Pinned Tweet
Have to pin this one
xitter.cf/xor/status/61560991549…
Pedro retweeted
>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
Pedro retweeted
Meta has stopped working with Sama, a company in Kenya that helped train its AI using videos from the Ray-Ban glasses.
After that, Sama fired about 1,100 workers. Some of the workers say they lost their jobs after speaking out about the very private videos they had to watch.
The workers saw very private videos from the smart glasses, including people using the bathroom, taking off clothes, having sex, private talks, and even bank card details.
So many users did not know that a guy in Kenya were watching their videos to train the AI so a class-action lawsuit against Meta was filed
Sama has lost the contract with Meta and fired 1,000 people
Meta has not given a detailed public statement on ending the contract or the workers’ claims
Pedro retweeted
I sent ChatGPT an audio file of a series of FART sound effects and asked what it thinks of "my music" and this is what it said
Pedro retweeted
This is wild: Citrini sent a dude with $15,000 cash, recording sunglasses, and a pack of Cuban cigars to the Strait of Hormuz. What he found flips everything Wall Street thinks about the strait on its head.
Every hedge fund, every macro desk, every retired general on CNBC is watching the same AIS shipping data to price Hormuz risk. The analyst signed a pledge at an Omani checkpoint promising not to gather information, then smuggled in a gimbal, a microphone kit, and a 150x zoom Leica camera past the border officer who inspected his bag.
What he discovered on the ground: the AIS data everyone is trading on is missing roughly half of what's actually transiting the strait on any given day. Ships are going dark, spoofing destinations, broadcasting "CHINESE CREW OWNER" through transponder fields to avoid getting hit. Iran's ghost fleet is running 29+ laden tankers inside the Gulf with transponders off, moving an estimated $3B in crude to Malaysia since the war started.
The entire market is pricing a "closed" strait off satellite imagery and transponder data that has a 50% blind spot. Every oil model, every supply forecast, every macro call built on AIS throughput numbers is working from a dataset that systematically overstates the disruption.
When the signals deliberately go dark, the people staring at dashboards are the last to know what's happening. Citrini figured that out by putting a guy on a speedboat 18 miles from the Iranian coast while Shahed drones flew overhead.
The gap between "what AIS says" and "what's actually transiting" is the most mispriced variable in energy right now.
Strait of Hormuz: A CitriniResearch Field Trip
The Field Report from Analyst #3 is live.
citriniresearch.com/p/strait…
Pedro retweeted
This is the craziest most accurate AI video I have ever seen.... xitter.cf/icantevenfilms/status/…
you'll own nothing and be happy
JUST IN: Elon Musk says Tesla $TSLA Full Self-Driving will switch to a monthly subscription & remove the one-time purchase option.
Pedro retweeted
Today's White House Press Briefing had a 98% chance of running over 65 minutes - until Karoline Leavitt abruptly ended it with seconds to spare.
Traders on the NO side made 50x in seconds.
Pedro retweeted
According to Lookonchain, hours before the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, three wallets on Polymarket placed large bets on Maduro being ousted, earning a combined $630,484. The wallets were created and pre-funded days earlier, activated only shortly before the event, and exclusively bet on Venezuela- and Maduro-related outcomes, with no other activity—behavior widely viewed as indicative of insider trading.
polymarket.com/@0x31a56e9E69…
Pedro retweeted
Hey @grok Please color the face of the pedophile black and the face of the war criminal Red.
Pedro retweeted
🚨 WARNING (AGAIN)
DPRK threat actors are still rekting way too many of you via their fake Zoom / fake Teams meets.
They're taking over your Telegrams -> using them to rekt all your friends.
They've stolen over $300m via this method already.
Read this. Stop the cycle. 🙏
