On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

worth literally trillions, which he claimed he could put toward EA-related causes. Who knows what the limits were; he’d even told Ellison there was a 5 percent chance he could become president of the United States. His utility function was “closer to linear,” he explained; the trillionth dollar really was almost as good as the first. Technically sp

someone with an informed, original opinion about what the betting line should be, usually formulated through painstaking statistical modeling.

“You’re essentially indirectly competing against the smartest, most informationally savvy groups in the world.”

He cited a forecast from a different play-money prediction market site called Metaculus. “What’s the chance of FTX defaulting on any customer deposit in 2022? It was like one point three percent,” MacAskill recalled.

Lucky people “constantly encounter chance opportunities” and try out new things. Lucky people “make good decisions without knowing why.” They listen to their intuition. Lucky people have positive expectations so their “dreams, ambitions and goals have an uncanny knack of coming true.” Lucky people “have an ability to turn their bad luck into good f

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.

You could tell that the Manifest conference was a rationalist rather than an EA event because of the presence of people who were either considered unwoke (like Hanson, who told me he’d basically been canceled from EA events since a 2018 blog post in which he wrote sympathetically about the idea of redistributing sex to incels),

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

Yudkowsky looks the part of the bearded, middle-aged computer nerd, and his vocabulary is shaped by years of arguing on the internet—his native tongue is Riverian, but his is a regional dialect thick with axioms and allusions and allegories. This particular one referred to a statement

The EAs were too “woke” and too concerned with appearances.