Brendan McCord 🏛️ x 🤖
@mbrendan1
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The academy for philosopher-builders (https://t.co/mzj0DMJQBv). A law unto myself, just like you.
Austin, TX
Joined March 2009
Every builder's first duty is philosophical: to decide what they should build for. AI is beginning to decide what ideas reach your mind—your next action, your next job, your next relationship. It will tempt you to outsource your thinking in ways you’ve never been tempted before.
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If we could inspect other humans' chains of thought we would be astounded by the chaos and beauty.
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“You still want to create the world before which you could kneel.”. Nietzsche, via Zarathustra, capturing the silicon valley urge to build false deities and submit to them.
To me god is the generalized second law of thermodynamics guiding the behavior of all systems towards maximizing functional information. Ergo, it is everywhere (omnipresent), and knows about every bit of entropy (omniscient).
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Earlier this year, @glukianoff, @PhilippKoralus, and I wrote an op-ed in connection with the launch of the $1M grant pool for AI that advances truth-seeking. We used a hypothetical example of a child with asthma. It is eerily similar to this:
"LLMs are going to be just as good at doctors!". Ok, where can I buy inhalers cheap online?. Grok tells me it's illegal. ChatGPT tells me it's illegal. Google tells me it's illegal. Albuterol is OTC in other countries, selling for $3 each in Mexico. Every American LLM wants me
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Both are runaway branches of philosophy.
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RT @vincentweisser: Super excited to power this $1m truth seeking AI grant initiative by @cosmos_inst and @TheFIREorg with @primeintellect….
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Announcing the first cohort of AI x Truth-Seeking grant recipients:. Proud to build this partnership between @cosmos_inst and @TheFIREorg. From 300+ strong applications, we chose 27 builders to pilot approaches for AI to strengthen open inquiry and intellectual freedom. Our
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Error and suffering are costs, but they are also raw material for self-education.
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In the last week at @cosmos_inst:. • Kickoff call w @glukianoff for a very special group (you'll hear more tmrw).• Finalized plans for our AI x Truth-seeking event in Austin in December.• Welcomed our new Editorial Lead (intro coming soon!). Big things ahead.
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No, this does not break the mold. A consistent pattern from history is people attempting to settle, once and for all, competing visions of the good by revealing the "one, true answer" (here the Kardashev gradient, elsewhere utility maximization, etc.). To release the energy in.
This is why e/acc breaks the mold. Good means actions that follow the Kardashev gradient for civilization. You can develop different theses of which directions / actions have inner product with this gradient, but at least we agree on the objective metric are optimizing.
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What is "natural"? Three views from history:. 1. Aristotle. Nature is an inner principle of development, the standard by which we judge if something or someone is fulfilling their purpose, and the foundation for distinguishing what's genuinely right from what's merely legal or.
If humans are natural, then everything we make is natural - including vaccines, GMOs, and skyscrapers?.
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First day of school at @AlphaSchoolATX for these two 💪. They LOVE this school and it's a brilliant blend of AI-based education and life skills/character development.
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When I see the unending stream of errors made by England, I think about these statues in Mayfair. It was people of a different stamp than today’s politicians that made England what it was.
Wikipedia operator loses court challenge to regulations under UK Online Safety Act
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RT @sebkrier: I'm a stuck record, but I think more people should work on the idea of agents as extensions of/advocates for users, and the k….
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Special delivery 💙. Hayek’s system of ideas is under appreciated. It rivals in its power and depth those of his classical liberal forebears.
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