Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
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studying AI and trust
San Francisco, CA
Joined October 2009
I increasingly believe that there are fundamental principles which simultaneously govern the designs of well-functioning minds, organizations and societies. Once we pin them down with mathematical precision, we’ll understand the world more deeply than we can currently imagine.
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Unfortunately today the children of the upper classes want to do ‘proper’ work and seek the ranks of the Goldman Sachs or BCG or Venture Capital and the like. They need to ‘make it on their own,’ or so they think, but they are not really doing so (they use their leg up to
Adorno in soft defense of extra-institutional "generalist" thinkers -- Marcel Proust, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Samo Burja...
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Watch if you’d like to see what it takes to make Critch react like this:
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I really enjoyed this conversation with @AndrewCritchPhD, whose research I have long been inspired and informed by!
theMultiplicity Podcast Episode 2: Richard Ngo on futurism and The Gentle Romance, with Andrew Critch (@RichardMCNgo / @AndrewCritchPhD) 0:00:00 – Introduction 0:02:01 – Notions of self 0:04:16 – Futurism and space travel 0:11:46 – Turning inward in the future 0:17:30 – AI
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The gender and racial numbers are important evidence but are a red herring. The important thing is that 100% of the people left in the mainstream are complicit. They all failed to do their jobs honestly and uphold a good faith compact with the public.
Reading this Compact piece, I realized that I myself was in academia at exactly this time, and basically had little chance because I wasn’t a minority or woke. So I did this instead, which is much better, and helped make DEI illegal, which is very funny.
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Thanks to everyone who came to The Gentle Romance book launch last week! It’s great to have it out. Also, signing books is surprisingly fun. If you haven’t already, there’s still time to order copies for xmas—link below.
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After counting, it’s actually more like 20 intercontinental flights. But still crazy ratio.
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Since this tweet I’ve had two more flights turn around a few hours in—most recently this morning due to engine failure. Three turnarounds out of my last ~dozen intercontinental flights is an insane rate. And all three were with United. Anyone got data on what’s happening?
Today I learned (the hard way) that when a long-haul flight turns around only an hour in, it will sometimes dump fuel from its wings so that it’s light enough to land.
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Announcing: the winner of our $10K Meme Prize! After reviewing almost 400 entries, we are thrilled to share that the winner of our Meme Prize is “Voices from 2099” by @JellyfishDAO! Their short video makes us see the present day through the eyes of a future society that has
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Lightcone Infrastructure's 2026 fundraiser is live! We build beautiful things for truth-seeking and world-saving. We run LessWrong, Lighthaven, Inkhaven, designed AI-2027, and so many more things. All for the price of less than one OpenAI staff engineer ($2M/yr). More in 🧵.
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He’s right, but you can mitigate a lot of this stress by letting go of the myth that which college you go to is more important than your capabilities and character. Raise your kids to be smart, decent and hard working, and they will do great no matter which colllege they go to.
Have a child going through the selective college admissions process for the first time and the system seems designed specifically to maximize stress for student and parents alike. The process has gotten worse in recent years and will will keep getting worse until it breaks. 1/n
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Tomorrow evening! Link for last-minute registrations below: Also, some people had trouble buying the book; there’s an updated Amazon link in this thread.
I’ll be doing a fireside chat at my book launch next week with @hannu about AI and fiction! Hannu’s Quantum Thief series is one of my all-time favorites—and he does great science alongside writing great fiction. Very excited for this chat.
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The results are in. Just 69.5% (n=115) people at this neurips knew what AGI stands for. This is only slightly up from last year. See you again next year!
Last year, I randomly surveyed people walking around at neurips, and found that only 63% of people (n=38) could tell me what AGI stands for I'm repeating the experiment this year. Preregister your guess for the % this year now!
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Wait, I had no idea that people were hypothesizing black holes, essentially for the right reason, back in the 1700s. How did I not know this? I guess I should have guessed, given that as far back as Rømer (1600s) people were extremely confident in light having a finite speed.
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I’ll be doing a fireside chat at my book launch next week with @hannu about AI and fiction! Hannu’s Quantum Thief series is one of my all-time favorites—and he does great science alongside writing great fiction. Very excited for this chat.
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