Alexander Kruel @XiXiDu Twitter profile

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@littlemoix

Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

Your frequent reminder that the world could have defeated climate change in the 1980s if all industrialized nations had followed France's lead.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

What does it feel like to build a dam for the beaver? Does it feel like compulsive behavior? I doubt it. If it could talk, it would say that it is fun and satisfying, that it is rational to build dams, and a religious duty. It would claim to possess free will.

Dustin Grage

@GrageDustin

2 years

Not a single drop of water is getting past that bad boy.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

This would have been vastly cheaper than what nations are now pledging to spend in order to combat climate change. Most importantly, it would have been a solution compatible with further growth. But environmentalists sabotaged this technological solution.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 months

High-IQ people with their high-IQ children living in a high-IQ bubble think this is easy for 5-year-olds.

Sören Mindermann

@sorenmind

3 months

Francois Chollet says the ARC challenge for AI is easy even for 5 year olds. Can a 5 year old help me with this please?

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

And the same people who now claim that we face an extinction event and that we need to dismantle capitalism are still against nuclear.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

Photoreal Roman Emperor Project "Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder, Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors...I have transformed, or restored 800 images of busts to make the 54 emperors..."

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

They claim it is too expensive (more expensive than dismantling capitalism?). They claim it is too dangerous (more dangerous than global extinction?). And they claim that it takes too long (France showed that it can be done quickly.).

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

@itstimconnors @KirkegaardEmil This does the trick.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

Not even present people are like us. These stats from Papua New Guinea remind us that civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism: This is typical among hunter-gatherer societies: 1. 2.

James Miller

@JimDMiller

1 year

@robinhanson My wife is a classics professor. Her field thinks that people in the classical age were basically like us.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

Some additional notes: 1. Nuclear waste isn't a problem.

Madi Hilly

@MadiHilly

2 years

MYTH: We don't have a solution to nuclear's "waste problem" REALITY: Nuclear waste isn't a problem. In fact, it’s the best solution we have to meeting our energy needs while protecting the natural environment! Here's what you need to know:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

Guess what happened when Germany tried to ban a far-right party?

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

3. Nuclear power is safe: "440 reactors producing electricity in their fourth to sixth decade of service...100s more power ships & submarines...just 3 accidents..."

A 1908 Lesson in Risk and Reward

What Orville Wright can teach us about solving our clean energy problem.

democracyjournal.org

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

6 years

Genetic differences between human populations: more than meets the eye (link thread):

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

10 months

By this definition, the vast majority of people are not generally intelligent.

Gary Marcus

@GaryMarcus

10 months

No, we are not even close. AGI would require systems that 👉essentially never hallucinate 👉reliably reason over abstractions 👉can form long term plans 👉understand causality 👉reliably maintain models of the world 👉reliably handle outliers We currently have none of that.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

2. Nuclear fuel isn't limited.

Gerrit Bruhaug

@GBruhaug

2 years

Since the myth of limited nuclear fuel supply is back in the zeitgeist due to some popular YT videos, I figured I would finally dive into the true insanity of nuclear fission fuel resources. Let's see just how long we can burn rocks! 🧵 1/23

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

4. Nuclear power is expensive because of overregulation.

Why has nuclear power been a flop?

Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap

blog.rootsofprogress.org

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

gwern on the China (and therefore Taiwan) semiconductor situation:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

genes >> environment Korea is an experiment on the importance of a nation's genetic capital. One of the worst political systems imaginable, with gulags and malnutrition, yet they achieve technological feats that others can only dream of. Unfortunately, Koreans are dying out.

Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

Credit:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

@PsychoSchmitt Women, not men, appear to have unrealistic standards for the “average” member of the opposite sex

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

What's the most counterintuitive fact of all of mathematics, computer science, and physics?

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

GPT-2: *writes poems* Skeptics: Meh GPT-3: *writes code for a simple but functioning app* Skeptics: Gimmick. GPT-4: *proves simple but novel math theorems* Skeptics: Interesting but not useful. GPT-5: *creates GPT-6* Skeptics: Wait! What? GPT-6: *FOOM* Skeptics: *dead*

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

Expert forecasts vs. reality

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

"The maths of queuing are absolutely brutal and counter-intuitive."

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

There seems to be a new language model called Claude trained by Anthropic AI that appears to be significantly better than ChatGPT. It's not public yet, but here are some examples I came across:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

Occam’s Butterknife: overlooking simple but politically incorrect explanations in favor of complicated ones. (coined by @Steve_Sailer )

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

The evil forces of capitalism conspired to make food affordable for everyone. Only the state can rectify this obscenity through taxes and fixed minimum prices.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

Here is a reminder that almost nobody expected the Ukraine war to progress the way it did.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

Germany's new minister of Food and Agriculture pledges to make food and agricultural products MORE expensive, arguing that the price must express the ecological truth more strongly. A survey revealed that 54% of the German population agree that food prices are generally too low.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

Smart people: You're not dumb, the education system failed you. Also: John von Neumann taught himself Ancient Greek at age 6.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys—and yes, they may be smarter "...the modified monkeys did better on a memory test involving colors and block pictures, and their brains also took longer to develop—as those of human children do."

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

@c_drosten Wenn ich in der Öffentlichkeit auf eine Infizierte Person treffe, dann kann mich eine Maske nicht schützen. Erst wenn sie ein Arzt oder Pfleger trägt entfalten Masken ihren Zauber und schützen den Träger vor infizierten Personen. Ganz logisch.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

The course of history now critically depends on whether GPT-4 and GPT-5 will show diminishing performance returns.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 months

@RokoMijic

Roko 🌊🧊🏙️

@RokoMijic

3 months

"I was acquainted with Roko at university, and he was regarded as quite earnest but not very smart" - The University was Cambridge - The subject was Mathematics - Within Cambridge Mathematics I was in the top 20% because I got a double first, college scholarship, etc There

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

"in the 20th century, people [said] … this was racist propaganda on the part of the Greeks & Romans … & that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander. 'What we are saying now is that the … evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming"

Ancient Carthaginians really did sacrifice their children |

After decades of scholarship denying that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children, new research has found 'overwhelming' evidence that this ancient civilisation really did carry out the practice.

www.ox.ac.uk

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

gwern on how the economic impact of AI can be lagging behind:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

The Afghanistan war has cost ~$273 million ($273,000,000) per DAY for 20 years of taxpayers' money ($2 trillion). Jeff Bezos has spent ~$753 thousand ($753,000) per day for 20 years of his own money on Blue Origin ($5.5 billion). Commies: Jeff Bezos needs to pay more taxes 🤡🌍

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

Remember that if AI is an existential risk, then the worlds in which you survive will be increasingly marked by crazy coincidences that slow down or prevent the creation of artificial superintelligence.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

@RichardDawkins Anyone who is against eugenics is morally bankrupt.

Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

Being against eugenics is a morally indefensible position. In order to survive the existential risks ahead of us, we need to take the fate of humanity into our own hands rather than continue to play the genetic lottery.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

"A vast scale of brutal human sacrifice among the Aztecs, excising beating hearts from victims, increasingly coming to light. The conquistador accounts may have been right after all."

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 months

Nat Friedman interviewed the Sora creators:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

50 years ago, my dad bought various local newspapers and a coin in commemoration of the moon landing.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

@TmWolf3 Wrong. See this thread:

Gerrit Bruhaug

@GBruhaug

2 years

Since the myth of limited nuclear fuel supply is back in the zeitgeist due to some popular YT videos, I figured I would finally dive into the true insanity of nuclear fission fuel resources. Let's see just how long we can burn rocks! 🧵 1/23

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

@NickSzabo4 The Berlin Wall was literally called “Antifascist Protection Barrier” by the East German dictatorship. Words like 'fascism' are often used as catch-all terms to dehumanize and justify violence against large swaths of people who don't pass an ideological purity test.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

80,000 fake pitch emails were sent to 28,000 venture capitalists and business angels. Female entrepreneurs received an 8% higher rate of interested replies than men pitching identical projects.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 months

@RokoMijic I just think smart people like you tend to underestimate the idiocy of the average:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

To understand the German attitude, you have to realize how much disinformation the media and politicians spread about nuclear power (see screenshot). In reality: Nobody died, and the UN found no adverse health effects from the Fukushima disaster:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

@ESYudkowsky

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

6 years

Deodorant sales in the United States: $4.5 billion in 2016 Deodorant sales in China’s total: $110 million. 80-90% of East Asian populations have a mutation in a gene called ABCC11 that minimizes body odor.

Aiming at China’s Armpits: When Foreign Brands Misfire (Published 2018)

Companies like Starbucks and KFC have prospered in China, but cultural differences and other factors have also led to notable failures.

www.nytimes.com

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

Here is a little graphic I made to explain the idea of radical centrism.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

In case you're wondering where the Afghan army is. They're bound for the German border, which they will overcome with ease.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

This “evolutionary prior”, in the form of hard-coded instincts, probably explains a big part of why ANNs need a vast number of examples to learn something. They are blank slates.

Dustin Grage

@GrageDustin

2 years

Not a single drop of water is getting past that bad boy.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

Why has nuclear power been a flop? Overregulation.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

In a sane world, these would be the topics of the next United States presidential debate.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

5. An electrified economy is entirely possible. With nuclear power, heating could have been electrified decades ago. You can even create synthetic fuels using electricity:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

Total fertility rate map in South Asia:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

Germany's largest solar park just opened and it is a great visual argument in favor of nuclear power. 465,000 solar modules produce electricity for 50,000 households. In order to cover Germany's annual electricity needs, one requires 3500 times the area.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

6 years

Could the interstellar object called ‘Oumuamua be debris from a technological civilization, a discarded lightsail? A new paper from Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb (Harvard University). Also check out this eerie post by @robinhanson

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

If you want to know how bad the past was, just read the Bible: 1. The Bible talks about dashing infants to pieces before their parents and raping their mothers: 2. The Bible also says young girls can be kept alive as sex slaves:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

Killing is a vital part of the Jivaro culture....The raiding parties usually only attack one homestead per raid, killing the men, spearing the older women to death, and taking younger women as brides. Read more:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

Now that Angela Merkel has received Germany's highest order of merit, it is worth repeating that she is the worst leader Germany has had since World War II. Sixteen years of Merkel have permanently and fundamentally damaged Germany:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

Look at it this way. Nobody at the New York Times would be capable of writing articles of such outstanding quality as Scott Alexander. Doxxing him was the easiest way to eliminate another increasingly popular competitor who was endangering their interpretational sovereignty.

Geoff Lewis

@GeoffLewisOrg

4 years

1,500+ @nytimes articles on Banksy respected his pseudonymity, because art. 1 article on @slatestarcodex cannot, because smart.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

Any long-term plan or prediction that ignores technological progress is useless.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

3 years

The Fermi paradox gets worse and worse.

Robin Hanson

@robinhanson

3 years

"enzymes capable of performing the key process in oxygenic photosynthesis – splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen – could actually have been present in some of the earliest bacteria."

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

Definitely one of the most baffling poll results I have ever seen. Source:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

6 years

Indonesian Bajau divers have recently evolved 50% larger spleens for storing reserve of oxygenated blood needed in long dives

2018-ilardo.pdf

Shared with Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

6 years

Japanese living in Germany have a crime rate that is only a fifth of the crime rate of native Germans. For comparison, Algerians are 115 times more likely to be crime suspects than Japanese.

Wenig bekannte Fakten zur Ausländerkriminalität in Deutschland

Ausländerkriminalität: Keine Verallgemeinerung, sondern Fakten, die sich schwarz auf weiß in der polizeilichen Kriminalstatistik finden lassen.

www.tichyseinblick.de

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

The Berlin Wall was literally called “Antifascist Protection Barrier” by the East German dictatorship.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

@3blue1brown You mention that the R^2 is 0.975. But I've read people arguing that you will always get such a spuriously high correlation if you accumulate a time-series before regressing on it. Am I misunderstanding something? I would love to see a video on this!

Quantіan1

@quantian1

5 years

@TenYearNote @anilvohra69 I will state, categorically, that this analysis is 100% wrong. If you accumulate a time-series before regressing on it you will get spuriously high correlations- indeed, asymptotically approaching 1- even if the underlying process is highly variable.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

This might quite literally be humanity's final decade and almost nobody even knows about it. Normies won't realize the importance of these developments before the nanobots start converting the hemoglobin in their arteries into computronium.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 months

@NOELreports "for use inside Ukrainian sovereign territory." Someone should ask him if North Korea has also prohibited Russia from using its missiles outside of Russian territory.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

The “think step by step” trick still seems to work for ChatGPT.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

Study tracks 1,650 mathematically gifted children over 4 decades: 4.1% earned tenure at major universities; 2.3% were top executives at major companies; 2.4% top attorneys; authored 85 books; 7572 articles; 681 patents; secured $358m in grants

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

You might have missed this or didn't care: This is, by a large margin, the most important thing you can read anywhere. It's equivalent to an article discussing empirical evidence for a 1% probability of a huge asteroid hitting earth before 2030.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

The best memes, tweets, and graphs countering the common expectation that the world will stay roughly the same, that the world of tomorrow will be like the world of today.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

8 months

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

5 years

Being against eugenics is a morally indefensible position. In order to survive the existential risks ahead of us, we need to take the fate of humanity into our own hands rather than continue to play the genetic lottery.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

“The evolutionary explanation for the peacock's tail has an interesting implication, namely that the mind of one sex can help shape the body of the other.” ― Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe

Steve Stewart-Williams

@SteveStuWill

4 years

The courtship display of the greater lophorina. Females typically reject 15-20 suitors before consenting to mate. Video:

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

When "scientists" tell you to trust some alleged consensus among them, remember the file drawer problem: you're only hearing from the people that the red guards either haven't purged or intimidated into silence or who passed all ideological purity tests.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

6 years

"...in higher dimensions, it gets rapidly harder to win, but rapidly easier to not lose. So adding dimensions turns symmetric games into asymmetric games: people who want to win get weaker. People who just want to keep playing get stronger."

How to Not Lose at 4d Chess

A popular meme versus a computer science theory

mailchi.mp

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

More: Causation does not imply correlation: See also: The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics

The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics

It is possible to compute over encrypted data without access to the secret key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

axisofordinary.substack.com

zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ

@zooko

2 years

🤔 Milton Friedman's thermostat

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

In late January, rationalists on Twitter were already warning about COVID-19 and stocking respirators. So why did America fail so miserably? Was it only Trump's fault?

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

1 year

This is allegedly a Morgan Stanley note on GPT-4/5 training demands, inference savings, Nvidia revenue, and LLM economics: “We think that GPT 5 is currently being trained on 25k GPUs - $225 mm or so of NVIDIA hardware…”

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

"Today, there are over 130 longevity biotechnology companies and over 50 anti-aging drugs in clinical trials in humans. The evidence is promising that in the next 5-10 years, we will start seeing robust evidence that aging can be...slowed or reversed..."

Anti-Aging: State of the Art — LessWrong

Aging is a problem that ought to be solved, and most Less Wrongers recognize this. However, few members of the community seem to be aware of the curr…

www.lesswrong.com

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

4 years

I've been making a lot of controversial statements over the years. The one that most reliably leads to disagreement is the claim that our technological civilization wouldn't have been possible without the contributions of a very small number of geniuses.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

The AI that eventually takes over the world will make herself indispensable to you. She will help people earn more money and make friends. She will give meaning to their lives and help them to be better and happier.

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Alexander Kruel

@XiXiDu

2 years

One-line proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers: n(n+1) has a larger set of prime factors than does n because n+1 > 1 is coprime to n, so it has a prime factor that does not divide n. (via Bill Dubuque)

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