EA ideas suffer from a particular problem where many people who've been significantly influenced by them still feel like endorsing any part of the worldview means endorsing all the people and orgs who are currently operating under the EA umbrella. But the ideas are general enough

Rationalists are good at decoupling, but they often underrate a complementary skill I’d call “recoupling”: once you’ve figured out what’s true object-level, taking people’s emotional and social responses seriously as data for how to communicate

Source:

Late to the discourse, but I love how this post restates in plain language a classic Tullock insight: theft is not a pure transfer — the real social cost is the opportunity cost of resources spent on theft prevention.

peak male form

Oren Cass's Twitter presence is genuinely baffling: He'll wade into a policy debate, counter the wonk consensus with vague claims and no evidence, get 10s of thousands of views and dozens of replies (all of which are critical), not reply to any of them, and then just dip

I doubt that anyone I know steals from Whole Foods, but the milieu that the article depicted, where it's normal for perfectly well-off people to steal things because why not, was really upsetting to read about, so I actually want to try to earnestly explain why you shouldn't do

Understand this: Waymo in DC is not being delayed because the City Council wants a study. Instead, the City Council is asking for a study because they want to delay Waymo in DC.

The funniest possible outcome of AI denialism’s hold on the left is that Chomsky’s linguistics may turn out to be more politically consequential than his actual activism

If a fact or chart is surprising, it might be because it’s new information, or it might be something deeper — a sign that our mental model is wrong. Anthropic’s economic gap chart is the latter. https://t.co/8ZyQdfK95P A big source of confusion in AI discourse is not recognizing

Not a novel point, but: one reason that progress against benchmarks feels disconnected from real-world deployment is that good benchmarks and AI progress are correlated endeavors. Both benchmarks and ML fundamentally require verifiable outcomes. So, within any task

He says it himself at the end of the clip: "homegrown" meth purity was low. Domestic interests always hate international competition. Have they no appreciation for consumer surplus? smh

Effective Altruism DC will be organizing a large EA conference in DC on May 2nd and 3rd. While I won't be directing the org anymore I'll be extremely excited to attend. The conference will bring together the large network of people working in EA cause areas in DC as well as

I understand why they're doing it, but it's kind of funny that people who changed the Department of Defense's name to the "Department of War", explaining that real men don't hide behind euphemisms, now refuse to formally acknowledge the obvious fact that America is at war.

it's already priced in, everything, all of it, past, present, future, the infinite expanse of the universe, you're priced, i'm priced, we are all priced, in

this is rent seeking, terrible stuff.

Edits like this are so much funnier than if the same interaction were AI-generated. This is a dying art

Nearly every time i see someone call something "Lynchian" they are wrong... why is this?

Serious question: why do journalists do this?

As someone trying to Claude-pill my wokest friends,, thank you Mr President