Essayists
Long-form thinking published slowly, where a post is a considered position rather than a reaction.
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- Robin Hanson Most of who is willing to debate whom is judgments of relative status. We'll debate someone much higher, but not much lower. Quoting@GaryMarcus@JeffLadish @sapinker either scott should debate someone like me or admit he can’t defend his positions.
- Robin Hanson "Want to read more books? Keep books on your nightstand. Watch less TV? Cancel a streaming subscription." newyorker.com
- Robin Hanson "Statistically, the mean … decamillionaire is a white, college-educated, sixty-two-year-old man … unusually likely to be married … They tend toward monomania. Their days are … 'full, busy, and mundane.'" newyorker.com
- Robin Hanson This really is quite good. metacritic.com
- Robin Hanson "People are often offended by beliefs, expect apologies for beliefs, and apologize for their own beliefs. … [but] beliefs [are morally] wrong only in virtue of other things (like evidence-gathering actions) wronging." onlinelibrary.wiley.com
- Paul Graham Jessica and I have been watching Professor T, and it's really good. If, like me, you wish Doyle had written more Sherlock Holmes stories, this may be as close as you're going to get.
- Paul Graham Something 14 yo told me: You have to overact when doing Shakespeare, because the language is now so hard for audiences to understand.
- Robin Hanson Hanging around many conservatives today, I notice they deeply love school. So even though the left has come to dominate schools, the right is quite reluctant to cut the status or importance of school in society.
- Robin Hanson Don’t forget to talk like a pirate today
- Paul Graham Remember how eagerly the press swallowed stories about how Twitter was going to crash after Elon bought it? How could they have believed that someone who could run rocket and car companies couldn't run a forum?
- Robin Hanson That seems quite a hard line to define. Nothing is allowed to contribute to improving itself in any way? Or just that the gains don't have increasing returns? Quoting@PolymarketJUST IN: “Godfather of AI” Yoshua Bengio declares recursive self-improvement should be illegal.
- Robin Hanson The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Prices We are now in the modern era, a brief but consequential few centuries in the history of Earth civilization, between the long ages of a pre-modern era, and an as-yet-hard-to-envision post-modern era.
- Scott Alexander Adam Kay's This Is Going To Hurt is a textbook case study of moral injury and post-traumatic stress in a competent doctor, narrated by the patient himself.
- Scott Alexander The medical system that broke Adam Kay in 2010 is still producing more similarly damaged doctors, and faster.
- Scott Alexander The original NHS bargain with doctors is moribund: the state kept the monopsony but stopped paying out the promised rewards.
- Paul Graham Some tasks inherently need a continuous stretch of time, so an appointment that splits the afternoon can leave no block long enough to finish them, and this is not limited to people with ADHD.
- Naval Ravikant Effective Altruism lets people appear both rational and moral and is the ultimate ego trip.
- Naval Ravikant People who want to appear moral are attracted to the left, while people who want to appear rational are attracted to the right.
- Paul Graham In the 1950s, an aluminum company commissioned Vacheron & Constantin to make them some aluminum pocket watches. The case, dial, hands, numerals, and even the plates in the movement are aluminum. The resulting watch is 44 mm in diameter but weighs only 22 g.
- Paul Graham Miriam Pawel says more than she realizes: "Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates."
- Paul Graham Notice anything interesting about this watch coming up for auction in a couple days?
- Scott Alexander Forecasting can turn subjective regulatory judgment calls into objectively observable bets about the future.
- Scott Alexander Cheap superforecasting could revolutionize clinical trials and FDA regulation.
- Scott Alexander Within a few years, ordinary people will have on-demand AI superforecasters comparable to top human forecasters.
- Paul Graham In the early stage, problems are approximately deciding what to do in what order.
- Paul Graham Noncitizen voting is a fake problem, with potential cases extremely rare even as an upper bound.
- Naval Ravikant The best way to pace the AI frontier is to hold labs fully liable for their models' behavior.
- Naval Ravikant AIs fighting AIs on behalf of humans is more likely than AI fighting humanity.
- Naval Ravikant If AI is risky like fire, everyone should have it; if it is risky like a nuclear weapon, no one should.
- Paul Graham A unit of AI inference needs to be defined, for example via a chain of increasingly hard problems where each consecutive pair is solvable by one model.
- Paul Graham Tokens are not the true unit of AI inference, because better models yield more problem-solving per token.
- Paul Graham Paul Buchheit ranks with Jobs, Zuck, and Elon in meme status and coined Don't be evil.
- Scott Alexander Humanity can take its finger off the scale of technological progress any time it wants.
- Scott Alexander Humanity invents great works, panics, and desperately tries to wrest them back under control.
- Paul Graham Eterna watches are among the biggest bargains in vintage watches.
- Paul Graham Technology is making everyone richer, as illustrated by lighting costs falling over 1000x.
- Naval Ravikant When liability for unverified failures approaches zero, verification budgets collapse and deployers flood systems with unmonitored agents while socializing catastrophic risks.
- Paul Graham Eterna-Matic Recommends
- Scott Alexander Open Thread 451
- Robin Hanson AI Vs. Human Value Drift I don’t see why people concerned with value drift should be especially focused on AI.
- Naval Ravikant The most important question is whether AI will be Godlike, Genius, or Jagged.
- Naval Ravikant AI will likely kill some people on the way to killing all of humanity.
- Naval Ravikant Strong liability enforcement could help the AI debate by holding people liable for rogue agent swarms, jailbroken weakly protected models, and weakly protected OSS models they serve.
- Scott Alexander Royce On San Francisco
- Robin Hanson AI Pause Regs Look Risky People dislike AI for many reasons, but one extreme fear is that AIs will escape control from those who make, buy, or rent them, and then hurt others.
- Scott Alexander God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques
- Robin Hanson What Hidden Motives Imply My book with the excellent co-author, Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, was published almost nine years ago, and has sold >60K copies so far.
- Scott Alexander Open Thread 450
- Robin Hanson Your Conscience Is Not A Moral Oracle I’ve previously outlined three ways we might fix cultural drift.
- Scott Alexander Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genji Finalist #8 in the Book Review Contest
- Robin Hanson Disclosure Seems Unlikely Many who hold the plausible belief that some UFOs are caused by strange strong (“alien”) powers now believe that the US (and maybe other) govts have long been keeping strong confirming evidence re these powers secret, p…
- Robin Hanson Modern Worries Hope is more fragile than fear.
- Robin Hanson Aliens Are Not Crazy Unlikely Astrobiologists have, for decades, defaulted to a conservative burden of proof that leans into two aphorisms coined by Sagan … life … should be considered a “hypothesis of last resort,” largely because “extraordinary cl…
- Robin Hanson You can be contrarian and usually right by finding and resolving conflicts between the consensus results of different fields
- Naval Ravikant Live in the Future Naval with three founders who are living in the future: Garry Tan (Y Combinator), Daniel Francis (Abel Police), and Farbood Nivi (A-LIST). More
- Naval Ravikant The AI Industrial Revolution Full episode with 20 minutes of new material at the end. With Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Blake Scholl (Boom Supersonic), and Max Hodak (Science). Nivi: Welcome. You’re listening to Naval Podcast, your authoritative sourc…
- Naval Ravikant The Regulatory Frontier Part 3 of our four-part discussion with three frontier founders: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Blake Scholl (Boom Supersonic), and Max Hodak (Science Corp). Also see Part 1: Waste Tokens, Save Time, Part 2: Vibe Coding Hard…
- Naval Ravikant Vibe Coding Hardware See Part I here. Nivi: Hey Blake, how are you applying all this at Boom Supersonic? It completely changes the role of software and hardware developers. From day one we tried to take a lot of traditional engineering work…
- Naval Ravikant Waste Tokens, Save Time Welcome. You’re listening to the Naval Podcast, your authoritative source for new knowledge. We’re trying something new today. I have three frontier founders with us—three good-looking guys, actually, and a fourth good-…
- Naval Ravikant Sell the Truth Hi, you’re listening to the Naval Podcast. This is his regular co-host, Nivi. There are only two skills you have to have in life: How to build and how to sell. Today we’re going to talk about the sales side. Naval is a…
- Naval Ravikant ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ Is Over You’re listening to the Naval Podcast. This is Nivi. There’s no set topic for this episode—it will be a potpourri. The Fully Interconnected Startup Naval, how are you using AI at Impossible, your current company, to cha…
- Naval Ravikant A Return to Code You’re listening to the Naval Podcast. This is Nivi, his regular co-host. Today we’re going to talk about vibe coding. Let me tee up the conversation with a tweet from Naval from March 23rd: “AI coding agents can now de…