Von Neumann was worried about global warming long before most people were—but mostly he worried about nuclear war, fearing that “mankind might not survive another twenty-five years but instead would become the victim of its own self-destructive inclinations.” However, charged with less abstract

He has distanced himself from the faction known as “e/acc” or “effective accelerationism,” a term used by Beff Jezos, Marc Andreessen, and others as a winking dig at effective altruism. (Altman has tipped his hat to e/acc too, once replying “you cannot out accelerate me” to one of Jezos’s tweets—another sign that he serves at the pleasure of the ph

Is America’s increasing penchant for gambling another sign of stagnation?

But SBF extended this willingness to gamble to infinity—he was willing to make a 50/50 coin flip on the future of humanity! This is dangerous and depraved. SBF had been a major investor in the AI company Anthropic.

in practice both EAs and rationalists have a catholic appetite for involving themselves in all sorts of controversies. Effective altruism

She once threw a party where everyone had to be naked except for a mask, hoping it might loosen up the rationalists a bit. “But instead, they all just sat around the circle and behaved exactly the way they normally do and started debating like global trade,” she told me. (Aella’s efforts weren’t entirely fruitless; Scott Alexander met his future wi

As news organizations scrambled to correct their coverage, for instance, traders at Manifold determined that the IDF probably hadn’t been responsible for whatever had happened on that particular night at the Gaza hospital.[*19] But the bigger concern I have,

who had a rapid run of success in poker tournaments between 2015 and 2018 before leaving to go into effective altruism–related jobs.

“The superforecasters see the doomsters as somewhat self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, messianic, saving-the-world types,”