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Showing posts from October, 2018

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 Podcasts You Might Enjoy

This is the first of a three-part series of useful online resources, covering podcasts, YouTube channels, and Chrome extensions. So, I think it'd be accurate to call me a prolific e-explorer: during the past years I've amassed quite a library of internet resources that perhaps not everyone is aware of. As such, I'd like to share the best stuff I've found. The podcasts span a very wide variety of topics of interest to me, but they're centred around my main interest of ethics, futurology, Effective Altruism, rationality, philosophy of mind, natural sciences (especially biology and physics), social sciences (especially economics and psychology), politics, geopolitics, world events, history, self-improvement and more. My podcast habit is to a large extent responsible, for those of you that know me, for my incessant trivia dropping and ability to say something about a pretty large variety of topics. I'm not entirely sure how useful knowing a little bit about a ...