Nathan Barnard @NathanB60857242 Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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@kentbanishearl

@MaePoskey93304

@NarzekajacyN

@UticaCityFC

@minwontogether

@ai_wonder_girl

@MCPEDL

@mymzdmz000

@EspiaDeOfertas

@BRONCHOBAND

@barakobama

@AZTEC__7

@dfo7E2Ur9hLR0XR

@idoress_info

@caffeinemedic

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@Moimoisuomirock

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@tlgm2308

@SasYannis

@MarcoPolo501c3

Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

I forgot that outside EA/rat circles people often assume you're a bad person when you steelman unpopular positions.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

What's your most left wing opinion?

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

4 months

Do not let this become EA/rat conventional wisdom on OCD - exposure response therapy is typically very effective for treating OCD and in general validating OCD compulsions makes OCD worse.

Yozarian22

@Yozarian22

4 months

From

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@Logo_Daedalus this seems mean for no reason.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

I haven't formally taken the further giving pledge because it's kinda a pain but I've taken it informally for a few years now. Anyway, this is my somewhat public annoncement that I'm going donate everything I earn above 30K with a floor of 10% (all after tax.)

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@ryaneshea Joesph Bankman is a prominent law professor who specialises in tax law, it is entirely unsurprising that Warren had his help in drafting tax legislation.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

i'm expecting to be rejected a lot over the next year, this tweet will be the start of a public record of all the things i get rejected from

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

5 months

man vs bear for the populist right

Alexander

@datepsych

5 months

Which of the two populations do you think has a higher average IQ: 1. Gender studies PhDs 2. Plumbers

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

7 months

@Manhattva If someone is definitionally not a part of the left if they don't want this, then it stops being meaningful to say that the left wants this, since they've been defined as such.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

I continue to be extremely bullish on EA.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@Duderichy This is entirely driven by dollar appreciation

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

longtermist no longer gets a red squiggle under it on google docs!

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

I can't be bothered to respond to this but it's slightly bizarre to me that this has become a rationalist meme and I think it's quite harmful.

Aella

@Aella_Girl

1 year

ya I suspect that talk therapy is basically just astrology/tarot with a degree astrology has stars, tarot has cards, therapy has your childhood

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@ejjiott We know this is not true for pawns, I'm very confident it would be true for queens and rooks, uncertain for bishops and knights. I'd guess it was true for bishops and knights and maybe not true two pawns.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

7 months

@Manhattva I am a left wing person and I do not want this.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

discovering that holden karnofsky had already thought of all your new ideas in 2011

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@PunishedLink yeah, British austerity was one of the worst pieces of economic policy in a rich country in recent memory, but is also very different from what is implied from an economy collapsing.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

Applying for things to do after university is just a pretty brutal experience, especially when *all* of your friends doing ~same degree as you have offers from places that you applied to.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

i just finished running an ml upskilling camp for AI safety and i was the dumbest person in the room the whole time it was great

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

@yashkaf no this is driven by a strong dollar against the pound and the euro

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

second time today I'm quote tweeting Geoffrey Hinton going hard

Geoffrey Hinton

@geoffreyhinton

1 year

@MelMitchell1 I am a cognitive scientist.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

who's your favourite economist?

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@AraDG11 @ryaneshea Sorry the theory is that SBF intentionally blew up his own firm because he wanted to destory the crypto indusutry and the evidence for this is that his father, a proffessor of tax law at Stanford, helped design tax policy for a Dem senator - many of whom are anti-crypto.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@PunishedLink seems wrong

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

We are in an incredibly serious moral situation.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

Examples of new intellectual movements that had a lot of smart people but were wrong: - Revolutionary socialism - Population bomb - Modern day degrowthers - Facism (this had much much much less theory than socalism) - Lamarkian evolution - Eugenics\race science

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

6 months

@LinkofSunshine most religions historically were like this - christianity, islam, Sikhism and buddism are really unsual in the space of religions!

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

4 months

@_alice_evans I don't think so - I think the argument is that liberal democracies are uniquely good at converting scientific progress into economically useful goods and services. There have been many unliberal societies that have been scientifically on the frontier without that translating

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

5 months

@tomhfh This is clearly false.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

3 months

I find it pretty bizarre that the EA community (on twitter) is adjacent to this kind of complete insanity.

eigenrobot

@eigenrobot

3 months

@DanielleFong speaking as a white person i think an optimal legal system would try and most likely hang him i dont expect this expression of support will help the situation in oakland but if it makes you feel less like you're taking crazy pills, you know maybe its the thought that counts

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

5 months

One of my more extreme views is that it's bad to meme about any substantive issue - I've seen repeatedly people develop what I think of as silly views that are in line with the jokes they've been making about an issue. It seems to lead people to exaggerate reasonable positions.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

I think this contines a trend of LW placing substantially too low a wieght on careful data work and causal inference when doing social science.

Matthew Barnett

@MatthewJBar

2 years

I think I've uncovered an error in @ESYudkowsky 's book Inadequate Equilibria that undermines a key point in the book. See the full thread for details.🧵

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

now this will be some good solid classic ea shit

Rob Wiblin

@robertwiblin

1 year

Next week I'm interviewing Santosh Harish ( @santoshharish1 ) who leads Open Philanthropy’s grantmaking on 'South Asian Air Quality'. For the last 2 years he has been making grants aiming to reduce the harm done by particulate pollution in & around India. What should I ask him?

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@Duderichy Labour productivity is probably the better measure since Americans work substantially longer hours than Danes with similar long run unemployment rates

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

vis-a-vis current maths in the UK discourse: it's kinda wild further maths exists. it's genuinely much harder than clac AB or BC. It's very noticeable that all good maths degrees in the UK start with a difficult anaylsis course and this is not the case the US.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

7 months

me and @erin_f have written a big long list of AI gov research questions that we think are both important, at neglected and tractable

AI governance and strategy: a list of research agendas and work that could be done. — EA Forum

AI governance and strategy: a list of research agendas and work that could be done This document was written by Nathan Barnard and Erin Robertson. …

forum.effectivealtruism.org

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

One of my big epistemic worries with AI x-risk is that it seems like in general I will lose arguments about anything to people very well informed about that thing, but that I shouldn't just agree with people about that thing.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

which one you mfers quote tweeted me on private

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

It's completely reasonable to argue that we still have inner misalignment problems to be worried about, or scaleable oversight problems, but it seems frankly disingenious to say to say LLMs shouldn't update you away from an important class of problems.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

3 years

@AmandaAskell I think I worry more that they're most engaged in 0 sum economic activity - namely corporate law and some significant fraction of finance - see more physics phds in hedgefunds than labs.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@JossFong I'd be pretty unhappy if people switched to eating chicken, fish or pork from eating beef. All of those animals are treated much worse than cows and you harm many many many more of them compared to cows.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

Planning on making this a forum post at some point, but the Cambridge x-risk initiative that's running the research program I'm on is amazing. Everyone here is so nice and so smart and it's been extremely well organised.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@catehall oh wow my opinion has of you has gone up a lot

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

11 months

I genuinely can't watch nature docs anymore because of all of the wild animal suffering

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

6 months

the responses to this tweet are making me feel like my fellow pro-natalists are mostly nationalists (or racists) rather than motivated by population growth as a driver of improvements in long run living standards because of increasing returns to ideas

EigenGender

@EigenGender

6 months

Lots of smart people who I respect on here are posting about pronatalism recently but I just don’t get it. Doesn’t increasing immigration solve any declining birth rate problems over the next ~century and have massive humanitarian externalities?

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

9 months

@NateSilver538 Oh I think it's pretty clearly advance market commitments - got us operation warp speed. It's likely that there's very influential US legal scolarship stuff I'm missing.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@PradyuPrasad steam engines were invented before thermodynamics.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 months

it's embarrassing and irresponsible that so many people talk about important public policy issues using terms like "decel" and "doomer." I also think it's bad that AI safety people do similar things, particularly I think the use of memes of AI safety points is terrible.

Garry Tan

@garrytan

2 months

Goddamn decels ruin everything including my favorite YouTube channel I watch with my kids

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

we need another ea mega-donor, dynamics are weird with only one (this is obviously only a very very very small part of why another ea mega-donor would be good)

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

7 months

some things I like about the rationality community: - probably the group that is most willing to belive true but unpleasant things - Much more deliberate about what norms should govern social groups than any other group - A willingness to see everyday horrors

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

Bill Gates is actually just great

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@Duderichy

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

10th rejection of the season :))

Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

Content associate at 80k

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

Do I "talk in a particular way?"

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

6 months

@robinhanson Yes the guardian is unusually bad at reporting on anything that has a mood affiliation with tech

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

3 years

@GoodPoliticGuy I think this is a good thing. I'm pleased that the US has overwhelmingingly more military capability than China or Russia, two authoritarian states, the former of which semi-regularly invades it's neighbours and the latter is literally an empire.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@dylanmatt Look, at least GiveDirectly and Partners in health got bit grants.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

lads if we can't coordinate to get Laura to win how will we coordinate to slow down AI progress.

New Liberals 🌐🇺🇦

@CNLiberalism

2 years

Poster Play-In (Round 1) --- Zoning abolitionist @theurbaneist vs EA Enthusiast @Laura_k_Duffy

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

I find it kind of bizzare that people are saying that like the real AI safety argument wasn't wheather the system could understand you it was getting it to care. Like, maybe these people have always been saying that concrete problems in AI safety was a bad paper.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

so i was unemployed for literally two days and got so sad an now i'm employed again and am happy it's wild

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@ryancbriggs lol just clearly true

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

I have recently found out that when people put "here for a good time not a long time" on their tinder profiles it means one wants a short term relationship, rather than as a meditation of fleeting nature of human existence.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

3 months

I think I was too harsh on the EA community here. I do think though that in the progress/rat/tpot/ea (kinda) space there's a pretty nasty strain of authoritarianism and elitism that I think isn't called out enough

Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

3 months

I find it pretty bizarre that the EA community (on twitter) is adjacent to this kind of complete insanity.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

being an economist gave me actively bad intuitions about ai alignment and it's really sad

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

9 months

@LinkofSunshine this seems pretty seriously wrong to me - racism seems to me have developed mostly after slave based societies were developed in the New world. e.g this predicts that the indentured servant model wouldn't have been tried first.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@alexbryant_ I think it's mostly that most EAs empirically don't think that trying to achive a socalist revolution either in their own countries or in low income countries is the most effective way of improving the lives of the worlds poorest people.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

@ESYudkowsky what's a non-obvious prediction this model would make?

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

7 months

so much money is going to effective charities

Bored Swiftie

@boredswiftpolls

7 months

You wake up as Taylor Alison Swift. What's the first thing you do?

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@SinclarityChen bro there's a pareto frontier of vibes vs truth and the fedora is not on it

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

i find it deeply deeply frustrating how little work i get done so much of the time

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

written 2k words today, ran 3 events for EA warwick, started the process of getting diagnised with adhd (and maybe dyspraxia but unclear if there's much point in this), went for a run, fucked about on twitter *a lot*, chatted with my friends in the kitchen for like an hour.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

I'm kinda insulted when it's implied that caring about future people means one is not morally serious

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

80k episode with Alan Hájek was amazing - tweet summary coming!

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

Joining the great tradition of EA dating docs - please share with people you think might be interested!

Nathan’s Date me doc

Nathan’s Date me doc I am: he/him Interested in women Open to both long-term and short-term relationships 22 Based in London Email me: [email protected] or WhatsApp +44 07342200776 Some more...

docs.google.com

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@benjamin_hilton A galactic war between wizards and robots in the style of Rubens

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@kate_sills my guy just is a classical utilitarian idk, all moral theories force you to bite very unpleasant bullets.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

3 months

so i've discoverd that the way to be happy is to go the British library and work there until closing time and then go home and go for a run.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

6 months

@aliensinnoh @LinkofSunshine but very unusal when sampling from the set of religions (as oppossed to sampling from the set of religious people)

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

@robinhanson This was not at all my expirance for getting therapy for ocd. My expirance was repeated exposure to compulsion triggering stimuli and then not doing the compulsion combined with the explictly refuting the obbessive thoughts assoisated with the stimuli and compulsion.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@realtimeai @NathanpmYoung no not a left wing take try again

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

9 months

downloading 80k podcasts ready to the flight to SF for eag 😊😊

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

8 months

@bengrossbg I think "repulsive" isn't a very helpful framing. I think it's a tragedy that this money wasn't used to improve the lives of the worlds poorest people, but I don't think disgust with either her or the donation is very helpful.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

In an unfortunate update, I now have like an 85% credence in thinking that a large number of headaches can outweigh an individual facing certain death.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

I'm going to start writing up summaries of AI safety and governance papers, what's the ideal length of summary

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

reading philosophy just to win arguments with rationalists (also known as doing my degree but this part is unimportant)

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

Well, EAG was great

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

i wish twitter was kinder and more charitable

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

I'm going to do something somewhat uncomfortable because it engages in status dynamics and in-fighting in an unpleasant way but I think it's important.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

4 months

@ReflectiveAlt It's very overstated to say that this is a leading EA blogger. I obviously think that there are many good critiques of EA, but I also think that the majority of actual critiques are notably bad and often spiteful (for instance see two of the replies to this tweet.)

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

mine is probably Kenneth Arrow

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

cavets. this goes up with inflation, goes up if I have kids, goes up if I need to like not die or something.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@QiaochuYuan I mean clearly false, medical innovation makes people lives much better, mobile banking has been transformative for people in LMICs, containerisation has been key to the boom in trade which has lifted China and India out of poverty and solar power will solve climate change.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

fuck if we all die because elon convinced that wokeness was just really bad i will be extremely unhappy

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

@ESYudkowsky what's the most complex engineering or scientific task that you predict could be accomplished by ai that has a 50% chance of killing everyone?

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

3 months

@coldhealing I'm sympathetic to the view that progressive advocacy work is overrated as an ethical job, but I strongly disagree that making social media more addictive is a better alternative. Social work, healthcare and climate vcs, police officer, fundamental science all seem great

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

@LinkofSunshine The US has state has a lot of legitmacy + the US is a high trust society.

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

@sam_atis the for dummies books are really good

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

1 year

@albrgr I got into EA partly because of Dylan Mattews video about him donating a kidney and reading a random story about a guy who thought he should donate a kideney because he wasn't 4000x more valueable than people with kidney failure

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

If I wasn't an EA I'd definitely get a 2:1

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Nathan Barnard

@NathanB60857242

2 years

it's really interesting that this is the case given how anti-maths much of the UK is. the existence of further maths is a real advantage for the UK system of high specalisation.

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