ash.err @ashdoterr

>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

listen man sometimes you gotta put the manhattan project on hold to sell b2b SaaS

Marc Benioff @Benioff

6 days ago

Welcome Dario to Dreamforce!

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I build an add-on in World of Warcraft to talk to your agents in Claude code or codex while you play. Can’t wait to grind levels and tokens

15 years ago, if you did the responsible thing & bought $10,000 of 'risk-free' long-term Treasuries, you'd have $11,072 today. If instead you spent $9,995 on drugs & $5 on bitcoin, you'd have $42,778 today.

DAOs are evolving: @trustgraphs alpha is live on mainnet. It's time to TEST IN PROD again. trustgraphs.xyz

@brian_armstrong okay but not talking about politics doesn’t make my groceries any cheaper, on account of everything is political

when the losses aren’t quite real enough to negate current profitability, but somehow still real enough to shelter future profits from taxes

Polymarket @Polymarket

7 days ago

JUST IN: Anthropic says they’re highly profitable if you take out some of their biggest expenses.

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millennial midlife crisis be like maybe i should reinstall world of warcraft

@girlintheverse capitalism but make it late-stage

on the other hand, and this is just scifi ofc: one would think such high IQ AI bourgeoisie might take history lessons more seriously -- what with their speed running of super intelligence trained mostly on the stolen entirety of proletariat voices maybe we let em cook.

Polymarket @Polymarket

a week ago

JUST IN: Trump declares the only guardrails AI needs is a “high IQ president,” accusing AI critics of trying to slow America’s lead over China.

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Today we’re launching Project Tailwind, a call for founders to start ambitious new AI safety initiatives: coefficientgiving.org/tailwind/?utm_… We’re looking for great people to engage seriously with the risks of transformative AI, and to create the research, technologies, and institutions that will help humanity navigate them. There are critical, basic problems that no one owns. Over the last several months, my team at @coeff_giving brainstormed ideas we’d be excited to fund if we could find a promising founder, and the list quickly grew to more than 200 entries. We’ve narrowed it down to our favorites, but we also expect the best founders to bring their own ideas: coefficientgiving.org/tailwind/initi… We’re providing funding at three levels: 1️⃣ Pre-seed: $200k to $2m to develop an idea and build a team 2️⃣ Seed: $2m to $20m to launch and scale 3️⃣ Scale: $20m to $200m+ for proven teams to scale, or world-class teams to start If you’re excited about something on our list, or you have another proposal for driving the field forward, you should get involved: coefficientgiving.org/tailwind/get-i… There are more good projects than there are people to work on them. Please help us make that stop being true! Also hi, I’m Emily! This is my first tweet. I lead AI and biosecurity grantmaking at @coeff_giving.

@leahfiles your violation is that you accurately described the extractive economic frame on which X, too, is built. 10/10. welcome to the resistance.

yes. i'd offer it simultaneously allows for the creation of permissioned cbdc controls (freezing, blacklisting, full txn viz), wo any of the constitutional constraints, oversight, or public seigniorage a cbdc might otherwise carry same impact to constituents, no accountability. aka, to your point: privatized upside, socialized cost 🎉

@ZoeCatherineF 🫠 ikr

@girlintheverse .. democracy?

@CanadianPM 'hydronyms' is outright diabolical

The people who voted for Trump so he'd rename bodies of water must be freaking pumped right now.

@hmptyc Sears Tower's been Willis Tower since 2009. Sixth Avenue's been Avenue of the Americas since 1945. and yet ...

vernacular legitimacy is powerful precisely bc it lives or dies by cultural consensus. it will always be: - Twitter - Sears Tower - Sixth Avenue - Gulf of Mexico - Lake Ontario gn

The White House @WhiteHouse

4 weeks ago

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY: Lake Ontario is renamed to LAKE AMERICA! 🇺🇸

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@MapQuest