David Piepgrass @dpiepgrass@schelling.pt

I think so.
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RT @paulg
Musa al-Gharbi recently published an article saying that wokism had peaked. So I asked @TheFIREorg, which among other things tracks cancellation attempts at universities, and sure enough all 4 of the measures they track are down. Maybe we've turned the corner!
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1624245399933558785

Alternate theory: there is a wellspring of people who hate MrBeast and will find any excuse to attack him.

But yeah, there are some who hate on billionaires who give their wealth away, some who hate on MrBeast giving his wealth away, and some who hate on Effective Altruists.

> MrBeast paid for a thousand blind people to get surgery that helped them see[…] the top three videos [about it are] about the backlash to his efforts.
> there..seems to be some deeper wellspring where people..hate the idea that other people are allowed to make the world better

A normal journalist would do one of two things. Either

1. do whatever it takes to prove (at least to your own satisfaction) that your source is credible, and tell readers why you are so sure.
2. tell us you couldn't vet the source, so we should take a massive grain of salt.

What did #Hersh say about how he vetted his anonymous source? Nothing. Instead he cited officials saying "this is false and complete fiction" as if it proved the story, and then simply carried on treating his source's claims as undisputed facts.

This is not normal journalism.

Even if you believe "sleepy Joe Biden" is the sort who plans to blow up its allies' gas supplies during peacetime, why would the plan continue unchanged after Russia itself shut down the pipelines?

I find this story fishy. https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22751977&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=63277667#63280189

Seymour #Hersh who won a Pulitzer 53 years ago, says the USA already planned to blow up #NordStream in 2021. Even after Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off all gas on NS, Biden's like "kaboom!!"

Russia wouldn't blow up its own pipeline, right? Well... https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22751977&cid=63277405

What's going on?

I thought all the rivers had already been dammed up 15 or 20 years ago!

The U.S. needs to help Mexico deal with its Cartel problem in order to... let's see... deter China from invading Taiwan and interfering in the US economy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGVnERMwG8M

A Wagner mercenary deserts and seeks asylum in Norway. Some Ukrainians seem offended that he would get asylum.

But we WANT Russians to be rewarded for deserting. It saves lives. Every deserting soldier is one you don't have to fight. Make the reward big! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_SWTlpxQko

That's why I instantly viewed WebAssembly as the most important technology of the century when it was announced in 2015 and hopped on board the community group — only to have precisely zero influence there.

(AGI would be more important, but I didn't realize the danger then)

Even dumber, today's "ergonomic" keyboards use an unergonomic keyboard misalignment that was needed for type bars that no longer exist.

So the way you improve the future is by identifying path dependencies early and change their course before they are set in stone.

Using path dependence.

Do we use the QWERTY keyboard because it's a great design for a keyboard? No. It's because it became popular and the popularity stuck.

(I don't use QWERTY, but that's another story https://millikeys.sourceforge.net/asset/)

What actually happened:

EAs realized the far future was the most important thing, but the far future is hard to predict or influence—except that extinction is ultrabad for the far future, and we can always work to prevent it right now.

But we CAN influence 100s of year away..🧵
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RT @ESYudkowsky
via Dank EA Memes
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1621896459523346433

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission tends to have anti-nuclear leadership (and always has).

But while this article says the NRC will require reactors be built to absurdly high standards, it doesn't actually show that it's *impossible* to meet them.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/new-red-tape-makes-new-nuclear-reactors-impossible/