nico λ

Changing the scale of these simple thought experiments adds complexities that completely change the calculus of the scenario

It’s a rather simple question that quickly gets to the core of someone’s sense of well-being and legitimacy: did your childhood leave you feeling that you were – on balance – OK as you were? Or did you somewhere along the way derive an impression that you needed to be extraordinary in order to deserve a place on the earth? And, to raise an... See more

But we didn’t really get that. We got, I guess, sparkling autocomplete — a fancy chatbot that can string words together in the most inoffensive people-pleasing customer-service voice you’ve ever heard.

The result is something I adamantly do not want to interact with. I do not want to be exposed to LLM output at any time. It’s noise , and I feel like... See more

The evidence here is a bit more mixed. There’s no relationship between extraversion and general intelligence. But smart kids tend to be more selective about who they like, and among the extremely intelligent there’s a negative relationship between life satisfaction and time spent with others. This latter finding isn’t necessarily causal (it could... See more

The government lost control of controlled substances. The Sackler’s main crime, which doesn’t really come through in these dramas because it’s actually a difficult thing to narrativize, is knowing precisely how to exploit America’s thin, hollowed out, and very weak regulatory state. And that’s just not a very sexy Netflix style crime. It’s a crime... See more

I don’t talk about it much but I do work at Google and I just want to contribute, as a small addendum to the wider conversation about AI, and how much it sucks, and how stupid it is, and how if you make garlic oil like it tells you to you will give botulism to your entire family -

we don’t use it.

like internally. we don’t use it.

I mean that we... See more

The hardest, recurring psychological task of my life has been learning to accept the absurdity of existence, to see ambition and achievement for the false gods they are, and to understand, truly understand, how one can flourish in what looks, from the outside, like mediocrity.

We have a problem here, folks. The word “intelligence” is a semantic catastrophe. Whenever doomers use this word, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I often don’t know if they’re talking about a real thing at all. And when they say things like, “AIs are approaching human-level intelligence,” I start to bang my head against the table. What... See more

When we dress our beliefs up in rational argument, we ironically end up constructing an iron-clad fantasy world. We convince ourselves that we’re immune to emotional appeal, that we alone have the pragmatic sobriety needed to see the situation clearly. But often all we’ve done is add a protective layer of reason around something that feels true.