Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž Profile
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž

@freed_dfilan

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Following
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Statuses

Someone should figure out how to make super-smart AI that won't take over the world, and nobody should make AI that takes over the world. 1 Cor 15:26. d/acc?

Berkeley, CA
Joined July 2023
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
Common pattern: people in a hobby have an unassuming name for their thing. Is there a name for this? Examples: - Meditators don't meditate, they sit. - Computer programmers don't have computers, they have machines. - Camera hobbyists don't own lenses, they own glass. (1/2)
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
- People with tattoos don't have tattoos, they have ink. - MMO players don't have characters, they have toons. (2/2)
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
Is memory safety going to become "woke"? - computers telling you what you can and can't access - Biden likes it - 30% of respondents to the rust survey are trans
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
@daniel_271828 wait this is real?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
The rowing machine is criminally underrated. It's like the squat of cardio.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
Beautiful X axis
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
@ciphergoth i guess the answer should be infinity?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
People are giving OpenAI a lot of shit for this but if you read carefully, it's not OpenAI that's requiring the signature, it's the document itself - OpenAI probably tried to convince the document to change its mind but was obviously unable to.
@KelseyTuoc
Kelsey Piper
3 months
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Bold timing for 80k to release this podcast episode
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
One big request I have for OpenAI people, including the board: please keep diaries! In the future you'll want to know what you knew and thought when, and if human historians are around 200 years from now, they'll want to know that too!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
FYI: you can count up to 100 on your fingers like so: - right hand is ones - left hand is tens - thumbs are 5/50, fingers are 1/10. This is convenient enough that it's the way I count by default.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
I've been normie-pilled. The last three conspiracy theories that I put stock in were that COVID was a lab leak, Epstein didn't kill himself, and Boeing killed those whistleblowers. But looking into them myself made them all seem less likely (altho I can't rule the first 2 out)
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
@ByrneHobart I think there were walls before Lightcone took over?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
5 months
doesn't want his alpha stolen
@crampell
Catherine Rampell
5 months
Why are all the books turned backwards? Is this a thing people do?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
It's official
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
The philosophy of dimensional analysis seems underrated relative to its importance. Like, what on earth is a 'dimension'? How do we figure that out? Why can you multiply but not add them? Is it a priori or a posteriori? The more you think about it the stranger it seems.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
Thought of a dunk that would be funny, but it would also be mean and kind of contrary to my values, so I'm exercising the virtue of silence. You're welcome.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
Not loving Twitter's assessment of which replies I'm more or less interested in seeing
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
@ByrneHobart > Manifold is a startup that runs Manifund, a prediction market Well that's not true
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
AI doomers are the type of people who are so awful that they would probably oppose all sorts of good technologies. No I won't provide examples. No biotech, fusion power etc don't count as examples, they probably haven't heard of those. ^ this is not a good argument!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
One thing I'd like to emphasize: I think this is the best debate I have seen in my life. Object level informative, and worth wondering how to emulate. I genuinely wish political debates had this format.
@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
Twitter thread of me watching the @Rootclaim vs @tgof137 covid origins debate
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
10 months
not loving the idea that the firing of Sam Altman is the work of "doomerism" / "safetyism" such that people like me are somehow responsible for it. especially when there is ~0 solid public info to go off.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
1 year
blood donation is not meant to be free. it's meant to be effective at providing blood to people who need it. humans are meant to be free. to transact. in, among other things, blood.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
"I would like a space for my memory to be safe" - what they mean is that they want you to be silenced
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
- literally has "safety" in the name
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
5 months
Holy shit you can just host a party by thinking of some people you like and inviting them to your house and it actually works and is fun!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
The Cowen-Thiel convo begins with a butchering of both Calvinism and LessWrongism (Calvinists don't believe in the use of reason? LessWrongers don't claim to know things? Give me a break...) Not promising!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
@ByrneHobart 2. "[EA, LW-ism] often see empowering the tech sector[...] as crucial to human survival in the far future" - some relevant context here is that Lighthaven people are super opposed to big AI companies doing AI development!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
guys we could just run for city council and maybe win by default
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
People keep on putting out crazy numbers for losses to cybercrime like this. US GDP is approx $25 trillion. I think it's really unlikely that ~40% of US GDP is lost to cybercrime!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
1 year
One problem with regulation is that I don't think anyone knows what companies can do to ensure that when they make super-smart AI, it doesn't cause this sort of catastrophe. So it's unclear what the government should mandate other than "stop".
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Given that last time we heard that Sam was in negotiations with the board to return it wasn't true, why should we believe it this time?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
@cremieuxrecueil I feel like there's probably a project in here of mapping out which journals have a high proportion of LLM-written papers, to make it legible to the rest of the world which bits of academia are more or less fake.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
I would simply not say something I didn't believe because of pressure.
@JacquesThibs
Jacques
9 months
"OpenAI employees: did you sign the petition out of fear?"
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
5 months
Do you regularly read LessWrong? || If for the next 100 years you had the power to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon, is there a >10% chance you would use this power?
No || No
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
10 months
ok this apparently isn't very capitalist of me but I feel like the social value of ozempic is probably higher than the social value of facebook+instagram existing.
@DKThomp
Derek Thompson
10 months
I'm mildly obsessed with this Q: Why did most of Europe industry whiff on the tech revolution? Look at the largest US vs. EU companies by market cap. - America: computers, computers, computers, computers, computers, computers - Europe: ozempic, luxury bags and jewelry, lotions
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
@cremieuxrecueil oh man i've always wondered if anyone's studied middle responding tendency
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
1 year
@PradyuPrasad I'm on Tyler's side on this one. He indeed never missed a day of posting! But his days of posting started later than Alex's.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
I feel like Paul Romer should be lauded for his take early in COVID that we should make tests super cheap and not bother to trace - IMO the discourse has forgotten how right he was.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
I have literally signed up to have my head be frozen in a gamble to escape death.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
11 months
I guess this is a matter of hourly income? As a PhD student I am for sure on team 10x cheaper, and intuitively shocked that others wouldn't be, but perhaps things will change in future.
@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
11 months
Would you rather flights were 10x faster (including time in the airport and on the tarmac) or 10x cheaper?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
The font for "EA Global" is different than the font for "Bay Area (GCRs)" in a way that's distracting to me.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
I am instinctively pro-tunnel. Let them dig.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
Being unemployed sucks but at least it makes it easy to regularly exercise at the gym.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
@ByrneHobart The two bits of the article that seem the most sketchy: 1. "A group with racist ties" is pretty strong for "a group that once held/hosted a couple of events that invited some racist people, as well as a ton of people with normal levels of racism"
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
"The reformation had to start from the outside, it couldn't start from within" - but it did start from within! Obviously it couldn't stay there, but Martin Luther was a monk and a priest!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Re: nonlinear drama, has anyone - read Ben's post, wrote down things that seemed bad on a piece of paper, and the evidence provided for that - then read Kat's post while looking at that piece of paper and checking off things that were disproven ? If so, what was the result?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
If you walk around Berkeley on the day of the graduation ceremony wearing graduation attire, people will say "congratulations" to you. But anyone can buy it, you don't need to have actually graduated.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
The Golden Gate Bridge is actually beautiful and majestic in real life. It's not just a funny meme.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
11 months
Me @ manifest
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
Finished watching the debate! tl;dr in my sketchy Bayesian model, I get a 96% posterior probability of zoonosis, which is massively sensitive to the question "Would you expect the first superspreading event to be at the HSM even if the pandemic didn't originate there".
@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
Twitter thread of me watching the @Rootclaim vs @tgof137 covid origins debate
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
Correction: 30% of respondents to the rust survey are not trans
@SSamson89
Shri Samson Wis/acc
6 months
@RomanHauksson @freed_dfilan 🧐14% of the total identified as marginalized * 31.4% of the marginalized are trans = 4.4% of Rust respondents are trans.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
11 months
~25% of people with an opinion would be willing to increase their expected lifespan by risking human extinction. Makes it plausible that some oppose AI pause for this reason.
@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
11 months
Suppose that slowing AGI development decreased the chance that humanity goes extinct by 1 percentage point, but also decreased the chance of you living for at least 1,000 years by 2 percentage points. Would you support slowing AGI development?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
Is it just me or is the 80k podcast getting better? Went back to it and there are quite a few fun episodes. To some degree it's at the cost of the EA focus but it's at least interesting.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
Am now at 50k downloads of AXRP! πŸŽ‰
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
is there a way for me to watch the anthropic super bowl ad online?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
@adrusi "it's not normal to post about what topics are and aren't normal to post about. if you do you're either a high decoupler or an anti-intellectual. sorry but those are the only options"
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
Me, a raisin brain: "man, why am I enjoying these book reviews by random authors so much less than the blog running the book review contest, written by one of my favourite authors on the internet?"
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
5 months
pope francis ate the planet earth for his birthday. not assuaging my concerns about the jesuits...
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Also what the fuck is even happening
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
when it's been nearly 3 weeks since the last axrp release
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
@norvid_studies I do think he's sort of overly swayed by things that bother him.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
This is kind of unfair, and I guess I'm largely preaching to the choir, but I would simply not have cheated on my wife.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
Twitter thread of me watching the @Rootclaim vs @tgof137 covid origins debate
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
TIL the word "Heroin" as in the drug is actually cognate to "heroine" the female hero.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
EA/LW terminology on the verge of acceptance that I really dislike: saying "X is counterfactual" to mean "X is factual and not present in counterfactual worlds". I get why people want a word for this but please pick another one!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
5 months
Hot take: a good sunset is objectively about half as cool as a total solar eclipse.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Wikipedia has a different view of what's in the news currently
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Are you a liberal? || Are you disturbed by the practice of medically unnecessary male circumcision of infants?
Yes || Yes
102
Yes || No
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No || Yes
91
No || No
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
everyone in this room is looking at their screen
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
People be like "it's so crazy that you need a flowchart to explain how Mormons think the afterlife works, that's so complex" but if there were an afterlife it probably would be pretty complex.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
I'm kinda surprised there doesn't seem to have been any OpenAI news since I went to sleep. I guess the people involved need their rest?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
11 months
My guess is that a lot of the information in "Going Infinite" is just wrong, perhaps because the author took SBF and Nishad's word for things. Reasons I think this: 1. SBF has a reputation among people I know for dishonesty, but the book paints him as a truth-teller. (1/2)
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
I think Pascal's Wager is at the opposite end of the spectrum of philosophy of colour, in that it's incredibly substantive, raises a bunch of interesting philosophical questions, and doesn't have an obvious answer.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
@moultano @diviacaroline Maybe development of vectors + vector calc would have made early EM faster? But we got Maxwell's equations without them somehow...
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
Is it just me or is it kinda sus that you have to scroll a bit to report a twitter account as spam, given that that's by far the main thing I want to report accounts for?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
@RatOrthodox i'm not a fucking robot
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
@AaronBergman18 @StatisticUrban Isn't there a thing where "outdoor cats" makes you think of pet cats but most of the deaths are from feral cats?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
1 year
Hello this is @daniel_filan but unlocked
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
6 months
@mealreplacer IDK if this exactly counts but it still makes me chuckle
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
1 year
As far as I can tell, continued development of more powerful AI risks catastrophe on the order of human extinction. In that context, a laissez-faire approach of suing for damages after the fact doesn't seem viable.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
@Aella_Girl I think there are probably a few axes of "accepted" and this is just picking up one. Like, I think it would be hard to imagine someone smoking marijuana in a TV ad for cheerios or something, but it's not very taboo. Similarly for "being below median attractiveness".
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
It occurs to me that Esperanto music and contemporary Christian music both suffer from the problem that people make them because they kind of feel like they should, and people listen for reasons other than the music being good.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
@ShakeelHashim Why? Like, Beff Jezos aims to influence policy by talking and making arguments and tweets. It seems to me that that speech rises and falls on its own merits. What thing of value did you gain by learning his identity?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
7 months
GCRI did an anonymous survey of experts on the origins of COVID! Apparently most believe (as I do) that it was most likely a zoonotic spillover, but 1/5 thought an accident was more likely.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
Weird that no major religion regulates its adherents' soda consumption. Seems like low-hanging fruit as a way to induce communal sacrifice, make the adherents distinctive, and also make them healthier. Mormons could do this this year! Or Catholics could ban it Fridays!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
10 months
I guess to be concrete: - I have no idea why Sam was fired. - Without more info, I don't have a solid take on whether it was good that he was fired. - I could imagine situations where Sam was cavalier about safety and lied to the board where it would seem good to fire him.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
It's weird that Twitter has officially been called X for 5 months now but the natural thing to call it is still twitter
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
boy dinner
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
8 months
@Aella_Girl As a man the easiest thing to notice is that they are all literally leaning away from you and you are literally leaning away from them.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
2 months
@ByrneHobart I guess I should say that the broad point, that people like Jonny Anomaly, Steve Hsu etc did attend and mingle and attract audiences etc, is true.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
AI Impacts report on why environmentalism became partisan is now out!
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Well this turned out to be a bad call
@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
Given that last time we heard that Sam was in negotiations with the board to return it wasn't true, why should we believe it this time?
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
In general it's disturbing how uninformed much intellectuals are when they analogize stuff to various parts of the Judeo-Christian world. I guess they accurately perceive that their audience is largely even less informed and are just impressed that you know fancy words.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
@ctjlewis Firing a CEO doesn't make you a terrorist.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
4 months
The views on metaphysics and epistemology expounded in the LessWrong sequences are not unique but rather have precedent in academic philosophy - people like Quine or Dennett. Also, they're great and underrated. This should give pause to LWer skeptics of academic philosophy.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
9 months
New episode of The Filan Cabinet with Aaron Silverbook, where we talk about how mouth bacteria cause cavities, and a new product that might prevent them.
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@freed_dfilan
Daniel Filan πŸ”Ž
3 months
I wrote an outline of a post about why I like "AI doom liability". I don't think fleshing it out would add much value, but maybe I'm just being lazy. Anyone want to read and give feedback? Explanation of "AI doom liability" in next tweets.
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