Fan of: #TTRPG #Pragmaticism Meta-ethical realism
Oklahoma City
Joined August 2009
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"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg."
-- Abraham Lincoln
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
Not once, in any way, as the Republicans have gotten worse, have the Democrats responded by getting any better.
Who's the greatest living American?
0%Warren Buffett
0%George Lucas
0%Thomas Sowell
100%Clarence Thomas
1 votes • Final results
Michael McGranaghan 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
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
So I'm pretty obsessed with hexcrawls now and I can't believe I didn't really know or understood them for so many years.
Every single thing about it is how I've wanted to play for as long as I've played but never realized that's how it was. It's the true epitome of open world exploration the same way it is in video games like Fallout or Skyrim
I can't understand why everyone doesn't want to play like this. It's infinitely better than hand waving travel or just rolling actual random encounters.
It lets you play in a living breathing world were the stuff that gets seeded there is truly part of it, not just "bandits come"
Anyway, hexcrawls!
(not my image)
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
The split in these very public homicide cases is that the left doesn't see self defence as legitimate and the right doesn't see insanity defence as legitimate.
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
Tuesday the Justice Department filed what it called a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools for facilitating secret gender transitions without parents. FERPA and PPRA. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said parental rights are paramount and that district does not know children better than their own parents.
justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-d…
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
The reason you can't let Trans Women compete in women's sport is that they are men.
The reason you can't let Trans Women into women's bathrooms, changing rooms, spas, shelters, or prisons is that they are men.
The reason you can't force people to use gender-based pronouns is that compulsory lying violates a right that everyone holds not to be coerced into saying things they don't believe.
The reason you can't chemically castrate and dismember confused children is that children can't consent to medicalized harm.
The reason gender medicine isn't medicine is that it's never been evidence-based and it's inherently self-harming.
The reason you can't teach children that any of them can change sex is that the claim is a lie.
The reason you can't build a civil rights movement out of people pretending to be something they are not is that "people pretending to be something they are not" is not an actual group, the group has never been oppressed (except by the binary and immutable nature of sex which is beyond the reach of any act of human self-determination), and there is no such thing as a duty to see someone as they see themselves or treat them as something other than what they are.
The whole thing has to be refused in its entirety.
You know what *really* amplifies the power of liars? State authority.
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
George Washington: “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure” (Letter to William Moultrie, August 28, 1793)
Thomas Jefferson: “We have already given in example one effectual check to the Dog of war, by transferring the power of letting him loose from the Executive to the Legislative body, from those who are to spend to those who are to pay” (Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789)
James Madison: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex[ecutive] is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legisl[ature]” (Letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798)
Abraham Lincoln: “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much… The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us” (Letter to William Herndon, February 15, 1848)
"Windfall." As if the Korean semiconductor industry didn't require mountains of effort and sacrifice.
South Korea plans chip windfall fund to back youth, AI investment reut.rs/4zBB5YL reut.rs/4zBB5YL
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
Essential piece by @EliLake. Most accurate take I’ve seen yet on the progressive socialist shift within Metro-Detroit’s (Dearborn) scene.
Nobody in the Dem party has the spine or capital to punch left, and a Sista Souljah is laughable.
thefp.com/p/abdul-el-sayed-a…
J.K. Rowling used the power of the state to silence critics.
Your apology for labelling women-only rape support centre Beira's Place 'anti-rights' is a nice birthday present, @AmnestyUK. Cheers.
And congratulations to all the other women's and LGB organisations Amnesty acknowledges having wrongly smeared as 'anti-rights'.
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
The precise reason the US never joined the International Criminal Court was to make sure that Mamdani-type anti-American, anti-Western ideologues didn't have to power to lock up Americans and others they don't like.
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
Mollie Hemingway breaks down the "disparity" in treatment between the liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices.
"Certain" types of justices can "literally go perform on Broadway," while those seeking to uphold the Constitution "can't go out to dinner" with their families, because they "might get shot."
Michael McGranaghan retweeted
A former Kansas Supreme Court research attorney offers a peek behind the curtain on how the supposed “merit based” system currently works and why she's voting YES on the August 4 constitutional amendment. #ksleg
In her experience, Kansas' current judicial selection system isn't free from politics at all. Instead, a small group of attorneys and well-connected law firms wield outsized influence over and campaign for who advances to our state's highest court, while everyday Kansans are left on the sidelines.
It’s time to put the control back in the hands of the people and stop the whisper campaigns and insider deals to elevate favored candidates behind closed doors. Kansans deserve transparency in choosing who will serve on our Supreme Court. On August 4, we have the opportunity to restore our voice. Join me in voting YES!
kansascity.com/opinion/artic…
