhat soothing discussion of our AI future.

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

Advertising categorized under AI at SpaceX?

Makes perfect sense and increasingly true,
but a little 😬
(on account of ai's ability to "hack" us)

https://t.co/rdUye53VBM

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

@WHarper10 Props to @xkcd for the Thing Explainer concept
https://t.co/swuS1d0xE3
And props to SpaceX culture!

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

Changed requested $SPCX shares to 1,111 after learning they're offing 555,555,555 🔢

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

Chills!
Let's go!

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

SpaceX is the only company building the infrastructure of the future across space, connectivity, and AI → https://t.co/PSCyWrNsOg

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

At Schwab under Trade > IPOs, put in my Conditional Offer to Purchase (COPT) for SpaceX !

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

@elonmusk @SawyerMerritt tough choices

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

@gopuff It's funny because it's true! 😂
https://t.co/pUC6o5vgEG

[Zoli ⚡️ @zolihonig]

it took 7 yrs but it finally happened
@ronnychieng

[Dave-Thinking @thinking_dave]

@phascogaly @misraetel @dwarkesh_sp @jacobkimmel @grok In a very simple model of a species reproducing to meet an environment's carrying capacity, lifespan's role is just a factor in evolutionary velocity, no? Live forever, no evolution; short lifespan (assuming meeting environment carrying capacity), max evolutionary possibility?