Arjun Panickssery
@panickssery
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Researching scalable oversight @MATSprogram | prev @METR_Evals @ai_risks | spaced repetition | AI safety |
The Object Level
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Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year effective altruist; you just got finished reading some Oxford philosopher, Will MacAskill probably. You're gonna be convinced of that till next month when you get to Nick Bostrom. Then you're going to be talking about how the
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"I'm autistic."
"Does that mean you take things literally?"
"No, you're thinking of kleptomaniacs."
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If Walmart's profit margin is less than 3%, why don't they just close all the stores and buy index funds (or treasury bonds even)
Am I misunderstanding something about what the term profit margin means here
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The S&P 500 would have gotten them a 852,827.90% return in this time period, leaving them with $64 million
@amytheartist
My grandparents bought their home in 1936 for $7.5K. It sold for about $700k a few years ago.
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Cowen on Chomsky lol:
"I think we need to entertain the hypothesis that he’s simply a person who’s wrong about everything, pretty much; and his true achievement is one of stamina and quantity, which I do not mean in a snide, negative way. I find that extraordinarily impressive."
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The evidence strongly suggests that the U.S. is massively under-policed
We have fewer police per homicide than any other developed country
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Nietzsche at age 24 was appointed a professor of classical philology without a doctorate on the strength of eminent philologist Friedrich Ritschl's recommendation alone
The recommendation is absurd; the John Nash rec letter people pass around doesn't hold a candle
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Five years ago Scott Alexander explained that it actually only takes him "a couple of hours" to write a post
he expresses confusion about people who write slowly: "they seem to be able to talk instantaneously, and writing isn't that different from speech" lol
Elsewhere he's
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I read all ~3500 blog posts on
@robinhanson
's blog 𝑂𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐵𝑖𝑎𝑠 and compiled an anthology of 125 key posts split into 5 categories and 19 sub-categories
thanks to
@RichardMCNgo
for sponsoring
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Oh I see profit margin isn't per year, is that the short answer
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Scott Alexander anonymously won his own book review contest before disqualifying himself
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This is what it feels like reading the first 10 chapters of HPMOR
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People need to RETVRN to traditional company naming where it's always the surnames of the founders and possibly a literal description of the product
"Altman AGI Company"
"Page and Brin Internet Search Corp"
"Dorsey Short-Messages, Inc"
"Musk Electric Motors"
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Fun to hate on rationalists for being weirdos, but don't forget that trying to 'debate' most people requires an endless string of
- "what about <absolutely trivial counterexample>"
- "it's not clear how this evidence supports your claim"
- "could you be more specific; e.g., do
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"Researchers have failed to identify the Big Five dimensions in non-student adult populations in Bolivia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Macedonia ... instead, researchers often find only two:
- Industriousness ...
- Prosociality ..."
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@scrd_rv
For the unenlightened:
(Also I highly recommend Moby Dick; the writing is beautiful and Ahab is profoundly moving, possibly the greatest character in American literature)
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Are LLMs biased toward themselves?
Frontier LLMs give higher scores to their own outputs in self-eval. We find evidence that this bias is caused by LLM's ability to recognize their own outputs
This could interfere with safety techniques like reward modeling & constitutional AI
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Woke up to many people repeating the same stuff but also two different actual answers
1) Walmart has net assets of $252B - $92B = $160, and net income of $16B, so the relevant number is 16/252 = 6.3% (is this "return on assets"?)
2) The relevant number is 19.3%, the "return on
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"Every supposed genius has a bag of tricks—a list of obscure technical methods that hardly anyone knows about, that they have mastered. Every time they hear about a problem, they go through the list ... once every year or two, you get a match, and then you look brilliant"
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Almost all "wow my <older acquaintance> bought house for <price> back in <decade> and now it's worth <price>" quotes on this site have this quality
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Kissinger's undergrad thesis at Harvard was 400+ pages long and led them to establish a word limit afterward
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there's no law that the Prime Minister has to be a member of Parliament
this creates the opportunity for the UK to make the greatest trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever
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@billyhumblebrag
Lol I see that I've liked your tweet already so this might be a cryptomnesia case on my part
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Thinking about how xAI has a higher valuation than Anthropic
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Do people in their 20s with extremely pessimistic AGI predictions/timelines act as if their lifespan is probably going to be very short?
Do they save for retirement, plan to have kids, or care about long-run health risks from e.g. smoking that they claim they likely won't reach?
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Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you, is that your thing, you come into a bar, read some obscure passage and then pretend—you pawn it off as your own, as your own idea just to impress some girls, embar...
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I'm skeptical that tech people dress down "because they can prove ability objectively"
Instead it's probably just SF hippie/counterculture that permeated outward right
e.g. I remember in Amazon's DC office no one would wear a t-shirt
How do they dress in Europe for example?
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@literally_chad
Lol just woke up and it's funny how despite getting the correct answer within a few minutes of OP (which follows easily from the correct definition), I got dozens of people repeating the answer and then dozens more answering that it's because of the "secret dealings"
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"Effective altruism" is too inscrutable so I usually tell people I'm at "an AI conference"
this morning at passport control in Stockholm the guy says "by AI you mean that you are summoning the demon, no?"
"Many experts think so, sir" (some chuckles)
"including the billionaire,
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The incredulous replies are probably ignoring the fact that their sexual partners probably have more sexual partners than the median person?
So the median sexual-partner-count from randomly sampling sexual encounters is probably much higher than when sampling individuals
The median number of lifetime sexual partners for America women aged 25-49 is FOUR.
Get a grip.
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@Bo_Beidi
"knocking the rudders off sailboats"
"and especially when ... it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟𝐟"
@scrd_rv
For the unenlightened:
(Also I highly recommend Moby Dick; the writing is beautiful and Ahab is profoundly moving, possibly the greatest character in American literature)
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The Interim CEO of OpenAI, on AI safety:
"You are building an alien god that will literally destroy the world when it reaches the critical threshold but be apparently harmless before that"
@jonst0kes
...that's zero percent of the AI safety discourse I'm part of? My AI safety discourse is 100% "you are building an alien god that will literally destroy the world when it reaches the critical threshold but be apparently harmless before that"
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EAGx Cambridge afterparty DJ: "the EA crowd are mostly quite young and generally not that musically aware (or even into music)"
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coordination that is vastly stronger and more intrusive than that required to merely prevent a few exceptional and localized existential risks? You got that from Hanson's ‘𝐿𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑅𝑒𝑓𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛’ 𝐼𝑠 𝐶𝑟𝑎𝑧𝑦 𝐵𝑎𝑑 𝐼𝑑𝑒𝑎, paragraph 4, right? Yeah, I read that too.
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governments of America and the USSR should have been focused on x-risks all the way back in 1945. That's gonna last until next year; you're gonna be in here regurgitating Toby Ord, talkin' about, you know, the Long Reflection and the utility-forming effects of delayed decisions.
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We're often reminded of our relative luxury (we're top 1% in the world if we make $30k/yr, etc) but from the broader perspective of everyone who will ever exist our lives could easily be among the nastiest, brutishest, and shortest experiences that there ever will be
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@paulg
The more common anecdotes among famous writers are that they edit ferociously, get long periods of writer's block, etc
On the other hand people like Scott and Christopher Hitchens and Matt Yglesias talk a lot about writing fast
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So I paid out a Fiverr task to get the text of all the U.S. presidential inaugural addresses but I no longer remember why I did this
Any ideas for what I could do with this information
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once a girl flirting at a party said her favorite book was War and Peace (haven't read it)
I said I'd heard that everyone you'll ever meet can be found somewhere in War and Peace
I asked which one I was; she said "Anatole," giggled and said she was kidding
what does this mean
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@chizenbread
@psychosort
Cowen would agree that he's brilliant
But surely he's not only "sometimes" wrong right; what has he gotten correct
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Moved into my house June 1 and met a Berkeley CC girl whose mom drove her to move into the apt property next door
When asked if we were students I said "oh no, none of us are; most of us work in AI" the mother immediately said "oh God you guys are going to destroy everything"
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OpenPhil: AI x-risk is one of the most important things
Also OpenPhil: AI x-risk grantmaking team of literally one person, governance team mysteriously not in DC despite OpenPhil having an office
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First feedback I got on the draft was "I think people would dislike it"
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@underthenettle
For weight specifically, most Irish are also overweight or obese
America is like 75% overweight+obese so I'm not sure where the author is getting the "almost half" figure from
The representation point is still silly of course
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"Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because to prevent this sort of change over timescales of centuries or longer would require a global coordination . . ."
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it's often pointed out that America has "5% of the world's population while having 20% of the world's" but the same chart shows that we have an average level of incarceration relative to our (very high) rate of serious crimes
meanwhile we have the lowest homicide clearance rates
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Update: wide awake/hyper alert but trapped under the five weighted blankets used to immobilize myself
Called out to girlfriend but remembered I broke up with her because I was worried about mattress microvibrations
Housemates can't hear me over the 105-decibel noise machine
It seems I've become one of those Sleep Guys
I got a sleep mask (which I sometime wake to find neatly folded on my bedside table), some kind of air purifier thing, and just put blackout film over my windows
Results to come
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Michael Lewis's SBF biography 𝐺𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐼𝑛𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑒 is scheduled for October 3
Lewis: "He’s let me see everything. When it all comes crashing down last November it’s literally me, his parents and his therapist. And I can hang around as long as I want, see whatever I want"
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Or maybe the relevant analogue is return on investment capital (is this more analogous to "the shareholders buy index funds instead" for some reason)
@panickssery
the comparison you’re looking for is return on invested capital, or maybe more simply, return on assets (net income/total assets) if that was lower than the treasury rate, it would be likely that the company could find better investments than reinvesting in the business. profit
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Or maybe my 2024 assets/liabilities numbers are wrong because the $92B ignores all of the "long-term liabilities"?
@panickssery
$92b is CURRENT Liabilities
If you were going to sell everything and invest in Tbills you would also need to pay off the Long term debt as well
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Why do rationalists come up with funny words for things which already exist
The LessWrong page for "Murphyjitsu" (I guess named for Murphy's Law) describes premortems—a strategy for anticipating likely failure modes—which are well-known enough to have a Wikipedia page
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@Jsevillamol
Definitely true, a few years ago everyone was talking about how it was the golden age of American chess
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Surely the rationalists—by their own values—must admit that it would be incredibly high EV for someone to condense the Sequences down to the length of a normal book
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Just met a literal governess, ie she travels with a rich family managing their 5-year-old
I'm vaguely aware there's an insular network of rich-family nannies but it's still interesting
I guess differentiating quality is hard for something like that so it's all word of mouth?
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as far as I know this isn't a "theory," just a conspiracy that happened and was bragged about afterward (see following tweet from Eric Topol, one of the guys behind it)
My conspiracy theory is that the libs delayed the release of the Covid vaccine, thereby killing countless innocent people, to ensure Trump lost the election.
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yes yes I know that selling your house and investing the money puts you short housing again which is undesirable and which you can hedge by buying a house ()
you can stop replying "imputed rent" now
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"If—God grant—he lives long enough, I prophesy that he will one day stand in the front rank of German philology.
...
He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig who – and they are rather numerous – cannot
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Bill Clinton apparently had a little pen-and-paper CRM of everyone he met that totaled 10k+ names by the time he reached his governor days in Arkansas
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Live reaction thread of the Michael Lewis SBF book below
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If some cognitively demanding jobs (novelist? mathematician?) only manage fewer than 6 hours per day, there's a sense in which these are the best jobs to try to compete in
you can work hard and then relax for the rest of the day, assured that your competition can't get any edge
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Signaling trades off against wealth
"Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws, customs ... But this idea greatly offends national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor."
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How did this seemingly very busy/important economist also produce the only unabridged Mahabharata and Ramayana translation in over a century
His Mahabharata translation alone is ~5000 pages across 10 volumes
Other translation attempts (e.g. at UChic) have stalled for decades
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Is this claim from Matt Levine correct? Doesn't ignoring the Kelly criterion maximize EV over any time scale (e.g. your life)
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Underrated Scott Alexander post: "Epistemic Learned Helplessness"
In analogy to the psychological behavior, ELH is when people give up on trying to discern true from false arguments and just believe non-weird stuff
Scott argues that this is good
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The S&P 500 would have gotten them a 852,827.90% return in this time period, leaving them with $64 million
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"Oh, you were an independent researcher in 2022? Where did you get your grant funding?"
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So I can't buy Anthropic stock, but I 𝑐𝑎𝑛 buy FTX debt at like $0.50 on the dollar right
👀
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Old post on
@robinhanson
's site, 1997:
"Imagine we each had a personal "party talk" email list. To my personal list I post all my "party" comments, and also appearing there are the contributions of others to the conversations these comments are part of."
Sounds like Twitter
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@gadfly1962
> Don't you know that long term return to real estate is similar to stock market return if not better depending on location
Really? Where is this true
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Online reaction to Yudkowsky suggesting that multinational agreements be enforced with airstrikes
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I often hear people say they increase their efficiency/impact by trading time for money, e.g. valuing their time at $35/hr and booking an Uber for $15 to save 30 minutes of walking as a result
But is this compatible with your marginal time value in most models of productivity?
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But then I explained briefly that they work on "interpretability, trying to make the AI models comprehensible to their operators" and she thought this was pretty based, though she didn't use that term
"is that going well"
"essentially no"
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Once at an EA party overhearing a nuanced discussion of utilitarianism I staggered drunk over to the whiteboard scribbling in huge font that the true ethics was the "3 virtues" (produced off the top of my head in the spur of the moment):
1. Loyalty
2. Hustle
3. Straight-talking
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What should people who believe in eg 15-year AGI timelines be investing in (I assume that if this prediction is true, it's not priced in right now)
Long Nvidia?
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New EA Cause Area: Build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens
1. Probably useless
2. Non-zero chance that we succeed and then "nothing will be restrained from" us
3. So basically +Inf EV
Makes sense under hits-based giving
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Narrator: he did not know how much money they had
@cz_binance
SBF on CFOs:
functional religion around the CFO ... people cannot articulate a single thing the CFO is supposed to do. They’ll say ‘keep track of the money,’ or ‘make projections.’ I’m like, What the fuck do you think I do all day? You think I don’t know how much money we have?
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In The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg mentioned how as a 27-year-old he forewent RAND's retirement plan in anticipation of untimely death by nuclear war.
Do young people who put high credence on an AGI-related apocalypse within ~20 years seem to be making updates like this?
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If Anthropic triples in value then FTX can pay everyone back
Today, we’re announcing that
@Amazon
will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop reliable and high-performing foundation models.
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wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is—and at the same time pleasant and modest.”
"I should stake my whole philological and academic reputation that the matter would work out happily"
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much of the postrat style is just people who experienced clear thinking, noticed that the truth is quite harsh, and declared "but what if we be wrong 𝘰𝘯 𝘱𝘶𝘳𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦 (winks loudly)"
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"None of our board members are effective altruists"
OpenAI board lying (on the public Internet, no less)
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Just learned how Magic: The Gathering works
Actually nuts, imagine if I was like "oh no FIDE just released a new piece called the Dark Tower which instantly checkmates me, I need to update my build"
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our cops kill 100x more people than the average developed country, but this is easily explained by our using lengthy sentences as a substitute for policing, leading to more aggressive criminals and dangerous environments for cops, who respond with shows of force (cf Foucault)
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Gotta start sending this to my friends when they don't reply to my messages
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Just checked and HPMOR is 10% longer than War and Peace
Hard to argue that I should finish HPMOR instead if I could spend the time one way or the other
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No Soylent on this island but they've got some kind of Huel vending machine in Heathrow
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Trump White House spent $100,000 on modafinil from 2017–2019 lol
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What are the worst grammar rules that are still very canonical
I don't like putting commas after i.e. and e.g.
The ".," is very unappealing
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Rawls's veil is about the society you'd want not knowing who in society you'd be (not only your wealth/status, but your preferences/desires)
But if you also hide your 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 in history, you'd want a different, growth-focused society, since you'll probably be born near the end
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Batman on existential risk:
"He [Superman] has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there’s even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty… and we have to destroy him."
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@literally_chad
Also a bunch of people somehow giving (admittedly subtly) wrong answers even after tons of correct responses?
And then some people thinking I'm a communist/that I was making an argument rather than asking a question
And 20 new followers
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