Smith College economics professor. PhD Chicago. JD Stanford. AI safety, game theory. Stroke survivor, hoping to make it to the singularity.
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Cryonics, multiverse, Boltzmann brain, AI utopia, quantum immortality, Roko’s basilisk, gray goo, paperclip maximizer, great filter, ethics in infinite universe, acausal trade, longevity escape velocity, simulation and zoo hypothesis.
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Find a classroom of low performing high school seniors. Give each $$$ if they don't leave the room until they have become proficient at math.
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Begs the question, what's wrong with India? With such managerial talent, why does it have a per capita GDP of only $1,900.
CEO of Google
CEO of Microsoft
CEO of Adobe
CEO of Twitter
CEO of Mastercard
CEO of Pepsi
CEO of IBM
CEO of Albertsons
CEO of Micron
CEO of Netapp
CEO of Nokia
CEO of Palo Alto
CEO of Arista
CEO of Novartis
and today...
CEO of FedEx
cnbc.com/2022/03/28/fedex-na…
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A lot of education is training you to figure out what your future customers and bosses really want and what implicit assumptions they are making.
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US should create reserve army of geniuses. If IQ>160 and pass basic sanity test then get training in how government works. In crisis they take over key relevant jobs. COVID-19 threat would have given these geniuses control of CDC and FDA.
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ChatGPT knows more econ than Reich.
Moderna is planning to charge $130 for its COVID vaccine, but the vaccine only costs $2.85 to make.
Meanwhile, over the last two years, the company made over $19 billion in profits off the vaccine.
Folks, this is what corporate greed looks like.
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My ideal college reform: To graduate from any college you have to pass some objective exam. Anyone can take the exam, including people who never attended the college, and their degree would be just as valid as those of people who attended and passed the exam.
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South Koreans have mostly given up on having children. They are losing at the only game that matters.
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For most of human existence the primary social value of 17-year-old boys was to jump to the defense of the tribe when attacked by outsiders. All of us are here only because such boys successfully defended our ancestors.
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I tell my college students that if they are alive in 20 years they will probably be alive in 1,000 years.
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My game theory class uses examples from dating. If I don't include examples with lesbians, students complain in course evaluations. But students seem uncomfortable when I (middle age straight man) discuss lesbian dating with them. Almost all my students females between 18-21.
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Russia's biggest long-term problem is a low fertility rate at 1.5 births per woman. The west could devastate Russia by making it easy for young Russian women to move to rich nations.
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Quick course in game theory: The enemy's strategy takes into account your strategy. So, for example, if you have a policy of never attacking military targets near civilians, the enemy will pack all of their military targets with civilians.
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Why not make them handwrite the statement using a writing instrument that they built in a language that they invented?
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I almost died today. While at the Natick Mall food court, a vent fell from the ceiling and landed where I had been walking about a second before. On the plus side, this is probably the luckiest day of my life and I've raised my estimate of quantum immortality being true.
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When Zohran applied to Columbia, he wasn't a US citizen, yet this rich kid reasonably expected that by claiming to be African American he would get a significant admissions advantage over poor white flyover Americans.
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I trust you told him that Mars might be ready for colonization by the time he is your age.
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Should it be illegal to sell paint to artists skilled enough to draw copyrighted and violent images?
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I'm a professor of economics at Smith College. Under president Biden the DEI head and provost told me I had to limit what I said in the classroom because of how federal laws were being interpreted.
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As an experiment, please consider working with people who have IQs<80 and imagine a world in which people with IQs>120 do not end up dominating them.
But seriously folks, this a short and juicy tirade in which I say:
(0) there will be superhuman AI in the future
(1) they will be under our control
(2) they will not dominate us nor kill us
(3) they will mediate all of our interactions with the digital world
(4) hence, they will need to be open platforms so that everyone can contribute to training and tuning them.
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After synthetic meat becomes cheaper, healthier, and tastier than real meat, many will look back in horror at factory farming. Let's get a head start on the future by destroying the statues of everyone who ever ate meat and let's rename institutions named after meat eaters.
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Another problem is models are not good at saying "you are too dumb to understand this." Basically, I ask math or physics questions, don't understand the answer and keep pressing and instead of saying you are not going to get this, the AI keeps repeating itself.
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Doesn't apply here. For most of human existence starvation was a threat so something that reduced bodyfat was bad.
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I'm an academic who has published in a classics journal and I wrote this for Quillette in the hopes of saving millions of poor people in poor countries. Why should I lose credibility? quillette.com/2018/09/07/ext… @clairlemon
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The more interesting 2020 becomes, the more future historians will run simulations of 2020, and so the greater the probability that we are currently in a simulation.
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An old house had a heated driveway. A repairman accidently turned it on during summer, and we had no idea. We got a massive electric bill, and assumed it was a mistake. Fortunately, the utility company took pity and didn't charge us the full amount.
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Providing top training to the most mathematically gifted young Americans should be seen as a national security priority.
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When we get AI sexbots with authentic personalities, we'll uncover what men and women really crave in their perfect partner. Be prepared to be disappointed and disgusted.
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Luigi Mangioni and Elias Rodriguez may have committed murder to become high status males. To deter future such crimes, castration should be part of the punishment for murder.
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We've reached the "children are heroes if they turn on their parents" stage of the revolution. percolately.com/michigan-gop…
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"The best answer to the question, 'Will computers ever be as smart as humans?' is probably 'Yes, but only briefly'" --- Vernor Vinge. We are in the 'briefly'.
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I'm 51 hours into a fast. It's given me a lot more empathy towards obese people as food now dominates my thoughts. If I had to choose between obesity and such constant intrusive thoughts I would probably pick the former.
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Donald Trump tweeted about the NYT hiring Sarah Jeong. If the paper keeps her, Trump can remind voters of her awful Tweets whenever the NYT attacks Trump. Trump will use the Tweets to paint elite liberals as police-haters. Might Sarah Jeong cost Dems control of House or Senate?
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"loathing of and contempt for “white people” is now background noise on the left." White leftists without children might find this acceptable, those with kids will #WalkAway @sullydish nymag.com/daily/intelligence…
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Your periodic reminder that one of humanity's biggest mistakes is not making thousands of clones of John von Neumann. Dolly (sheep) was cloned in 2003. So say in 2005 we made von Neumann clones so they would now be 16, on verge of making massive contributions to science.
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But competence for political elites means being good at winning elections, not good a governing. Competence for media elites means excelling at selling eyeballs to advertisers, not at understanding or truthfully communicating how the world works.
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Soon will be possible for AI to listen in on all phone conversations and terminate communications if you violate some sacred norm. Woke groups will complain to Apple about why the company tolerates its phones being used to spread hate when they have an easy fix.
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The biggest prediction failure was of the financial markets. A market crash in early Feb would have been a wake up call to the world. We pay $$$ to our best and brightest to work in finance, and prediction is a huge part of their job. They let us down.
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Worse, veterinary schools in the US are generally more selective than medical schools are.
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When students ask me a question for which a truthful answer could get me in trouble with the DEI police, my response is something like, "that is not an issue we can honestly talk about here." AIs should respond similarly if the truth is beyond the pale.
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It was not accurate. cnn.com/2019/01/31/politics/…
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"Being smart is a double-edged sword. Intelligent people appear to live longer, but many of the genes behind brilliance can also lead to autism, anxiety, and depression, according to two new massive genetic studies." sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/…
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How much trust should we have in the press understanding the exponential growth math needed to understand the coronavirus's likely spread?
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If you want to decimate the cultural power of elite colleges, you should enthusiastically support UofCal suspending SAT/ACT requirements and demand that all US elite schools drop admissions criteria strongly correlated with IQ.
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Fellow Aztecs, behold! A high-tech ship is approaching our shores. Fear not, for their advanced knowledge surely means they're morally evolved enough to respect our culture and only aim to enrich us!
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Key great power threat to US is if China uses gene editing to mass produce super-geniuses. If China produces babies that will develop into super-geniuses will take 15+ years before threat is obvious and will be too late for US to respond with own program. gatestoneinstitute.org/17048…
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I take anxiety meds since my stroke. During video chat with prescriber was asked if I had persistent worries. I said yes I think that AI is probably going to kill everyone, then realized provider might think I'm insane so I said I'm a college professor and this is what I study.
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The higher your school district's crime rate the better chance your kid gets into Harvard. Expect parents to put pressure on their local police to increase arrests and severity of criminal charges.
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That's because the SATs have a low ceiling. Could redesign SATs so you can distinguish 1 in 1,000 from 1 in 100 academic ability.
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Imagine the rationalist community wanted to have a high birth rate. How could we confer high status/benefits on women in community who have lots of children?
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No one should be forced to pay dues to any of these unions as a condition of their job.
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In 1978 a structural flaw in a Manhattan skyscraper found. Strong winds could have collapsed building and killed 200,000. Flaw fixed, but crisis kept secret until 1995. How many such secrets are being kept from us now? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citico…
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I've talked about the topic to many scientists (mostly at parties) and they say it's feasible and there would almost certainly be no ecological downside. An article in Quillette is vastly more likely to influence the world than one in an academic journal would.
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Do you have any examples of bad things Trump has actually done? "denier of scientific facts" is an anti-science term since, unlike with religion, we should continually question scientific "facts"?
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Ten people are each given a separate button. If you press the button you get $1 million. If anyone presses a button, there is a 50% chance the world ends one year from now, so same risk if 1 or 10 press. What happens, and how does this game relate to AGI risk?
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It would not be bad for the economy if airline companies go bankrupt. This would just mean that airline creditors and stock holders lose a lot of money. It wouldn't cause the planes to be destroyed, they would just go to another owner who would operate them again.
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We should be sympathetic when the media reports "we don't yet know" not when they reflexively take terrorists at their word.
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Andrew Sullivan probably save my job. I was denied tenure for what I think was political bias. Sullivan linked to student paper article favorable to me. I got massive national publicity. Eventually tenure decision overturned as bias found by 5 person college committee.
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Imaging building a nuclear power plant near a big city and saying 25% chance it melts down killing everyone in the city.
.@JimVandeHei asks @Anthropic CEO @DarioAmodei what probability he would give that AI ends in disaster: "I think there's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly." #AxiosAISummit
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A sane CIA would get this TEEN amnesty in return for a decade or so of service.
BREAKING: A Florida teen was charged with hacking the Twitter accounts of prominent politicians, celebrities and technology moguls to scam people out of more than $100,000 in Bitcoin. apne.ws/dTglhCC
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My family had an unsafe dog. We hired a dog trainer and after several sessions she told us we had to have the dog killed because it would otherwise eventually seriously hurt someone.
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I'm autistic and have a wife, kid, job and pay taxes. But the word "autistic" is too broad if it includes both me and the people RFK Jr. is referring to.
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I thought "all lives matter" was bad for the same reason you don't bring up the deaths of unrelated people when you are at a particular person's funeral.
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Keep in mind that the candidates and messages would be very different if just high IQ people could vote.
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Nvidia predicts one million fold increase in AI computing power in ten years. So either scaling fails to continue to bring big ML improvements, this prediction is wrong, or a singularity within ten years. pcgamer.com/nvidia-predicts-…
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Wild Conjecture: As AGI could result in a paperclip maximizer that eats galaxies, high tech life always sends out probes to prevent life on other planets from creating paperclip maximizers, and so as we get closer to AGI on earth, UFO activity will increase.
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An employee at my college was placed on administrative leave and is getting a massive amount of hate directed at him because he liked some Tweets that probably at least 40% of Americans would agree with. gazettenet.com/Smith-College…
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The Japanese and German armies relying on horses, while the US has long-range bombers.
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GPT-4 is like a fire alarm that not only blares a siren but also sprays fuel onto the flames, igniting an unprecedented surge of funding and enthusiasm for AGI capacity research.
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A key reason the US is rich compared to the rest of the world is that we have much better run companies. If elite human capital is to mean anything, it should include managerial talent as a key element, and I'm guessing Brian Thompson had a lot of that.
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As a male social scientist in his 50s, how am I supposed to compete with this strategy?
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AI is being built by humans working in markets. Markets excel at many tasks and are why we are so wealthy. However, they perform poorly in managing global externalities, such as those associated with greenhouse gases and AI existential risks.
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The real free loaders are those with equal IQs and drive to Elon who instead of becoming monster wealth-creators spend their mostly gene-given gifts on pursuits that don't result in them paying billions in taxes. String Theorists: I'm looking at you!
Elon Musk made $36 BILLION in one day, but wants to brag about paying an $11 billion tax bill.
Oh yeah, he also added more than $270 BILLION in wealth just since the pandemic started.
Time for the rich to pay their fair share.
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Why don't these stolen goods themselves get stolen? Let me guess: because if you get caught trying to steal these goods you suffer significant consequences.
How can we hope for a functioning and viable @Walgreens on 23rd & Mission, if we allow this?
24th BART has turned into a magnet of illegal dealing&stealing, under the watch of Sup. Ronen, @Calle24SF, @sfpublicworks, @SFBART, @SFPD, BART Police, @LondonBreed. All complicit.
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In @StephenKing's spine-tingling new story, his hidden shadow self falls for Elon Musk while conspiring to take total control of King's brain—until a single clue unravels it all.
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In the near future we figure out consciousness and determine that AIs have it but humans don't.
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Prediction for 2024: Most well-educated people will think that within 10 years AI is going to be better at intellectual work than 99% of humans, and this expectation will have profound effects including reducing the importance parents put on their kids doing well in school.
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AGI doomsters mostly high IQ nerds with well-developed, consistent models. Before you have right to mock them, you should understand their reasons. At minimum know how instrumental convergence, uncontrollability, orthogonality thesis, and Mesa-optimization relates to AGI risk.
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A selfish reason Elon has for supporting Trump is that a President Trump would punish any European country that arrested Elon, whereas a President Harris would probably cheer his arrest.
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