• 5 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • She seems to do this kind of thing a lot.

    According to a comment, she apparently claimed on Facebook that, due to her post, “around 75% of people changed their minds based on the evidence!”

    After someone questioned how she knew it was 75%:

    Update: I changed the wording of the post to now state: 𝗔𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟳𝟓% 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘂𝗽𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻*

    And the * at the bottom says: Did some napkin math guesstimates based on the vote count and karma. Wide error bars on the actual ratio. And of course this is not proof that everybody changed their mind. There’s a lot of reasons to upvote the post or down vote it. However, I do think it’s a good indicator.

    She then goes on to talk about how she made the Facebook post private because she didn’t think it should be reposted in places where it’s not appropriate to lie and make things up.

    Clown. Car.


  • What a bunch of monochromatic, hyper-privileged, rich-kid grifters. It’s like a nonstop frat party for rich nerds. The photographs and captions make it obvious:

    The gang going for a hiking adventure with AI safety leaders. Alice/Chloe were surrounded by a mix of uplifting, ambitious entrepreneurs and a steady influx of top people in the AI safety space.

    The gang doing pool yoga. Later, we did pool karaoke. Iguanas everywhere.

    Alice and Kat meeting in “The Nest” in our jungle Airbnb.

    Alice using her surfboard as a desk, co-working with Chloe’s boyfriend.

    The gang celebrating… something. I don’t know what. We celebrated everything.

    Alice and Chloe working in a hot tub. Hot tub meetings are a thing at Nonlinear. We try to have meetings in the most exciting places. Kat’s favorite: a cave waterfall.

    Alice’s “desk” even comes with a beach doggo friend!

    Working by the villa pool. Watch for monkeys!

    Sunset dinner with friends… every day!

    These are not serious people. Effective altruism in a nutshell.






  • This is good:

    Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

    Also this:

    If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

    And:

    If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.