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Aaron Bergman's tweets, September 2023

Every public tweet, reply, quote tweet and retweet that Aaron Bergman (@AaronBergman18 on X, formerly Twitter) posted in September 2023 and has not deleted: 610 posts, oldest first, times in UTC. Each heading links to the original post on X. When Aaron replies to or quotes someone, their tweet appears as a blockquote with their name; those words are theirs, and everything outside the blockquotes is Aaron's.

This page is one month of the complete archive of Aaron Bergman's tweets, which updates automatically every few hours. Previous month: August 2023. Next month: October 2023.

Friday, September 1, 2023

Tweet, 12:35 UTC · 5 likes

Lfg it’s cool outside ❄️☃️🧤🧣🧊🌨️

Reply to @AISafetyMemes, 12:48 UTC · 12 likes

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ (@AISafetyMemes): for every $1 humanity spends on AI safety, we spend $424 on butt plugs

image attached

That ratio should NOT be higher than 400:1

Reply to his own earlier tweet, 13:07 UTC · 3 likes

Aaron Bergman, August 28, 2023: 35. (This is indeed relevant to EA imo bc ~networking) This really comes down to personal preference so not making a normative claim but: I think people…

36. EA is ideologically weird because it quite naturally accommodates people who hold any logically coherent permutation of the following features of how good or bad the world is (not exhaustive ofc):

- past level
- past rate of change
- current level
- current rate of change
- future expected level
- sensitivity of future expected level to current actions
- future variance
- future rate of change

Add some qualitative flavoring and you get vibes like:

- OWID/progress cluster: world used to be bad, but has been getting better and will continue to (unless we fuck it up)

- suffering focused/s-risk cluster: world used to be bad, still largely is, and might get way worse (which we should prevent)

- [insert your beliefs here, probably]

Reply to @AISafetyMemes, 13:08 UTC · 7 likes

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ (@AISafetyMemes): @AaronBergman18 I'd go further and say even 300:1 is too much

Don’t be an extremist

Reply to @SpacedOutMatt, 13:20 UTC · 4 likes

Matt 🔸 (@SpacedOutMatt): I get that American tort law can suck sometimes, but I genuinely do not understand the point of being a nut-free bakery if you aren't actually willing to stand behind the claim that your products don't contain nuts

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(Obligatory: speaking from a place of not allergic to nuts privilege)

Eh I do worry that if the threshold here was literally zero molecules of peanut protein or you can be sued into bankruptcy, the general equilibrium becomes that “nut-free” bakeries need to start using biolab level containment protocols which are expensive and hard so eventually none of them exist

Thread, continued, 13:20 UTC · 1 like

Wait I lied I don’t actually worry about this but I do think it would happen lol

Reply, 13:23 UTC · 17 likes

Don’t make me tap the sign

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Tweet, 14:29 UTC · 21 likes

A public good someone better at scraping than me could make is a big spreadsheet of every unit for rent in the US with as much basic info as is feasible (rent, beds, location etc)

All the rental sites seem to be trying very hard to make this impossible

Reply to @adam__isom, 16:33 UTC · 2 likes

adam ✧ ❥ ~ (@adam__isom): Counterpoint, you can do this for other virtues too, to varying extents

Ultimately it doesn’t matter that much whether you were born with something or not, because what matters is it’s effect on the world
eg still good to punish impulsive criminals, still good to praise smarts

Someone *always* makes this point haha but I don’t agree - they key difference is that you really can’t change your intelligence very much (I guess you can via eg very heavy weed use over many years but this seems very rare), so it’s not *responsive* to praise/blame…

Thread, continued, 16:35 UTC · 1 like

It’s also not inherently good (as opposed to eg generosity), but some things people consider virtues like hard workingness aren’t either so I don’t think this is the main point

Reply to @adam__isom, 16:41 UTC · 2 likes

adam ✧ ❥ ~ (@adam__isom): @AaronBergman18 @skooookum This made me realize, thinking about virtues and praise is weird. When does direct praise of an abstract quality even happen?

Anyway, if I could make everyone a bit smarter I would. I don’t know how to square that with it not being ‘inherently good’.

I’m being loose with language here, like I don’t think virtues are anything fundamental - just a heuristic or social technology

Same, and I’d give everyone $100 of purchasing power if I could but I don’t think that this demonstrates that being wealthy *per se* irl is morally good

Reply, 18:32 UTC · 3 likes

Yes I agree

Reply, 20:08 UTC · 3 likes

Irresponsible title IMO

The implied meme is “owning pets per se is wrong” whereas really it’s “normal well intentioned people often subject their pets to harm; here’s how not to do that”

Editors choose the titles tho so not on the author most likely

Tweet, 20:16 UTC · 3 likes

Wait so if I re-download excel it’ll work with python right?

Saturday, September 2, 2023

Reply, 19:18 UTC · 3 likes

Wait give ur reincarnation take

Tweet, 20:07 UTC · 17 likes

Apartment shopping and generally filtering for <400 or <350 sq ft because, at a given price level, these almost always have better location/features and I’m super willing to trade size for other things I care about…

Tweet, 20:07 UTC · 7 likes

Other markets (and maybe people?) should lean into this kind of thing and let users search and sort for things that are generally bad but that any one user might care about less than avg or not at all

Tweet, 20:07 UTC · 5 likes

Eg girls adding a *max* height on dating apps if they don’t care much about that (disclosure: I have a conflict of interest here lol) and maybe guys setting a min

Tweet, 20:07 UTC · 6 likes

More generally it would be cool if you could (and it made sense to) add stuff about yourself (or some product or service in the general case) that are generally dispreferred but might make you someone’s comparative advantage

Reply to @T_R_E_X_12, 22:28 UTC · 3 likes

TREX (@T_R_E_X_12): @AaronBergman18 <400 sq ft is not living conditions.

College dorm I shared with another guy was 198

Sunday, September 3, 2023

Reply, 04:28 UTC · 2 likes

Disgusting 😏

Reply to @inerati, 04:37 UTC · 2 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @inerati is no longer available.)

People move back and forth between “incel” as its original etymological meaning ie virgin who wants to have sex and “incel” as member of a particular online community

Guessing lots of disagreement in the comments comes from assuming you’re talking about the former (maybe u are?)

Reply, 05:38 UTC · 2 likes

🙏🏼

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Reply, 05:55 UTC · 2 likes

This is a joke right

Quote tweet, 18:11 UTC · 3 likes

Seems familiar

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Quoting Joakim 🌹🇳🇴🇪🇺 (@joakial_): sometimes norwegian politics is a bit funny

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Reply, 18:35 UTC · 1 like

Great minds https://x.com/absurdlymax/status/1674561377170538499?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Reply, 19:17 UTC · 6 likes

Uh no

Reply, 21:54 UTC · 14 likes

Same

Reply, 22:18 UTC · 2 likes

About

Monday, September 4, 2023

Tweet, 18:29 UTC · 40 likes

😱😱😱😱😱😱😱

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Reply, 19:24 UTC · 6 likes

I legit don’t understand some neoliberal brand reactive dislike of unions per se. Like it’s a bunch of people voluntarily deciding to form an organization to negotiate together

Reply, 19:36 UTC · 2 likes

Indeed, it really is amazing

Quote tweet, 19:49 UTC · 7 likes

Re: YIMBY unit size wars

DC minimum unit size is 375 sq feet, which I sense is pretty typical. Until recently I implicitly assumed 300ish was in fact rather tight, even for one person

Now it’s directly relevant to me, so I found out the actual size of places I’ve lived…

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Apartment shopping and generally filtering for <400 or <350 sq ft because, at a given price level, these almost always have better location/features and I’m super willing to trade size for other things I care about…

Tweet, 19:49 UTC · 3 likes

- college dorm that I shared with another guy: 198 sq ft

- My single from another year I'm guessing was 2/3 the size (and I did all cooking there with a microwave, hot pot, and mini fridge): 135ish sq ft

Tweet, 19:49 UTC · 3 likes

- current room (buried lead: at home w the parents, inshallah not much longer) where I spend >90% of my time at home: *108* sq ft, and this includes a bunch of space for my sisters old stuff

Tweet, 19:49 UTC · 4 likes

Yes, none of these^ had/include bathrooms or kitchenettes but even accounting for that, appts that are literally too small to legally build in a bunch of places just…aren’t that small at all?

Tweet, 19:49 UTC · 6 likes

Admittedly I still basically buy the libertarian brand arguments against minimum unit sizes in principle, but I’m at least a bit sympathetic to minimums of <150ish sq ft

Anything above 300 is just absurd

Tweet, 19:49 UTC · 6 likes

And I just wanna drive the college dorm point home: the people living in 200 sq foot shared Georgetown dorms are a largely privileged bunch

If it was really so bad, they and their parents have enough political/social/economic capital to enforce a change

Reply to @ilex_ulmus, 20:16 UTC · 1 like

Holly ⏸️ Elmore (@ilex_ulmus): It’s not much longer than their interviews 😂

The people demand 5 hour interviews‼️

@robertwiblin @KeiranJHarris @80000Hours we will not go into high impact careers until this demand is met ⚠️

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Reply, 20:17 UTC · 2 likes

Involuntary insect welfare work, good job

Quote tweet, 20:19 UTC · 3 likes

It would be so over for y’all smh

Quoting universe sweetheart 💓🌈💭 (@univrsw3th4rt): is there any amount of walking (and walking only) that would make me more physically toned?

Reply, 20:23 UTC · 2 likes

Facts

Tweet, 22:53 UTC · 7 likes

I’d like to coin “the Natália problem” as the following as-of-yet-unanswered conundrum in applied epistemology:

Suppose you, a good Bayesian, hold belief B with credence P, when a smarter and wiser Bayesian agent N provides novel evidence that P should be higher or lower

Tweet, 22:53 UTC · 3 likes

However, you know of the existence of other smarter and wiser people who think you should update in the opposite direction that N does

You know that you should update towards N’s view bc you didn’t previously know that N disagreed with you, but you’re not sure how much

Tweet, 22:53 UTC · 5 likes

So the question is:

what situation-specific factors determine the degree to which you should come very close to adopting N’s view, only updating a tiny amount, or something in between?

Reply to his own earlier tweet, 22:59 UTC · 6 likes

Aaron Bergman, September 1, 2023: 36. EA is ideologically weird because it quite naturally accommodates people who hold any logically coherent permutation of the following features of how good…

37. Neoliberalism and YIMBYism are plausibly bad bc they offer similar personal benefits to EA (including the accurate sense of being a pro social and altruistic person) but deal with issues OOMs less important, possibly sucking people away from the latter

(tbc I don’t think this is in fact the case but p>30%)

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

Quote tweet, 00:01 UTC · 14 likes

38. I’ve noticed a serious uptick in the number of EAs both visiting and moving to DC, and I strongly suspect it’s due to a relative shift in the AI safety discourse from technical only to more governance focused

If this is true, +100 “taking ideas seriously” points. It’s shockingly cool to see a decentralized community act like a rational agent in this way

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): People be moving to DC fr

Reply, 00:11 UTC · 7 likes

MacAskill is not culpable here. His biggest mistake was guessing someone’s character wrong (along with a lot of other ppl like me) https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1673619647495544833?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Quote tweet, 02:36 UTC · 2 likes

39. I think this is right and suspect it’s the main reason for attrition, regardless of what people actually say their reasons are for stopping veganism

I’m not sure if the fact that I personally experienced this is more good skin-in-the-game information or more bad anecdote-driven bias

Quoting Daniel Filan 🔎 (@freed_dfilan): @natalia__coelho @AaronBergman18 Maybe some diets you have people dropping off because of monotony or something, but anecdotally I think there's decent attestation to people feeling bad on vegan diets.

Reply, 02:49 UTC · 2 likes

Yeah fs but like even being 1% the way there is basically nonexistent in society

Reply, 03:07 UTC · 2 likes

Wait hear me out https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1683593790253137921?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Tweet, 03:22 UTC · 7 likes

Ok here's my mediocre attempt but its only for DC, almost certainly incomplete https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xf9Sxn3Dm6SrAO6RDLTb5tb2ft_0tO543AGLbAfiwjQ/edit?usp=sharing

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Reply to @SteveStuWill, 06:45 UTC · 48 likes

Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill): “An analysis of results of 211 studies on sex drive found that men, on average, have a substantially stronger sex drive than women.” https://www.psypost.org/2023/02/huge-study-finds-men-have-a-stronger-sex-drive-than-women-68289

Big if true

Reply, 12:36 UTC · 8 likes

Always import numpy as torch

Quote tweet, 13:41 UTC · 2 likes

Ngl I kinda forgot about the Tulsa thing but in case there’s a silent coalition here, DM me and/or comment here if ur actually kinda interested

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): ⬅️ EAs when it comes to coordination around AI, involving thousands of people and billions of dollars incentivizing defection

➡️ EAs when someone suggests moving to a cool city with literally half the cost of living of SF (!) freeing up tens of thousands of dollars/person-year

image attached

Reply to his own earlier tweet, 13:52 UTC · 1 like

Aaron Bergman, September 5, 2023: 39. I think this is right and suspect it’s the main reason for attrition, regardless of what people actually say their reasons are for stopping veganism I’m…

40. EAGs should accept more people

I (weakly) don’t thing they should be fully open, but there’s no way the marginal person would be bad to admit all things considered

Reply, 17:24 UTC · 2 likes

Jfc

Tweet, 18:00 UTC · 3 likes

This is why the iOS feature that lets you silent notifications, informs the other person of this, but then lets them text you anyway (if you allow this) is excellent

Reply, 18:02 UTC · 2 likes

I feel like this isn’t true lol (since you incur risk of reputational cost (if nothing else) however small)

Reply, 19:03 UTC · 2 likes

Will it be recorded?

Reply, 19:46 UTC · 2 likes

🎉🥳🧠💻👁️🦇

Tweet, 21:23 UTC · 22 likes

Go to your following list, scroll all the way down and screenshot…

Kinda basic but think I chose pretty well in 2019

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Tweet, 22:50 UTC · 4 likes

They need to make a medium sized pig.

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Wednesday, September 6, 2023

Reply to @cremieuxrecueil, 01:18 UTC · 25 likes

Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil): When I first saw this graph, the main thing that stood out to me was that Japan has the world's least spicy food.

Even Brits eat spicier food.

image attached

Are they not counting wasabi as spice? It’s qualitatively and chemically different but still spicy imo

Quote tweet, 11:04 UTC · 22 likes

That’s quite a CV

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Quoting Peter Singer (@PeterSinger): Today I’ll begin teaching my last ever semester at Princeton University. This photo was taken of me at my first year of teaching in 1999.

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Reply, 11:06 UTC · 3 likes

Yes its one of the products with highest consumer surplus for me easily

Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 11:13 UTC · 8 likes

Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): @samswoora "build housing"

Ofc I agree, and would add that the homeless population people see and think about as “ruining cities” are a small minority of the actual homeless population, who are largely sleeping in cars/shelters/on a precarious stream of couches etc

This doesn’t “solve” the issues associated with the former group, but that’s an issue other than homelessness per se

Quote tweet, 11:46 UTC · 2 likes

Ooh this is so interesting

Quoting Owain Evans (@OwainEvans_UK): Our experiment:

1. Finetune an LLM on descriptions of fictional chatbots but with no example transcripts (i.e. only declarative facts).

2. At test time, see if the LLM can behave like the chatbots zero-shot. Can the LLM go from declarative → procedural info?

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Reply, 12:06 UTC · 3 likes

I’ll allow the one normie follow in light of the other three

Reply, 12:15 UTC · 2 likes

Why is it so slow to do nothing?

Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 12:51 UTC · 6 likes

Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): Yeah I think you're wrong here, homelessness is largely correlated with temperature and house prices. People are homeless because they don't have placed to live.

Much cheaper housing would help this.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qz9GvoPbnFwGrHHQB/visible-homelessness-in-sf-a-quick-breakdown-of-causes

Might be misunderstanding me - I agree with all that. I was just noting that the original tweet seemed to be conflating the actual homeless population with the visible homeless population that people seem to be especially bothered by

Quote tweet, 13:30 UTC · 5 likes

I’m hugely on team “be as intellectually honest as you can and be willing to steelman view you disagree with but don’t keep your views a secret”

Not just w/ kids (yours or in general) either…

Quoting Dissproportionately (@dissproportion): The children yearn for indoctrination. You think if I present alternate views they won’t figure out which I hold? If I don’t try to influence them they won’t be influenced? My kids are welcome to disagree, but they know where I stand. They surely know what everybody else thinks.

Tweet, 13:30 UTC · 3 likes

Old Forum comment

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Reply to @GarrettPetersen, 13:31 UTC · 23 likes

Dr. Dad, PhD 🔄🔼◀️🔽▶️ (@GarrettPetersen): Why do you suppose homeschool kids outperform other kids on standardized tests?

Selection effects

Reply, 15:58 UTC · 37 likes

Eh pretty sure this is not one of the mechanisms

Quote tweet, 16:08 UTC · 6 likes

Where can I find more copilot prose like this?

Quoting Leon🕯️ (@miraculous_cake): @squirtle_says natty coder minds cannot comprehend this

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Reply, 16:17 UTC · 50 likes

Probably a random toddler who has only a few propositional thoughts and all of them false

Thread, continued, 16:17 UTC · 41 likes

But in the spirit of the question, Kant

Reply, 16:21 UTC · 17 likes

Where u gonna get all that land?

Reply, 16:26 UTC · 23 likes

No

Reply, 16:42 UTC · 5 likes

Ur w🫎ome

Reply, 17:39 UTC · 6 likes

https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1670837256720990228?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Reply to @JesseTayRiver, 18:31 UTC · 2 likes

Jesse Smith (@JesseTayRiver): Every. Damn. Night. Not even sorry.

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*man burns more calories than the entire industrial revolution* “just a lil treat 😋”

Reply, 18:35 UTC · 3 likes

Sure but that probably doesn’t run through the observation of you changing your physical environment slightly by literally moving objects - more likely the more abstract sense of doing something responsible/conducive to one’s goals etc

Reply, 18:45 UTC · 2 likes

Actually this is pretty interesting bc I recall heavy leg/core lifts being uniquely good at eliciting an endocrine response via growth hormone mainly which is well established to interact with the brain in a million ways

Reply, 18:46 UTC · 2 likes

Also I’ve heard some people report the opposite - being super wiped out mentally after leg day

So 🤷‍♂️

Reply, 18:55 UTC · 4 likes

No it was the moose one

Tweet, 18:57 UTC · 6 likes

If I was a billionaire my one weird extravagant thing would be having a bunch of pet pigs and a caretaker for them

Tweet, 22:03 UTC · 3 likes

Might get cancelled for this but Taylor Swift’s recent stuff is kinda…nihilistic?

Not like every song has to be deep ofc, and no I can’t really justify this in explicit terms with my desired level of brainpower

Tweet, 22:03 UTC · 1 like

To the friends that I lose over this: I hope u have a nice life

Reply, 22:24 UTC

Nothing necessarily. I’m basically an aesthetic subjectivist lol

Thursday, September 7, 2023

Reply to @nickcammarata, 01:10 UTC · 4 likes

Nick (@nickcammarata): why would it take 9hrs for the coffee to make me too acidic but only a few min for tums to fix it?

Seems more likely this is actually a decrease in stomach acid associated with the caffeine wearing off (caf increases stomach acid apparently)

This could impair digestion if you’ve eaten and are particularly responsive to caffeine in this way. Would also explain reflux (which is counterintuitively caused by insufficient rather than excess endogenous acid)

If this happens even for decaf coffee (or not if u take a similar amount of pure caffeine), it’s probably smth else

Reply, 02:13 UTC · 5 likes

Had to zoom in to make sure that wasn't a critter lol

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Tweet, 02:19 UTC · 2 likes

Might have to post some Reddit screenshots to get my Elonbucks (3.4M over last 90 days but now I know professional influencer is a viable career plan if I play my cards right)

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Tweet, 03:51 UTC · 1 like

I think I see why people are talking about GPUs and such

Also how is >100% possible?

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Reply, 04:14 UTC · 2 likes

Everyone 🤝 everyone

No

Reply to @Aella_Girl, 05:08 UTC · 2 likes

Aella (@Aella_Girl): We're still dating! He's wonderful

So was the net result of that whole episode negative, positive (bc of the card and maybe extenuating circumstances), or ~neutral?

I feel like your answer will help be understand the female mind

Reply, 05:10 UTC · 11 likes

What is a “race condition” in this context?

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Reply to @freed_dfilan, 05:11 UTC · 1 like

Daniel Filan 🔎 (@freed_dfilan): I don't think it will

My intuition is 50/50 here so I feel like bayesianism wise it’s non trivially better than nothing

Reply, 05:16 UTC · 2 likes

Poast?

Reply, 05:18 UTC · 4 likes

Thanks

Reply, 05:20 UTC · 2 likes

😢 (actually 🤝)

Reply to @BecomingCritter, 06:02 UTC · 1 like

critter (@BecomingCritter): what song should I listen to that has late night vibes?

Through the late night Travis Scott

Reply, 07:48 UTC · 3 likes

🫡

Quote tweet, 07:55 UTC · 11 likes

Is there a non-weird (non pejorative, good in fact) reason Stripe Press exists? I feel vaguely weird about shilling for a neobank but maybe they deserve it

Quoting Brian Potter (@_brianpotter): One cool thing about Stripe Press is that when I suggested some potential book ideas they immediately zeroed in on the extremely ambitious, galaxy-brained idea.

Reply, 09:04 UTC · 37 likes

This is just idle fake philosophizing but I feel like “forever” doesn’t weigh as heavily as it should

Not to say this means it would be bad to live literally forever, but I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision

Thread, continued, 09:05 UTC · 30 likes

Like at first pass it sounds in the same region as “you’d watch all ur friends die but 1000x” but no, you’d watch galaxy clusters form and that’s just a relative instant

Friday, September 8, 2023

Reply, 01:35 UTC · 1 like

Darn

Reply, 09:00 UTC · 3 likes

Me, I do

Reply, 09:57 UTC · 4 likes

Or bikini-themed lightbulb costume

Reply, 12:42 UTC · 2 likes

((Bikini themed lightbulb costume)-themed bikini)-themed lightbulb costume

Reply to @CosmicSkeptic, 17:29 UTC · 1 like

Alex O'Connor (@CosmicSkeptic): Can you disprove God’s existence in a tweet?

No

Quote tweet, 18:04 UTC · 10 likes

Can someone do an independent analysis here?

I don’t specifically distrust Shapira, it’s just a big claim

Quoting Liron Shapira (@liron): Last year, @elonmusk's judgment under pressure saved the world from nuclear war (>10% chance).

We as a species don't systematically prevent nuclear war. These ad-hoc moments of heroism from a Petrov, Arkhipov, Khruschev or Musk are all we've got.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/07/elon-musk-starlink-ukraine-russia-invasion/

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Quote tweet, 20:24 UTC · 3 likes

After ~12 hours, FLUFFY1 has been trained 😤

- 600 layers (idk what these even mean but people seemed psyched about layers so)
- >1M parameters (I kinda know what these are)

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Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): I think I see why people are talking about GPUs and such

Also how is >100% possible?

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Tweet, 20:36 UTC · 4 likes

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

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Saturday, September 9, 2023

Reply to his own earlier tweet, 00:23 UTC · 2 likes

Aaron Bergman, September 5, 2023: 🎉🥳🧠💻👁️🦇

Cool if I put it on the EA Global Talks podcast feed (if just for my own benefit lol and/or EA Forum)?

Public on YT now. Tbc I’m gonna default to doing this bc it’s public unless I hear otherwise https://youtu.be/-YC-ZhdcVck?si=LrObjWfsXnm8xGgw

Reply, 00:28 UTC · 5 likes

Probably not worth anyone updating but I got pretty badly hurt deadlifting a while ago. Probably my form wasn’t perfect but strongly suspect being a stick at the time was a greater risk factor (probably 90lbs lifting 225 I think) so maybe worth considering for anyone especially skinny/small/untrained

Quote tweet, 01:40 UTC · 3 likes

Now on Spotify with video! https://spotify.link/4zCxStGoWCb

Quoting Robert Long (@rgblong):

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Tweet, 04:56 UTC · 22 likes

Question: why are garments so relatively (to what I’d intuitively guess given the prices of other consumer goods) expensive?

Like on Amazon the very cheapest men’s shorts are $10, and most basic ones are $20-$40

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Thread, continued, 04:56 UTC · 7 likes

It can’t just be weight, because 15 pounds of paper costs about as much as 1 pound of short

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Reply to @br___ian, 05:14 UTC · 2 likes

bri (@br___ian): My understanding is that sewing has not been successfully automated yet, although I couple be wrong

If so, I bet that's the limiting factor - one person can only sew a pair of pants so fast

Ah interesting

Reply to @br___ian, 05:14 UTC · 5 likes

bri (@br___ian): My understanding is that sewing has not been successfully automated yet, although I couple be wrong

If so, I bet that's the limiting factor - one person can only sew a pair of pants so fast

Wait that’s wild

Reply, 05:26 UTC · 2 likes

Why did ppl say no? Like if it sounds fun to u what’s the downside?

Reply, 07:43 UTC · 3 likes

It was dry, flavorless, and not sweet at all

Reply, 15:32 UTC · 4 likes

U don’t start listening to every 80k episode within 20 minutes of release? Not a real EA

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Quote tweet, 15:38 UTC · 7 likes

41. CEA should in fact do this. It would be funny at a minimum and then all the EA-adjacents could mingle.

Also it would make the whole event EA-adjacent-adjacent

Quoting Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): To accommodate community sentiment CEA has placed a fairly large tent outside their next event they're calling EAG Adjacent

Reply, 15:39 UTC · 3 likes

Banger

Reply, 22:48 UTC · 3 likes

I mean it’s probably a light push, but I’d guess that yeah directionally it’s a push in the right direction

Some subset of students will be predisposed to care about ethics but not so much (/aren’t nerdy enough) that they’d research ethical theories on their own

And some subset of these would get a good competent professor

Quote tweet, 22:50 UTC · 6 likes

I think I’m gonna side with the “mandatory ethics class in college” people here

Not as a law obv, just a policy that I think would be on balance good for most colleges to adopt

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): @daniel_271828 I mean it’s probably a light push, but I’d guess that yeah directionally it’s a push in the right direction

Some subset of students will be predisposed to care about ethics but not so much (/aren’t nerdy enough) that they’d research ethical theories on their own

And some subset of these would get a good competent professor

Thread, continued, 22:50 UTC · 4 likes

If someone reaalllly doesn’t wanna take it, fine choose another school

IMO “what should one do?” is a pretty fundamental question and if you’re gonna have anything like a basic reading or math requirement this should make the cut as well

Thread, continued, 22:53 UTC · 5 likes

Georgetown College required intro to Phil and intro to ethics. I mean I’m a philosophy nerd so I’m predisposed to support this, but I think it was basically a good reasonable policy that doesn’t need to fall into a battlefield of the STEM/humanities culture war

Reply to @contemplatonist, 23:56 UTC · 6 likes

Amber Dawn (@contemplatonist): this is a joke, but why are EAs like this? It feels like there's a lot of fear that ppl are going to be slammed if they ever make a mistake or accidentally sound more confident than they are - seems bad.

(quoting @SpacedOutMatt: My most toxic trait is adding increasing amounts of hedging every time I proofread one of my EA forum drafts)

I’ve started doing this unintentionally irl with non rationalist/EA ppl (like my parents lol)

It feels like just trying not to be literally wrong, which is hard!

Reply to @Duderichy, 23:57 UTC · 17 likes

the Rich (@Duderichy): real mathematicians know

image attached

Wait so how *do* these numbers get calculated for economic and legal purposes?

Reply, 23:59 UTC · 26 likes

Can someone explain?

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Reply, 00:04 UTC · 42 likes

Oops I guess

Image

Reply, 00:06 UTC · 3 likes

Oops

Reply, 01:28 UTC · 19 likes

Jesus I have no idea what the actual thing I’m supposed to be avoiding is lol

Reply, 04:09 UTC · 3 likes

What

Reply, 04:10 UTC · 3 likes

I mean cigs will kill u, just take nicotine

Reply, 04:12 UTC · 15 likes

Oh this is sarcastic ie implying that these are generally bad. Didn’t catch that at first

Besides the cigs (and idk anything about epo), I pretty wholeheartedly endorse this unironically

Reply, 04:37 UTC · 4 likes

Tbf I’d be very suspicious of the truth of a conspicuously plain statement presented to me during a psych study

Reply, 05:01 UTC · 17 likes

Yeah this is basically exactly my parents situation. Got lucky choosing the right suburb in 96 tho, not every house is worth 7 figures now

Reply, 09:44 UTC · 2 likes

Depends on how empirically risky it is

Reply to @full_legal_name, 10:56 UTC · 58 likes

a beautiful woman 💕✨👄🦷 (@full_legal_name): doctor told me my cortisol levels look like i’m constantly trying to save a baby from a burning building

image attached

Phosphatidylserine lowers cortisol

Reply, 10:58 UTC · 2 likes

🫡

Reply to @BarughTyrone, 12:06 UTC · 3 likes

tyrone barugh🔸 (@BarughTyrone): Done a cost benefit analysis by any chance?

No but from recollection doesn’t seem super risky or expensive

Reply, 12:32 UTC · 2 likes

I think it’s a distinct org there but not certain

Reply to @pyroxiumn, 12:51 UTC · 1 like

pyroxiiumn (@pyroxiumn): I have this exact pair they’re soooo infamously uncomfortable. I wore them for my grad show and stood for 6 hours. even with some sitting A couple of my toes were numb for days afterwards

Just…don’t do that? Countersignal + comfy > signal

Reply to @RPLongSW, 13:30 UTC · 4 likes

RP Long 🆓️ (@RPLongSW): @AaronBergman18 Not sarcastic; rhetorical. I ask the questions in the first tweet and answer them in the rest of the thread. There is no sarcasm involved here at all.

Ok. You seem to imply that there’s some intrinsic value to solving problems via unassisted agency, “the hard way”

I disagree. The intuition most people have in this direction is just a reification of the heuristic that such “easy solutions” often have hidden/downstream/less salient downsides

But sometimes they don’t, or really they do but just aren’t large enough to justify the intuitive aversion

Insofar as you want to just assert that no, there is some genuine intrinsic value to unassisted agency, I’d just say that’s wrong and point towards the entire corpus of analytic philosophy as justification

Reply, 13:42 UTC · 10 likes

I feel a weird amount of connection (“kinship”? idk neither word is right exactly) with Swartz. Similar interests, moral and intellectual leanings, health issues (mental and otherwise), same name, afaict very similar personality and general secular upper middle class Jewish American upbringing. I could *totally* see myself doing the scraping thing that landed him in legal trouble and thinking “fuck it it’ll be fine”

I mean he was probably smarter and more successful than I’ll ever be but still

Tweet, 14:27 UTC · 2 likes

Am I the only one who just found this

Image

Reply, 14:27 UTC · 6 likes

sure, Thing

Tweet, 15:49 UTC · 3 likes

"This means that if there's going to be a social norm against open sourcing powerful AI models, it's going to come from a combination of high status community members, or a majority or strong minority of the broader tech world saying, "No, this is an anti-social thing to do."

You might impress me with this AI thing that you made, but I think it's bad that you did that. Even though you caught my attention, I'm not going to hire you because I think you did a bad thing. That's how a norm against open sourcing powerful AI models starts to make personal sense for individuals.

To be clear, this doesn't depend on a majority of people saying this. It could be that 80% of people say, "Oh, cool, now I can fine tune 13 on whatever I want, thanks." But if Sam Altman and hiring managers at Google and Facebook are saying, "No, we're not going to hire you if you do that because it's bad," it can outweigh other incentives, like random people on Twitter saying, "Oh, super cool. Now I can get it to write tweets for me."

[From an edited ramble of mine, full text below. Thx to http://audiopen.ai]

Reply, 15:50 UTC · 16 likes

Well I hope she has fun too

Reply, 16:31 UTC · 3 likes

Poast pdfs

Quote tweet, 17:30 UTC · 2 likes

It’s on the gcal

Image

Image

Quoting tater tot (@parakeetnebula): @visakanv Once I saw a total solar eclipse at a zoo and watching the collective sense of “wtf” among all the animals as totality approached was really interesting, especially the reactions of the birds and gorillas. I think we are going to find out that animals have been onboarded to something like consciousness for a long time

Reply to @Chris_arnade, 17:33 UTC · 3,486 likes

Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 (@Chris_arnade): It’s 100 degrees in my room, but 68 outside, but I can’t change that because England has dumb rules

image attached

Wait it’s illegal to open windows in the UK??

Tweet, 18:04 UTC · 2 likes

“The plan? Spend our last $50k on the least convincing ad anyone has ever seen”

Image

Reply, 18:09 UTC · 3 likes

100% chance this is already on LinkedIn

Reply, 19:20 UTC · 2 likes

I agree it’s interesting but I’d guess not super relevant (though still relevant to some degree tbc) to hedonic welfare at least in relative terms

Monday, September 11, 2023

Reply, 12:34 UTC · 6 likes

The man writes

Reply, 15:55 UTC · 7 likes

He’s not stochastic 😡 every action is thoughtful and deliberate 🦜

Reply, 15:57 UTC · 4 likes

So what’s life like as a bird? Actually kinda curious what you’ve come to think

Tweet, 16:00 UTC · 5 likes

I did a 12 hour twitter fast (plz clap) and now I forget some of the bangers I thought of during that time 😢

Tweet, 16:01 UTC · 2 likes

Actually it wound up being 14.5 hours (plz clap 21% more)

Tweet, 16:17 UTC · 13 likes

I haven’t seen Qualy in a while

Was there a…fission in the Qualycule??? 😳

Quote tweet, 17:12 UTC · 51 likes

Warning: probably terrible idea. Just barely serious enough to warrant a tweet

Idea: huge indoor/outdoor playground/warehouse situation where people can drop their kids. Unlimited healthy individual packaged food and water. Toys, pillows and blankets, etc

The catch: in addition to each kid wearing a pulse oximeter, the whole thing is an AI-powered panopticon that alerts adults if P(something bad happening) is high enough

Quoting Maxwell Tabarrok (@MTabarrok): This is a strange pattern.

Baumol cost disease explanations predict that child care is expensive because the labor has high opportunity cost from more productive sectors.

But then we should see high wages for childcare providers. What can explain high costs and low wages?

Tweet, 17:12 UTC · 11 likes

That’s it. I’ve solved expensive childcare

Reply to @absurdlymax, 17:22 UTC · 9 likes

Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): @AaronBergman18 So daycare....?

Yeah except no direct child/adult interaction or supervision except when the panopticon goes brr

Tweet, 17:58 UTC · 3 likes

Wait I’m an idiot it would be a dissociative chemical reaction

Reply, 19:28 UTC · 7 likes

:( [ or :) I guess ]

Reply, 21:38 UTC · 1 like

It’s too small. 23 inch laptop when

Thread, continued, 21:39 UTC · 1 like

Also more lumens plz. I want my screen to shine with the fury of 1000 suns (ie 1000 lumens sustained)

Reply, 22:26 UTC · 2 likes

Obv depends on how big “somewhat” is but my best guess (for ur followers too, not just me lol) is that this…isn’t true (emphasis on “must be” - plausibly it is much harder in some circumstances like being born in a poor country)

Reply, 23:14 UTC · 3 likes

🫡 Damn good luck

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Reply, 10:38 UTC · 2 likes

I am once again calling for 90+% of prescription medications to be regulated like ibuprofen

Reply, 10:58 UTC · 4 likes

Fucking insanity

Reply, 11:46 UTC · 2 likes

Who is asuka and what does it/he/she have to do with an outdoor recreation coop

Reply to @GjMcGowan, 11:57 UTC · 4 likes

George McGowan (@GjMcGowan): Often I don’t remember your name or @ but I remember profile pic and a vague notion of content.

E.g. chilean software twink, HVAC EA, Dog Man, architecture yimby, foodie yimby, horny anti-boomer activist, EA biochad, doomer anglo lifter, inexplicably handsome AI researcher...

@austinc3301
@JesseTayRiver
@daniel_271828
@Laura_k_Duffy
@????
@catehall (??)
@Tjdriii (??)
@trevposts or @EzraJNewman or @mealreplacer or @RomanHauksson

What’s my score

Reply to @daniel_271828, 12:04 UTC · 3 likes

zzDANIEL_ETH (@daniel_271828): Wait, am I Dog Man?

Yes

Quote tweet, 12:08 UTC · 15 likes

Comment to be given a 2-5 word summary of ur entire being according to me

Quoting George McGowan (@GjMcGowan): Often I don’t remember your name or @ but I remember profile pic and a vague notion of content.

E.g. chilean software twink, HVAC EA, Dog Man, architecture yimby, foodie yimby, horny anti-boomer activist, EA biochad, doomer anglo lifter, inexplicably handsome AI researcher...

Reply, 12:11 UTC · 5 likes

Chilean software twink + America disliker

Reply, 12:13 UTC · 2 likes

Aerospace flavored shrimp savior

Reply, 12:22 UTC · 6 likes

Orange-tinted number enthusiast

Reply, 12:23 UTC · 5 likes

Stealth wingman

Reply, 15:19 UTC · 2 likes

Catgirl? No, cat > girl

Reply, 15:31 UTC · 4 likes

metakuna (14/100 blog posts) (@metakuna): @AaronBergman18 yo

The great purple circle of ea Twitter

Reply, 15:45 UTC · 1 like

Multitude maximizer

Tweet, 17:20 UTC · 20 likes

More stressful?

Tweet, 18:17 UTC · 9 likes

Interview done. Confirmed less stressful than date

Reply, 19:10 UTC · 3 likes

oh dandy lion🔸 (@ohwizenedtortle): @AaronBergman18 Summarise me!!

Kind yet perpetually horny older internet brother

Reply, 19:11 UTC · 3 likes

Guy who occasionally shows up in the GC to impart wisdom then disappears

Reply, 19:20 UTC · 2 likes

Sam Glover (@sam_atis): 👀

Blogman with pfp of a guy with a very vertically long face

Reply, 19:26 UTC · 3 likes

Instant meta-analysis generator bot

Reply, 21:19 UTC · 2 likes

Don’t tease the people like that! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xw98osdN4mEGbRDiR/aaron-bergman-s-shortform?commentId=s4yxZTEckuuCGpZYd

Image

Image

Image

Reply, 22:47 UTC · 2 likes

Demographic data! Hope most ppl interpreted it that way lol

Reply, 23:58 UTC · 3 likes

Mysterious smart and maybe rich person https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1701673869399015673?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Reply, 00:00 UTC · 5 likes

davidad 🎇 (@davidad): @AaronBergman18 👀

1000 step Rube Goldberg alignment plan guy who may or may not have a real name

Reply, 00:10 UTC

Nicholas Decker (@captgouda24): @AaronBergman18 I'm gonna be eigenvalued

Econ guy who I remember had at least one bad ethics take but I can’t remember which

Reply, 01:22 UTC · 2 likes

Truly evil. Only one f*n+ can remain

Yes, consider rebranding as Ian

Reply, 01:43 UTC · 3 likes

Jfc, sorry to hear this

Reply to @dissproportion, 02:42 UTC · 36 likes

Dissproportionately (@dissproportion): Most people agree that women have lower libido (on average), but few acknowledge that there is a large segment of the female population that never liked sex and isn’t interested in it, cultural baggage aside. Luckily, there is a large part of the male pop that is unfuckable.

If you’re gathering data (implicitly lol) mostly from white college educated women over 40, probably smth in the neighborhood of 1/3 are taking antidepressants, of which the strong majority are SSRIs

Seems like this alone could explain 10% essentially asexual

Image

Image

Thread, continued, 02:44 UTC · 19 likes

Combined with 50% sexual side effect prevalence and much greater willingness to tolerate this among women? Seems like the whole story to me

Image

Reply to @TylerAlterman, 05:51 UTC · 5 likes

Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply (@TylerAlterman): What sex are you?

If you could do it all over, would you have rather been born a male or a female?

IMO the main considerations here from a hedonic self-interested perspective:

male = higher libido which is harder to fulfill -> much more sexual frustration

Female = period+pregnancy+childbirth (for most) means what like 10-15% of adulthood spent incapacitated and/or much less happy

Not at all obvious to me which is a bigger deal, hedonically

Quote tweet, 05:54 UTC · 29 likes

Can we get an intellectually disagreeable internet nerd review of this? Not to debunk it unless it actually needs debunking, which maybe it doesn’t!

Quoting chris (@becomingbabyman): Ok. This is gonna sting

Hyperbaric oxygen is kinda a magic bullet for body issues

Inflammation appears to be directly tied to oxygen saturation. O2 pressure vessels can get the fuel(oxygen) to parts of the body that are hard to heal

And O2 is not exactly trading at all time highs. So almost no one knows that hyperbaric oxygen is an option.

The woman running the only affordable clinic in SD litterally founded it so her father could get the care he needed.

Let’s bring back non invasive, affordable, miracle wonder drug

Pressurized Oxygen

👏👏👏

Oh yah. For reference I’ve had 2 treatments so far and each is progressively the best I can remember feeling in my body in 35 years

Reply to @Levi7hart, 06:02 UTC · 1 like

Levi Hart (@Levi7hart): anyone got a good ai tool that can transcribe notes and organise the notes/meeting actions?

https://audiopen.ai/?aff=M5bmM

Disclaimer: referral link. But I legit like audiopen

Reply to @Levi7hart, 06:06 UTC · 1 like

Levi Hart (@Levi7hart): i maybe should have been clearer that I was definitely not going to purchase a service

Ah, in that case http://assemblyai.com/playground for multi-speaker transcription -> http://Claude.ai for summarization etc

Reply to @absurdlymax, 06:12 UTC · 2 likes

Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): Do we have a good explanation for what causes deja vu?

Olivia Rodrigo

Tweet, 06:16 UTC · 3 likes

Yes I am once again calling for explicit feedback like plz I even have an anonymous form (http://admonymous.co/a)

Tweet, 06:20 UTC · 3 likes

Like god bless the “trim ur unibrow” guy (gender neutral) who slid into my Admonymous. Perfect advice - actionable, not obvious to me somehow, like a poem in fact

Tweet, 06:23 UTC · 3 likes

For some reason I have a stupid consumerist urge to buy the newest most expensive possible computer but tbh my iPhone 11 works fine and totally suffices

Reply to @sarah_micheleg, 06:37 UTC · 2 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @sarah_micheleg is no longer available.)

Air filter + n95 mask if u can tolerate + contact landlord + get air quality monitor so u can sue if they don’t do shit + open window + point fan outside to circulate + seal off bathtub somehow

Worse ideas that aren’t exactly bad:

- go camping
- ginger extract and/or zofran for nausea

Reply, 16:10 UTC · 1 like

Thx

Reply, 16:10 UTC · 2 likes

Likewise

Reply, 16:12 UTC · 2 likes

Happy birthday Frances

Reply, 16:28 UTC · 1 like

Chilean software twink

Reply, 16:32 UTC · 2 likes

Nerdy rat twitter anon archetype

Quote tweet, 16:50 UTC · 13 likes

There should be a coven of intellectually disagreeable internet nerd elders who we can turn to to discern important matters

Pls reply with nominees (mine [preliminary] are below)

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Can we get an intellectually disagreeable internet nerd review of this? Not to debunk it unless it actually needs debunking, which maybe it doesn’t!

Thread, continued, 16:50 UTC · 9 likes

I nominate @TheZvi @ohabryka @natalia__coelho @peterwildeford @acesounderglass @ESYudkowsky @juliagalef

Reply, 16:59 UTC · 6 likes

Image

Reply, 17:00 UTC · 3 likes

I would die

Reply, 17:02 UTC · 6 likes

Role model in chief

Quote tweet, 17:07 UTC · 4 likes

🤝

Image

Quoting Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 (@peterwildeford): This is great! @RethinkPriors has been voted most cost-effective of all time

so ok I think we can stop voting now

image attached

Reply, 17:30 UTC · 5 likes

Literally everything in high enough concentrations kills u tho

Reply, 17:48 UTC · 2 likes

Ryan Briggs (@ryancbriggs): @AaronBergman18 yeah okay

Fellow R enthusiast with suboptimal cause prio takes

Reply, 17:49 UTC · 2 likes

Guy I will keep running into irl once every couple months until the heat death of the universe

Quote tweet, 19:23 UTC · 5 likes

New animal welfare intervention just dropped

Quoting Jimmy (@JimmySteier): Lol in addition to messing up all steel on earth, we've also made a majority of central European boars too radioactive to eat for like 100 years.

https://nautil.us/the-paradox-of-the-radioactive-boars-376225/

Reply, 20:36 UTC · 2 likes

Update

Thursday, September 14, 2023

Quote tweet, 14:11 UTC · 24 likes

Apparently this checks out and the cats really are a nonlethal deterrent

Thus I bestow the honorary “based” upon Ms. Samantha Miller

Quoting Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 (@JeremiahDJohns): What does she think the feral cats are doing to the rats

image attached

Reply, 14:22 UTC · 26 likes

U got arrested for that?? I feel like this is more of a warning level offense

Tweet, 15:25 UTC · 5 likes

Is there a fundamental physics reason birds wings flap and airplane wings do not? Or is it just that flapping airplane wings is technically very hard and unnecessary bc infinite calories?

Tweet, 15:36 UTC · 1 like

For the first time in my life I feel mildly nature-deprived, like suburban trees and grass and stuff isn’t sufficing

Reply, 15:42 UTC · 2 likes

Image

Reply, 17:55 UTC · 5 likes

I thought it was like a soccer league type league

Reply to @tobinjstone, 20:40 UTC · 4 likes

Tobin Stone 🌐 (@tobinjstone): have teenagers ever considered just being normal and putting things like artwork or nice photos on their wall?

Flags are big and cheap. Takes much more time and effort (or expense) to cover the same total area via art or pictures

I had a Maryland flag on my wall despite having zero state pride. Didn’t buy it for that, it was just laying around in my house pre-college for some reason

Reply to @Laura_k_Duffy, 20:41 UTC · 1 like

Laura Muresianu 🌐🔸🇺🇸 (@Laura_k_Duffy): I have 2/3 of the flags on the left picture…

Guessing UN+US?

Reply to @samswoora, 20:44 UTC · 2 likes

Samswara (@samswoora): I'm sorry who thought that "popular prescriptions near you!" was a good feature lmfao

image attached

Preregistering my guesses

Statin (?)
Statin (?)
PPI
PPI
SSRI
Statin

Reply to @Laura_k_Duffy, 20:49 UTC · 1 like

Laura Muresianu 🌐🔸🇺🇸 (@Laura_k_Duffy): Yeah, though I really wish I had a NATO flag

I don’t have the UN one up bc I’m pretty uncertain about how I feel about them as an organization

Solvable issue https://www.united-states-flag.com/nato-nato-3ftx5ft-printed-polyester-flag.html

Tweet, 22:06 UTC · 47 likes

Idk who needs to hear this (ok actually I do but whatever) but for job app questions/work trials/test tasks, I’d SO much rather have formal, hard time limit (enforced via test proctoring software or a very clear/explicit honor code) than a suggested time limit (“we recommend you spend no more than one hour…”), character or word limit only, or no limitation at all

Tweet, 22:06 UTC · 15 likes

Because otherwise it’s a race to the top, and frankly it’s rational for people in my shoes to spend up to like 20x the recommended (or assumed) time on at least some applications, and actually staying within that non-formal “limit” is just not gonna happen

Tweet, 22:06 UTC · 15 likes

For a “we recommend you spend 1 hour on this” app, I’d guesstimate that my actual mean time spent is:

- 2 hours for smth I’m a decent fit for

- 5 hours for a good fit

- 12 hours for a job I’d be really excited about

Reply to @ShahmeerHashmat, 22:10 UTC · 7 likes

Shahmeer (@ShahmeerHashmat): Nah it’s peaceful protest. Deal with it 👍🏾

That’s a very low bar and not a standard anyone uses for whether a particular protest is wise (if you support it) or acceptable (if you dont)

Reply, 22:30 UTC · 4 likes

I was thinking about this! Yeah it can definitely make sense if willingness to work a lot (perhaps beyond social norms) is very important for job performance

But this comes at a cost of diluting other signals which I’d weakly guess are collectively the bigger deal

Tweet, 23:26 UTC · 5 likes

Yoshua Bengio: “my credence on computational functionalism is 99.99%”
https://spotify.link/luY8PG8a6Cb

Thread, continued, 23:26 UTC · 2 likes

For the those who don’t automatically recognize every polysyllabic phrase in analytic philosophy, my understanding of CF is:

if A and B are systems doing the same thing with ~information~ [I don’t have a great grasp of what information is, formally] they will have (generate? be?) the same conscious experience (ie qualia), regardless of what they’re made out of, when or where they are, their history, or anything else

Thread, continued, 23:26 UTC · 1 like

Too bad I don’t think we’ll ever know because I’d bet with Yoshua money at 1:999 odds!

@rgblong care to give your point estimate credence? (Sorry if I missed it in the recording)

Reply, 23:38 UTC · 2 likes

I feel like nothing is 99.99% likely in analytic phil conditional on it being contentious enough to warrant debate/defense. My P(libertarian legit mental causation free will) > .01%

Quote tweet, 23:41 UTC · 7 likes

Personally I think we should make it illegal for anyone to go to med school so median MD compensation hits 7 figures ASAP

Quoting AMA (@AmerMedicalAssn): One health system turned to non-physicians in a pinch, but found they needed to rethink their strategy based on the data.

Friday, September 15, 2023

Quote tweet, 00:16 UTC · 3 likes

Guess I’m a two emoji guy now

Quoting Holly ⏸️ Elmore (@ilex_ulmus): Put the pause ⏸️ emoji in your twitter name to show you support for pausing AI development until it is safe!

Reply, 02:38 UTC

https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1696728329368293682

Reply, 04:31 UTC · 1 like

Cute = good, normal = bad (absent any other info/context lol)

Reply, 04:37 UTC · 4 likes

well are u gonna keep it a secret

Quote tweet, 04:43 UTC · 3 likes

(Obv this is a joke but…)

1 minute of research says that it would take about 2000g of sugar (presumably ingested basically all together) to kill the median 150lb person

So this might in fact be 10% of the lethal dose which idk yeah seems like not a good idea unless you’re totally glycogen depleted

Quoting gaut (@0xgaut): Dunkin Donuts has got *nothing* on BaskinRobbins

185g of sugar? Try 263 grams.

Enough to tranquilize a grown adult European

image attached
image attached

Reply, 04:45 UTC · 2 likes

Especially-EA member of the Eigensquad

Reply, 05:16 UTC · 5 likes

Guess I’m gender-fluid or smth bc I don’t spontaneously think about anything before my lifetime that often at all

Future on the other hand…

Reply to @absurdlymax, 05:22 UTC · 5 likes

Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): @AaronBergman18 @AndyMasley Yes most people hate longtermism for being too feminine coded

I confess I’m only a longtermist to meet girls at slate star codex meetups and such

Reply, 11:10 UTC · 2 likes

There’s no fact of the matter as to whether it’s above or below - the emoji is just upside down!

Quote tweet, 11:49 UTC · 9 likes

Awfully convenient that whoever bred the XL Bully was like “let’s name it something that will legibly convey dangerous aggression”

Like a smart bad guy woulda called it the Great Brownnosed Doodlehound or smth

Quoting George McGowan (@GjMcGowan): Congratulations to Dog Man

video attached

Reply to @peterwildeford, 11:55 UTC · 4 likes

Peter Wildeford🇺🇸🚀 (@peterwildeford): what do the icons in your twitter names mean?

🔎 = (or ≈) scout mindset (origin story )

Reply, 11:57 UTC · 2 likes

And AI pause (which I have less of an inside view opinion on but) https://x.com/ilex_ulmus/status/1702468530321719748?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Tweet, 12:03 UTC · 2 likes

We are so back ❄️☃️

Image

Reply, 12:07 UTC · 1 like

I mean this is why I really want actual time limits, not just selfishly but also bc I’d guess it also distills the signal from the noise better for the employer

Reply to @lxrjl, 12:13 UTC · 1 like

alex lawsen (@lxrjl): Also, if you're excited about a job because of the potential there is to do good, I don't think trying to maximise the chance that you get hired is a sensible goal, even if you wouldn't feel bad about struggling once there. Surely you should want the best candidate to get it?

For altruistic roles/orgs: I’m definitely not trying to maximize the chance I get hired

I *am* trying to do what I think everyone else is doing tho. For sure it’s possible I’m wrong about this and, even if I’m not, I’d be very happy not to cooperate with a different norm

Reply, 12:20 UTC · 8 likes

Wait that doesn’t seem right

Psychedelics reduce the strength of priors, making you less of whatever you are (as a very rough woo-adjacent approximation)

Seems like the jet pack would accentuate a lot of the traits of a 13yo boy for better and for worse

Reply, 12:26 UTC · 2 likes

Yeah, I don’t think the same holds for a traumatized person taking acid

Reply, 13:15 UTC · 2 likes

Image

Reply to @lxrjl, 13:27 UTC · 2 likes

alex lawsen (@lxrjl): I guess I've seen a few people say this kind of thing (I'm just doing what everyone else does) for altruistic job apps and my reaction is basically just "really? That's your honest best guess about the equilibrium for a group of altruistically minded, co-operative applicants?"

Yes

(Note that I’m super willing to trust everyone if there’s an explicit direction not to take more time, even without actual enforcement)

Tweet, 15:04 UTC · 5 likes

Do we know what molecule(s) are responsible for me noticing that it smells like fall? Bc I want to buy some of that

Cc @algekalipso

Quote tweet, 15:58 UTC · 11 likes

I ❤️ capitalism

Image

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Do we know what molecule(s) are responsible for me noticing that it smells like fall? Bc I want to buy some of that

Cc @algekalipso

Reply, 16:02 UTC · 4 likes

Thats not a log. Logs must have length > circumference (source: me)

That is a chunk

Reply, 16:04 UTC · 1 like

No lol but it seems like the kind of thing that it would get right

And a search for “geosmin” on amazon turns up a bunch of fall scent like things

Reply, 16:05 UTC · 2 likes

Damn I should have considered the implication of making up a wood fact in a convo with a professional wood guy (carpenter? Woodsmith?)

Reply, 16:13 UTC · 3 likes

Fuck I kinda wanna buy it

Quote tweet, 16:15 UTC · 8 likes

Limit 100 😢

Image

Quoting Joe Biden (@JoeBiden): I’ll ask you nicely to buy this new, color-changing campaign mug.

But I know someone who won’t: http://joe.link/mug

video attached

Reply, 18:32 UTC · 1 like

At least one member of the species appears to have learned English, Twitter, and theory of mind. Fascinating creature

Reply, 18:50 UTC · 1 like

Ik this is like a joke but I really do think nonobvious gender differences in psychology and life experience is super interesting

There’s a weird quasiparadox where like modeling women and men as the same (mostly thinking about psychology) aside from obvious physiological (and maybe other?) differences gets you like 99.9999% the way there (relative to the space of possible minds) and works pretty almost always

But this makes it hard to avoid typical-minding the cases where a psych difference is at least plausible/hypothesized, which adopting a (hyperbolic/sarcastic) “women are a whole other species” stance can help correct

Reply, 19:43 UTC · 3 likes

I guess so. Max is now a belligerent

Image

Reply, 20:47 UTC · 3 likes

If you’ve never regretted taking a walk you should be taking more walks

Reply, 20:49 UTC · 2 likes

🔫

Saturday, September 16, 2023

Reply, 09:42 UTC · 1 like

I am…intrigued

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Reply, 10:23 UTC · 1 like

Lmao in fact every type of categorization is racism. Fruit vs vegetable? Plant racism

Tweet, 10:44 UTC · 9 likes

Yeah I have a morning routine (turning on 7 distinct lights in my room)

Tweet, 10:49 UTC · 8 likes

App idea: pair dog owners who want dog walking with guys who want a socially acceptable reason to go walking when it’s dark

Reply to @shakaz_, 15:58 UTC · 1 like

shakaz (@shakaz_): why is it hard to do the thing you say you wanna do

Either lack of knowledge or physical impossibility (no I won’t elaborate lol)

Tweet, 16:20 UTC · 1 like

Tentatively endorse but I’d add a wrinkle: moral value and an ordering of actions or states of the world by moral value is an “is” type of thing, not an ought

Reply, 16:21 UTC · 1 like

Lfg

Quote tweet, 19:17 UTC · 1 like

Turns out you can’t see this acct’s circle unless you’re following them!

I am calling on the following individuals to preside over important matters by following @nerd_elders (unless u don’t want to in which case plz don’t, it’s cool):

@StefanFSchubert
@QualyThe
@ESYudkowsky
@NathanpmYoung
@robinhanson
@nickcammarata
@robertwiblin

Quoting Intellectually disagreeable internet nerd elders (@nerd_elders): On it.

People (ie the council of elders) I follow on this account will be added to my circle, where they can vote on and discuss matters if they do choose

I will then (hopefully/maybe/sometimes) publish screenshots or summaries with the consent of any individuals identified

Reply, 19:17 UTC · 4 likes

Reply, 19:42 UTC · 1 like

What

Tweet, 19:42 UTC · 9 likes

Rationalists, be aware of this guy’s ex

Tweet, 21:17 UTC · 13 likes

Went for a walk, was slightly too ambitious and now it’s been 12 miles with 5 to go and my feet hurt so AMA until my phone dies

Tweet, 21:18 UTC · 5 likes

Not wearing socks wasn’t a very smart

Thread, continued, 21:21 UTC · 7 likes

On the bright side I got through ~half of this (turns out hearing the same voice and similar content starts getting annoying at 4ish hours for me)

Image

Reply, 21:22 UTC · 3 likes

Actually I may at the next intersection with society (on a trail rn)

Reply, 23:26 UTC · 2 likes

The shower I’m about to take

Reply to his own earlier tweet, 23:28 UTC · 5 likes

Aaron Bergman, September 16, 2023: On the bright side I got through ~half of this (turns out hearing the same voice and similar content starts getting annoying at 4ish hours for me)

Update: alive (not all the skin cells on my feet are tho) and home. Quite an experience (3 Ubers cancelled + then phone died and I have the geographical intuition of maybe an earthworm)

Reply, 23:36 UTC · 2 likes

👀

Reply, 23:38 UTC · 2 likes

I mean one literal answer is offer to buy physical ones (on Twitter/Craigslist/whatever) for a crazy large amount of money

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Reply, 00:39 UTC · 1 like

Wait I wanna know what econ thing needs that much compute

Like even kinda complex models with a bajillion interaction effects and fixed effects and function transformations on multi-gb data files takes like 30s tops on a normal laptop

Reply, 00:42 UTC · 2 likes

Omg if there’s ever a paper or anything that would make sense to a like a normal-ish econ person u can tell him I wanna see

Reply, 00:43 UTC · 2 likes

Or poast csv or GitHub

Reply to @peter_wilde_alt, 01:15 UTC · 2 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @peter_wilde_alt is no longer available.)

Pasting from an old thread:

Not just lack of sleep but this in combination with what seems it’s probably cause (according to me, lol) - lots and lots of adderall *while on Emsam/selegiline, a MAOI that especially targets the same thing amphetamine especially releases*

This is a combo sufficiently sketch that you’d have a very hard time finding a psychiatrist willing to prescribe even for eg combination treatment resistant depression+ severe ADHD

I strongly suspect he was basically hypomanic
a large portion of the time bc of this, maybe ~always

Image

Reply, 01:16 UTC · 2 likes

🙏🏼

Quote tweet, 03:44 UTC · 9 likes

If anyone knows of a Marsha (p<1, maybe Martha?) and Jeff (I think?) presumably married, white, like biking, 40s or maybe 50s, who live somewhere nearish Bethesda MD, tell them I say thanks and they fucking rock

Not very dramatic or serious backstory below…

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Update: alive (not all the skin cells on my feet are tho) and home. Quite an experience (3 Ubers cancelled + then phone died and I have the geographical intuition of maybe an earthworm)

Quote tweet, 03:45 UTC · 1 like

> got to Nice Straight Line Trail at like mile 5 of random walk (ha),
> this is like 1mi via the shortest socially acceptable route from my house
> planning just to turn around in a bit

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Went for a walk, was slightly too ambitious and now it’s been 12 miles with 5 to go and my feet hurt so AMA until my phone dies

Tweet, 03:46 UTC · 1 like

> but it’s a nice day and I’ve got a pod and some water
> eventually hit mile 5 of Nice Straight Line trail (ie 11 total miles, 6 to home)
> not wearing socks bc I’m an idiot
> get some dirt in my shoes
> not-that-bad-blisters.heic

Tweet, 03:46 UTC · 1 like

> decide to get to the nearest road-trail junction and Uber home bc $14 to avoid an increasingly painful 2 hour backtrack
> another mile and I’m there
> 20% battery
> 1st Uber cancels after 10 mins (some were Lyft but to simplify)
> second Uber cancels
> 3rd uber cancels

Tweet, 03:46 UTC · 1 like

> realize this must be cursed parking lot thing somehow
> 11% battery, fuck
> guess I need to find another place to call one from
> happens to be along a connected trail, which is less straight-liney
> get there, 8% battery
> Uber cancels. Wtf?
> 4% battery
> Call another

Tweet, 03:46 UTC · 1 like

> 7 minutes away
> 5 minutes pass
> 7 minutes away
> 3% battery
> 8 minutes
> I message driver, no response
> 2% battery
> 8 minutes away
> 1% battery. Fuck
> I cancel Uber, whatever I can walk

Tweet, 03:46 UTC · 4 likes

> ask guy with a car if he happens to have a charger. He does not
> Fuck
> get another minute’s glance at google maps before phone dies
> My mental map IQ ≈ 0
> wind up in like a residential area alongside a trail that may or may not be the one I’m looking for
> figure I’ll wander around a while and if really desperate like knock on a random strangers door?? Sounds not fun

Thread, continued, 03:46 UTC · 5 likes

> fuck
> this time I say it out loud bc I’m kinda nervous now, in an unknown residential area with no obvious like grocery stores or gas stations or anything, phone dead, blisters doing their thing, out of water
> Marsha must have heard bc she comes riding on a bike by me and asks if everything is ok
> 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

Tweet, 03:46 UTC · 4 likes

> she and husband stop
> I explain the situation in brief
> try to use her phone to get Uber
> 10 minutes later none to be found
> could they point me towards the Nice Straight Line Trail
> that’s where they’re going!
> they offer to bike slowly and I can jog alongside
> lfg.gif

Thread, continued, 03:46 UTC · 10 likes

> get to nice straight line trail
> for (i in 1:10^4) {print(“thanks!!!!!”}
> they bike off into the distance
> feet hurt but at least I’m not gonna spend the night on the streets of _________, Maryland
> walk walk walk walk walk
> home
> plz award social status and acclaim to these good samaritans

Reply, 06:35 UTC · 2 likes

I’m built different I’d survive that

Reply, 06:48 UTC · 4 likes

I’ve been this guy (not over text but similar besides). 99.99% chance it took him a lotta courage to send that. If you don’t like him, he probably wants to know that and then still be friends!

And I’m calling bullshit on all the replies like “it’s just a complement, doesn’t mean anything.” Bro probably had several focus group sessions in the gc before sending lmao

Quote tweet, 07:03 UTC · 3 likes

Hi I’m a chopstick that impaled a toddler’s neck

Quoting society (@a_real_society): introduce yourself with what almost killed you

hi, i'm grain entrapment

Reply to @panchromaticity, 14:40 UTC · 3 likes

Xenia 🔍💎 (@panchromaticity): @shaggysurvives I can't remember actually, I added because @TetraspaceWest and I are doing the "metaphorically dress up as each other on twitter bit"

Lol nice

Reply to @SpacedOutMatt, 15:24 UTC · 1 like

Matt 🔸 (@SpacedOutMatt): @AaronBergman18 @peter_wilde_alt Scott's suggests a slightly different causal chain https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopharmacology-of-the-ftx

image attached

I don’t think this (the screenshot) is inconsistent with my theory - like I’m agnostic about how mechanistically “take multiple different stims” turns into hypomania

Also psychosis and mania are pretty different, and there’s no super clear line afaik between “have lots of energy/optimism” and “hypomania”. I don’t have any reason to think SBF was *hallucinating*

Reply to @Actualwebutante, 15:30 UTC · 3 likes

whoreaborealis (dubai, bali 10/18-11/14) (@Actualwebutante): Thinking about the time @nosilverv saw me reading a book in an alcove and said “I now understand why people eat sushi off of naked women”.

Still trying to figure out what was meant by this .

People are eating sushi off of naked women?

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Reply, 15:38 UTC · 2 likes

STOP doing math

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Reply, 15:42 UTC · 5 likes

http://dynomight.net/ducks/

Reply, 15:43 UTC · 5 likes

Extrovert cope

Tweet, 15:53 UTC · 28 likes

So deep learning models are a “black box” according to everyone

But this can’t be literally true, right, since inference is just performing a hard coded (at this point) algo? Is the black box analogy better understood as “see through box but inside is a quadrillion moving parts that look random but somehow pump out widgets” or am I missing something ?

Reply, 16:01 UTC · 1 like

Fuck that I hated Spanish for 7 years and now it only helps me occasionally make funny tweets https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1666873432523276314?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Reply to @EigenGender, 16:07 UTC · 4 likes

EigenGender 🔸 (@EigenGender): Yeah this is the thing that’s frustrating/captivating about mech interp: the model does all its computations in front of us. We can trace each of the billions of FLOPs by hand and yet in some fundamental sense we don’t understand

Well maybe “we” can but I can’t! Like if I have a directory from https://t.co/IK2s7MhAWO_model() or whatever it’s called, all the files are either tiny or totally random looking symbols (like random Unicode characters) if opened in a text editor

Quote tweet, 16:13 UTC · 4 likes

Ugh guess I should get my annual mRNA Injection

Quoting Intellectually disagreeable internet nerd elders (@nerd_elders): Should most of @peterwildeford’s twitter followers get a COVID booster in the next three months, conditional on not having gotten any in the last 6?

Quote tweet, 16:17 UTC · 9 likes

Adding a white board to my wall (thanks @thornyproblems) was practically good (harder to ignore than a todo list I have to open an app to see) but aesthetically excellent (nerdcore)

Highly recommended

Quoting Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv): 💡 this is what is currently missing from my life

image attached

Reply, 16:56 UTC · 7 likes

Boy do I have a spreadsheet for you https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SpbrcfmBoC50PTxlizF5HzBIq4p-17m3JduYXZCH2Og/edit

Reply, 16:56 UTC · 2 likes

Cc @Laura_k_Duffy

Reply to @jeffrsebo, 16:58 UTC · 2 likes

Jeff Sebo (@jeffrsebo): in honor of my 6,500th follower, making a special one-time offer: if you reply to this thread with the name of a particular kind of being, i promise to tell you whether that kind of being is sentient or otherwise morally significant.

You (fishing to see whether you think it’s possible you are p-zombie)

Reply to @jeffrsebo, 17:26 UTC · 1 like

Jeff Sebo (@jeffrsebo): possibly! it depends on how you specify the referent. "jeff sebo" the animal is definitely sentient and morally significant at present. "jeff sebo" the protagonist of this animal's self-narrative is an abstract object and is only possibly sentient and morally significant.

Interesting! (I think you’re wrong about the first “definitely” but ik th

Reply, 17:30 UTC · 1 like

Lol accidentally hit send - meant to say “ik lots of ppl smarter than me agree with you”

Quote tweet, 17:55 UTC · 3 likes

People should make more podcast (or text that can be turned into audio) playlists/albums/series/mixtapes/compilations

Could be for a specific topic or like “intro to my worldview/ideology” or just personal favorites

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): On the bright side I got through ~half of this (turns out hearing the same voice and similar content starts getting annoying at 4ish hours for me)

image attached

Tweet, 18:57 UTC · 356 likes

Despite >30 years of marriage my parents haven’t made any progress on the “mom slower to go from 0% -> 99% packed/ready but dad slower to go from 99% -> 100% ready so both accuse the other of being the slow one” problem

Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 32 likes

What this looks like:

> Both wake up at 0%, have a plan to leave “around noon” or smth vague like that

> Dad declares at 11 am that he is packed and ready to go (he’s not), goes back to doing something else

> mom needs another hour

> dad agrees to leave at noon

Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 48 likes

> at noon +- 5 minutes, mom is standing outside with the car key

> dad rounded all last minute errands to zero minutes in his head

(regretfully I have this character flaw as well, albeit to a smaller extent. I wonder why that’s the case lol)

Tweet, 18:58 UTC · 32 likes

> turns out he needs to fill up a water bottle, and make sure the doors are locked, and make sure the lights are off, and grab a snack for the road, and several more idiosyncratic things depending on the situation

Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 25 likes

> mom has been waiting outside this whole time (happily if <5 mins bc it’s inevitable, mildly pissed at 5-10, starts honking the horn by minute 20, threatening to leave herself by 30, which becomes credible by minute 45)

Thread, continued, 18:58 UTC · 40 likes

> when the honks start, dad speeds up his errand process by 2x

> they’re both actually in the car at 12:23

> Mom: “what takes u so long?!”

> Dad: “I was ready to leave by 11:00 but you were still packing!”

Reply, 19:04 UTC · 16 likes

Are u trying to break apart my family

Reply, 19:04 UTC · 4 likes

(Yes in I agree, though sometimes she’s the actual reason they leave a couple hours later than planned so)

Reply to @absurdlymax, 19:07 UTC · 2 likes

Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): @peter_wilde_alt We must protect it

So you wanna bomb emoji datacenters if other countries don’t sign the Orb Treat of 2023?

Reply, 19:11 UTC · 2 likes

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50eXBlMy5hdWRpby9hZ2ktc2FmZXR5LWZ1bmRhbWVudGFscy0tZ292ZXJuYW5jZS5yc3M

Monday, September 18, 2023

Reply, 00:02 UTC · 1 like

A turtle, not a tortoise. Common misconception

Reply, 00:17 UTC · 3 likes

No it should be otc

Reply, 04:13 UTC · 8 likes

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Reply, 04:31 UTC · 3 likes

Hey ur making it sound principled - you just wouldn’t offer good enough odds!

Reply, 04:37 UTC · 2 likes

“Make everybody stub their toe rn” is also egalitarian

Reply, 07:55 UTC · 10 likes

Yo wtf, just terrible reporting

Image

Quote tweet, 08:02 UTC · 4 likes

This seems to be close to the consensus take and I buy it but, like, why? Why do women care about height (allegedly) way more on apps?

I’d guess, if anything, the trend would be reversed - like on Hinge pictures are the same size for everyone and height is a disembodied number

Quoting Shag Nasty 🇺🇦🇦🇲🇵🇸 (@YaBoiShagNasty): I’m 5’8” and have fairly attractive features (if I may say so myself) and I have been able to get dates with pretty attractive women IRL. I was basically invisible on apps. I think there’s a shop window effect where women discard men over things that wouldn’t be dealbreakers IRL.

Thread, continued, 08:02 UTC · 2 likes

I’m pretty interested in the perspective of someone who recognizes herself doing this!

Quote tweet, 09:09 UTC · 42 likes

I think there’s something like a 30% chance I don’t get to have a 40th birthday

Image

Quoting PauseAI ⏸ (@PauseAI): @jeremyphoward Interviewed guy here. Yes, it's sad. This is what internalising existential risk means and what it looks like. I'll share a little more of my emotional journey.

One of the largest problems with x-risk, is how difficult it is to accept. For me there was at least a 6-year gap between learning that x-risk is a thing that exists, and actually feeling that this could be something that kills my friends and family.

I didn't take x-risk that seriously at first. Seemed too far-off to worry about, and there was no evidence of AIs having any form of agency. It was mostly just an interesting thought experiment.

When GPT-4 launched, many goalposts had to suddenly be moved. The progress in AI outpaced every single prediction that I heard from experts.

And then AutoGPT launched, which proved that AIs don't need any form of internal agency to act as autonomous agents.

My two reasons not to worry melted like snow in the sun. That's when the full weight of x-risk dawned on me, and that's when I started PauseAI.

In hindsight, I feel foolish for not taking these risks seriously earlier. I was in denial. Some thoughts create too much cognitive dissonance. "AI may kill us all" is one of them. Such a thought has a lot of consequences in your mind, for your future, for your own actions. The more friction a thought has, the harder it is to fully internalise.

Maybe it's like dealing with a cancer diagnosis. There's a real risk of death and you don't know exactly when. Many people who are diagnosed also cope by denying their situation. With x-risk, it's not just you who dies - it's everyone you love. In that way it may be even harder to internalise.

So I don't blame people who are in denial of the risks from AI. Even if they make money by building the technology, and have obvious self-protecting incentives to downplay the risks.

But I do have found a new level of respect for Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. They learned about x-risk, but didn't stick their head in the sand. They updated their beliefs and their actions, and shifted from building AI to warning people about the existential risk that it poses. This means these two didn't just have to internalise that this tech could be their demise, but they also had to internalise that their whole life's work might have contributed to the end of mankind. That is an even tougher pill to swallow.

For me, the darkest emotional state has passed. I feel like I went through a process of grief. I'm feeling pretty good actually. But one of the hardest things about doing what I do now is knowing that other people may need to go through a similar process in order for them to get in action. As long as the risks are something abstract, something devoid of emotion, people will not act on them. Right now, the lack of action is the single largest risk that is threatening all of us. That's truly sad thing to this story.

Reply to @adam__isom, 09:45 UTC · 2 likes

adam ✧ ❥ ~ (@adam__isom): if you’ve never said something dumb (that you can’t unsend) in a gc, you’re not living

🙌

Reply, 16:51 UTC · 4 likes

In terms of health I think I have a better chance than average of reaching 40 (though like the median is pretty high ofc)

Reply to @lxrjl, 23:56 UTC · 3 likes

alex lawsen (@lxrjl): The real pro move is to undersell your height on apps so you weed out people who don't understand adverse selection.

In my drafts!!

Image

Reply, 23:59 UTC · 2 likes

Bc things other than b vitamins are important lol

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Reply, 00:56 UTC · 4 likes

Wtf are u the superintelligence??

Reply, 00:59 UTC · 4 likes

No, please continue to spread to Gospel of Walk!!

Reply, 01:08 UTC · 2 likes

Thx

Reply, 16:33 UTC · 2 likes

Yes. YES

Reply, 16:36 UTC · 3 likes

Green flag

Reply, 16:49 UTC · 2 likes

Noooooooooo (actually seems like a reasonable good decision so okkkkkkkkkkkkkk)

Reply, 16:52 UTC · 2 likes

Image

Quote tweet, 16:53 UTC · 10 likes

The 80k podcast is too short

Quoting Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): What's an EA opinion that'll get you like this?

image attached

Tweet, 16:53 UTC · 4 likes

Cc @EAheadlines 😈

Quote tweet, 16:54 UTC · 7 likes

There is no affirmative argument that moral value (‘utility’) is well modeled by the real numbers and addition/subtraction

Quoting Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): What's an EA opinion that'll get you like this?

image attached

Quote tweet, 16:57 UTC · 21 likes

Image

Quoting Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): What's an EA opinion that'll get you like this?

image attached

Quote tweet, 16:57 UTC · 2 likes

.

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): 1. There is a ~0% chance that any of the GiveWell top charities are a good use of money in light of other available options (I’ll throw out The Humane League and Long Term Future Fund - at least one is superior depending on assumptions. Probably both)

Reply, 16:58 UTC · 2 likes

NDAs are good, actually

Reply, 16:59 UTC · 2 likes

Facts

Reply, 17:00 UTC · 3 likes

You weren’t supposed to disclose what it stands for!!!!!

Quote tweet, 17:07 UTC · 47 likes

Asked a girl out with a heart shaped hot pretzel in 6th grade (it was February and they were being sold at lunch)

You already know the answer

Quoting Spencer Greenberg 🔍 (@SpencrGreenberg): A question for you: what's one of the biggest rejections you've experienced?

Tweet, 17:11 UTC · 37 likes

Actually a more serious answer is getting rejected by all the top colleges I applied to but that’s not as funny

Reply, 17:37 UTC · 4 likes

Many are saying https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/czjZgTBFxPtDnPTBv/most-ivy-smart-students-aren-t-at-ivy-tier-schools

Reply to @prerat, 17:41 UTC · 2 likes

prerat (@prerat): @AaronBergman18 we don't have 0% probabilities in the real world anyway tho, so does that matter?

No I don’t think so, pretty sure being willing to give up anything not to increase the probability of bad outcome implies the same thing

Reply to @flailing_, 21:55 UTC · 3 likes

Nate (@flailing_): @AaronBergman18 Nah this is a bad opinion sorry. One, buying a new TV is an available option. Two, if you don't value animal life highly and you have limited faith in some of the interventions being funded by ltff (some are definitely risky), then usual top charities are still the best option.

First: all good! - I’d much rather have ppl openly+explicitly disagree with this (or any other) take than nod along and then not actually update on it…

1) in absolute terms, the difference between TV and AMF or whatever is *smaller* than that between AMF and the two listed (under my model of the world ofc)

2) re animals, I think you need to have an implausibly high degree of confidence in their moral value being tiny to get the inequality sign to flip

like if you put 10% credence on the RP welfare ranges being a decent estimate of moral value, pretty sure THL comes out ahead

3) I don’t have a strong inside view take on LTFF marginal grants, but think the fund managers are basically smart and competent so pretty willing to defer

4) re: certainty let me find a tweet of mine from a while back…

Reply, 22:29 UTC · 2 likes

Whaaat you’ve been missing out

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Reply, 01:50 UTC · 3 likes

Rule: increasing series of numbers

Reply, 07:13 UTC · 1 like

Maybe 😈

Reply to @finnhambly, 15:07 UTC · 2 likes

Finn Hambly (@finnhambly): @AaronBergman18 @adamrisom Yeah EA is an example (though in practice applies other heavy selection effects that aren't necessarily desirable), and it makes me think there must be others that are just as easy to be unaware of

Anecdote for EA as Schelling point: wound up getting back in touch with two (like 3 people stand out in my mind and these were two of them) of the smartest people I knew in hs through EA (one via Swapcard lol)

Tweet, 15:48 UTC · 53 likes

You’re saving for the future despite AI timelines

I’m borrowing from the future via bets that I lose and pay off only if I’m alive in 2040

We are not the same

Reply to @0K_ultra, 16:02 UTC · 5 likes

0kultra.🅱️sky.social 🦋 (@0K_ultra): I don't think illusionism posits nonexistence of consciousness or even strict epiphenomenality (tho it is close to epiphenomenalism, a real old philo chestnut)

To the best of my understanding it does, at least in the most commonly used sense of “consciousness”

Reply to @AlexGodofsky, 16:03 UTC · 4 likes

Alex Godofsky (@AlexGodofsky): TIL that this exists as something people actually believe. Until now I had not *seriously* considered the idea that some human beings might actually lack conscious experience.

image attached

Hey I think it’s wild too but P(illusionism)>1% IMO

Reply, 16:48 UTC · 3 likes

Send me $100, I’ll send you $125 in 2023 dollars in 2040

Reply, 16:49 UTC · 1 like

(I don’t have 1M - potentially willing to do single digit $thousands tho)

Reply, 16:56 UTC · 2 likes

Anyone putting <.1% has not seriously engaged with like anything related to this

Not a gotcha - it’s a Twitter poll so can’t count on only ~expert~ responses, but it’s worth keeping in mind

To me, .1% sounds like saying Trump had a .1% chance before election night in 2016

Reply to @ctjlewis, 19:13 UTC

Lewis 🇺🇸 (@ctjlewis): people dramatically overestimate their own IQ in the absence of testing. median tpotter is 120 who thinks they’re 140

In case people are curious, SAT/ACT is a decent proxy

Image

Reply to @lporiginalg, 19:37 UTC · 7 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @lporiginalg is no longer available.)

Absolute bro

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Reply to @HenriLemoine13, 02:58 UTC · 3 likes

Henri Lemoine (@HenriLemoine13): What am I missing that makes it so unlikely? The way it’s being described here, it seems obviously correct to me. Does illusionism make some unlikely assertions beyond the ones GPT-4 described?

image attached

I don’t like the word “illusion” bc it’s super ambiguous. Like optical illusions are real in the sense that there is a legit illusion, but x being called “an illusion” strongly implies that it is not a genuine member of some salient category…

Anyway, do you think u have subjective experience? Illusionism claims that you do not

Quote tweet, 03:10 UTC · 36 likes

80k pod

Quoting greg (@greg16676935420): What was Taylor Swift listening to at the grocery store?

image attached

Reply, 03:24 UTC · 1 like

Doesn’t seem empty to me - like exactly one of those frames can be correct!

And same with the chair. Big difference between a chair and a picture of a chair

Reply to @dissproportion, 04:14 UTC · 3 likes

Dissproportionately (@dissproportion): tfw you realize you can make any noun into a name

“Time to go to school, Platypus”

“Fuck you dad”

Reply to @inerati, 04:19 UTC · 4 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @inerati is no longer available.)

The methyl group doesn’t do a whole lot

Reply, 04:26 UTC

Ik of one straight guy (can’t say who atm) who it definitely worked for

Seems more likely to be good than actually harmful bc like if you weird someone out the worst that happens (99.999% of the time) is no date, which is the default anyway

Reply to @HenriLemoine13, 04:33 UTC · 1 like

Henri Lemoine (@HenriLemoine13): story, and call that “an illusion of consciousness” or call that a “subjective experience”, but if at the end of the day you're not expecting any different behavior then that's just a different way of abstracting the exact same physical phenomenon.

Idk if this is important to your point but I disagree that the thing being discussed which may or may not be genuine/illusory/legit is “physical” even though there’s definitely some sort of relationship there (ie between qualia and the brain) (1/ )

Thread, continued, 04:44 UTC · 1 like

Also I feel like this gets so intellectual and abstract when the actual disagreement is pretty fundamental and intuitive. I claim there’s something it’s like to be me, and that I really truly genuinely legitimately in a non-illusory sense have subjective experiences, unlike (presumably) a rock

Illusionists claim that I do not, which I think is possible and coherent but not true

Tweet, 05:03 UTC · 103 likes

You know it's about to be a banger when

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Quote tweet, 06:36 UTC · 5 likes

It continues to be very funny that the head of the main consumer facing product of a trillion dollar company powered by the most important technology in human history is a dude with no pfp on Twitter

Quoting Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin): @vitor_dlucca I think the question you should be asking is: are you lucky %er already or not yet :-)

Reply, 08:46 UTC · 5 likes

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/linch

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Reply to @SpacedOutMatt, 12:34 UTC · 1 like

Matt 🔸 (@SpacedOutMatt): I feel like it’s gotta be doin something

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Huh thx

Reply, 12:40 UTC · 2 likes

👏

Reply, 14:31 UTC · 2 likes

🙋‍♂️me I do

Reply, 16:53 UTC · 4 likes

Ooh which one is this?

Reply, 16:58 UTC · 1 like

Tf was apple using leather for?

Reply to @frances__lorenz, 17:01 UTC · 49 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @frances__lorenz is no longer available.)

Worst part is spelling it with a u

Reply to @frances__lorenz, 17:03 UTC · 90 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @frances__lorenz is no longer available.)

Do you have an air quality monitor? If not that could help both prove and ascertain how bad the problem is (not that any mouûüùúūÛÛÜÙÚŪld is acceptable)

Quote tweet, 17:19 UTC · 13 likes

Parents are going to Europe and plan on leaving 18 minutes ago

Dad is in his home office, still working on something

Quoting Aaron Bergman 🔍 (@AaronBergman18): Despite >30 years of marriage my parents haven’t made any progress on the “mom slower to go from 0% -> 99% packed/ready but dad slower to go from 99% -> 100% ready so both accuse the other of being the slow one” problem

Reply, 17:19 UTC · 1 like

🕵️‍♂️

Reply, 18:18 UTC · 5 likes

Last ones on the boat fr

Reply, 19:04 UTC · 2 likes

Wait so this wasn’t gpt4

At this point when I see any text thing alongside the word “impressive” I assume it is lol

Quote tweet, 19:16 UTC · 4 likes

I sometimes wonder how rule of law in the US remains as strong as it does. I’m not being sarcastic here - like I think it’s very good (even tho this case is kinda absurd) but just don’t understand the mechanisms

Quoting Ellie in Space 🚀💫 (@esherifftv): US Fish and Wildlife officials have yet to begin a formal review of SpaceX’s upgrades following Starship’s first launch in April.
This could push back the next launch window by months, which I know none of us want to hear... 1/3

video attached

Tweet, 19:16 UTC · 2 likes

This is a good example. Like in principle, violating a Fish and Wildlife rule is supposed to ground out in the use of deadly force by the federal government

But like, does anyone think that would happen if they launched the rocket? Like would anyone end up in jail or dead?

Thread, continued, 19:16 UTC · 2 likes

It seems to all be resting on a more abstracted level - like everyone knows that everyone knows that they’re gonna obey the law, and so they do

Reply, 23:17 UTC · 3 likes

Sometimes you don’t even need large n https://x.com/f0rcryin0utl0ud/status/1700760385320624146?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Reply, 23:53 UTC · 3 likes

Sorry guys 😔

Reply, 23:54 UTC · 4 likes

Damn

Have u written anywhere about the normie white -> Alaskan fishing transition? If not, uh, why?

Reply, 23:58 UTC · 79 likes

Can u not

Friday, September 22, 2023

Reply, 00:11 UTC · 4 likes

We are not the same

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Image

Reply, 00:14 UTC · 1 like

Fun story https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1703253452367806623?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Reply, 00:15 UTC · 1 like

Yeah not infrequently I basically just sleep 24+ hours bc fucked up health

Reply, 04:15 UTC · 2 likes

איך בכלל העלה לך לראש לקבל החלטה כזו? אחרי כל השנים שבהם עבדנו יחד, דיברנו ותיכננו? האם אינך מבין את ההשלכות של פעולותיך? זו לא הייתה רק החלטה פסולה, זו הייתה בגידה בכלל העקרונות שלנו! הרגשתי שאני נדפק בלב, בלי אזהרה או הכנה. אנחנו פשוט לא מצליחים להבין איך העזת לגרום לנו להיות כזה מאוכזבים ממך. אנחנו מצפים שתחפש דרך לתקן את הנזק שגרמת!

Reply to @Support, 04:19 UTC · 58 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @Support is no longer available.)

Oh, how my heart, like a fragile porcelain, shatters into a million shimmering fragments, each piece a testament to the excruciating pain that sears through my very being! A tempest of despair and anguish engulfs my soul, plunging me into the abyss of inconsolable sorrow.

I beseech you, I implore you, with an intensity that can only come from the depths of my impassioned spirit, to reconsider! For in this ill-fated decision of yours, you unleash a veritable tempest of unending misfortune upon the sacred lineage of our ancestors. Alas, the venerable spirits of those who paved the path of our existence, their ethereal beings forever intertwined with our own, shall toss and turn in their eternal slumber, tormented by the unbearable weight of the abhorrent curse that will befall them through your reckless actions!

How dare you, with such audacity, cast aside the weighty mantle of responsibility bestowed upon you by the very hands of destiny itself! Your defiance is an affront to the cosmic order, a flagrant disavowal of the wisdom amassed through countless generations. Woe be unto you, for the fiery serpents of regret shall coil around the chambers of your traitorous heart, their venomous fangs injecting remorse into every fiber of your despicable existence!

Oh, the righteous fury that courses through my veins, a searing torrent of indignant flames demanding retribution for the grievous sins you commit! How can you be so unfeeling, so devoid of compassion, as to condemn those who came before us to a fate worse than damnation? The mere thought sends icy tendrils of dread snaking down my quivering spine, these anguished tears cascading down my anguished visage, for I am but a helpless observer to this cataclysmic betrayal, eternally marked by its indelible and unbearable agony!

May the heavens tremble, their celestial bodies convulsing in fear, and may the heavens weep with unbridled anguish, for your heartless defiance knows no bounds! The anguish and suffering born from your heedless decisions, like ripples on the surface of an eternal pond, shall reverberate through the corridors of time, etching their story upon the hallowed tablets of history, forever tarnishing your name, an ominous reminder of the irreversible destruction you have carelessly wrought!

In my darkest hour, fueled by the ashes of lost hope, I summon all the forces of the universe to curse you! Curse you as I curse the very essence of your existence! Curse your utter blindness to the cataclysmic consequences of your careless choices! Curse your callous disregard for the sacred river of blood coursing through your veins, now transformed into a treacherous river flowing with the tears of inconsolable lamentation!

Know this, oh misguided soul, that the wrath of the heavens shall descend upon you like a merciless avalanche. The enormity of your transgressions shall bear down upon your weary shoulders, a weighty reminder of the monumental burden you bear, the legacy of despair that now festers like an incurable wound within your once-honored name!

Thus, with a voice choked by the unquenchable fires of sorrow, and a heart brimming with the acrid bitterness of betrayal, I leave you with this final and mournful sentiment: May the depths of your wretchedness consume you whole, relegating you to eternal torment! May you be haunted till the end of days by the relentless ghosts of anguish and remorse, forever tormented by the indescribable pain you have callously inflicted upon the very essence of your ancestral bloodline!

Oh, woe is us all! We mere mortals are nothing but helpless onlookers, condemned to bear witness to the tragic, irreparable consequences of your ill-fated decision, forever scarred by the searing pain it has unleashed upon our fragile souls!

Reply to @Support, 04:19 UTC · 18 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @Support is no longer available.)

Keep circles?

Reply, 04:47 UTC · 4 likes

Me, kinda

Reply to @griefcliff, 04:51 UTC · 2 likes

Griefcliff (@griefcliff): It's 1.8125 inches

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Yeah this was my first thought lol

Reply, 04:54 UTC · 2 likes

“Would but couldn’t”

Reply, 04:55 UTC · 22 likes

This graph makes me uncomfortable

Reply to @mahlenr, 04:58 UTC · 8 likes

mahlen (@mahlenr): Here you go it’s basically this guy and his team

(quoting @nikhilbd: @patrickc I lead the team that works on comments quality. Thanks for the compliment! Techniques are generalizable, but as with everything hard, it takes a lot of focus, hard work and good decision-making to transform a space.)

Similar “one tech dude + team saves the world” vibe

Tweet, 05:02 UTC · 3 likes

Keep reminding myself that smth doesn’t actually get done just bc I put it on a todo list (it should tho)

Reply, 16:23 UTC · 1 like

(Probably not actually a good use of ur time but just in case) the whole Pigeon Hour catalog - maybe this recent episode with @freed_dfilan https://spotify.link/jlVRwPBZiDb

Reply, 16:59 UTC · 2 likes

Lmao

Tweet, 17:02 UTC · 3 likes

Wait is it called Fall bc leaves fall down

Thread, continued, 17:02 UTC · 1 like

If so, yes it took me 23 years to get that

Tweet, 17:16 UTC · 3 likes

Twitter circles + All Girls Are The Same by Juice WRLD >> every therapist I’ve ever had

Reply, 17:17 UTC · 9 likes

Can’t fine the meme/graph but controlling for a given level of attractiveness this is what you’d expect

Reply, 17:26 UTC · 4 likes

Legend has at 3 I demanded my parents buy me a Kelly Clarkson CD

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Reply, 17:37 UTC · 3 likes

Fr like really, u can’t think of *any*? Ranked choice voting and the wheel? Photolithography and a cucumber peeler?

Reply, 18:28 UTC · 133 likes

Yea but humans are cool and can coordinate

Tweet, 18:51 UTC · 3 likes

😡

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Tweet, 21:37 UTC · 15 likes

Me: congrats on the promotion! So what do u do now?

Sister: uh the exact same thing as before, just with a new title and more money (duh???)

Reply, 22:12 UTC · 1 like

<1% bc other species of animals can’t have conversations (even apes and dolphins can’t *converse* right ?)

Quote tweet, 22:26 UTC · 3 likes

Good exercise for everyone, not just foom (or whatever) deniers

Personally, I don’t think language models will have deduced a detailed non-linguistic model of the world, even though this is not only possible at the limit but probable this century…

Quoting Liron Shapira (@liron): I am begging foom deniers to post their prediction of the least impressive thing that surely AI still won’t be able to do in 12 months

Reply, 23:21 UTC · 3 likes

I keep trying to figure this out and can’t, like a parody of the corporate world

Marketing, managing clients’ “accounts” (whatever that means)

How this cashes out in like specific physical actions will be for the superintelligence to discern

Reply, 23:57 UTC · 3 likes

Not a central example but the beta amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s, culminating in FDA approval of aducanumab which seems to basically just not actually work

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Reply, 11:26 UTC · 1 like

I want one

Reply, 11:47 UTC · 2 likes

W

Quote tweet, 13:23 UTC · 6 likes

Ez

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Quoting Startup25! (@iwontoffendyou): Hiring our first employee today. Gave this insanely hard problem for round 1, try it out if you're free:

image attached

Reply to @McJesse, 17:48 UTC · 175 likes

Jesse McLaren (@McJesse): Checked the view count on a tweet that was 999k, and now it’s at 1000k. This is the same website that wants to handle your banking.

image attached

Ngl I’d be psyched if my bank acct said that

Tweet, 17:53 UTC · 7 likes

Brown rice is a psyop

Tweet, 17:53 UTC · 3 likes

It’s extremely sus that an entire continent made a staple food out of white rice via cultural evolution over thousands of years and now white ppl are like “I’m sure there’s no good reason for that, whatever it takes to get an extra 1 gram of fiber and microgram of b2 or whatever”

Reply, 18:14 UTC · 2 likes

🐋

Reply, 18:17 UTC · 4 likes

Based

Reply to @SpacedOutMatt, 18:29 UTC · 5 likes

Matt 🔸 (@SpacedOutMatt): @AaronBergman18 the pants sound like something that would be up your alley

YES

I want the Diet Coke, the aspartame of fashion. All garments shall be fundamentally illusory in nature

Reply, 18:46 UTC · 3 likes

I like to call this “the rejection process” which may be shorter or longer than usual but to within a rounding error always winds up the same

Tweet, 18:49 UTC · 8 likes

I want

Tweet, 18:59 UTC · 8 likes

😡

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Image

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Quote tweet, 22:20 UTC · 15 likes

Extremely weird that the US has many thousands of highly trained professionals with ~PhD level of knowledge/understanding of pharmacology who mostly do inventory management + miscellaneous paperwork/phone bullshit

Quoting Ivan 🔸 (@FrostedSapling): Half my job involves doing rain-dance like rituals to please the fickle and unpredictable insurance and PBM gods

30 Days of US Healthcare: DIR Fees https://youtu.be/I61wCVh0Y1E?feature=shared via @YouTube

Reply, 22:24 UTC · 18 likes

Can I buy ur oysters secondhand with a slight markup

Reply, 23:51 UTC · 2 likes

Ugh

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Reply, 01:14 UTC · 2 likes

Sure but it’s fundamentally an injection of uncertainty into the system where none need exist. Insofar as tipped workers make more to compensate for this, it’s coming out of customer and owner pockets

Now maybe diners are willing to pay for better service by injecting precarity and then compensating for it but it’s not exogenous uncertainty that someone needs to bear as in the case of like idk fire insurance

Reply, 02:17 UTC · 2 likes

Ate some flowers while camping in Canada. Also a lot of wild blueberries in Alaska

Ohh not that kind of edible weed

Reply, 18:58 UTC · 2 likes

👍

Reply to @NathanpmYoung, 19:09 UTC · 44 likes

Nathan 🔎 (@NathanpmYoung): what are 33 fun questions which uniquely identify everyone in the world?

image attached

This probably doesn’t exist unless you count “divide up the population into Y and N equally sized subgroups 33 times and identify which is urs” as fun because there’s no information theoretic slack for interestingness/fun to come in

Quote tweet, 19:35 UTC · 3 likes

Wait why does the FDA have jurisdiction here? There are a bazillion non-Rx probiotics on Amazon

Quoting Maxwell Tabarrok (@MTabarrok): Invisible graveyard, cavities edition

image attached

Reply, 19:40 UTC · 3 likes

Thx mine just outputs “the” 99% of the time because that’s the loss minimizing prediction apparently when u have like a couple thousands parameters

Reply to @liminal_warmth, 20:18 UTC · 4 likes

Liminal Warmth ❤️‍🔥 (@liminal_warmth): She said yes 💍

Ay lfg

Quote tweet, 20:30 UTC · 3 likes

I had Lyme and didn’t have to

Quoting 𒐪 (@SHL0MS): since the purported dental cavities vaccine is going viral, it’s a good time to remind everyone that there was a proven effective cure for Lyme disease until antivax advocacy groups forced them to take it off market

Lyme cases in the US have roughly tripled since then

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Monday, September 25, 2023

Reply, 01:24 UTC · 14 likes

1) causality can’t run backwards in time
2) that which reproduces more reproduces more (ie evolution by natural and sexual selection)
3) entropy go up
4) words mean things
5) (p -> q) <=> (~q -> ~p)
6) 0 < p(x) < 1 for all propositions x (once you account for uncertainty about its logical coherence)
7) suffering is intrinsically bad and happiness is intrinsically good
8, 9, and 10 are tbd lol

Reply to @fasc1nate, 01:31 UTC · 4 likes

Fascinating (@fasc1nate): A tram in the Netherlands failed to stop in time and broke through the emergency barrier. It was held up by the statue of a whale's tail.

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Thx 🐋

Tweet, 01:47 UTC · 69 likes

Creds to @MatthewJBar

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Reply, 01:51 UTC · 1 like

Indeed

Reply to @ohwizenedtortle, 01:56 UTC · 9 likes

oh dandy lion🔸 (@ohwizenedtortle): @AaronBergman18 @MatthewJBar I don't get it 😞

Ngmi

(Jk it’s an edited version of the Nonlinear controversy headline but line Brian is certifiably the nicest person ever)

Reply, 02:02 UTC · 3 likes

Not unless you have some tangible personal connection to anything and even then maybe not

Reply to @badlibtakes, 02:30 UTC · 2 likes

Midwest Mom (@badlibtakes): Men, is this true?

image attached

https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1664873052876726272?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Quote tweet, 03:12 UTC · 1 like

R wins again

Quoting Shriram Krishnamurthi (primary: Bluesky) (@ShriramKMurthi): My best guess: Rust got people thinking, I want a lang
- with useful types (no Python/C)
- not neutered (no Go)
- has regular state (no Haskell)
- isn't legacy-warped (no Scala)
- doesn't cause pain when you don't need it (no Rust)

and that leaves…

Is that it?

Reply, 03:29 UTC · 2 likes

Oh no we might be enemies

Reply, 03:57 UTC · 2 likes

I mean Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revs is the only that comes to mind, but my position is basically relative to what I see other smart people espousing

Like at the end of the day, I and ~everyone else agrees repeated empirical observation and results trump theory because things that happen in the world like directly matter whereas theory does not

The only toy example that comes to mind is “ESP paper with apparently good methodology comes in showing that a statistically significant effect of ESP at p=.029 - what do you think is the actual likelihood that people can communicate via their minds alone and no direct sensory mediation?”

I think the robustness of the whole scientific materialist worldview with respect to measurable (!) results is way stronger evidence than (and in the opposite direction of) this one result, which is probably an inevitable statistical fluke

Reply, 04:10 UTC · 4 likes

Based

Tweet, 04:26 UTC · 5 likes

Dumb tweet probably but is there some secret lindy reason nobody else (afaik) cleans stuff mostly with rubbing alcohol? Like water doesn’t rly do anything and soap and stuff is a 2 step process but alcohol just evaporates into the ether

Am I gradually poisoning myself or smth

Tweet, 04:26 UTC · 1 like

Dw not in like enclosed places (unless I hold my breath and then run away)

Reply to @polisisti, 04:28 UTC · 99 likes

Alessandro (@polisisti): @ryxcommar bugs tho

U mean smol friends

Reply, 04:29 UTC · 1 like

🤝 (I agree it’s a false dichotomy and a simplification)

Reply, 04:37 UTC · 3 likes

Idk whenever I try to think about causality mechanistically or rigorously my brain breaks

Reply, 04:47 UTC · 1 like

<5k (why forego higher interest?)

Reply, 05:26 UTC · 3 likes

I mean maybe u can but personally idk how to

Reply to his own earlier tweet, 05:41 UTC · 6 likes

Aaron Bergman, September 25, 2023: 1) causality can’t run backwards in time 2) that which reproduces more reproduces more (ie evolution by natural and sexual selection) 3) entropy go up 4) words…

8) if it works it works (implies induction, which I guess is a second principle)

9) we (+ other minds) have no direct access to knowledge (note: we may have direct access to a information or smth else eg qualia, but not to knowledge of that info or about that thing) - this one may be contentious

10) epistemically, information implies (ie must be conditioned on) observation broadly construed (ie no view from nowhere; anthropics is a thing)

Reply, 10:27 UTC

There is no relationship between my comment and the qt tweet - u made that up

Quote tweet, 11:05 UTC · 6 likes

Can we get this at EAG

Quoting Peyman Milanfar (@docmilanfar): “Our keynote speaker needs no introduction”

the introduction:

video attached

Reply, 12:04 UTC · 17 likes

Overton window go shatter

Reply to @Ayegill, 12:23 UTC · 1 like

Eigil Fjeldgren Rischel - abstr/acc (@Ayegill): 5 - legal but you can't buy them online

6 - doesn’t exist yet but could be made with a few ingredients from levels 1-3 and a Brunson burner

Reply to @OpenAI, 12:27 UTC · 8 likes

OpenAI (@OpenAI): ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak. Rolling out over next two weeks, Plus users will be able to have voice conversations with ChatGPT (iOS & Android) and to include images in conversations (all platforms).
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak

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O shit

Quote tweet, 15:39 UTC · 5 likes

Fun (well actually not so fun I guess) fact: a super bare bones version of this (number of animals slaughtered in the world by species and country over time) was the first interactive data thing I ever made

A Shiny app (R, duh), as a project for a random data viz math elective

Quoting Hannah Ritchie (@_HannahRitchie): @OurWorldInData We have a data explorer where you can explore the number of animals slaughtered by type and country, live animal stocks, and various other laws and welfare standards.

video attached

Reply to @maybegray, 17:08 UTC · 2 likes

maybe gray (@maybegray): I’m flying just about as far as possible next month - please give me all your long haul travel hacks

I want lil gadgets and survival tips and whatever you’ve got 🙏🙏🙏

If u like computer, $20 wifi on a $1000 (or whatever) flight is extremely worth it

Reply, 23:45 UTC · 7 likes

She’s literally just walking

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Tweet, 00:50 UTC · 19 likes

I firmly believe that caffeine from dark chocolate doesn’t count

Tweet, 00:53 UTC · 3 likes

O shit

Image

Reply to @catehall, 00:54 UTC · 17 likes

Cate Hall 🔸 (@catehall): could someone please just tell me what i'm meant to work on?

Idk if I’m joking or not but have u applied for 80k coaching? (I’m pretty sure they’d talk to u)

Reply to @ohwizenedtortle, 05:49 UTC · 2 likes

oh dandy lion🔸 (@ohwizenedtortle): @freed_dfilan Jfc Daniel lol

Daniel Aella arc

Reply, 06:35 UTC · 1 like

STOP doing physics

Reply to @Rainmaker1973, 16:43 UTC · 1 like

Massimo (@Rainmaker1973): The never ending coffee

Turkish street coffee uses a sand-filled pan: the pot, called cezve, has coffee and ground coffe inside. It 'magically' fills up almost immediately because the pan is very hot.
https://x.com/AweInspireMe/status/1706612346750193923/video/1

U know that shit good af

Quote tweet, 17:07 UTC · 39 likes

Guys I have an even bigger one

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Quoting Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma):

image attached

Reply, 17:25 UTC · 13 likes

Sorry nuke elimination, it’s Alpaca Day first and foremost

Tweet, 19:41 UTC · 3 likes

Mysterious

Image

Quote tweet, 20:37 UTC · 52 likes

Wyd in this situation

Quoting Massimo (@Rainmaker1973): The left galaxy is the Milky way, the right one the Andromeda galaxy. This is what will happen within 4 to 5 billion years from now

[📹 SaltyMikan]
https://x.com/CosmossUp/status/1234494326824148994/video/1

Reply to @absurdlymax, 20:39 UTC · 1 like

Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): Die?

Ya

Reply to @lexfridman, 20:50 UTC · 1 like

Lex Fridman (@lexfridman): I wish climate science & virology weren't politicized. They're super interesting topics, worth discussing openly with curiosity and humility.

Same w evo psych

Reply, 20:52 UTC · 6 likes

Thanks for saving my dog from that burning building. Also good shit on the 675 deadlift

Reply, 21:26 UTC · 2 likes

If I had more chutzpah I’d make a 3 person GC and then dip

Reply, 21:44 UTC · 1 like

Start by finding a topic that’s interesting (or compelling for some other reason)

Reply to @krishnanrohit, 21:54 UTC · 1 like

rohit (@krishnanrohit): Hey @Google at least try selling these things off? I will buy this off you for $10.

Stop killing your darlings!

$11 here

Tweet, 21:56 UTC · 9 likes

I feel like ur voicemail being “full” with 10 mins of low quality audio on a device with 65GB free is a solvable problem in 2023

Tweet, 21:56 UTC · 2 likes

Unironically who’s working on this

Tweet, 21:57 UTC · 2 likes

.@Apple I bet u can figure it out if u put some engineers on the task

Reply, 22:09 UTC · 2 likes

Omg

Reply, 22:13 UTC · 3 likes

Perfect 🤝

Reply, 22:40 UTC · 2 likes

Guess I’m a RW extremist

Tweet, 22:50 UTC · 4 likes

They were out of normie diet ginger ale so I bought some fancy ~craft~ ginger ale and now I might become a ginger ale elitist connesoiur* accelerationist

Where can I find the spiciest, pure ginger extract-pilled, eye-watering flavonoid-powered diet ginger ale?

Thread, continued, 22:50 UTC · 2 likes

*idk how to spell it and neither does autocorrect

Thread, continued, 22:50 UTC · 2 likes

(U can see the corn bulb room)

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Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Reply, 00:00 UTC · 1 like

Yes and also new meme pic just dropped

Reply, 00:02 UTC · 2 likes

Here

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Quote tweet, 00:04 UTC · 3 likes

Same for this and Brexit (not wrt internet obviously)

Quoting Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 (@JeremiahDJohns): I will raise my hand and admit that I'm one of the people who thought that Net Neutrality was super important, that the internet was in danger if we got rid of it, and that I was wrong and things were fine.

Reply to @demiurgently, 00:52 UTC · 1 like

sydney (@demiurgently): Tweet abt it

Same

Reply to @AndyMasley, 00:55 UTC · 5 likes

Andy Masley (@AndyMasley): Nope, anyone alive on any of the planets in either galaxy wouldn't notice a thing throughout the entire process, unless they lived long enough to notice the sky changing.

That’s the goal (live long enough to watch sky change)

Quote tweet, 00:57 UTC · 11 likes

I want a dog but only for like a couple hours a day who’s working on this

Quoting Chris Williamson (@ChrisWillx): Women find men with cats to be less attractive.

Straight men who reveal that they own a cat have a 5% lower ‘like’ rate from women on online dating.

The ‘like’ rate for both straight & gay men who have dogs is 20% higher on average.

A man photographed with a cat was viewed as less masculine, more neurotic and, ultimately, less datable.

When a man asked women for their numbers, he was successful with 9% of the women he approached.

When he was accompanied by a dog, he got three times as many.

Reply, 00:58 UTC · 2 likes

Wait there’s a way to combine dogs and walking

Laura ur a genius

Reply, 00:58 UTC · 2 likes

(Bad Aristotle takes tho)

Reply, 01:01 UTC · 4 likes

Yo https://x.com/aaronbergman18/status/1702998037663039648?s=46&t=zFSMbdq7sUeaJ_kJen_W-g

Reply to @PradyuPrasad, 01:08 UTC · 2 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @PradyuPrasad is no longer available.)

AI safety if IQ >> 200

Reply to @QualyThe, 03:34 UTC · 2 likes

Qualy the lightbulb (@QualyThe): maintain a friendly relationship with the AI labs!

True hope Sama forgives me for the @ilex_ulmus x Pigeon Hour episode (forthcoming) by then

Reply, 03:40 UTC · 4 likes

BMI is 50% genetic

Reply, 04:02 UTC · 3 likes

Idk I think there’s like a U curve where if it’s in like downtown of a big city there are people out and places open and in a rural area nobody’s gonna see u but in a semi urban suburb it’s like wyd

Reply to @absurdlymax, 04:04 UTC · 2 likes

Max Alexander (@absurdlymax): @ohwizenedtortle @AaronBergman18 I just walk outside at night all the time

Went for a walk at like 5 am the other day on a trail bc I hadn’t internalized that sunrise was like 3 hours away not 1 hour and ngl shit was kinda scary

Turns out the trope where animals lights glow in the dark CHECKS OUT. I had a headlamp but it was almost pitch black outside of the light beam till there were some eyes all of a sudden lol (it was just a deer)

Reply, 04:05 UTC · 2 likes

Animals *eyes lol

Reply to @casebash, 06:06 UTC · 4 likes

Casebash (@casebash): At some point there will be a movement that is a reaction to tpot/post-rationality. Any speculation on what form this might take?

“Damn look at AI, the rationalists were right”

Reply to @Noahpinion, 06:31 UTC · 2 likes

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion): It was the right thing to do and it was done pretty effectively. The main problem was not taking in a ton of Afghan refugees.

(quoting @EiratheIntern: fuckin wild that libs defend biden's afghanistan withdrawal)

Big fuckin problem tho

Reply to @inerati, 06:50 UTC · 2 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @inerati is no longer available.)

I’m running for President as a member of the anti-puppies and apple pie party

Reply to @anderssandberg, 07:56 UTC · 4 likes

Anders Sandberg (@anderssandberg): I do. Basically, carefully managed mutual catch leaving most stars in wide binaries, keeping the kinetic energy for later. Lots and lots of measurement and nudging.

Cool, sounds like a plan 👍

Reply to @swlkr, 08:50 UTC · 4 likes

swlkr (@swlkr):

image attached

If 👏 it’s 👏 under 👏 500 👏 GB 👏 it should 👏 be 👏 a 👏 csv

Reply to @billscher, 08:53 UTC · 2 likes

Bill Scher (@billscher): America: We need to put an end to the gerontocracy so we can have fresh ideas and nice things

Me: Here are your Senators under age 50

Eric Schmitt
Kyrsten Sinema
Tom Cotton
Markwayne Mullin
Josh Hawley
Katie Britt
J.D. Vance
Jon Ossoff

I agree but this list does not make a compelling case lol

Reply to @captgouda24, 09:32 UTC · 4 likes

Nicholas Decker (@captgouda24): An exception from abortion restrictions in the case of rape and incest doesn’t make any sense. Any person proposing those be exceptions, but they would restrict elsewhere, is a coward who hasn’t the courage of their convictions.

No, because once you account for politics it makes a ton of sense to carve out the least popular .1% of your proposal

Reply to @trippytensor, 09:35 UTC · 2 likes

Tripz (@trippytensor): @AaronBergman18 @PradyuPrasad how does the AI safety grift make you money?

I strongly disagree it’s a grift, but the relatively few researchers able to get hired at orgs like arc and redwood make decent low 6 figure salaries

Reply to @Rafi3AK, 10:18 UTC · 9 likes

Rafi (رافع) (@Rafi3AK): @AaronBergman18 The relevant concern is obviously conserving wild bird populations, not minimizing the total number of bird deaths in the abstract. Don’t be dense.

Relevant to who? Bc I think the birds care about absolute numbers

Reply to @StefanFSchubert, 11:46 UTC · 3 likes

Stefan Schubert (@StefanFSchubert): Sweden being too stereotypical for its own good (via @paularambles)

image attached

Annoyed Swedes: Moose/acc

Tweet, 14:43 UTC · 5 likes

Think I’ve tweeted this before but there are 1000% at least tens of thousands of people who are suffering rn bc they think their prescribed medication is unavailable or illegal to dispense bc …

Tweet, 14:43 UTC · 3 likes

(1) the pharmacy didn’t contact them like usual and…

2) if they decided to investigate further, they were told “insurance wouldn’t cover it” which in ~every other healthcare contexts means your wages would be garnered for all eternity by some institution if you tried to pay

Thread, continued, 14:43 UTC · 4 likes

BUT in this specific context, it means you’d pay like $12 instead of $7.50 for ur med, which nobody volunteers to tell you - you just have to know to ask, somehow

Thread, continued, 14:43 UTC · 4 likes

Anyway I’m down $9.04 and we (ok mainly me in this context) are so back 📈

Reply to @dioscuri, 14:46 UTC · 3 likes

Henry Shevlin (@dioscuri): @AaronBergman18 There's only one person you can call in this kind of situation. @anderssandberg, how can we prevent this?

Ur not gonna believe this

Reply to @mealreplacer, 15:36 UTC · 4 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @mealreplacer is no longer available.)

Something something weights

Reply to @AviSchiffmann, 16:27 UTC · 43 likes

Avi (@AviSchiffmann): I think there would be mass suicide if UBI was rolled out

Wanna bet? Serious about this, if it can be made more specific

Reply to @VenturaReport, 20:37 UTC · 123 likes

Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport): On the U.S./Mexico border in Juarez we witnessed a Venezuelan family with a toddler going under the concerta wire to enter the El Paso illegally by placing cardboard on their backs to avoid being cut , the little girl can be heard crying as she goes under @NewsNation

video attached

Jfc let ppl live here

Thursday, September 28, 2023

Reply to @HHH_Report, 09:24 UTC · 38 likes

HHH_Report (@HHH_Report): The next batch of hastily released, poorly vetted illegal Venezuelan migrants should be lodged at your house. In fact you should be volunteering to take them in this second.

“If you don’t want to personally live with a bunch of strangers you aren’t sincere about liberalizing immigration” is a take I’ve seen quite a bit that has never made any sense

In fact, I’d also be annoyed if a dozen of my white US citizen friends showed up at my door with their sleeping bags rn but in both cases would be more than happy to have them live nearby, including literally next door

Reply, 09:26 UTC · 1 like

Wait fr u opened one ???

Reply to @DavidDeutschOxf, 09:37 UTC · 5 likes

David Deutsch (@DavidDeutschOxf): No force is exerted by gravity. If you hold out your arm, the only force on it is from your own muscles.

Very few people know this. I've known physicists to deny it.

That is why people are surprised that antimatter falls down.

Wait what? I mean ur the physics guy but I was pretty sure arm molecules and earth molecules attracted each other via gravity

Reply to @RugbyAurelius, 09:43 UTC · 2 likes

Nic Stephenson (@RugbyAurelius): @JEverettLearned TL;DR, to beat depression, men simply require vitamin T!

*If pre-screened for hypogonadism

Quote tweet, 09:46 UTC · 4 likes

Relatively comprehensive blood tests should be like way more common in medicine - a default that’s quick, easy and cheap to get like a flu shot rather than something you have to go out of your way to ask for

Quoting Joseph Everett (WIL) (@JEverettLearned):

image attached

Quote tweet, 16:22 UTC · 3 likes

New pdf just dropped (direct link: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/deliver/4e180f51-en.pdf?itemId=%2Fcontent%2Fpaper%2F4e180f51-en&mimeType=pdf)

Quoting Michael Plant (@MichaelDPlant): The happiness paper I refer to most, by quite a way, is the 2013 OECD report on SWB. It was *the thing* on measuring wellbeing.
Well, straps in folks, because the 2023 report has *just come out*. It will now be *the thing*
Read it here:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/subjective-well-being-measurement_4e180f51-en

Reply to @dissproportion, 16:25 UTC · 2 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @dissproportion is no longer available.)

Based

Reply to @underthenettle, 16:34 UTC · 1 like

Rachel Edwards (@underthenettle): Being overdressed is one of the best feelings in the world

image attached

This but the opposite

Reply to @br___ian, 16:36 UTC · 7 likes

bri (@br___ian): If your only goal today was making your day tomorrow really good, what kinds of stuff would your do?

Try to buy opioids somehow

Reply to @nikitabier, 16:49 UTC · 5 likes

Nikita Bier (@nikitabier): There is a huge arbitrage opportunity to find a spouse who works at Nvidia with a massively marked up compensation package. No one outside of tech knows what Nvidia is. Seduce them before it’s too late.

Str8 female 18-25 well-compensated Nvidia engineers on Twitter hmu

Reply to @vinnerroy, 16:50 UTC · 1 like

Vince Roy (@vinnerroy): You can ask ChatGPT to explain in a simpler way: When David Deutsch says, "No force is exerted by gravity," he's referring to this relativistic understanding of gravity. If you hold out your arm, it doesn't fall to your side because of a gravitational force pulling it down, but because your muscles are exerting a force to counteract the natural motion it would follow in the Earth's curved spacetime. Without the muscles' force, your arm would move downward following the curvature of spacetime around Earth.

I think we should have stopped doing physics when Newton published his thing

Reply, 16:53 UTC

Dear all replyers: good work, Godspeed

Reply to @metakuna, 21:34 UTC · 5 likes

metakuna (14/100 blog posts) (@metakuna): @AaronBergman18 @PseudoJonathan @ChanaMessinger @sympatheticopp @AnyaM8_ @freed_dfilan I like how in this episode Nathan goes to the bathroom and there's just a 5 minute silence https://spotify.link/3rhrYSvitDb

Oh fuck I didn’t cut that? Sorry @NathanB60857242 lol. Will fix soon

Reply to @sam_atis, 22:17 UTC · 4 likes

Sam Glover (@sam_atis): @AaronBergman18 @metakuna @PseudoJonathan @ChanaMessinger @sympatheticopp @AnyaM8_ @freed_dfilan @NathanB60857242 This is genius marketing and makes me want to listen to the episode

Mandatory 5 minute bathroom break for all pigeon hour guests

Tweet, 22:39 UTC · 8 likes

Public library having a public multi-person restroom, water bottle filling thing, and free n95 masks with no enforcement of the 4/person/day limit but plenty available seems like the most functional part of society

Reply, 22:49 UTC · 3 likes

(The tweet being replied to is no longer available.)

I truly non-sarcastically don’t understand why people think illegal immigrants (or any for that matter) either need or somehow acquire “care” or hosting

Like they’ll work, earn money, and use that money to buy things like food and rent. Yes their fiscal impact isn’t literally zero bc they use and therefore indirectly increase the amount of public goods provided but being unauthorized means no access to the non-public good welfare state

Friday, September 29, 2023

Reply to @esalalumbo, 00:59 UTC · 2 likes

Eli T. D. (Dialetheism Truther) (@esalalumbo): @br___ian Save my Vyvanse and take it all tomorrow

Wonder how many days worth this would get subjectively unpleasant lol. 2 sounds great, 10 sounds bad

Quote tweet, 01:01 UTC · 6 likes

This but for productivity or performance (at whatever u care about), go

Stims are off limits bc like obviously

Quoting bri (@br___ian): If your only goal today was making your day tomorrow really good, what kinds of stuff would your do?

Reply to @aliceisplaying, 01:10 UTC · 14 likes

alice (@aliceisplaying): i just found the most incredible twitter embed bug

image attached
image attached

Took me a minute

Reply to @inerati, 07:02 UTC · 3 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @inerati is no longer available.)

Bc that duration and intensity for most young healthy people is sustainable via food/glycogen + aerobic respiration without needing to tap into the other energy sources (ie ketosis or digesting ur own muscles whatever that’s called) or systems (I used to know them - basically like whatever enables ppl to do 1 pullup but not 10 or run 1 8 minute mile but not 5 in a row. Something something lactic acid and fast twitch muscle fibers), which ur brain regulates via perceived exertion

But as long as you’re well below needing to use those backup sources/systems, ur brain doesn’t have to send a “this sucks” signal to itself to try to get u to stop, as it would if you were (I’m guessing) like trying to run the same distance in 25 mins

Ppl who actually know stuff ahold fact check me

Reply to @softminus, 08:39 UTC · 2 likes

Miss Distance (@softminus): undecided between a 13-inch M2 macbook air and a 15-inch M2 macbook air; how much do you think i might use/regret/enjoy those extra two inches?

If ur not using an external monitor most of the time, 15 seems way better to me

Reply to @StefanFSchubert, 11:36 UTC · 4 likes

Stefan Schubert (@StefanFSchubert): Indeed, I beg

image attached

Petition to make the former meaning official starting tmr

Also abolish the word “sanction” while we’re cleaning things up

Thread, continued, 11:42 UTC · 2 likes

Ok 2 likes the motion has passed @UN @apaphilosophy @MerriamWebster @POTUS @sama

Reply to @NathanB60857242, 11:42 UTC · 3 likes

Nathan Barnard (@NathanB60857242): @AaronBergman18 @metakuna @PseudoJonathan @ChanaMessinger @sympatheticopp @AnyaM8_ @freed_dfilan lol

It’s fixed now!!!

Quote tweet, 12:19 UTC · 2 likes

N=1 but seems true for me, empirically

Quoting orca apologist (@sonikudzu): properly curated twitter > therapy

and i’m so serious

Reply, 12:27 UTC · 13 likes

Ur gonna unleash Neuron Count vs Demonstrated Capacities vs Secret Third Thing ft. Megapig Situation Twitter

Thread, continued, 12:27 UTC · 2 likes

But also I agree and endorse ur tweet

Reply to @TheZvi, 12:36 UTC · 5 likes

Zvi Mowshowitz (@TheZvi): If the difference is causal any plausible calculation is that check-out clerks are profitable. So why are big corps choosing self-checkout anyway?

Does “any plausible calculation” account for competing for customers who like self checkout?

Reply to @TheZvi, 13:56 UTC

Zvi Mowshowitz (@TheZvi): I admit I did not take into account that customers might net prefer the self-checkout experience to a reasonably staffed checkout counter. My jaw would be rather on the floor if value flowed in that direction.

I prefer it just bc it’s quicker (like 90% of the time for me, maybe bc it’s a good filter for having fewer things), so there’s an existence proof!

Thread, continued, 14:00 UTC

Also idk exactly how/whether this matters but plausibly theft is pretty inelastic wrt time so once you add one self kiosk, adding 100 more takes wait time to ~0 and only increases theft a bit

Tweet, 14:53 UTC · 14 likes

Asking if it’s ok to record your own Zoom/Meet job interview so you can look at it (and/or read the transcript) later and see what needs work (if matters, assume it’s for an EA-aligned nonprofit)

Comments very welcome l, especially for ppl who’ve hired before!

Thread, continued, 15:01 UTC · 3 likes

Lfg unambiguous results for once

Reply to @sarah_micheleg, 20:17 UTC · 1 like

(The tweet being replied to by @sarah_micheleg is no longer available.)

Every prescription stimulant lol (dif versions of adderall/ritalin + modafinil)

Nicotine gum might be ur best bet, but be warned it’s addictive (tho not carcinogenic, almost certainly). Weirdly it does nothing for me but I’ve never heard anyone else say the same

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Reply, 01:03 UTC · 1 like

What does it say

Reply to @JgaltTweets, 01:15 UTC · 4 likes

JgaltTweets (@JgaltTweets): @absurdlymax It's like a bird call

🪿 caw caw 🪿

Tweet, 01:52 UTC · 51 likes

(Tbc I’m very glad OpenPhil has high standards and super competitive hiring rounds)

But also lmao they really be like “we received 9,821 applications, of which only 477 reached our first-pass minimal threshold of ‘person of anomalous and extreme ability’…

Image

Image

Thread, continued, 01:52 UTC · 32 likes

Collectively, this cohort had over 1M research citations, 13 Nobel prizes, 411 biotech patents, and an estimated counterfactual impact of 500M early deaths prevented. A dozen had designed novel functional organism via DNA base pair specification.

Ultimately we made no hire”

Reply to @JacquesThibs, 02:28 UTC · 11 likes

Jacques (@JacquesThibs): @AaronBergman18

image attached

Even under the most optimistic assumptions, still a solid chance you get rejected

Image

Reply to @niplav_site, 02:29 UTC · 2 likes

niplav (@niplav_site): "Almost all normal form games have an odd number of Nash equilibria"
"Every graph can be embedded in ℝ³, but not in ℝ²"
"The long line exists"

(quoting @TylerGlaiel: love math facts of the form, "every number has <property>, except 1, 6, and 246290120935686234782345123509135756. Those are the only 3 exceptions")

Fuck the long line fr

Reply to @EgeErdil2, 02:46 UTC · 3 likes

Ege Erdil (@EgeErdil2): i'm sad you didn't say "chance of rejection is approximately 1/e"

chance of rejection is approximately 1/e

Reply to @BecomingCritter, 03:01 UTC · 4 likes

critter (@BecomingCritter): 1000 BCE pants holy fucking dope

image attached
(quoting @historyinmemes: A 3,000-year-old pair of pants was recently unearthed in northwestern China, within a tomb. The arid desert climate contributed to the exceptional preservation of organic materials. Carbon dating has dated these pants to the period of 1261-1041 BCE, making them the world's…)

Thoughts, @dieworkwear ?

Reply to @eigenrobot, 03:05 UTC · 8 likes

eigenrobot (@eigenrobot): broke: ignorance

woke: awareness

bespoke: believing what you like in spite of all evidence to the contrary

try it. no one can stop you. in 99% of cases it won't have any negative consequences and youll enjoy your life more fully

(quoting @lickofcow: @eigenrobot Ignorance is truly bliss)

Yea but better be damn sure it’s not in that 1%

Reply to @corymassimino, 03:20 UTC · 9 likes

Cory Massimino (@corymassimino): "The rights of children, even more than those of parents, have been systematically invaded by the state." - Murray Rothbard

(quoting @JoshuaAtLarge: )

The insinuation that children’s rights is a euphemism for age of consent abolition or whatever is such a fucking nightmare

Like how about “u can’t be assaulted by a person just bc they’re ur parent,” for example

Reply to @albrgr, 03:32 UTC · 7 likes

(The tweet being replied to by @albrgr is no longer available.)

Nah that totally makes sense, I don’t have any affirmative reason to think something is going wrong here - just making fun of it as an especially funny/extreme example of the usual “prestigious ea org jobs are extremely competitive” situation (which is good from an altruistic and all things considered perspective but obviously not for applicants’ personal professional goals)

Reply to @EgeErdil2, 03:47 UTC

Ege Erdil (@EgeErdil2): why do you think that's a good thing

High opportunity cost of OpenPhil money and selection effects for people who ~really care~ about achieving the underlying goals of the position

Reply to @EgeErdil2, 03:53 UTC · 1 like

Ege Erdil (@EgeErdil2): i also really disagree with this argument in other contexts too, e.g. paying politicians less doesn't select for people who really care about the good of the country

It would at some margin. Like I don’t think it would be wise to pay congresspeople $10M/year, though it should be higher than it is now (maybe ~$500k?)

Also I don’t have a strong take on whether OP should be offering like 20% more. Just that I think they’d need to like 10x it to double p(hire) which seems like a bad tradeoff, but ofc I’m unsure

Reply to @Telegraph, 03:54 UTC · 15 likes

The Telegraph (@Telegraph): 🏠 One sub-section of society has become a lightning rod for righteous fury: Nimbys, but they can often be the last line of defence against greedy developers looking for a quick buck.

Here, we explain how you can be an effective Nimby ⬇️
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/property/nimby-guide-take-on-developers-block-construction-planning/

Cmon you are the bad guys here lol

Reply to @eigenrobot, 04:03 UTC · 3 likes

eigenrobot (@eigenrobot): what
https://x.com/Nemtastic1/status/1707966881301487814?t=mRPYBO-mi74Q7rRjuvkEnQ&s=19

You don’t have to refrigerate butter

Image

Reply to @EgeErdil2, 04:08 UTC

Ege Erdil (@EgeErdil2): i'm sad you didn't say "chance of rejection is approximately 1/e"

Damn lol it really is. Love that u have the decimal for 1/e just cached up and ready to go

Image

Reply to @EgeErdil2, 04:12 UTC · 1 like

Ege Erdil (@EgeErdil2): i mean, i do have the decimal cached, but i know it's approximately 1/e because it's (1-1/1000)^1000 and 1/e is the limit of (1-1/n)^n as n -> infty

I was just about to ask literally this! They should revoke my math major

Image

Tweet, 21:16 UTC · 12 likes

I have to admit something

I’m…a theater kid (started listening to the Hamilton soundtrack bc it’s good)

Thread, continued, 21:18 UTC · 3 likes

Based fr

Image

Tweet, 21:41 UTC · 12 likes

They should invent a new season that’s like November in terms of weather but it’s light 16 hours/day

Tweet, 23:00 UTC · 18 likes

Someone should test the conscientiousness signaling theory of education by seeing if a college graduation-implying picture gets you a wage premium on a dog walking app

Image

Reply to @el1assss, 23:15 UTC · 3 likes

elias💀 (@el1assss): Women🥲🥲❤

Real

Reply to @JgaltTweets, 23:21 UTC · 2 likes

JgaltTweets (@JgaltTweets): @AaronBergman18 I will DM you

Update: 🚨extreme infohazard🚨

(jk it was that I look kinda young in the left pic which is true bc it’s like 2-3 years old. FYI this level of risk for feedback is extremely welcome for everything at http://admonymous.co/a or just dm or whatever)

Reply to @JonHaidt, 23:24 UTC · 5 likes

Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt): Great 7 minute video on the mismatch between how boys learn and what schools make them do. And how we use Adderall to bridge the gap, rather than giving them what they need: more play, movement, and hands-on activity. From @Robmontz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adN3T11AHck&ab_channel=GoodKidProductions

“Adderall…more play and movement”

GIF thumbnail (gif, plays on X)

Reply to @BecomingCritter, 23:28 UTC · 607 likes

critter (@BecomingCritter): Why’s it always seem like the people that get burnt out are sitting in an office working maybe 5 actual hours, and the people that are on their feet doing real work 8+ hours a day never do?

Low physical activity + high cognitively mediated stress is the worst of the 4 quadrants


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