@MaleManlpulator
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shadow work alt | alert: turn off retweets, sporadically high volume
d(m)v | he/him
Joined February 2020
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The worst thing about the future is that the people I argued with on tumblr in 2016 are now influential on a national scale lol.
It was a lot funnier when it was clueless people inventing math pedagogy from first principles (“no homework” the rallying cry)
Remember Arbital?
This guy joined OpenAI like a month ago and he’s already posting swill like ‘Safety is something that is built’. Worried about lead in paint? Asbestos in houses? Fool, leave it to builders not politicians.
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
Product safety is pretty famously something that is created by laws
I feel like i never *stop* hearing about what makes women sexy
“Most women have never heard a frank discussion of what makes a woman sexy in their whole lives. Because men won't be honest, women have been left to pass hearsay, gossip, and marketing copy to each other.”
So funny to frame this as some kind of PSA for women lol, “did u know men are attracted to blow-up dolls”
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
Bari Weiss took over CBS less than a year ago and she's already doing true crime slop to juice the ratings. It's so over.
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
This is precisely right. As a track chair at Neurips, I am seeing cases where the papers were written by LLMs, reports likewise, rebuttals too, even in some cases Area Chairs joining the flood. It becomes a potemkin village where nobody is actually accountable for anything that they are saying, and neither individual understanding nor our collective epistemic projects make *any* progress at all.
At this point, "researchers" are basically DDoSing classic academia. It's pretty sad to see. Either someone comes up with, and executes, a CloudFlare for academia, or it's toast.
And the only thing i can think of that might have a chance to scale is more automation combined with a credit/point system like we've discussed a few times here on X over the years, but it needs simultaneous buy-in and coordination from all ~10 major AI conferences and journals, so it's a heavy lift.
But if nothing big happens, i think it's game over soon.
>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
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
“Anyone who doesn’t like my sci fi wish fulfillment is actually Selfish and Bad and Unclubbable, you have to contend with all of this made up bullshit before you can even think of bed nets” narcissistic lunacy from people who do not believe in a reality outside their thoughts.
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
The big problem with effective altruism is that an objectively noble idea was taken over by sociopath-nerds who use moral blackmail to trick timid and well intentioned people into believing in their obviously insane and meaningless hypotheticals
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
This is so unbelievably bad. Two days after you had Obama and Kamala Harris promoting right wing billionaire Ron Conway, you have him writing policy for them, along with a Palantir founder and Marc Andreessen.
Democrats just want their money. They are begging to be captured.
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
A lot of the EA AI safety x risk people have avoided talking about the policies they support to address their concerns with AI, but a look at some of the laws that EA orgs do support should send a chill down your spine
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
LessWrong has no Western literary memory prior to 2009 because they believe that that was the year they invented ideas.
Idk about the QT but this is such an annoying characteristic of sonnet and opus. It will happily do things that could easily be used to do things it refuses to do.
I understand how this prevents some lazy or amateur attackers from using it but it wastes my time constantly lol
First reaction is... what??? How??? This isn't even Mythos, this is Opus 5. It's less that the models are scary and more that OAI cybersecurity just... isn't that great?
Also I'm glad they got paid, but $6500?
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
We should also take pains to avoid aligning ourselves with calls for a type of regulation that would socialize risks while keeping profits private, which in my view is what the frontier companies are calling for. 2/3
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
I respectfully disagree with my friends who signed this letter. As experts, we should avoid reinforcing the promotional narrative of an impending AGI (whatever that means), or the unfounded claims of a 10% chance of extinction. 1/3
I have signed this letter addressed to the president of Royal Society about the worrisome pace of development of AI. I urge you to do the same. docs.google.com/document/d/1…
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
everyone wants a trad man who lives in the forest and chops wood and stuff until it’s time to get Lyme disease
male manipulator (reformed) retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: AI giants warn their tech could kill us all.
Their proposed safety rules could help kill off cheaper competition.
Our @BylineTimes investigation exposes unproven runaway claims, oversight conflicts and a bill worth 10% of world GDP 1/20
bylinetimes.com/2026/09/15/b…
get a grip mate. I’ve been associating with them since 2014 (they’re the people I argue with on the internet) and what do you mean they have hypertrophied specialized brains??
Huh, I hope it’s not a load-bearing part of your ideology! (The singularity nears etc)
Yeah, this is a really important question.
I’ve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.
The way I relate to rationalists is it’s like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely able to be correct about topics removed from daily experience. These “specialized minds” also can make them off-putting to many people.
I dont know if I’d consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.