Posts

Grief at the end of history

Epistemic status: emotional ranting and grief (and, I'm aware of the structural incentives of capitalism and not deluded that it's all about individuals; allow me to indulge anyway) My days are absolutely filled with reading about and discussing AI x-risk. How to think about it. What to do. How to think about what to do. Of course, this is nothing new, but — again and again, I encounter arguments in the style of, well, "us safety-concious, responsible people need to keep having a seat at the table. So we need to stay in the race, or get in the race." And I just keep coming back to that it feels really wrong to yield to this logic. The best thing we can do is to join everyone else in the thing that is causing our destruction! And it's quite likely that that's not a strategic response given the situation we now find ourselves in. But my thoughts keep coming back to the root cause: why the fuck did we start an AI race in the first place? We could have avoided so...

A Long List of YouTube Channels For The Curious Minded

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This is the second post in three-part series of useful online resources, covering podcasts , YouTube channels, and Chrome extensions. The best plan is the plan you'll actually execute. What do I mean by that? I've found over the years that sometimes, there are things I'd like to learn, or feel like I should learn, but the thought of picking up a pop sci book... too effortful. Time passes, and I don't get around to it.  Then I realise there's a YouTube channel with videos on that topic!  It's perhaps not quite as efficient as reading, but at least I get around to it, and enjoy myself while doing it. So, as an infovore, I've amassed quite a library of informational/educational/infotainment YouTube channels in the past 13 or so years. These channels cover these topics, everything between them, and more: ecology, economics, philosophy, cosmology, anthropology, tech, geography, politics, history, chemistry, news, rationality, physics, productivity, futurology,...