Holly ⏸️ Elmore
@ilex_ulmus
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Dedicated to the protection and thriving of sentient beings. PhD in evo bio.🔸 Executive Director of @PauseAIUS. Opinions not necessarily those of the org.
Joined November 2021
I make no promises ever about being reachable on Twitter. If you don’t know my email, try me though the PauseAI US Discord:
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Guys. Plastic is the perfect material for straws. Paper disintegrates. Metal doesn’t bend in to assist with the suck. American trash is basically not what ends up in the Ocean (mostly from 3rd world rivers). And straws are not a large percentage of single-use plastic trash.
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@Duderichy These are some of the most miserable people in the world, no lie— they feel like they *have* to keep doing stuff they hate bc of money they aren’t enjoying. They are in prison.
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@danwaterfield If the objection was the scope of her research was not PhD-worthy, that really should have been noticed earlier. I didn’t read that she failed at her research— the scope is something that should have been clear at the time the proposal was approved.
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A ridiculously oversimplified model that works well ime 🧵. Men are excited children. They thrive when they feel safe to be rambunctious and carefree. They feel unsafe being themselves when women scold them and get sullen and withdrawn, but are unlikely to say or know that’s why.
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The success of DALLE 2 and Stable Diffusion has freed me up to enjoy art again in a simple way that is centered around viewer experience instead of narcissistic expression of the artist or a focus on the technical or conceptual difficulty of making the piece.
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Update: ghosting is often the kindest way to reject someone and saves you a lot of time and energy that you don’t owe matches on a dating app.
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Stop banning plastic straws. It’s performative and dumb.
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All my anger at the “post-rationalists” of Twitter is explained by my lifelong hatred of people and cultures that treat truth as an aesthetic and not the brute reality we can either be in touch with or blind to.
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It makes me extremely angry when people think they should have the right to be insulated from children in public spaces. Like the world is for powerful adults only and developing kids with all their nEeDs should be hidden away. I never forgot what it was like to be a child.
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Western Buddhism tends to be more of a bag of wellness tricks than a religion, but it’s worth sharing that Nietzsche was right-- Buddhism proper is anti-life. It came out of a Hindu obsession with ending the cycle of reincarnation. Nirvana means “cessation.”.
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I'm very saddened to have watched my friends of, in some cases, 10+ years, go from ambitiously trying to protect and improve the world to becoming toadies for supervillains, grasping for the crumbs they drop as they imperil the world.
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I am so, so sad today. Some days the weight of it all just hits me. I want to live my life with my boyfriend. I want us to have kids. I want love and a full life for everyone. Some days the possibility that that will all be taken away is so palpable, and grief is heavy.
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@PikesPeak777 @0xSynsitive I like how the normal guy also has a full head of hair and the barrel chested guy is bald.
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The willingness to be poor and the willingness to be alone are so OP. Add the willingness to look dumb and to be ugly and you’re unstoppable.
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A lot of conservative-bashing is just shaming people with anxiety who want social predictability and stability. Low trait openness is a severely underappreciated and even maligned kind of neurodiversity.
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I’m grateful for:. GOOGLE DOCS. Seriously what a miracle. I remember in the 90s my mom was getting an English PhD and she would read (literal) papers about these theoretical hypertexts that could maybe one day be. Now they just casually EXIST and I can control the permissions.
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When I'm stressed, most often what I'm actually afraid of is getting in trouble. And I don't acknowledge that to myself bc it seems so childish (and nonsenscial if there's no particular entity in authority over me).
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When I was a kid, I used to think that I would just accept getting old or sick or ugly and I couldn’t understand adults being so angsty about it. Now I see that what I really meant by “I would accept it” was “that will never happen to me”.
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What is apparently my spiciest take ever: I don’t give beggars money, I don’t feel bad about it, and the only thing that upsets me is how my friends judge me for it.
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I'm curious now how everyone would have reacted if someone had been able to remove SBF from power at FTX *before it was too late to stop the fraud*, w/o being able to share why, only able to vaguely say they were concerned about his integrity. Might have looked a lot like this.
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@thechosenberg Are you joking? Obviously this man is head over heels. This is way more important than staying in that job.
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If procrastination is not laziness, and ADHD is not laziness, and depression is not laziness, what IS laziness? Is there any plain laziness that isn't preempted by a sympathetic explanation? . Why can't laziness just mean "tending toward low activity" minus the neg connotation?.
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Peak TPOT cope. "*I* need to have nice times with my friends, but me and my friends enjoying them is not enough. I have to insist that making them happen is actually more moral than helping strangers not suffer from diseases that could kill them.".
Throwing a dinner party for your friends will do more to abolish suffering than tithing 10% of your dubloons to eliminate malaria.
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@gran1te_mtn People who feel really irritated by other people’s anxiety: your irritation is not making things any better and is making the anxious person nervous about your disapproval on top of the original thing.
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I have negative feelings about polyamory. I feel that relationship style (poly/mono/whatever) is truly morally neutral and totally a matter of preference, and I gladly defend the rights and reputations of ppl who do poly. But I found it be a harmful emotional environment for me.
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Really bugs me how I see people worried that being nice will compromise their judgment (no “sugarcoating”) but never worried that the pleasure of being brutal motivates or warps their judgment. I’m just supposed to assume it’s a disincentive to be mean when they seem to love it.
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I’m increasingly learning that a lot of what comes off as PR-speak is actually necessary the larger your audience is. The more people read what you say, the more likely wildly off base interpretations are, and the more you have avoid, e.g. loaded words and assumed knowledge.
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Is it me, or are 95% of so-called “communities” completely fake and just sets of people with one thing in common?.
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Why do so many smart, privileged, healthy people hate our world so much? Why are they so eager to gamble it or surrender it to ASI? Even my allies constantly talk about how “inadequate” and “insane” it is. I’ve suffered plenty in it, but I love the world and I want to protect it.
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Agreed, I find prison rape jokes intolerable. How can we find it funny to lord over people that they are going to receive cruel and unusual extrajudicial punishment while they are under the care of our state? It’s a disgrace.
Prison rape is actually bad, and we should be ashamed it happens in our country.
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I’m just gonna say it. A lot of ppl have hated EA from the first bc they don’t like feeling even implicit pressure to give away their money. EAs think they take the high road by not considering this motivation and dealing instead w the confabulations, but that’s just being blind.
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I would love for ASI development to go well and be remembered as a dumb Luddite. I would *love* that. That’s basically the best case scenario. I hope I’m wrong about AI danger or we get lucky. But I just can’t leave it to chance.
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Imo men are looking for emotional safety in a partner just like anyone else but that means something different to them than to most women. For them it often means safety from emotional intensity, which is something I used to wield like it was nothing (and I’m not the only one).
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@nosilverv The funny thing is I think you are the one missing levels of what is going on, but you feel superior for it. It’s fine to complain about this thing but not to attribute it to being “normies”.
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I know a lot of people are really invested in using "Moloch" to describe a cluster of concepts. But, I'm sorry, it's terrible. "Moloch" is the opposite of clarifying and insightful. You don't even know what each other are talking about--your audience def does not understand you.
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I'm annoyed by how much all this advocacy of deontology in EA all of sudden overlaps with covering our own asses. I don't buy this as a massive update about the dangers of utilitarianism. imo it's a massive update about the optics of utilitarianism. 🧵.
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The PauseAI SF protest was a great success. This was the largest AI Safety protest ever in the United States, and it was part of the first and largest global AI Safety protest in history! . Thank you so much to everyone who made it possible 🩷
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@CartoonsHateHer I noticed that Zendaya and Timothee Chalamet wore prosthetics in Dune so that their teeth were a little crooked— really nice touch.
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EA social media’s response to the FTX scandal is revealing a god complex. By all means, let’s learn what can from this, but we don’t control everything, guys. If you’re agonizing about how you didn’t write a critical blog post on naive utilitarianism earlier, u’re kidding urself.
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Being around kids reminds me of how terrifying an angry woman can be in a way I don’t immediately dismiss as sexist. In fact, on reflection, I think it’s sexist to trivialize the power of women’s emotions.
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We desperately want AI Safety to be a technical problem with a technical solution, but it’s inescapably a coordination problem as well. Even if we develop the tech for safe AGI, we need others not to develop unsafe AGI. There’s no getting around politics here.
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Women are entitled to be their full emotional selves, but I suddenly feel a lot less intense when I realize that *he hears you*. So much of my rage comes from a feeling of helplessness, and recognizing the harm of my behavior is also a demonstration that *I am not helpless*.
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I really appreciated @repligate laying out their process and why it is difficult to summarize their work or explain on demand. I have really come to like Janus a lot from our conversations.
a long thread i just wrote to @ilex_ulmus (who is cool btw even if i disagree with some of her actions & i do not condone anyone being nasty to her) about why it's difficult to explain my work. Final message in screenshot is cut off but linked in QT.
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That’s the whole post-rat thing, “vibes”. Rationality is not a vibe, it’s a system. You’re not rational bc rationality appeals to you aesthetically— you’re rational if you understand why those techniques lead to more true beliefs and you want the most true beliefs possible.
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Guys, I’m sorry someone told you different, but conflict is real. Sometimes it’s not a mistake and you are actually in conflict for something you can’t both have. And that’s okay.
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I’m getting to be a stickler on dehumanizing language, even in jest. Turns out using it is a really good indication of not viewing every person as a full moral entity. “Normie” is a slur, and if you feel like you need it to express your thoughts, question your thoughts.
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Many EA institutions won’t fund advocacy to the public to pause AI, often bc they work w AI companies in some way, and they don’t want to jeopardize that influence. How did we get here? How can AI companies expect only nice relationships from what should be watchdog orgs?.
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What's the eval theory of change at this point? . 1. measure how awesome the models are, with no regulatory consequences attached .2. tell everyone .3. if people are worried by the results, call them alarmists and say they don't get the nuances .4. ??? .5. safety?.
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Pet peeve: when ppl name the math model that describes something as if it is an explanation. Ex: “Why can’t an animal have lots of kids and a long lifespan?”.“Bc there are two attractors in life history space, r- and K-selected”. ^Useful terms, but basically just restates the Q.
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Anthropic is bad. They are the enemy bc they are making superintelligence, by definition unsafe atm and undemocratic, and they need to be stopped. If you work for them, you personally are bad and should quit. 2/28/25 PauseAI US Protest at Anthropic offices. More info to come.
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Big recent update: doing something resentfully is often worse than refusing to do it at all. I thought I had a handle on what I could endure, but I didn’t appreciate immense cost of my resentment to other people. If it sucks, just don’t do it! Often everyone’s better off.
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The treatment of @AISafetyMemes by the so-called “AI Safety Community” is one of the wildest examples of people letting snobbery and tribalism directly contradict their stated aims (preventing AI danger) I’ve ever seen in real life.
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Can everyone who supported Sam Altman when the board removed him admit they were wrong now?. I’d particularly like an apology from Emmett Shear. (Someone else will have to convey that to him as he has blocked me.).
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I commend Richard quitting OpenAI. I publicly criticized him for staying in the job and I want to give loud public acknowledgment and praise of his decision to leave. Go, Richard! 🎉.
After three years working on AI forecasting and governance at OpenAI, I just posted this resignation message to the slack. Nothing that surprising in it, but you should read it more literally than most such messages - I’ve tried to say only things I straightforwardly believe.
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I feel so empowered saying “no” to invitations to do circling. I don’t like it. I share a lot about myself but that’s on my terms. Circling feels contrived to me and has a sort of polycule energy I don’t like. I am proud of myself for not feeling like I have to be part of it.
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“But AI will spare us if it finds us interesting.”. Look what we do to species whose works we find interesting.
Them: "Super-intelligent AI would never do such a stupid thing as paperclips!". Meanwhile other super-intelligent species:. (humans casting a “sculpture” of ant nest with 125kg molten aluminum)
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You guys realize that being on the “right side of history” is just another form of going with the crowd, right? Thinking about likely future morality can be a good way to explore what *you* think is right, but it’s cowardly to defer your judgment to the future mob. 🧵.
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I’m getting divorced (amicable, will always love each other) and this is serving me well. I feel happy that love is felt, that other people are still in the thick of it, that I was ever in the thick of it (even tho the relationships ended).
When I was profoundly depressed in my early 20s, I couldn’t feel my own happiness. That was when I broke through and started to value *that happiness was felt* whether by me or not. I was already an intellectual utilitarian but that’s when I became an emotional utilitarian.
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I’m not putting men down by comparing them to children. Children are great. I’m reminding myself that not all people react to hurt the same way, and they don’t always tell you or know to tell you they are hurt, but there is still a tender heart inside.
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It really saddens me to see younger generations not seem to think love is worth taking chances or making sacrifices for. And it’s sad the extent to which they correctly guess that overtures will be rejected with disgust or offense. Love and attraction are good, actually.
@thechosenberg Are you joking? Obviously this man is head over heels. This is way more important than staying in that job.
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I tell ppl I don’t want to hear them be blunt or receive their feedback sometimes when they ask this and you would think I just slapped them in the face.
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I’ve known several people who had had both a serious (chronic, managed) mental health problem and cancer. They all said they preferred the cancer bc, as one woman said, “bipolar is not a casserole illness”. Don’t underestimate the importance of nonjudgmental social support!.
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Thank you, Burger King, for offering this Impossible Whopper at the airport. It just keeps getting easier not to eat animals! And I love how normalized it is on their menu. Such a triumph 🙌
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I am extremely concerned about AI risk, enough to found @pauseaius, but I think it’s a misguided act of surrender to behave as if the end is nigh. I’m going to have kids. I save for retirement. I fight because I intend to keep living.
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You’re not “post-rational” if you wear a lesswrong hat one day and a spiritual woo hat the next. You’re just not being particularly rational, and you should find another name that doesn’t misleadingly imply you have something to do with rationality.
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A lot of you aren’t old enough to remember how, during the Bush Jr administration, people had to go on at length about how much they “supported the troops” before they could say anything negative about the Iraq War. This is how I sometimes feel now about “progress” now.
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Recently someone asked whether I was the kind of girl who liked alphas. For the first time in my life, I thought, instantly, “I am the alpha.”.
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The elephant in the room: many AI capabilities and AI Safety people desperately want to see ASI built. It's part of their identity, their tribe, and their spirituality. They are not coolly evaluating costs and benefits-- they have a strong emotional preference for charging ahead.
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Is the true point of Twitter to teach us how to communicate in short bursts over long physical, temporal, and social distances? To prepare us for the ambiguities that arise and the effects on our thinking?. My headcanon is now that I’m training for interstellar communication.
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I think “parts” talk is most useful for getting around ego sensitivity. I just remembered the trick (that I discovered basically thru dissociation) of checking my email as if I were my secretary rather than myself, so I get the info w/o being overwhelmed by the implications.
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To everyone who hassled me about blocking deepfates’s previous account— this is why I’m blocking them again
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I particularly resent the common poly mythology that by challenging jealousy, they are ascending to greater beings. Ppl tell me, "maybe we can't handle it, but better/higher humans would be poly". I think "why wouldn't higher humans just not want other partners?".
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A lot of people on the AI capabilities side AND the AI Safety side want to live forever, and they see AGI as their ticket to immortality. Importantly, this biases them to want AGI to be built ASAP, during their lifetimes, rather than built safely over decades or centuries.
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Consider this: What if AI alignment just doesn't happen?.
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Gonna just periodically keep saying this until it seems to penetrate, but nerds can be very bad people. They can be evil, and more often they can be weak toadies and pawns for evil people. They think ever having been low status protects them, but if anything it makes them worse.
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I want to express love and gratitude for my partner but I don’t want to gloat at what a marvelous fit we are and how happy he makes me bc I care too much about y’all’s feelings. Stop stifling my professions of love!
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I don't know anything that isn't public, but I have a strong feeling that this story about the board wanting Sam Altman back is fake. It's all anon sources, and it just seems like it's good for Sam's image while making no sense on the board's part.
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Caring whether your opponents think you are cool is like wearing a leash around your neck that anyone can grab.
@Maxeonyx @crash23001 And the interactions I see between “my side” and e/acc are often my friend trying to convince the e/acc that they aren’t some fuddy-duddy Luddite in a way that gives e/acc the moral upper hand. Don’t interact with the other side just to justify yourself or get their approval!.
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What should we call it when someone elaborates one part of the argument in highly accurate detail and then slips in their actual conclusions without evidence?. Pulling a "Situational Awareness".
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I think we should be confronting people for being cowards more. We shouldn’t be like “oh, I get it, they make a lot of money in their risky job”. It’s not okay to have a job you think could end the world because it pays well. If you do this, you suck. You are bad.
Me: Hey what do you do. Them: I'm an AI engineer. Me: p(doom)?. Them: 40%. My brain:.Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. .
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I am heartbroken. I feel like a kid who doesn't understand why her parents can't just get along. I can't help but see throwing EA under the bus as not just cowardly, but dodging accountability and abandoning the principles.
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Ime the most generous EA givers are also the most generous relatives, friends, and neighbors. Not surprising at all that compassion and helpfulness at different scales would be correlated.
People on twitter will really be like "you believe in highly effective charities to help the global poor, that pales in comparison to my strategy, being highly involved in my local community institutions" and then not be involved in their local communities.
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Straight up, I am furious that early people who identified AGI as a threat were still fixated on making it, but just doing this hypothetical “alignment” thing to make it great. Had they been less arrogant and greedy they would have pursued preventing AGI from ever being made.
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Had a high context thread about personal stuff get too big so I just deleted it.
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I don't see why wanting more partners is good but desiring exclusivity is bad and reflects character weakness. Obvs plenty of conservative ppl see it the other way around, but I expect poly ppl to be less judgmental than that. Just say that's what you want w/o impugning my style.
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You know the bad names for “vibes”? Unconscious bias. Prejudice. The sense that one understands without understanding. People are always looking for new places to hide them.
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EA is an atheist Protestant movement, and I really feel that the most when there's recrimination and schism talk in the air. I know this is the nature of the beast, but it still makes me so sad. I feel so much panic and catastrophizing around me.
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LessWrong has such a great interface that I love and yet tragically is also one of the most miserable places to spend any time.
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For whoever needs to hear this: it’s okay to anglicize words when you’re speaking English or that’s how you’re able to pronounce them. It’s not chauvinism. I promise you people do the same thing in other languages.
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Well, @GavinNewsom had lost me forever. What an act of cowardice. All our insiders told us that we needed to fluff up his ego and present SB-1047 as a “hero moment”. Instead it was a coward, sell-out moment that I will never forget.
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I'm not one of these people whose like "Yay! Criticism! A chance to improve!" 🧵. I'm still finding it hard to tweet after my whole twitter was harshly criticized by someone I respected even though I didn't agree with them. I still feel tainted with shame.
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@robbensinger @ylecun There's a lot of stealth assumptions in the word "dominate". We don't call it "domination" when we step on bugs we don't see in the grass, even tho we may intellectually know they are there. Don't need a drive to dominate to cause collateral damage w your movements thru the world.
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I appreciate how aware rationalists are of typical mind fallacy in theory, but, man, they are exceptionally bad typical-minders in a lot of ways. They often refuse to believe me that others don’t want, if only they knew better, in their heart of hearts, to colonize the lightcone.
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