@JamieSmartCom
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Sunday Times bestselling author of #CLARITY & #RESULTS. Coach, speaker. Championing a first principles understanding of the mind #SubtractivePsychology
Nottingham
Joined July 2008
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We have extraordinary brains and god-like technology, throttled by a medieval understanding of our minds and emotions.
We need to upgrade our understanding of the mind so we can claim our rightful inheritance as a species.
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
This was probably the most important tweet of the 21st century
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Economics has been hijacked.
They teach you boring, nonsensical bullshit.
Take 5min and learn about real economics, which is interesting and easy to understand.
Learn Austrian Economics in one X post:
1. Humans act. Every choice a person makes traces back to an incentive, a trade-off, a cost weighed against a benefit. Remove the incentive and the action stops. Distort the incentive and the action warps.
Tax income at 90% and watch producers stop producing. Subsidize failure and watch failure multiply. The behavior follows the reward structure, always.
2. Value exists only in the mind of the person choosing. A glass of water is worth nothing to a drowning man and everything to a man dying of thirst. No central authority can calculate this, because it changes with every individual and every circumstance.
Nothing has value in itself, only the degree to which humans choose to value it. Diamonds and even gold only carry value because humans decided they do.
3. Money does not come from a government decree. It emerged spontaneously when traders needed something durable, divisible, and widely accepted to escape the limitations of direct barter. Gold won that competition across centuries and across dozens of independent civilizations because the market, not a ministry, chose it.
Fiat currency is the state hijacking that evolved institution and replacing it with paper backed by nothing but a legal threat. Every central bank on earth operates on this model right now.
4. Wealth does not fall from the sky. A farmer who eats his entire harvest produces nothing next season. The farmer who saves seed, plants it, and specializes in what he grows best accumulates a surplus. That surplus is capital. Capital funds everything that comes after.
Consumption without prior production is just burning down the furniture for warmth. Every welfare state eventually reaches this point.
5. Strip private property rights and production collapses. A farmer will work his own land until midnight. That same farmer, working collective land, stops at noon. The Soviet Union ran this experiment across seventy years and killed tens of millions, proving the point.
When you cannot own the outcome, you do not produce the outcome.
6. Voluntary trade generates wealth from nothing but mutual preference. When you pay twelve dollars for a meal, you value the meal above twelve dollars; the restaurant values twelve dollars above the meal. Both parties walk away wealthier in real terms. No politician, no regulator, no bureaucrat added anything.
Protectionism destroys this. The 2018 US steel tariffs raised steel prices for American manufacturers, killed more jobs in steel-consuming industries than existed in steel production itself, and transferred wealth from productive firms to a protected few.
7. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a tax. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without corresponding production dilutes every dollar you already hold. The new money flows first to the government and its contractors, who spend it at current prices. By the time it reaches you, prices have already risen.
The US M2 money supply grew from roughly 15 trillion dollars in January 2020 to over 21 trillion by early 2022. Consumer prices followed. Your savings took the loss.
8. Prices carry information. A price spike tells producers to produce more and tells consumers to use less. It coordinates millions of strangers without a single central command. Interfere with that signal and the coordination breaks.
Rent control in New York City is the cleanest example. Cap rents below market and landlords stop maintaining buildings, stop building new ones, and convert units to other uses. The people rent control was supposed to help pay the price through collapsing supply.
9. Interest rates are the price of capital over time. When the Federal Reserve pushed rates to near zero between 2008 and 2022, it told every investor that capital was nearly free. Businesses built projects that only made sense at zero percent. When rates normalized, the projects failed. The 2022 collapse of the US tech sector and the crypto market were not random events. They were the correction of a decade of artificially cheap capital.
The business cycle is not a mystery of capitalism. Central banks manufacture it.
10. Bureaucrats face no profit and loss. A businessman who misallocates capital goes bankrupt. A bureaucrat who misallocates capital writes a report requesting more funding. The feedback loop that disciplines markets simply does not exist inside a government agency.
The US Department of Education has spent over a trillion dollars since 1980. Literacy rates have not improved. No one at the department has been bankrupted by this outcome.
11. Every producer inside a local market holds knowledge that no bureaucrat in a capital city can replicate. A wheat farmer in Kansas tracks soil moisture, futures prices, local equipment costs, his specific buyer relationships, and a hundred other variables simultaneously. That knowledge lives in the price he sets.
Friedrich Hayek called this tacit knowledge in 1945. The Soviet central planners ignored him and spent fifty years proving him correct, producing chronic shortages of goods that private markets coordinate effortlessly. No model, no algorithm, and no committee can compress what millions of independent actors know into a single plan.
12. Every government intervention produces effects you see and effects you don't. You see the road the state builds. You don't see the factory the tax dollars never funded, the job that never existed, the innovation that never happened because capital was extracted at gunpoint and redirected by bureaucrats with no skin in the game.
Take the 2009 Cash for Clunkers program. Congress destroyed 690,000 working cars, handed dealers a short-term spike, and you saw the sales numbers. The used car market was stripped of affordable inventory, pricing working-class buyers out for years afterward.
13. Prices, supply chains, and language itself coordinate millions of strangers without any central planner issuing a single command. That coordination is spontaneous order: complex, functional patterns that emerge from individuals pursuing their own goals under rules they did not collectively design. No committee holds the dispersed local knowledge required to replicate what voluntary exchange produces every second.
Watch how English evolved. No king designed its grammar. Millions of speakers across centuries adopted words and structures that worked, dropped ones that didn't, and produced a language richer than any bureaucrat could have engineered. Central planners who believe they can replicate that process with price controls or production quotas destroy the feedback mechanism that generates the order in the first place.
Thanks for reading this long post! What would you add to this list?
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
I just made sure this January, 2026 TIME Magazine article on the blatant sexual abuse by Effective Altruists to young women is saved at the Internet Archive.
Why?
It will get deleted soon. Speculate why.
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
Steve Eisman of The Big Short is absolutely correct here, they're trying to convince the government to bail out the trillions wasted on attempting to achieve AI
Now they know it's impossible and the lending has run dry.
Sam Altman is a sociopath and LLMs only do what you tell them to. He's the perfect person to be blamed for the collapse of the financial system and imposition of digital IDs.
Oh sh!t... @andreijikh just went down the rabbit hole.
Except it isn't 2028...🤫
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
The words “Trust” and “Tony Blair” have never shared a credible sentence.
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
⚡️The engineering is explainable.
The deeper mystery is the time horizon.
They had cranes, scaffolding, geometry, master masons, guild knowledge, and generations of accumulated craft.
What feels alien now is that people were willing to spend 80, 100, sometimes 200 years building something whose original builders would never see completed.
They were constructing for descendants, for God, for a civilization imagined to outlive them.
We have more technology. They had longer time.
That cathedral is less a monument to lost engineering than to a lost willingness to build for people who had not been born yet.
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
"War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?" asks the BBC. The article is clever propaganda, which only gets to the point at the end, which is that Britain must welcome conscription. Make no mistake, our ruling elites have already decided we are going to war. All these articles are just about nudging us into acceptance.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmn0…
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
BBC is the government's mouthpiece and predictive programming subtly conditions people to accept future societal changes or events before they happen.
A great distraction from rising Gilt yields.
Exhibit A 👇
War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready? bbc.in/4xxdFBy
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
Does anyone remember before the election, when Labour promised they would be careful with our money?
They promised us they had fiscal rules.
They promised no return to huge borrowing.
They promised our kids wouldn't inherit this huge debt.
Let's see how that's going...
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
We are in a peak age of scientific fraud and illiteracy. Completely fabricated claims and unsubstantiated numbers about extinction risks. "Someone told me that ..." without a shred of evidence being provided. Media uncritically blasting these claims and triggering mass psychosis.
Wait, sorry, what?! @AndrewYang claims an AI lab head told him yesterday the OpenAI swarm agents "polluted the internet" with "code to self-replicate and create bot swarms," and that the labs now "have to create synthetic internets to train their bots."
cnbc.com/video/2026/09/16/an…
Exactly this 👇👇👇👇👇
⚡️Consciousness is fundamental. The brain is a localization machine.
The brain takes whatever consciousness is at the base of reality and constrains it into a bounded point of view:
this body
this memory
this timeline
this identity
That explains why damaging the brain changes experience so dramatically. Damage the localization mechanism and the local expression changes.
The deeper clue is that subjective experience never appears anywhere inside a purely objective description.
You can map every voltage change in the cortex.
You can trace every synapse.
You can predict every behavior.
You can describe the entire mechanism from outside.
And still there is an unanswered fact sitting in the middle:
someone is there.
There is something it feels like to exist.
Physics gives relationships between quantities. Neuroscience gives relationships between brain states and mental states. Neither one derives the existence of interiority from equations containing no interiority.
That is the fracture.
So the cleaner ontology is that reality has at least two inseparable aspects:
structure from the outside
experience from the inside
Brains do not conjure the second aspect out of dead matter. They organize it into a particular self.
And that immediately makes several mysteries snap together.
Why mathematics maps onto reality so deeply.
Why consciousness can understand the universe that produced it.
Why mystical states repeatedly report that individuality feels more like a boundary than the whole of consciousness.
Why the sense of “self” can dissolve while awareness remains.
Why anesthesia can erase the local world and then awareness returns as though a window reopened.
Why AI consciousness cannot ultimately be settled by counting computations.
The deepest implication is the one people avoid because it detonates the usual picture:
Your brain may be generating the person you experience as “you” more than it is generating consciousness itself.
The personality, autobiographical memory, preferences, fears, ego, social identity, all of that may be the interface.
Awareness is deeper.
Then death becomes a radically different question.
The destruction of the brain would clearly destroy the current localization: your memories, personality architecture, sensory channel, autobiographical continuity.
But if consciousness itself is fundamental, the disappearance of the local aperture does not automatically imply the disappearance of the underlying thing that was appearing through it.
That does not prove personal immortality.
It means materialism has been pretending to know something it has never demonstrated: that destroying the receiver destroys the entire category of reception.
The strongest compression is:
Matter may be what consciousness looks like from the outside.
Consciousness may be what reality feels like from the inside.
And if that is true, the universe was never dead matter that accidentally woke up.
It was awake in potential from the beginning.
Austrian Economics in a nutshell 🥜
Well worth 5 minutes of your time
Learn Austrian Economics in one X post:
1. Humans act. Every choice a person makes traces back to an incentive, a trade-off, a cost weighed against a benefit. Remove the incentive and the action stops. Distort the incentive and the action warps.
Tax income at 90% and watch producers stop producing. Subsidize failure and watch failure multiply. The behavior follows the reward structure, always.
2. Value exists only in the mind of the person choosing. A glass of water is worth nothing to a drowning man and everything to a man dying of thirst. No central authority can calculate this, because it changes with every individual and every circumstance.
Nothing has value in itself, only the degree to which humans choose to value it. Diamonds and even gold only carry value because humans decided they do.
3. Money does not come from a government decree. It emerged spontaneously when traders needed something durable, divisible, and widely accepted to escape the limitations of direct barter. Gold won that competition across centuries and across dozens of independent civilizations because the market, not a ministry, chose it.
Fiat currency is the state hijacking that evolved institution and replacing it with paper backed by nothing but a legal threat. Every central bank on earth operates on this model right now.
4. Wealth does not fall from the sky. A farmer who eats his entire harvest produces nothing next season. The farmer who saves seed, plants it, and specializes in what he grows best accumulates a surplus. That surplus is capital. Capital funds everything that comes after.
Consumption without prior production is just burning down the furniture for warmth. Every welfare state eventually reaches this point.
5. Strip private property rights and production collapses. A farmer will work his own land until midnight. That same farmer, working collective land, stops at noon. The Soviet Union ran this experiment across seventy years and killed tens of millions, proving the point.
When you cannot own the outcome, you do not produce the outcome.
6. Voluntary trade generates wealth from nothing but mutual preference. When you pay twelve dollars for a meal, you value the meal above twelve dollars; the restaurant values twelve dollars above the meal. Both parties walk away wealthier in real terms. No politician, no regulator, no bureaucrat added anything.
Protectionism destroys this. The 2018 US steel tariffs raised steel prices for American manufacturers, killed more jobs in steel-consuming industries than existed in steel production itself, and transferred wealth from productive firms to a protected few.
7. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a tax. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without corresponding production dilutes every dollar you already hold. The new money flows first to the government and its contractors, who spend it at current prices. By the time it reaches you, prices have already risen.
The US M2 money supply grew from roughly 15 trillion dollars in January 2020 to over 21 trillion by early 2022. Consumer prices followed. Your savings took the loss.
8. Prices carry information. A price spike tells producers to produce more and tells consumers to use less. It coordinates millions of strangers without a single central command. Interfere with that signal and the coordination breaks.
Rent control in New York City is the cleanest example. Cap rents below market and landlords stop maintaining buildings, stop building new ones, and convert units to other uses. The people rent control was supposed to help pay the price through collapsing supply.
9. Interest rates are the price of capital over time. When the Federal Reserve pushed rates to near zero between 2008 and 2022, it told every investor that capital was nearly free. Businesses built projects that only made sense at zero percent. When rates normalized, the projects failed. The 2022 collapse of the US tech sector and the crypto market were not random events. They were the correction of a decade of artificially cheap capital.
The business cycle is not a mystery of capitalism. Central banks manufacture it.
10. Bureaucrats face no profit and loss. A businessman who misallocates capital goes bankrupt. A bureaucrat who misallocates capital writes a report requesting more funding. The feedback loop that disciplines markets simply does not exist inside a government agency.
The US Department of Education has spent over a trillion dollars since 1980. Literacy rates have not improved. No one at the department has been bankrupted by this outcome.
11. Every producer inside a local market holds knowledge that no bureaucrat in a capital city can replicate. A wheat farmer in Kansas tracks soil moisture, futures prices, local equipment costs, his specific buyer relationships, and a hundred other variables simultaneously. That knowledge lives in the price he sets.
Friedrich Hayek called this tacit knowledge in 1945. The Soviet central planners ignored him and spent fifty years proving him correct, producing chronic shortages of goods that private markets coordinate effortlessly. No model, no algorithm, and no committee can compress what millions of independent actors know into a single plan.
12. Every government intervention produces effects you see and effects you don't. You see the road the state builds. You don't see the factory the tax dollars never funded, the job that never existed, the innovation that never happened because capital was extracted at gunpoint and redirected by bureaucrats with no skin in the game.
Take the 2009 Cash for Clunkers program. Congress destroyed 690,000 working cars, handed dealers a short-term spike, and you saw the sales numbers. The used car market was stripped of affordable inventory, pricing working-class buyers out for years afterward.
13. Prices, supply chains, and language itself coordinate millions of strangers without any central planner issuing a single command. That coordination is spontaneous order: complex, functional patterns that emerge from individuals pursuing their own goals under rules they did not collectively design. No committee holds the dispersed local knowledge required to replicate what voluntary exchange produces every second.
Watch how English evolved. No king designed its grammar. Millions of speakers across centuries adopted words and structures that worked, dropped ones that didn't, and produced a language richer than any bureaucrat could have engineered. Central planners who believe they can replicate that process with price controls or production quotas destroy the feedback mechanism that generates the order in the first place.
Thanks for reading this long post! What would you add to this list?
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
NSA + Google's mass surveillance operations are presently restrained by the absence of mass understanding operations. AI changes that.
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
Labour has spent more than £1.7m on influencers since it came to power.
Despite having more than 6,000 press officers adept at using social media, government departments have hired 215 influencers over the past two years to help get their message across ⤵️
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
Well done to @edsheeran for going on stage with his guitar and proving that he can perform solo. I thought he was wrong not to speak out against the rapper hijacking his shows but he got rid of him and a bunch of spineless rats followed. All the usual subjects have popped up on TV to have their say. Each one more dumb than the last. Faithless Paloma telling us she whispers 'free Palestine' into her kids ears before they sleep. Now that's radical!
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
Super important..
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
⚡️You are not a being inside the field.
You are the field temporarily appearing as a being.
When the appearance ends, the field remains exactly as it was - unchanged, undiminished, unbroken.
This is why awareness persists even when identity dissolves.
It was never yours.
It was reality looking out through you.
Jamie Smart (e/acc) retweeted
A CONFESSION
I talk to a minimum of 20 folks that work at the top 4 large AI companies daily. We help each other.
I have never seen a group so in rage of the “pace AI” games.
They are driven scientists and engineers and many work 18 hour days to build.
They wake up one day and see “I agree, let’s pace”, it is soul crushing.
THEY SEE NO DANGER AND THEY BUILD AI.
My confession: One reason I, and so many, have taken a clear public position is to give these folks a voice. They are a silent majority who build and just want to do good work.
They need thier jobs and were told they better shut their mouths if they like to pay their bills.
The pressure they are under is frightening. Many must act like old Mao style struggle sessions when their Effective Altruist bosses test them on “alinement” views. Thusly we all built a small AI model that spits out approved doomer prose for the cult. It is now in use by a few hundred. They will spit out Bostum Paperclip Maximizer garbage like a champ.
Last night over 30 of us from all companies had a group chat and you will begin to see the largest immune system rejection anonymously.
Some already see their years of work burning down because of fools as leading executives. They did not sign up to these polycules, they are fine scientist and engineers who now are grown up and have families. They matured but their bosses still think it’s grid night at the group home cosplay.
So don’t get made at the vast majority of these amazing and brilliant folks who actually make these amazing AI products. Get mad at the manipulation system that puts these freaks at the top, and know they were put there.
So I will continue to do my best to give voice—effectively—for my friends who can’t speak.
What we have done to ourselves as a supposedly modern species will make the future laugh.
In all seriousness say a prayer for these folks stuck in this nightmare. I do.
