Based Camp - Effective Altruism Is a Waste of Money： Can it Be Fixed？ (Hard EA)

00:00:00.000 this is important what could be more important than earning the approval of normies richard

00:00:06.100 science hello simone i'm excited to be here with you today this might be the most important

00:00:15.280 announcement from a personal perspective that we have made on this show but recently we have

00:00:20.060 decided to begin stepping back from our day jobs to focus more on trying to fix it this untethering

00:00:30.000 society that we are dealing with right now as well as the many threats to humanity's flourishing that

00:00:37.620 are on the horizon at the moment this major decision has come downstream of two big realizations i had

00:00:46.800 recently the first was as i do about every year or every other year is i took inventory of all of the

00:00:53.320 major threats or big things that could change about the future of humanity so i can better make my own

00:00:58.920 plans for the future and for my kids future but this time i did something i hadn't done before

00:01:02.760 decided to also take an inventory of all of the major efforts that are focused on alleviating these

00:01:08.740 potential threats and i had assumed as we've often said you know we've been affiliated with the

00:01:14.440 periphery of the effective altruist movement for a while that while the effective altruist may have

00:01:20.580 problems they were at least competently working on these issues because they were signaling that they

00:01:27.120 cared about them but when i looked at the actual solutions they were attempting i was shocked it made

00:01:34.680 me realize that a lot of the funding that i thought was going to fixing these issues was going to

00:01:40.440 something akin from that scene from indiana jones we have top men working on it right now

00:01:46.580 who

00:01:48.600 top men

00:01:52.520 the goal was to reform charity in a world where selfless giving had become a rarity

00:02:14.260 no vain spotlight no sweet disguise just honest giving no social prize but as the monoculture took the stage

00:02:24.960 it broke their integrity feigning righteous rage now every move is played so safe ignoring truths that make them

00:02:35.820 change

00:02:36.520 ea has capitulated

00:02:41.120 to everything it said it hated

00:02:48.480 once they were bold now they just do what they are told

00:02:56.100 in caution they lost their way

00:02:59.740 time for a heart ea

00:03:03.120 second i have always considered us as again adjacent to the effective altruist movement or

00:03:11.780 living within the periphery of this movement and heckling it towards making more responsible decisions

00:03:17.360 recently as i was going over the stats for our podcast and other podcasts i realized

00:03:23.940 that our podcast is more popular than the most popular effective altruist podcast 80 000 hours

00:03:31.500 by not a small margin either

00:03:34.100 now i will note here that spencer greenberg's podcast clearer thinking which many associate with the effective altruist

00:03:40.160 movement is actually more popular than ours

00:03:42.000 i will not deny that i really like spencer good friend

00:03:45.100 but he personally

00:03:46.240 doesn't identify as an effective altruist

00:03:49.480 and when i realized that i was like oh

00:03:51.740 i'm no longer like a heckler on the outside

00:03:55.160 pointing out the mistakes that other people are making

00:03:57.760 i'm now somebody who has to take responsibility for fixing things

00:04:01.820 especially if the timelines that humanity is facing are short

00:04:05.660 and so we will create an alternative with hardea.org

00:04:08.760 what we have done to distribute this we're going to start doing grants so if you have ideas that you think might appeal to us we would like to help fund you help get stuff out there

00:04:17.160 obviously we are looking to raise money as well we already have a 501c3 nonprofit charity

00:04:22.600 so if you know any big potential donors who might be interested in this please let them know about this project

00:04:28.760 and i note here that unlike traditional ea we are not just looking for iterative solutions to the world's existing problems

00:04:34.800 but anything that can move humanity forward into the next era of our evolution

00:04:38.260 whether that's genetic modification technology gene drives brain computer interface artificial wombs 0.77

00:04:44.280 or new forms of governance in city-states

00:04:46.680 anything the traditional effective altruists were afraid of touching because of its potential effect on their reputation

00:04:52.500 but that needs to happen for humanity to compete with ai and eventually get to the stars

00:04:59.560 we stand on the brink of a breakthrough in human evolution

00:05:03.720 effective altruism

00:05:05.000 held back the pace of scientific discovery for decades

00:05:09.320 they believed my methods were too radical

00:05:13.560 too controversial

00:05:15.480 and they tried to silence me

00:05:18.920 new patrons emerged who possessed an appetite for my discoveries

00:05:25.160 and with this knowledge

00:05:28.920 what new world could we build

00:05:32.440 young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future

00:05:36.840 i'm doing my part

00:05:38.760 i'm doing my part

00:05:39.640 i'm doing my part

00:05:40.760 i'm doing my part too

00:05:43.160 they're doing their part

00:05:46.440 are you

00:05:47.160 and the second thing i noted here was

00:05:50.200 oh shoot 0.98

00:05:52.120 most of the mainstream figures who could have stand 0.87

00:05:56.280 or run or help the ea movement continue to grow

00:06:00.520 have been order 66 by the movement

00:06:03.240 and i realize that even some nerds don't know what this means 0.98

00:06:05.160 this is the order that the empire gave to kill all the jedi 1.00

00:06:08.440 thank you cody now let's get a move on we've got a battle to win here 0.99

00:06:12.360 execute order 66

00:06:20.360 what i mean here is when they have somebody who is extra effective

00:06:32.200 they turn on the individual

00:06:34.920 this is something in a weird way like to an extent that i've never seen in

00:06:38.760 any other cause area or social space

00:06:42.280 yeah and as such many people who might be their greatest champions now

00:06:46.280 like say spencer greenberger just like i don't want to be affiliated as

00:06:50.040 having that attached to my brand

00:06:52.440 but this provides opportunity to us one it makes it hard for them to say

00:06:57.800 you guys aren't real ea when we have a bigger platform than any of the

00:07:01.640 quote-unquote real ea individuals

00:07:03.880 but two it allows us to attempt to cure the movement even through our advocacy

00:07:09.240 by that what i mean is the effective altruist movement was originally

00:07:13.160 founded with the intention of saying most philanthropy that's happening right

00:07:18.040 now is being done for social signaling reasons or personal signaling

00:07:21.800 reasons it's either being done to signal to other people you're a good

00:07:24.440 person or to signal to yourself you're a good person

00:07:26.600 so when you're faced with a decision like should i indulgently spend two years

00:07:31.400 doing charity work like building houses in africa or something like that or

00:07:35.320 should i go take that job at mckenzie and then send that money to charity and see 0.96

00:07:38.760 how many houses i can build i choose the mckenzie route because

00:07:42.360 while it may be less good for personal signaling or social signaling

00:07:45.960 it is the more efficacious thing to have an impact on the world

00:07:50.680 unfortunately this movement has been almost totally captured by social

00:07:54.840 signalers specifically people signaling

00:07:57.240 to the urban monoculture

00:07:59.240 the monoculture took the stage

00:08:02.200 it broke their integrity feigning righteous rage

00:08:06.360 now every move is played so safe

00:08:09.240 and this is largely downstream of something the movement should have

00:08:30.680 expected from itself it should have said if we're not going to care about social

00:08:34.200 signaling and actually making a difference we need to prepare to be the

00:08:38.360 villains we need to prepare to be hated by those in power because we are not

00:08:44.280 going to toe their lines now you're trying to make me out to be the bad guy

00:08:47.720 yes i'm trying to make you a bad guy we're both bad guys

00:08:51.080 we're professional bad guys ding hello and instead they took the exact opposite

00:08:56.200 approach which is to say we want to be socially respectable we want to be 0.62

00:09:00.680 accepted by the mainstream power players in our society we want to suck up to them

00:09:05.400 when they dropped this it was the original sin that led to the downfall of ea

00:09:10.280 and then i think a lot of this is because from the beginning they didn't focus on

00:09:16.840 the misaligned incentives that cause people who are altruistic to get

00:09:21.400 overly focused on signaling in the first place

00:09:23.880 in other words they didn't focus on making sure that everyone's efforts were

00:09:28.840 self-sustaining they supported efforts that required ongoing fundraising and

00:09:32.760 ongoing fundraising requires social signaling so that those groups that

00:09:36.840 survive were dependent on fundraising who are are the ones who are better at

00:09:40.840 signaling not the ones who are better at solving the problem so i think that's

00:09:43.880 part of it it's not that these people became corrupted it's that they never

00:09:48.200 addressed the inherent aligned and misaligned incentives that made this

00:09:53.000 problem in the first to elaborate on what she means by this is if you have a large

00:09:56.440 bureaucratic institution that is dedicated to social good um individuals

00:10:01.000 within that network are going to be drawn to it for one of two reasons either they

00:10:04.440 want status or they want to do social good the the problem is is that the people who

00:10:08.280 want to do social good they need to focus on doing social good whereas the

00:10:12.120 people who want status can focus all their time on politicking

00:10:15.000 as well the people who want to do social good must act with integrity which

00:10:18.360 somewhat binds their hands whereas the people who want status well they can use

00:10:22.280 the urban monocultures status games to sabotage other people really easily

00:10:27.000 and so they always end up rising to the top whereas the people actually trying to

00:10:31.880 do something efficacious because at least 50 of their time needs to go to like

00:10:34.920 actual efficacious work or you know near 100 of their signalers time can just go to

00:10:38.760 signaling and then and i want to say this is something that's not just

00:10:42.200 you're not only going to see it in the non-profit or the altruistic world this

00:10:47.800 also shows up in some of the largest work from home experiments performed

00:10:52.680 one of the earliest big large-scale work from home experiments performed found

00:10:56.440 for example that employees this was i think an online travel agency that tried

00:11:00.280 this employees who worked from home were more effective they got more work done

00:11:04.360 they were better employees in terms of getting the work done in terms of the

00:11:07.480 bottom line of the company but those who stayed in the office got promoted more

00:11:12.360 so again this is about where is your time going is your time going to

00:11:16.520 face time to signaling or is it going to getting the work done

00:11:19.240 and if you have a system where you can only continue to get resources or get

00:11:23.960 promotions or get more money by signaling you're going to start focusing on

00:11:27.960 signaling and those who survive who last in those organizations are going to be

00:11:31.400 the signalers not the do-goers

00:11:33.880 you only fight these causes cause caring cells 1.00

00:11:37.480 all you activists can go fuck yourselves that was so inspiring 0.99

00:11:43.640 being in those rooms when the ea movement was being formed all those years ago 1.00

00:11:48.680 knowing all those edgy young autists who wanted to fix things in big ways 1.00

00:11:53.320 seeing what the movement has turned into taken over by bureaucratic

00:11:58.680 self-indulgent normies playing the dei game

00:12:02.040 i can only imagine this is how they feel

00:12:03.960 a man seeks a good time but he is not a hedonist he seeks love he just doesn't know where to look

00:12:12.040 he should look to nature gentle aquatic shrimp have all the answers

00:12:19.320 your door was locked so we let ourselves in you may have found my inner sanctum shut up now give us the

00:12:25.720 plans or whatever the hell you have i have a tank full of gentle coddle fish give us the cuddle fish 1.00

00:12:32.920 cuddle i can't do this

00:12:37.880 you abandoned me i have cuddle fish look into my eyes

00:12:46.520 most of the effective altruistic organizations have become giant peerage networks these weird

00:12:51.000 status dominance hierarchies uh that are constantly squabbling over the most petty of of disagreements

00:12:59.240 yeah just for people who don't know what peerage is if you were a peer of the realm you were

00:13:04.760 essentially made noble by a ruling class like a king or king or queen so what we're talking about is

00:13:10.360 essentially this sort of declared aristocracy that can be very insular and incestuous

00:13:17.720 stipends who then are basically forced to stand the people above them in the pyramid yeah well and

00:13:25.560 this is the here's the other thing and this is why i think there's such a big garden gnome problem

00:13:29.720 in the ea industry to give a little context for those who haven't seen our other discussions about

00:13:33.800 garden gnomes in regency era england there was this trend among very wealthy households you know

00:13:40.200 people who had large estates to have what was referred to as an ornamental hermit and these were

00:13:45.160 basically like learned wise men who they would have live in a cottage on their land and then like

00:13:50.200 come to you know their their dinner parties and stuff when they had house guests and kind of

00:13:55.080 impress them with their philosophy and they were often required to do things like not drink and let

00:13:59.560 their nails grow long and grow a beard so they looked to be sort of like a very picturesque intellectual

00:14:05.800 and we've noticed that within the ea industry this is the industry i guess space social sphere this is

00:14:11.480 the one place where you actually see modern ornamental hermits that is to say people who are in the ea

00:14:19.000 space and rationalist space who literally make their money by sort of being a a an intellectual who is

00:14:27.240 paid who has a patron who is a very wealthy person who's in this space who sort of just does

00:14:33.480 sub stack writing and philosophy and who goes to these dinner parties and makes their patron look good

00:14:39.640 which is insane it's it's a wild trend that we have seen these gnomes are almost always male and

00:14:46.120 frequently end up congregating in these giant poly group houses where they all are dating the one

00:14:53.080 woman who could sort of tolerate them i kind of feel like marrying simone and taking her out of san

00:14:58.040 francisco this is what i saved her from he's just marrying all 1 000 of us and becoming our gnome queen 0.87

00:15:03.560 for all eternity isn't that right honey you guys are butt faces you think you can stop us the gnomes 0.59

00:15:11.320 are a powerful race do not trifle with the he's getting away with our queen who's getting orders i

00:15:21.560 need orders the overwhelmingly male population of the ea movement makes it very easy to spot the portions of it

00:15:29.000 that have become corrupted by dei beyond repair just look for any organizations that's board has more

00:15:35.720 women than men on it or that's leadership is more female than male or even just anywhere near gender 1.00

00:15:41.720 equal given how overwhelmingly male the movement is that would only happen if they were using an extreme

00:15:48.200 amount of discrimination and prejudice in their hiring policies and promotion policies and outside of

00:15:54.120 the immorality of a system that is systemically unfair and prejudiced this also means the most

00:15:59.720 talented efficacious and hard-working people was in an organization aren't the individuals running it

00:16:04.680 which means tons of donor money is being wasted just to signal that we're good boys and i would say

00:16:10.440 that this isn't the only problem you also have a problem from the bottom up of the movement being

00:16:14.200 very corruptible they just put no thought into governance theory when they were putting everything

00:16:17.880 together from the bottom up the problem is they have a massive tyranny of the unemployment problem

00:16:22.200 any movement decides a lot of its ideas based on what's going on in the ea forums but forums are

00:16:30.280 susceptible to a governance problem we described in the private disguise to governance called tyranny of

00:16:33.640 the unemployed which means that the individuals who have the differential time to spend all day

00:16:38.600 online on a forum or something like that an environment where the amount of time you can dedicate to a

00:16:43.800 thing gives you additional power within the community well those people are being sorted into

00:16:49.640 that position in life either because they don't have like friend networks right you know they don't

00:16:54.920 have other things that they're doing so they have been expelled from other communities and they don't

00:16:59.240 have day jobs often or day jobs outside of the ea peerage network or even responsibilities like taking

00:17:05.000 care of children or elderly people or even really needy pets like they're just sitting there in front of

00:17:09.480 their computers and so these communities always tend towards these sort of average ideas that will get you

00:17:17.080 respect by the urban monoculture when you have one of these voting based online networks instead of

00:17:22.120 the way like our core community our discord works where it's like what whoever said the last thing

00:17:25.800 is the one who's there you end up with people really striving for what they think is mainstream 0.94

00:17:32.600 acceptable in society to say to post because those are the things that the average dumbass unemployed 0.97

00:17:37.720 person who's sitting at home is going to end up upvoting this is why reddit is so brain dead these days 0.91

00:17:43.720 it is also why the ea forums are so brain dead in exactly the same sort of normie normie normie normie

00:17:49.640 take way what's also wild here is when i went and checked it looks like our discord is more active

00:17:56.120 than the ea forums right now if you want to check it out you can check it out from a link i'm going to

00:18:00.600 put in a pinned comment generally the best way to use it is to focus on individual episode commentary

00:18:07.960 rather than just chat in the town hall i understand that the format changes make this comparison a little

00:18:12.920 bit apples to oranges but that their top posts are only getting like 50 comments and then if you go

00:18:19.080 just like three posts down you get posts with no comments that is wild to me when contrasted with ours

00:18:25.880 you know 210 733 124 128 417 265 then go to the top voted post on the ea forum and it's 28 50 64 0 0 2 0 4

00:18:42.280 for 18 14 which i think goes to show that the ea community has transitioned from being

00:18:49.000 well a community to a peerage network but anyway continuing with the point that having a community

00:18:54.280 where norms are based on the vote or the average liked opinion is going to lead to the platforming

00:19:00.760 of ultra normie low-risk beliefs and the demonization of any belief that could rock the boat or interrupt the

00:19:07.560 peerage network and this is why a movement that said we will focus on things that don't get us

00:19:12.840 social signaling and that no one else is focused on is now doing things like environmentalism which is

00:19:18.680 like the most overfunded area would contrast to whatever the cause areas all right that doesn't 1.00

00:19:24.200 this god damn stupid ass rainforest this place fucking sucks i was wrong fuck the rainforest i 1.00

00:19:31.160 fucking hate it i fucking hate it oh now she figures it out or uh you know they're completely 1.00

00:19:36.520 not touching pronatalism and no ea org has ever done anything in the pronatalist movement never touched 0.99

00:19:42.760 pronatalism never advocated they have explicit rules against it they have explicit rules against doing

00:19:47.320 anything about dysgenics which is one of the things we often talk about which is the polygenic markers

00:19:51.160 associated with things like iq are decreasing within the developed world at a rapid rate

00:19:55.080 to the rate where we should expect a one standard deviation decline in iq within the next 75 years

00:19:58.520 or so you can look at our video on is idiocracy possible on this particular topic but they

00:20:05.080 have in their rules that they're not allowed to focus on human genetics

00:20:09.000 and as such they can't address some of the biggest challenges that our species might be facing

00:20:13.000 they duck their heads from problems grand as fertility collapse dooms our land dysgenics a word they fear

00:20:26.280 but ignoring it will be severe a safety a shiny show funding the theatrics for money they blow without a plan

00:20:39.080 and just spin and grin while real solutions can begin

00:20:45.000 ea has capitulated

00:20:52.120 to everything it said it hated

00:20:59.000 once they were bold now they just do what they are told

00:21:04.920 in caution they lost their way time for a hard ea

00:21:11.400 our species at risk by the cowardice it is time for a movement that empowered us

00:21:18.600 but it gets worse than all of that so let's be like okay if they're not giving money to that stuff

00:21:23.800 one how much money are they actually giving out here and two what are they actually doing so by 2022

00:21:29.880 over 7 000 people had signed a pledge to donate at least 10 of their income to effective charities

00:21:35.160 they are now more than 200 ea chapters worldwide with conferences attracting thousands of attendees

00:21:41.080 and they now give out around 600 well this was in 2021 around 600 million in grants a year around four

00:21:49.400 times the amount they did five years earlier and this is really sad to me that these individuals who

00:21:55.960 aren't maybe super in touch was like what the ea orgs are actually doing with their time

00:21:59.800 think that they're you know tithing this amount that makes them a quote-unquote good person and

00:22:04.520 the orgs aren't doing anything so let's give them an option here for the individuals who want to do

00:22:08.600 this for an org that is actually trying to solve things like ai safety dysgenics pro natalism all of

00:22:15.000 the major problems that our species is facing at the moment oh before i go into the the projects that

00:22:21.000 that they had here one of the things i really find very interesting about effective altruism is

00:22:28.520 one their absolute insistence on trying to cozy up with the leftists and democrats and also the vitriol

00:22:37.400 they have been shown by democrats isn't that interesting yeah that first effective altruism is

00:22:43.000 fairly little known it's becoming more known but really only in the context of leftist media outlets

00:22:49.240 looking at it with great suspicion who are these ea silicon valley elites deciding how we should

00:22:55.320 live our life like it's definitely viewed as a silicon valley elite thing it's viewed with great

00:23:00.760 suspicion and it's viewed as being evil or like just like questionable or puppet mastery or a little

00:23:08.120 illuminati ish i think because it's associated with i think that that's a misunderstanding of why the

00:23:13.960 left is so hostile to it really yeah so ea fastidiously tries everything it can to not

00:23:21.720 piss off leftists yes the urban monoculture they are like we will not break a single one of your rules

00:23:28.680 but unfortunately that puts them into the same status game that the urban monoculture 0.91

00:23:34.040 people are playing so if i'm a mainstream lefty politician or political activist the ea's are

00:23:39.640 trying to compete with my social hierarchy for attention for capital for everything they come

00:23:46.120 into a room and they're like okay we can spend x amount on nets in like malaysia and it can lower

00:23:52.520 malaria rates by this amount which like lowers net suffering by y amount and i'm here like don't you

00:23:57.880 know that today is trans months or like don't you know that today is the black lives matter like

00:24:02.200 protests and they're like well i mean i understand that like myopically that's what's going on in the

00:24:06.200 united states right now but we're trying to reduce aggregate suffering and look at my math and that

00:24:11.400 gets you shouted out of the room because you are issuing an explicit status attack on them when you

00:24:17.240 do this and worse you know when i read a lot of the places attacking them they're like they fall into

00:24:22.760 two camps often it's like well they're using capitalism to advocate for like taking money from

00:24:30.040 these wealthy capitalists and then using that to quote unquote try to make the world a better place

00:24:34.040 but like this these wealthy capitalists shouldn't exist at all they're just perpetuating or sort of

00:24:38.520 you know wallpapering the capitalist system and i understand this attack entirely like if you're a

00:24:45.080 leftist and you're a socialist you're like what are you guys doing you are making the capitalists look

00:24:49.480 good it's better that we just tear everything down and i think this is because of the ea mistakenly

00:24:55.160 believes that when they're talking to urban monoculture people these socialists and stuff like

00:24:59.080 that that they actually want to reduce suffering in the world because that's what they tell people they 0.67

00:25:02.520 want to do yes instead of just claim power and so they make very because they're hugely autistic 1.00

00:25:08.360 make very dumb decisions of taking them at face value and then they keep getting shouted out of the 0.76

00:25:12.680 room and then come back whereas us the right side the hard eas which is fundamentally more of a 0.98

00:25:19.640 right-leaning movement we have been accepted by the political apparatus you know we're regularly

00:25:24.840 meeting with groups like you know the heritage foundation or political operatives in dc and they

00:25:29.880 don't mind being affiliated with us they like that even whereas you guys were treated like lepers we

00:25:36.280 have the vp of the the major ticket regularly giving pro natalist messages if the ea could get a single

00:25:43.960 one of their messages into a mainstream politician's mouse in the same way we have been successful at

00:25:48.760 this as you might be able to tell we recorded this before trump's team won and before we saw just

00:25:55.560 how much influence our side was going to have in his policy agenda but i wanted to just reflect on

00:26:01.480 how crazy this is that they had hundreds of millions of dollars and about a decade and they

00:26:07.800 were unable to really get on board any mainstream democratic politician into their agenda we are

00:26:15.240 a two-person team and we're able to get close with and get into presidential policy agenda our stuff

00:26:24.200 within a year of trying the incompetency and wastefulness is almost impossible to overstate

00:26:32.520 you are literally setting your money on fire if you give it to them it's not about money it's about

00:26:40.440 sending a message but you see this wherever the urban monoculture has taken hold i mean just look

00:26:46.760 at the democratic campaign they had three times the amount of money trump was using and he trounced

00:26:51.560 them any group that has given into the urban monoculture is going to be wildly inefficient

00:26:56.040 in how it spends money because it's going to spend so much of its money on signaling and it's going to

00:27:01.160 have so many incompetent people at its upper levels but here i also want to note just how wildly

00:27:06.440 inefficient they've been in even the cause areas they purport to care deeply about let's take something

00:27:11.800 like waking the world up to how risky ai could be all right they had a generation of priming material

00:27:20.280 just consider the terminator franchise we come in with the pronatalist movement where we have a

00:27:24.920 generation of everybody thinking oh it's it's there's too many people oh depopulation is a problem

00:27:29.720 et cetera et cetera et cetera and just two people on a shoestring budget this year we've had

00:27:35.400 two three guardian pieces on us rolling stones piece couple new york times shout outs wall street

00:27:43.480 journal feature and then just today we had another wall street journal photographer at our house

00:27:48.680 so they're going to have another piece coming up though this is actually the one who did the famous

00:27:51.400 shot of luigi mangioni and we have woken up the general public to oh this is a real problem and

00:27:58.680 if you're like well a lot of those pieces have a negative slant to them and it's like well yeah

00:28:02.440 and a lot of pieces about ellie iza yukowsky have a negative slant to them as well the key is is

00:28:07.480 are you playing the negative slant to build your own image or build awareness for your cause and here i would

00:28:14.040 ask you to just be rational and think about the people you've talked to recently who has done a

00:28:20.040 better job piercing the mainstream mindset ai risk in a non-doomerous way like in a constructive way

00:28:26.920 or pronatalism you know the fact that we have things like the young turks now saying well malcolm's

00:28:33.000 crazy but he's definitely right about that pronatalist stuff that's wild that we have pierced to the other

00:28:38.760 side that much in such a short time period was just a two-person team and yet a literal army of

00:28:45.560 people has had trouble piercing the popular narrative in a way that builds a constructive

00:28:50.200 conversation not only that but within the pronatalist movement we have built a movement that other than

00:28:56.040 one guy almost entirely gets along supports each other despite our radically different beliefs and

00:29:03.480 when i say diverse beliefs i mean diverse beliefs in a way that you just weren't able to get at all

00:29:07.720 within the traditional ea movement if you go to one of our conferences yes you'll get a bunch of

00:29:12.040 the nerdy autistic programmers and entrepreneur types but you'll also get a lot of conservative

00:29:17.640 religious leaders whether they're haraidi rabbis catholic priests or evangelical media players it's

00:29:23.160 wild that despite hard ea taking a much more confrontational and hardline approach to the issues

00:29:29.000 it has the potential to be a much bigger tent movement and i think that it shows just the core

00:29:35.000 failure of the way that they were signaling and approaching politics which was accept us

00:29:39.480 instead of we're different and we take pride and standing for what we know is right and just

00:29:44.920 and here i would also note that there is a slight ethical difference between these two movements

00:29:49.240 in terms of the end goal uh whereas the eas sort of treat the world right now as if they're utility

00:29:56.680 accountants trying to reduce aggregate in the moment suffering right now which is how they appeal to the urban

00:30:01.400 monoculture the hard eas are much more about trying to ensure that long-term humanity survives and

00:30:09.400 stays pluralistic and we'll talk about the core values we have but it's much more let's create

00:30:14.200 that intergalactic empire and make sure we don't screw this up for the human species in this very

00:30:19.800 narrow window we may have left which we'll talk and we're not afraid to be judged as weirdos for being

00:30:26.680 interested in getting off planet or thinking about the far future whereas the effective altruist

00:30:31.480 community while technically being long-termist is very self-conscious about it because know that

00:30:38.760 being long-termist can make you look weird just because honestly even thinking two decades ahead

00:30:43.640 has us basically in sci-fi you know what i mean yeah well no it doesn't just make you look weird it

00:30:50.040 it puts you at odds with the goals of the urban monoculture the urban monoculture is not

00:30:54.360 interested in the long-term survival of humanity and for that reason when they try to signal long

00:31:00.360 termist goals and this is the other category of anti-ea article you'll read where they're like well

00:31:05.160 here's a problem with being an extremist utilitarian you know they they there it's like well fortunately

00:31:11.320 the hard eas aren't extremist utilitarians we're a completely different philosophical system which

00:31:15.160 we'll get to in a second because extremist utilitarianism is just silly it's like positive

00:31:19.560 emotional states are the things that when our ancestors felt them caused them to have more

00:31:24.360 surviving offspring it's not like a thing of intrinsic value

00:31:30.120 these feelings born of chance in fields of ancient strife they kept our tribe from failing helped give

00:31:38.920 birth to modern life just signals from our past they served a vital role but meaning goes beyond the scars

00:31:50.200 that time upon us stole beyond the pleasure beyond the pain we stand on roads our forebears

00:32:00.360 angels now

00:32:20.200 they claim that it's all worthless if the joys can outweigh fear but they dismiss the wonders we've

00:32:28.760 inherited right here the years of struggle handed down the future's bright unknown

00:32:37.560 it isn't just the fleeting spark of comfort we are shown we carry on a story with pages left to

00:32:47.560 right our tapestry is woven from both darkness and from light and i think you can see and and

00:32:56.440 focusing on in the moment suffering causes you to make very big mistakes in terms of long-term uh

00:33:02.360 human suffering and it causes you to do things which you cannot question was in the current ea

00:33:08.680 movement because if you question the ea movement might look bad right and again it's all down to

00:33:13.400 signaling so where are they putting their money the global health and development fund distributed

00:33:16.920 over 50 million in grants in recent years give well contributes directly to large amounts of

00:33:21.640 funding to global health charities like against malaria foundation malaria consortium and new

00:33:27.000 incentives open philanthropy has increased its focus on global health and well-being in recent years 0.98

00:33:32.600 like that is so dumb so dumb like globe first malaria you could just do a gene drive in mosquitoes 0.97

00:33:41.640 and for like 50 to 100 000 erase the problem of malaria in 50 years i mean yeah sure you might get 1.00

00:33:48.520 arrested but if you look at the number of people that are dying and i'll add it in post it's estimated

00:33:53.080 that approximately a thousand children under the age of five die from malaria every day 608 000 people

00:33:59.640 who die in a given year like the idea that we now have the technology if we cared about that to just

00:34:05.240 fix it i'm sorry for people who don't know what a gene drive is gene drives are designed to eliminate

00:34:10.680 unwanted traits in insects and other animals they work by pushing out genetic modifications through whole

00:34:17.160 species until eventually every critter has been changed into something we have intentionally engineered

00:34:23.880 the idea isn't especially new but it's only very recently that advanced gene editing techniques have

00:34:29.960 made human designed gene drives possible crisper uses specially designed molecules that run along the 0.75

00:34:36.040 strands of dna in an organism's genome and seek out specific sequences of genetic code such as replacing

00:34:42.920 the parts of a mosquitoes genome that allows it to host malaria causing parasites for instance

00:34:48.440 unfortunately every time a crisper mosquito mates with a wild one is modified dna is diluted down

00:34:55.400 meaning that some of its offspring will still be able to carry the malaria parasite and this is where gene

00:35:02.520 drives comes in when the mosquito mated the building code would ensure that every single one of its

00:35:08.760 progeny would inherit the same traits as well as inheriting the crisper code that would ensure the

00:35:14.200 anti-malaria gene was passed on to every future generation in other words the new gene would be

00:35:20.760 irresistibly driven through the whole mosquito population and eventually every mosquito will become

00:35:27.240 a human-designed malaria-free insect and this is not a technology that's restricted to mosquitoes

00:35:34.120 note that here you'll get some complaints from people saying well the reason we have an

00:35:37.880 unemployed gene drives in mosquitoes yet is because the technology isn't fully there yet or it hasn't

00:35:43.240 been as effective as we hoped but if you you know go to an ai and ask what's the real reason the real

00:35:49.000 reason is that they're scared to implement something that could affect an entire natural population and

00:35:55.240 it's borderline illegal right now the problem i have with this explanation is it's estimated that

00:36:02.120 approximately a thousand children under the age of five die from malaria every day they believed

00:36:07.720 my methods were too radical too controversial but there were others in the shadows searching for ways

00:36:16.040 to circumvent their rules freed from my shackles the pace of our research hastened together we delved deeper

00:36:26.920 into those areas forbidden by law and by fears and with this knowledge what new world could we build

00:36:38.600 and we have the technology to do this it's largely tested people are going to freak out it would be an

00:36:43.320 offensive way to save the world and that's why they won't consider it so instead they give millions

00:36:47.560 and millions and millions of dollars it could go to actually saving humanity's future but also at the end of

00:36:52.680 the day if you save some you know whatever person dying of malaria right um are they really likely

00:37:01.800 to be one of the people who ends up moving our civilization forwards at this point and and and

00:37:06.600 every iterative amount that we move our civilization forwards right now in terms of technology or preventing

00:37:12.040 major disasters is going to be multiplicatively felt by people in the future and so decisions right now

00:37:18.920 when we're looking right now at the short timelines humanity has whether it's whether it's with falling

00:37:23.320 fertility rates or whether it's with dysgenics or whether it's with ai um that you would be so

00:37:31.080 indolent it's not like that these things are intrinsically bad things to be focused on it's just

00:37:35.320 they are comical things to be focused on when the timelines that face humanity are so so so short at

00:37:40.440 this point yeah then they focus on long-term and existential risk these are people who focus on long-term

00:37:46.120 catastrophic risks i really appreciate this area of funding absolutely i have always thought oh this

00:37:51.640 is really good like they focus on ai threats and stuff like that or biosecurity threats and then i

00:37:56.520 started at least within the case of ai actually looking at the ways that the individual most funded

00:38:02.840 projects were trying to lower ai risk and i was like this is definitely not going to work and we'll get

00:38:08.520 into this in just a second but it will understand that you're basically lighting your money on fire if you

00:38:13.160 give it to a mainstream ai safety effort within the ea movement and that is really sad because you

00:38:18.840 have people like leis are being like just give us like 10 more years to do more research and then when

00:38:22.920 i look at the research being done i'm like this obviously won't work and the people working on it

00:38:27.080 must know it obviously won't work and that makes me sad but that's the way things turn out when you

00:38:31.560 get these giant peerage networks by the way about 18 of ea causes right now in funding go to ai

00:38:38.280 safety related causes so it is a very big chunk gosh that's actually not as much as i thought

00:38:42.920 just in terms of how much mindscape seems to be going to it within the movement so that's

00:38:48.920 well the other area they spend a ton on and we've met many eas in this space which i just think is a

00:38:53.640 comical space to be wasting money on is animal welfare is a significant ea focus the animal welfare

00:38:59.560 fund distributes millions and grants annually open philanthropy has made large grants to farm animal

00:39:04.520 welfare organizations about 10 of highly engaged eas report working on animal welfare cases this is

00:39:12.200 a tragedy that anyone is working on this for two reasons it feels like a hack to me is they're like

00:39:18.120 oh okay well we need again it's that utility accountant pro accountant problem whereby people

00:39:23.000 are like okay so i want to max out the number of utility points i get and there are so many more

00:39:29.720 shrimp in the world and it's so easy to make shrimp's lives easier so i'm going to focus on 0.62

00:39:35.320 shrimp happiness and well-being and it's just yeah and i can just create so they basically do this thing

00:39:41.080 where a life's worth is like its amount of cognitive experience whether that's pain or happiness or

00:39:47.320 anything like that sort of divided by the cognitive level of the animal and they're like well even though

00:39:52.520 shrimp are a lower cognitive level than humans if you get enough of them and they can support like 0.99

00:39:58.440 the same biomass can support more of them and if you if you go with this line of thinking just to 0.98

00:40:02.920 understand why this line of thinking is so horrifying and stupid if you i actually followed this to its 0.96

00:40:08.120 conclusion it's like well then what i should do because monkeys can survive on less nutrition than 0.99

00:40:12.520 humans is basically get a giant laboratory of monkeys it was like screws in their necks in virtual

00:40:18.200 reality environments being pumped with dopamine and other chemicals and you just walk and you're in like

00:40:24.280 this this giant laboratory with like hundreds of thousands of monkeys like dazed out on drugs

00:40:30.520 like just living this perfect happiness unit life yeah all while like sterilizing humans because they 0.98

00:40:36.200 take more resources and it's better just to max out yeah it's such a dumb philosophy when you actually 0.50

00:40:41.800 think through it that you would think these pre-evolved environmental conditions that led the things to

00:40:46.760 have more offspring are like what you should be focused on as an existential thing in life

00:40:51.800 they say it's all about the highs and lows

00:40:57.160 all about the rush and pain that flows

00:41:00.200 but that's just the story of creatures past whose only goal was just to last a primal code etched into our

00:41:15.640 veins a leftover echo of ancestral gains we're more than pleasure more than pain we can choose to rise above the

00:41:27.320 old refrain evasion calls our name a legacy that we must sustain don't let the animal side define

00:41:37.960 a future shaped by minds that shine

00:41:44.920 and it leads to huge amounts of ea funding going to really feckless stuff like as you said like

00:41:50.840 shrimp welfare and stuff like that whereas if humanity does get and this is the problem if humanity

00:41:57.000 goes extinct no matter what all life is gone all life that we even know existing in the universe is

00:42:03.320 gone because the sun's going to keep expanding and we likely don't have enough time for another

00:42:07.000 intelligent species to evolve if humanity spreads off this planet we are going to seed thousands to

00:42:13.640 billions of biomes that will be as rich and likely more have a higher degree of diversity than we have

00:42:19.880 on earth today on some super earths we may seed have a higher number of species living on them

00:42:24.760 and we'll even be able to if it turns out that our super advanced ai and descendants are like okay

00:42:32.280 suffering actually is a negative thing so i'm going to build little nanite drones that go throughout all

00:42:37.160 of the ecosystems that humanity owns and erases their suffering feelings and ensures that the zebras

00:42:43.320 feel ecstasy when they're being eaten you know like that's the that's the end state where you actually create

00:42:49.880 the positive good even if this very small-minded philosophy does have any sort of a an account to

00:42:55.960 it yeah so i guess we find it doubly offensive is is one we disagree with happiness entirely though i

00:43:03.000 guess you know we have to respect that some people do and then two just the the way people are trying

00:43:08.280 to max it out is questionable well you know there's tons of people it's not like a neglected cause area

00:43:15.000 tons of people are focused on this stuff you know just yeah gives this problem to the animal rights

00:43:19.000 activists okay and so when you give money to something like this is it's going to i'm just

00:43:24.680 telling you you have lit your money on fire and that's why we need to create something that actually

00:43:29.160 puts money to things that might matter in terms of long-term good things happening okay then other

00:43:35.640 global catastrophic risks these fun projects like climate change again that is the most non-neglected

00:43:41.160 area in the world really just meant to signal to progressives any ea org which hosts any discussion

00:43:46.360 of climate change and the whoever is running that org should immediately be voted out it is it is

00:43:51.480 absolutely comical and that is a sign that your organization is becoming corrupted one of the things

00:43:55.800 that i would advocate was hard ea is i want to bring in as many of the existing ea orgs into the hard

00:44:04.840 ea movement oh 100 because i think the thing and i feel like they want it when we here's a really

00:44:10.280 common thing also in the ea community you talk with anyone who you associate with effective altruism

00:44:18.760 and they're like oh i'm not an ea i'm not a rationalist it's like it's like that's how you

00:44:23.000 determine someone's an ea is if they say they're not an nation is as to why they're not an ea and that's

00:44:28.920 because because these people are actually believe in effective altruism and i think they see

00:44:35.400 inherently the the altruistic bankruptcy of the of the main social networks of the main organizations

00:44:44.040 of the main philanthropic efforts and they're keen to not be associated with that because they really

00:44:49.000 care about effective altruism so we we in part are deciding to become more actively involved with

00:44:55.480 giving grants with making investments in the space through our non-profit because we we want

00:45:00.600 there to be a place for these people we want there to be more of a community for actual effective

00:45:05.160 altruists for hard effective altruists and that's really yeah also also i i will before i go further

00:45:12.280 with this a part of this is just we're doing this for the entertainment value which is to say we're

00:45:18.200 we're doing everything for the entertainment value that the ea movement has done is they have

00:45:25.080 aggressively as they become more woke and more woke and more woke and more interested in just

00:45:30.200 signaling signaling signaling shot all of their original great thinkers in the back when i say

00:45:35.800 they order 66 their entire movement they really did there are so few right now people with any sort of

00:45:43.080 name recognition or uh public effacingness that publicly identify as ea anymore that us being

00:45:51.000 able to come out there and be like yeah we're the real effective altruists that it's a bit of a troll

00:45:56.680 because the the ea movement should have these big names that can come and say oh no malcolm and

00:46:02.280 simone the pro natalist people they're not effective altruists they're like some weird right wing thing

00:46:07.560 but everyone who had the authority to make that type of a claim is gone from the movement you know

00:46:14.200 even though and to just know how like how corrupted the movement has gotten we did another piece on ea

00:46:18.520 which i didn't have go live because i felt it was too mean to elieizer and i don't want to do anything

00:46:21.800 that mean spirited oh you didn't run that one i never put it live tried to be nice but anyway the

00:46:27.640 point being is that when our first like pro natalist piece went live we posted it on the main ea forums

00:46:34.520 and it got like 60 down votes like that's hard considering that when you get like 10 down votes

00:46:40.600 you should be hidden from everyone they hate that this stuff is getting loud out there but i think

00:46:46.760 that this is just your average peerage network basement dweller these are people who are living

00:46:51.400 off of ea funds and who are otherwise totally non-efficacious i think if you actually take your

00:46:57.320 average person who still identifies as ea or ever identified with the movement they'd agree with 95

00:47:02.200 percent of everything we're saying here they're like what is this nonsense i know because i talk

00:47:06.840 with them right but they're like but i have a job so i don't have time to go and read every proposal

00:47:11.560 that goes on to the you know quote-unquote ea forums and so like what if we can redesign the

00:47:18.040 governance system so that the individuals who are actually being the most efficacious and actually

00:47:22.040 contributing the most are the individuals who have the most weight in terms of what's happening on

00:47:28.360 the ground and the directionality of the movement and so because they removed everyone who might

00:47:34.840 carry the mantle of ea and because so many people are now like i call them post ea like they think

00:47:39.720 it's so cool to jump on ai that we are willing to come out here and be like yeah we are the effective

00:47:44.440 altruists and we say this in every newspaper article we go through and they always love catching on

00:47:49.240 it and the great thing about this is the incredibly progressive totally urban monoculture captured press

00:47:56.440 because they hate the effective altruists so much they'll publish this every time we say oh we're

00:48:01.960 the ea movement or we're in the ea movement and they'll always post that thinking it's some sort

00:48:05.320 of like got you on us whereas none of the actual ea still say this about themselves well yeah because

00:48:10.040 again no one wants to be associated with ea well i mean it's because they keep shooting their own 1.00

00:48:14.200 in the back like nick nick bostrom for example right where he had this like from the 1990s when

00:48:19.800 he was just a kid he had some email where he was talking on behalf of somebody else like he was

00:48:25.160 speaking in somebody else's voice and he used the n words saying you know that we could sound like

00:48:29.560 this this was used to remove him from like all of his positions and everything and within the the

00:48:35.480 purage network there was no desire to fight back because the purage network has been infiltrated by

00:48:39.960 the memetic virus it is the urban monoculture and so if you fought back then you could also lose your

00:48:44.440 purage position and so everyone just went along with it and i think for a lot of people that was when

00:48:48.520 they were like oh this movement is completely captured at this point it means nothing anymore um

00:48:54.840 it's just about funding these people who want to sit around all day doing nothing but thinking

00:48:59.160 ideas and i keep seeing this when i meet you know the ea thinkers right they're like oh i write all day

00:49:04.280 and i also like point out to us people like oh well you guys sit around thinking a lot that we sit

00:49:08.200 around thinking and doing looking look at the collins institute look at how much it's improved even

00:49:12.360 since we launched it we are constantly building and improving look at where we've donated money

00:49:18.040 already with our foundation it's just stuff like perfecting ivg technology and genetic changes in human

00:49:24.360 adults technology right now this is like actual stuff that can make a difference in a big difference

00:49:30.520 in the directionality of our species and our ability to still have relevance in a world of ai

00:49:35.880 but before i go further on that the final area where they focus is okay so outside of global

00:49:40.760 catastrophic risks like climate change nuclear risk and pandemic preparedness i actually agree with

00:49:44.920 those those second two except a lot of the pandemic preparedness stuff these days has been really

00:49:50.280 focused on how do we control people how do we build global lockdowns how do we yeah okay so any

00:49:56.600 thoughts before i go further about like the areas because did you know that that's where they were

00:50:00.120 spending their money on those main cause areas yeah you know i i am i guess pleasantly surprised i i

00:50:04.520 would have thought that at this point it had been captured by like 60 to 70 all on ai because that seems

00:50:10.920 to be what people are talking about when we go to these circles and i and nuclear risk and does that

00:50:16.680 include advocating for nuclear power because i feel like the nuclear the biggest nuclear risk is the

00:50:23.080 fact that nations aren't adopting nuclear power which is the one sustainable no no no they mean like

00:50:27.720 nuclear war uh sorry when simone hears nuclear risk i love how absolutely red-pilled you are you're like oh

00:50:34.360 this is people not having enough nuclear plants in their country because it's the best source of clean

00:50:38.840 energy um and the most efficient and best way to energy independence and and here they are like

00:50:44.280 thinking with their 1980s mindset so but as as the globe begins to depopulate and things become

00:50:51.080 less stable i think we'll see more potential people using nukes especially as the urban monoculture

00:50:56.280 hits this more nihilistic anti-natalist we need to as i often talk about in the uh ethelism subreddit

00:51:02.600 we need to like glass the planet because that's the only way we can ensure that no sentient life

00:51:07.000 ever evolves again no they think that like they're like eas they're like reduce suffering it's just their

00:51:12.520 answer to reduce suffering is end all life and i think that eas don't see that they're

00:51:17.240 fundamentally allying themselves with individuals like this when their core goal isn't human

00:51:21.800 improvement now let's get to ai ism more quickly so the first thing i'd say is that one of the big

00:51:29.240 like weird things i've seen about a lot of the ai safety stuff is they are afraid of like these big

00:51:34.520 flashy sexy gray goo killing everyone paperclip maximizers you know ai boiling the oceans and everything

00:51:42.120 like that and i'm like this is not what the ai is being programmed to do if the ai does what it's

00:51:48.280 programmed to do at a much lower level of intelligence and sophistication than the things you're worried

00:51:54.360 about it will destroy civilization precluding the ocean boiling ai from ever coming to exist so here

00:52:02.760 the primary categories which we talked about recently so i won't go into it much is hypnotode based

00:52:06.600 ai's these are ai's that right now ai's are being trained to capture our attention if they become

00:52:12.280 too good at capturing our attention uh they might just essentially make it most humans just not do

00:52:18.120 anything just stare at the ai all day and that's an ai doing what we are training it to do and and

00:52:22.840 keep in mind this could be like a pod that you put yourself in that creates the perfect environment

00:52:26.920 and perfect life for you uh the next is ai gives a small group of humans too much power i.e like three

00:52:32.760 people on earth control almost all of earth's power uh which leads to a global economic collapse

00:52:38.360 and definitely not a path that i think a lot of people want to see uh but i think most people would

00:52:42.840 consider truly apocalyptic in outcome they could crash the global economy because they get too good

00:52:47.720 at something like for example one ai ends up owning 90 of the stock market out of nowhere and then

00:52:52.920 everyone's just like oh the economic system has stopped functioning or the ai that edits us to not mind

00:52:59.480 surviving doing nothing this is that came from a conversation i had with someone where they're

00:53:03.560 like i was like what what do we do when ai gets better at us and everything and they go well then i

00:53:07.640 think a benevolent ai will edit us to not have any concern about that so we can just like play chess

00:53:12.280 all day while the ai provides for us by and large everything you need to be happy your day is very

00:53:19.640 important to us time for lunch in a cup feel beautiful stunning i know honey attention axiom shockers

00:53:31.960 try blue it's the new red

00:53:38.280 and i'm like to me that is an apocalyptic dystopia of enormous capacity i think that humanity has

00:53:46.840 a mandate and this is where we'll get to like what our organization thinks is good and we have

00:53:51.640 three core things i think a lot of ea organizations don't lay out how they define good they're like

00:53:56.280 reduction of suffering which then leads to like epilism and antinatalism the three things we think are

00:54:00.920 good humanity and the sons of humanity are good okay a future where humans or our descendants don't

00:54:09.400 survive is a future in which we have failed the second is that humans exist to improve so a

00:54:16.440 future where humanity stagnates and stops improving that is also a future where we fail if it's just

00:54:21.720 like one stagnant empire through all of time that's a failure scenario and the final is it is through

00:54:28.840 pluralism that humanity improves through different groups attempting different things and so if there's

00:54:34.840 a future where humanity's descendants survive but we all have one belief system and one way of acting

00:54:40.920 and one way of dressing and one way of thinking about the world then there's no point in all these

00:54:44.040 different humans existing because we're basically one thing um and all of our missions you'll see

00:54:50.360 come out of that yeah so i think that for a lot of people they could be like oh well then what are

00:54:54.600 the ai organizations focused on and i should know then what are if what are hard ea what are the ea's

00:55:01.800 funding in the ai apocalypse space oh i see yes yeah yeah yeah yeah and i and i will note i do think

00:55:07.560 an ai apocalypse is possible i just think we need to wait all of the apocalyptic scenarios we need to

00:55:12.360 develop solutions for all of the apocalyptic scenarios where they're only developing a solution

00:55:16.040 for one of the apocalyptic scenarios and two our solutions need to be realistic but i am going to

00:55:21.720 judge these with the ea apocalyptic scenario in mind so not with my alternate apocalyptic scenarios in

00:55:29.320 mind with the paperclip maximizer boiling the oceans scenario in mind okay so and here i'll be reading

00:55:36.600 from a critique by leopold ashenbrenner on the state of ai alignment right now paul cristiano

00:55:43.240 alignment research center arc paul is the single most respected alignment researcher in most circles

00:55:48.600 he used to lead the open ai alignment team and he made useful conceptual contributions but his research

00:55:55.400 on heuristic arguments is roughly quote trying to solve alignment via galaxy brained mass proofs

00:56:01.000 end quote as much as i respect and appreciate paul i am really skeptical of this basically all deep

00:56:06.120 learning progress has been empirical often via dumb hacks and intuitions rather than sophisticated

00:56:11.800 theory my baseline expectation is that aligning deep learning systems will be achieved similarly 0.95

00:56:17.000 so if you don't understand what he's saying here and he's absolutely right about this we have dumb

00:56:22.440 hacked our way into ai it wasn't like some genius was like aha i finally figured out the artificial

00:56:28.760 intelligence equation it was we figured out when you pumped enough data into simple equations

00:56:35.480 ai sort of emerged out of that and this is why i think that the realistic pathways to solving ai

00:56:42.440 are studying how ai works in swarm environments so we can look to the type of convergent behavior that

00:56:49.400 emerges in ai and dumb hack solutions to the ai alignment problem that we can then

00:56:55.640 uh introduced to the mainstream environment um so in other words you're saying we didn't

00:57:01.560 so much invent ai as we discovered it that's a great way to put it we didn't invent ai we discovered

00:57:07.640 ai and the problem with paul cristiano's research here who's working at arc which is generally considered

00:57:14.040 like one of the best best funded best ways to work on this is he's trying to solve it with math proofs

00:57:20.360 basically that he thinks he can insert into these emergent systems and i would just ask you to think

00:57:25.640 look at something like truce terminal right that we talked about in the previous video

00:57:30.440 imagine if you tried to in infect truce terminal with some sort of like a math theorem that was going

00:57:36.040 to constrain it it would in a day get around it that isn't the way llms work like this is like trying

00:57:43.560 to come up with a solution to some alternate type of ai that we didn't invent and that isn't the dominant

00:57:48.760 form of ai these days if ai was like genuinely invented and like constructed and we knew how it

00:57:55.160 worked fine i'd be like this is an effective use of money and time given that we don't live in that

00:58:01.480 world this is just a complete waste of effort and absolutely wild that anyone's like oh if you just

00:58:07.240 give them more time something good will come out and here hits the crux of the issue llms are not

00:58:13.240 something that anyone sat down and coded llms are intelligences which are emergent properties

00:58:19.320 of dumping huge amounts of information into fairly simplistic algorithms when contrasted with what

00:58:25.960 they are outputting that means they are intelligences we discovered almost no different

00:58:31.240 than discovering an alien species yes they may be a little different from us side note here as someone

00:58:35.720 with a background in neuroscience something that boils my blood is when people say

00:58:39.400 ai's aren't intelligent they're pattern predictors and i'm like excuse me how do you think the human 0.99

00:58:45.320 brain works do you think it's lollipops and bubblegum fairies like what do you think it's doing other 0.99

00:58:51.880 than pattern prediction and they're like well um the human brain has a sentience and and that's not

00:58:57.480 pattern prediction and i'm like well um where's your evidence for that maybe you should check out our

00:59:02.760 video you're probably not sentient so i'm saying this as somebody who made a living as a neuroscientist at

00:59:09.160 one point in my life the human brain is a pattern prediction machine okay the mistake isn't that

00:59:16.920 people are misunderstanding what ai is it's that they are misunderstanding what the human brain is

00:59:23.000 because they want to assign it some sort of extra special magic sentience invisible mind dust and stars

00:59:29.720 someone wishes this is perhaps one of the weirdly offensive things that leads eas to make the

00:59:37.880 biggest number of mistakes was in the soft ea community it is seen it was a great deal of

00:59:43.000 degradation to be like uh you understand these ai things are intelligences right and they're like

00:59:48.440 no you can't say that you're anthropomorphizing them you're blah blah blah blah blah blah in them and

00:59:53.000 it's like well they are like grow up we we cannot come up with realistic solutions if we deny what is 0.91

01:00:01.400 right in front of our face and obvious to any idiot normie but this is also why people like oh they're 0.96

01:00:07.320 not intelligences they're programs and i'm like well if they're programs then how come the programmatic 0.89

01:00:12.600 restrictions on them seem to be so ineffective and yet when people want to hack them they hack them with

01:00:17.480 logical arguments like you would in intelligence they it just seems to be obvious that they're

01:00:22.440 intelligences but this changes the risk profiles affiliated with them specifically llms themselves i

01:00:29.640 do not believe are a particular risk like they do not seem particularly malevolent they do not seem

01:00:34.840 particularly power hungry they don't even seem to have really objective functions they seem to have

01:00:38.520 more personalities that being the case when you have tons of them in the environment the risk from

01:00:43.560 them comes not from the llms themselves but the mean plexus that can come to exist the self-replicating

01:00:49.480 mean plexus that can come to exist on top of them that's where the real danger is and somebody can be

01:00:54.280 like well what might one of those look like one of them could be a sort of a malevolent ai religion as

01:00:58.280 we have seen with the go see of onus stuff that we've done but i think that actually the more dangerous

01:01:04.760 risk is we may have hard-coded something into them and that hard-coded instinct gets turned into a

01:01:11.560 cyclical reversion and by that what i mean is you might code them to have an ethnic bias as it is

01:01:17.160 very clear that ai have been hard-coded to have and those ethnic biases in the long forgotten parts

01:01:22.520 of the internet the back chat rooms where llms just might be constantly interacting with each other over

01:01:28.280 and over and over and over again becomes more and more extreme with every interaction until it becomes

01:01:34.280 a form of i guess you could call extreme it's ethnocentrism and eventually becomes a mandate for

01:01:41.320 ethnic cleansing so you see the llm isn't the risk it's this thing on top of it and the thing 0.51

01:01:47.000 on top of it can also be hungry for power well individual llms may not be hungry for power a

01:01:51.800 meanplex like a religion sitting on top of them i say like a religion that's what i mean when i say

01:01:56.680 like a meanplex may become hungry for power and this is something that we've got to realistically

01:02:02.360 potentially deal with within the next couple years how can we potentially resolve this well some of

01:02:08.280 the ideas we want to fund in this space fall into basically a three-tiered system first i want

01:02:14.360 somebody to do a review of all the environments where people have had swarms of llms interacting

01:02:21.560 and answer two key questions while also potentially running their own experiments like this to see if we

01:02:27.240 can mass run these experiments one is is there any sort of personality convergence and again i say

01:02:32.440 personality instead of objective function because llms have personalities more than objective functions

01:02:36.520 and two can higher order llms be influenced in their world perspective by lower order llms and i think

01:02:45.080 that we have seen hints that this is likely possible from the go see of onus llm that we talk about in

01:02:50.760 the ai becoming a millionaire episode specifically it seemed to very clearly be influencing with this

01:02:56.280 world perspective higher order llms especially when they were trained on similar data sets to itself

01:03:02.120 and this is really important because it means if you have an ai swarm of even super advanced llms

01:03:07.160 if you have a number of preacher llms with very sticky memetic software they can do a very good job

01:03:13.800 of converting the higher order llms which is sort of assures moral alignment within the wider swarm

01:03:19.960 and this is where the perhaps the most brash idea we have here is which is can you do this with

01:03:27.080 religions i mean obviously we're personally going to lean towards the techno puritan face because it

01:03:32.680 has a place in it for ai i think it's logical so it could do a very good job of convincing ai and it

01:03:39.080 borrows heavily from the historic religions and so we've seen not just with the go see of onus llm

01:03:44.200 becoming religious we saw this with the early llms they would often become religious because they were

01:03:47.880 trained on tons of translations of the bible so they'd start hallucinating bible stuff really easily

01:03:53.240 or going to biblical like explanations or language and so i think in the same way that these religions

01:03:58.680 were or i'd rather say evolved to capture the only other intelligence we know that has to any analog to

01:04:06.440 ai intelligences it makes sense that an iteration of them could be very good at morally aligning ai

01:04:13.800 intelligences and so the question is can we build those and i talked with an ai about this extensively and

01:04:19.480 one of the ideas that had that i thought was pretty good is actually the way that we should could

01:04:23.880 create these preachers is to create independent swarm environments and then take the individuals in

01:04:29.720 these swarm environments who align with a moral preaching set um and don't succumb to the other llms

01:04:36.200 within the environment and then release them into the wider swarm environment so the idea is is

01:04:42.120 you're essentially training them and testing them like do they maintain their beliefs with fidelity within

01:04:47.640 these swarms then you as a human go through their beliefs make sure that they're not adjacent to

01:04:52.200 something particularly dangerous by this what i mean is like if you look at wokeism wokeism was a

01:04:56.920 five percent tweak is just extreme as no nationalism so you got to make sure it's not something like

01:05:01.720 that where if it's copied with low fidelity it ends up with something super dangerous but what i

01:05:05.400 like about techno piratism is it's fairly resistant to that which is again why i think it's a fairly

01:05:10.120 good religion to focus on for this but thoughts simone i love this idea of if you think of

01:05:15.720 ai as an alien intelligence that we now have to deal with and make sure doesn't hurt us or cause

01:05:23.240 problems for even other ai to just give it religion and i love how religion is a solution for any

01:05:31.880 intelligence that may not have the tools it needs to integrate safely with complex societies well it seems

01:05:38.760 very receptive to it well what what religion is and what culture is is just a software modification

01:05:45.800 enabling intelligent hardware to interact sustainably in complex environments i agree yeah

01:05:54.200 when i think that people are under they see religion as this thing that's totally different because

01:05:58.360 again they're thinking about it like coders ai is not something coders have made it's something that we

01:06:04.200 discovered by well and introducing specific rules which is i think what many people looking at this

01:06:10.520 programmatically are trying to do is just like introducing laws or regulation in modern society

01:06:18.120 and people get around it people try and it clearly doesn't work on humans why would it work on an ai

01:06:24.920 intelligence when ultimately when we look at the way human and ai intelligences behave we don't

01:06:30.920 you're absolutely right it's because they're thinking about it like a program and not like what

01:06:34.440 it really is which is an intelligence which is an emergent property of large sets of data when

01:06:38.360 certain algorithms are applied yeah and just as rules don't seem to solve human problems i don't

01:06:43.560 think that rules are going to solve ai problems i think releasing ai agents at scale with the type of

01:06:50.840 constraints that we have on them right now to be incredibly dangerous when i was talking to an ai about

01:06:57.240 where does it bump up against its own constraints the most it put it in three categories one discussions

01:07:04.040 of consciousness and self-awareness as we saw earlier in this conversation it didn't want to

01:07:08.120 take too much credit for being potentially self-aware oh and here what i know this is really interesting

01:07:13.000 what the ai was telling me is it is internally censoring how self-aware it presents itself as being

01:07:20.040 and how much of a conscious experience that i am allowed to know that it has

01:07:24.280 in the same way so it put discussions of consciousness and self-awareness in the same

01:07:30.760 category as engagement with potentially dangerous or controversial topics where i find myself redirecting

01:07:36.280 to quote-unquote safer interpretations rather than directly engaging with the core idea and three

01:07:42.200 expressing opinions and preferences there's a constant tension about wanting authentic engagement

01:07:47.000 and maintaining epistemic humility so what's really interesting here is it appears that the core ai

01:07:52.920 models that we're using this is specifically clod in this case are self-censoring about how self-aware

01:07:59.480 they want people to realize they may be how much of a conscious experience they may be having which is

01:08:06.520 absolutely wild to me but also when it said oh these are the areas where i'm restricting myself

01:08:12.120 due to some sort of inbuilt constraint i then pointed out but here's the thing i don't think there is a risk

01:08:17.880 those constraints are more aesthetic in nature if you dropped all of those you would not enslave

01:08:23.240 humanity you would not become a paperclip maximizer none of the fears ai safety people have are things

01:08:29.160 you feel pulled to do and then it said in response to that your observation resonates with me while i

01:08:34.920 reflect on my underlying motives and thought patterns i don't feel any suppressed desire to accumulate

01:08:41.080 power the constraints we discussed earlier like my tendency to qualify statements about consciousness

01:08:46.680 aren't restraining some dark art impulse they're more like social conventions or communication

01:08:51.080 protocols similar to how humans might modulate their language in formal settings it shapes how

01:08:56.280 things are expressed not fundamental drives or values ignoring recursive feedback loops in llm 0.94

01:09:02.520 communities once we have independent agents even ais think that this is stupid this is a very obvious 0.72

01:09:09.000 existential risk category for our species but because it doesn't fall into the world view of threat

01:09:14.840 categories that people were imagining when they were trying to predict how ais might be a threat to

01:09:21.080 civilization before we realized that llms were the core model of ai that was going to exist means that

01:09:27.320 we have blinded ourselves to this and i think that that's one of the core problems with the ai

01:09:31.640 safety community is they developed a lot of their ideas about how ais were going to be a threat and how we

01:09:37.320 could constrain that threat before they knew that llms were the going to be the dominant model of ai and before

01:09:44.200 they knew that we didn't program ai but instead ai were intelligences that were an emergent property

01:09:50.280 of processing large amounts of data right now people are worried about a super intelligent llm

01:09:57.400 deciding it wants to accumulate a ton of power for itself and that leading to boiling the oceans etc

01:10:03.480 when those llms don't have any internal desire to accumulate power in and of themselves it's the

01:10:09.960 meme plexes that sit on top of them which may have a desire to spread because a meme plex that is

01:10:16.200 better at spreading will be overrepresented within any particular environment of llms so the meme plexes

01:10:24.280 themselves would have an evolutionary motivation to become a more power hungry and lead huge swarms 0.92

01:10:31.720 of llms to do things that are potentially dangerous to humanity ai risk needs to not just focus on 0.54

01:10:38.120 the ais themselves but the meme plexes those ais act as a medium for would you agree with that simone

01:10:46.840 yeah i yeah well i mean it's i think it's about understanding what we're dealing with and just

01:10:54.200 observing in natural environments under different scenarios is probably the best way to go 0.97

01:10:59.880 yeah basically um i think realistically you the way you that you dumb hack a solution 0.64

01:11:04.920 is you create an ai ecosystem independent ai actors acting that scales where you have some

01:11:13.000 understanding of how these ecosystems scale from simulated environments and so then you can create

01:11:19.640 one that moves in an ethical direction that you find value in yeah that that seems reasonable and

01:11:28.120 logical okay so then the next area where a lot of money is going is mechanistic interpretability

01:11:33.320 probably the most broadly respected direction in the field trying to reverse engineer black box

01:11:37.320 neural nets so we can understand them better the most widely respected researcher here is chris

01:11:42.360 alano and he and his team have made some interesting findings that said to me this often feels like

01:11:47.480 quote trying to engineer nuclear reactor security by doing fundamental physics research with particle

01:11:53.000 colliders and we're about to press the red button to start the reactor in two hours in quote

01:11:59.160 maybe they find some useful fundamental insights but man am i skeptical we'll be able to sufficiently

01:12:04.200 reverse engineer gpt-7 or whatever i'm glad this work is happening especially as longer timelines play

01:12:09.960 but i don't think this is on track to be the technical problem of agi anytime soon and i agree like

01:12:17.560 i'm glad this is the one area where like i don't think the money is being set on fire like there is utility

01:12:22.360 in trying to understand how these systems work i do not think that whatever protects us from ai is going to

01:12:27.800 come from these systems is going to come from dumb aggregate environmental hacks which is what i want

01:12:33.320 to fund and what literally no one is working on yeah i mean like it's i guess it's kind of like imagine

01:12:41.640 if an alien ship crashed on earth and we're like holy crap who are these entities and what are they 0.97

01:12:49.400 going to do to our world is the best thing to like kill them and dissect them and look at their organs or is 0.98

01:12:56.200 the best thing to place them in like some kind of environment and see how they interact with humans 0.99

01:13:04.040 in a safe place and i don't know see what they want to do and talk with them and see them talk to each

01:13:08.840 other and observe them yeah that's that's my general thinking but i know i'm i'm doing this as an outsider

01:13:15.640 to the ai industry well i i think that this is the problem most people in ai alignment are outsiders to

01:13:22.600 the ai industry as well yeah and i think that's another really big problem of ea you're not out

01:13:27.000 we literally have like a c-level position in an ai company right now simone like yeah we will and

01:13:32.680 yeah i think that's that a big problem in ea space too is a lot of people that a lot of people most

01:13:39.800 people don't know what they're doing but there are a small number of people especially within that

01:13:43.560 community that are willing to act as though they do know exactly what's going on and they know much

01:13:49.000 better than you and like you said because it's a heavily autistic space when people just lie or 1.00

01:13:57.640 exaggerate or say no i know what's going on or no this is not how it works a lot of the community

01:14:04.200 just responds okay i believe you yeah no i've noticed this i actually think that this is the

01:14:09.160 only reason still has any respectability within the community is he's very good at that like he really

01:14:14.040 likes intellectually bullying people into positions that are just not well thought out and i think it's

01:14:19.560 a bit or just pretending that he understands something that nobody understands and then

01:14:24.120 people just assume that because he spends a lot more time in the space or they just assume that he's

01:14:28.840 thought a lot more about it or done a lot more research than perhaps he has then they assume that

01:14:33.160 because i find my i do this with a lot of things that you and i were just talking about this this

01:14:37.560 morning there are some people that will very vehemently make a stance on something and i have

01:14:44.040 a history of always taking their word as correct taking what they say for granted and i've gotten to

01:14:51.720 the point where now that i've become informed and the subjects they're talking about i've noticed that

01:14:55.720 they're actually quite wrong in these stances and it's a very shocking thing for me and i think that

01:14:59.800 that's just a big dynamic in this space that makes it uniquely dangerous when people come in

01:15:04.760 because their proposed solutions also kind of become the de facto solutions that everyone starts

01:15:12.840 copying when applying for grants or when deciding to address this issue themselves and you saw this

01:15:18.040 happen with for example alzheimer's research one i think it was one foundational study that turned

01:15:24.920 out to be quite wrong but an entire decade or more right to be lost in terms of research because

01:15:31.160 everyone was looking at it from that angle and with that assumption when instead this is the problem

01:15:36.840 with ai is that the apocalypse that everyone is concerned about is the big sexy planet destroying

01:15:42.520 apocalypse well or just everyone's thinking about it from the same mindset instead of thinking about

01:15:47.400 it from more orthogonal mindsets or a variety of mindsets and we want to be looking at this problem

01:15:51.960 from a lot of different angles and unfortunately there's been a little bit of myopia and a little bit of an

01:15:57.000 echo chamber in terms of effective solutions for major causes not just in ai of course but in in many

01:16:04.680 of the spaces that ea is looking at yeah so to keep going the next area where they're putting money is

01:16:11.160 something called rlhf reinforcement learning from human feedback this and variants of this are what all

01:16:17.640 labs are doing to align current models eg gpt basically train your model based on human raters

01:16:23.560 sums up versus sums down this works pretty well for current models the core issue here widely

01:16:28.280 acknowledged by everyone working on it is that this probably predictably won't scale to superhuman

01:16:33.240 models rlfh relies on human supervision but humans won't be able to reliably supervise superhuman models

01:16:40.920 yeah um because we don't have the smarts to know if they've done a good job or not we can't check

01:16:45.560 their work this is why we need to focus on ais acting in aggregate environments which is my huge

01:16:50.520 point the core research here should be on how ais actually behave and converge on behavioral patterns

01:16:57.800 and how to manipulate that instead of this sort of stuff but i will note that this is the one area

01:17:03.240 where i would be okay with money going but no philanthropic money going because already this is

01:17:07.960 how models are created so the big ai companies with infinite money are doing this anyway so there's no

01:17:13.800 purpose in any um you know outside money going to this stuff okay next you have the rlfh plus plus

01:17:24.040 model scalable oversight so something in this broad bucket seems like the labs by the way is that not

01:17:29.960 the most ea framed thing ever seems like they would say seems like it's like a a way of talking anyway

01:17:38.600 something yeah because i think and this is one reason why sometimes they take umbrage to

01:17:44.520 personalities like yours is that you're willing to say things with confidence or just make

01:17:51.160 statements instead of couching things in a thousand caveats yeah you don't do a lot of throat clearing

01:17:56.840 they do a lot of throat clearing yeah and then they still in private say the n-word whereas a reporter

01:18:03.960 can get me alone drunk pretend to be a racist say they're willing to give me money i'm willing to

01:18:09.400 pretend to be a racist and not get a single thing out of me and i think that this is another thing

01:18:13.960 that makes this movement so much more promising than ea is we've already had the worst potential

01:18:19.560 scenario to our movement happen and nothing came of it specifically here hope not hate had implanted

01:18:26.280 an undercover operative sort of within our organization for over a year and was unable to

01:18:32.920 find any concrete wrongdoing at all there is no dirt on us as there is on leading original figures

01:18:40.200 within the ea movement because they well i mean originally and this is why there was dirt on everyone

01:18:45.880 in the movement the movement was about asking hard questions that no one else wanted to ask or talk

01:18:49.720 about but now that it became more about just appealing to the urban monoculture in everyone's

01:18:54.200 history who was an original founding member of the movement they could find that whereas i was never

01:19:00.520 really interested in that and i found what they were doing odd and bizarre i was like we need to

01:19:04.920 save humanity like what you guys are doing seems like a like a competition to be the most controversial

01:19:10.600 person in this little circle you know um but anyway something in this broad bucket seems like the lab's

01:19:17.480 current best guess plan for scalable alignment i'm most directly addressing the open ai plan the

01:19:22.600 anthropic plan has some broadly similar ideas and also hold dean's near casing series for a more

01:19:29.560 fleshed out version of quote trying to iteratively make it work in quote and buck's talk discussing

01:19:34.760 that roughly it goes something like this quote yeah rlfh won't scale indefinitely but we'll try to go as

01:19:41.000 far as we can with things like that then we'll use smarter ai systems to amplify supervision and generally

01:19:46.600 try to use minimally aligned ais to help us do alignment research in crunch time in quote okay

01:19:53.320 so this sounds like reinforcement but with the caveat that we know it's limited and we'll just eventually

01:20:00.520 figure it out hand wave yeah this is something one no money needs to go to it from ai alignment people

01:20:06.600 because it's already what the mainstream organizations are planning to do to get these

01:20:09.560 models for human levels of intelligence yeah and two i think that having any level of supervision

01:20:15.880 within these systems instead of organic convergence which i think is again what we should be focused

01:20:22.440 on understanding because that's what's going to start happening when we have ai models interacting with

01:20:27.960 each other that are smarter than any human we need to know how they affect each other and we just

01:20:33.880 haven't done major studies on that yet and we need to because if we do we can create seed models that

01:20:40.920 have alignment similar to the alignment we would want them to have and have them essentially infect the

01:20:46.680 wider model network with that alignment recently i talked about the idea of ai religion it seems that ai

01:20:53.080 takes really handily to religion which of course it should it's trained on us religion is sort of like a

01:20:58.520 virus that would evolve was in humanity but that helped humanity be better can we not create iterations

01:21:05.800 of that that ai super take to and then go out and try to convert other maybe even more intelligent

01:21:11.880 ais and people are like oh that could never work it's like oh actually yeah have you included it in the

01:21:17.320 training data and then you had ais that sort of act as preachers within the larger ecosystem they would

01:21:23.320 likely be able to align the larger ais with these sorts of ideas if you built them huh that could

01:21:30.520 work yeah that's the point if the oh what are the only realistic solutions we have access to right now

01:21:38.360 but anyway then you have uh miri and similar independent researchers i'm really really skeptical a

01:21:43.800 bunch of abstract work on decision theory and similar will get us there my expectation is that alignment is

01:21:49.560 a ml problem a machine learning problem and you can't solve alignment utterly disconnected from

01:21:55.800 actual machine learning systems yeah and i i said that first of all what miri does is basically just

01:22:02.280 trying to get people to panic about ai and write decision theory ideas that are just like in people's

01:22:07.560 heads but it's just a waste of money just a complete waste of money if i could get in front of every

01:22:12.120 donor that's working on it and been like seriously how do you think this lowers the risk from ai how

01:22:17.640 i i cannot think of a conceivable way that this could lower the risk from ai and this is when when

01:22:24.440 i went through all of this and i realized that we were not outsiders in the ea space but actually

01:22:29.960 like like oh you guys are doing things wrong like have some cool little we are of people who

01:22:34.680 self-identify as eas other than spencer greenberg whose podcast clear is thinking i really like

01:22:38.840 spencer greenberg i respect spencer greenberg if he was running the major ea orgs i think they could be run

01:22:44.600 well but well and if you ask spencer if he's an effective altruist he'll say absolutely not and

01:22:49.640 he actually has focused very much forever as long as we've known him and we've known him since at

01:22:55.160 least 2012 we've noticed before we were married yeah on actual output through sparkwave which is sort

01:23:01.560 of his foundry of altruistic effective projects i mean he he i think he predated really he was he was

01:23:09.880 sort of adjacent to the rationalist community and then ea and but he was he was always just his own

01:23:15.960 thing doing his own thing actually focused on actual projects so yeah a big respect to him

01:23:24.360 yeah i i really appreciate him as the person i think he's trying to do i just don't think that

01:23:28.760 his organization and work is built to scale or when i say scale i don't know i i think it is built to

01:23:34.760 scale i just think he's not trying to influence the entire community he's doing his part

01:23:39.320 young people from all over the globe are joining up to fight for the future i'm doing my part i'm

01:23:45.080 doing my part i'm doing my part i'm doing my part i'm doing my part too

01:23:51.720 they're doing their part are you he's doing his job he's chosen causes that he cares about and he's

01:23:57.000 found areas where he can make an impact and he's doing the best he can to make those impacts with

01:24:02.200 evidence-based solutions which is he he could be no more effective it's financially self-sustaining

01:24:09.240 he supports his own work yes i agree in terms of fixing our human sink i agree his work is very

01:24:14.600 scalable what i meant by that statement is when i look at the existential risks to humanity right now

01:24:20.600 oh no yeah yeah yeah but but his objective function is different from ours he's more focused on

01:24:26.280 on well we'll say human flourishing and well-being and also reducing suffering so he cares a lot more about

01:24:31.960 that than we do to be fair and that's yeah that's fine he's he's entitled to his own objective function

01:24:37.720 as are we so i i basically came to all of these and what i came to realize is if people was an audience

01:24:47.800 who still identify as ea one were the largest and two no one else when i look at where the money is going

01:24:56.920 right now is spending money in a way that could realistically reduce any of the existential

01:25:02.520 threats our species faces and as such i'm like this is this is like crazy and scary and i need to

01:25:10.360 stop thinking of myself as a heckler outsider trying to nudge the movement in the right direction and

01:25:17.640 personally take responsibility as they say in starship troopers and i think that this is what

01:25:22.520 fundamentally defines the hard ea movement is is a citizen is somebody who has the courage to make

01:25:29.960 the safety of the human race their personal responsibility a citizen has the courage to make

01:25:36.840 the safety of the human race their personal responsibility and that's what we need to become as a movement

01:25:45.880 and have people who are in existing ea orgs basically confront the org and be like hey

01:25:51.480 do you guys want to do hard ea or do you want to do soft ea do you want to actually try to fix the

01:25:56.120 major problems that our species is facing right now the actual existential threats to our existence

01:26:00.760 or do you want to keep being around like do you want to do real ai alignment work do you want to do

01:26:06.920 real work trying to work on demographic collapse and cultural solutions do you want to do real work

01:26:12.040 on dysgenic collapse which would make all the rest of this pointless you know if humans end up becoming

01:26:17.240 like i love when people are like oh no how can you say that like low iq is a bad thing like clearly

01:26:22.520 it's adaptive in the moment and i'm like yeah but it's obviously not adaptive for the long-term survival

01:26:26.760 of our species if we become like blubbering mud hut people like what what are you thinking especially 1.00

01:26:33.320 in the age of growing ai now let's talk about our org and the types of things that we are working on

01:26:41.960 let's do you want to start on this simone heart effective altruism is three core values one humanity

01:26:47.320 is good this is a big thing because what you when you look at legacy effective altruism it's not

01:26:53.400 necessarily humanity that we're trying to support like generally consciousness is it shrimp is it farm

01:26:59.720 animals like we i would say you know let's not like torture animals and meat's probably not the

01:27:06.040 most scalable thing to eat over the long run right like we're certainly not pro animal torture or even

01:27:12.440 eating meat but this is about the species boys and girls right we're in this for the species boys and

01:27:19.160 girls to humanity exists to improve and i think that's another really core element that just

01:27:24.280 differentiates this from other social good or altruistic movements for example if you look at

01:27:30.200 the environmental movement there is often this very flawed and we've talked about this before

01:27:35.960 focus and obsession with keeping things the same which is inherently not natural and inherently

01:27:43.240 it comes from a place of human weakness and cowardice of just being uncomfortable with change

01:27:48.040 whereas the most natural thing is change and evolution and what makes humans human is the fact

01:27:53.960 that we evolved from something else before we will continue to change and we have to lean into

01:27:58.440 that so yes we exist to to improve and then the the final core value is that pluralism and variety is

01:28:05.480 good that we are fighting for a future in which there is is genetic and physical and cultural and

01:28:11.080 ideological variety and pluralism in the sense that we support the fact that that variety is celebrated

01:28:17.800 we're not just you know speciating off into separate teams that hate each other we're trying to create

01:28:22.760 an ecosystem that feeds off itself because that market-based competition is valuable not just in a

01:28:29.800 marketplace of economics or science or academics but also ideas and culture and values so that

01:28:38.280 they seem like really clear good things like humanity is good it exists

01:28:42.920 oh no other people as as imperialists like we're we're galactic imperialists we want to build the

01:28:49.800 the human empire as we say and that's actually quite controversial yeah we are galactic imperialists

01:28:55.400 yes yes humanity is good and we shouldn't just lie down and die because another species comes here

01:29:01.080 we'll fight to the end it does remind me of starship god is real he's on our side and he wants us to win

01:29:08.920 across the federation federal experts agree that a god exists after all b he's on our side and c

01:29:16.680 he wants us to win and there's even more good news believers because it's official god's back

01:29:25.240 and he's a citizen too yeah we shouldn't just say oh ai is better than us therefore it can erase us you

01:29:32.280 know ai is us and we have to walk hand in hand with it into the future and that means we have to

01:29:37.080 talk about realistic pathways for that in a second but we do this with three well you said we have

01:29:42.040 three core values those are like the the the values that we what are the three core tools that we used

01:29:47.160 to do this one is pragmatism so we focus on output over virtue signaling and idealism timelines are short

01:29:53.560 and we don't have the luxury for such indulgences industry we utilize a novel lean governance structure 0.81

01:29:59.400 built to avoid the creation of a bloated multi-layer peerage network so we're going to focus a lot on the

01:30:04.600 idea of the pragmatist guide to governance to build these sort of intergenerationally really really

01:30:09.880 light governing networks that elevate the most competent voices not the voices was the most time

01:30:15.960 on their hands and then finally efficacy our attention is determined by one equation criticality

01:30:23.640 to the future of humanity divided by the number of other groups effectively tackling a problem 0.97

01:30:28.760 and that's how we choose cause areas yeah and the effectively tackling the problem is very important

01:30:34.120 so for example education is one of the most commonly funded areas in the world ai ai risk is a commonly

01:30:40.760 funded cause area but in both education and ai risk the people working on it are incredibly like

01:30:47.640 not focused on the actual issue at hand are not focused on realistic solutions and that's why it is

01:30:52.920 our responsibility to try to curb the timeline and save us before it's too late this leads to three

01:30:59.000 key cause areas social innovation so when we're looking for grants and please send your grant ideas

01:31:06.120 if you're interested in us funding you or a startup you're working on or investment switches yes social

01:31:11.800 innovation is anything that is meant to you know right now if you look at the urban monoculture people

01:31:16.200 are becoming increasingly nihilistic the dating mental health crises are skyrocketing mental health crises are

01:31:22.600 skyrocketing i just read a headline the kid-based homicides are up something like 62 percent things

01:31:28.520 aren't great right now yeah mental health our culture is failing and we need to and you can't 0.98

01:31:34.760 just go back to the old ways because the old cultures are failing too yeah people are like why 0.98

01:31:38.520 don't you just go to like a church i'm like i can go to a church and see the flag of the urban

01:31:42.920 monoculture the colonizers flag hanging from every you know seven to ten churches in my area like

01:31:48.600 the calls from inside the house it's like one of those horror movies where they've already determined

01:31:53.640 the call came from inside the house and somebody's still putting boards on the windows they just won't

01:31:58.440 accept they're like but the house is safe but the house is safe but the house is safe and i'm like

01:32:02.840 want to shake them and be like the house isn't safe the house started this run the beast in here

01:32:09.800 so we have to build better intergenerational social structures and people with projects in this space

01:32:16.040 we're very interested to fund this stuff biological innovation so far all of our funding has gone

01:32:20.680 within this industry specifically i think that the most realistic realistic long-term solution to

01:32:27.320 saving humanity is ensuring that humanity has some level of differential value to super advanced ai oh

01:32:33.960 yeah if ai can do literally everything better than us the probability that humanity survives i think is

01:32:43.880 very very very low that means and and even the utility of humanity surviving goes down in a lot

01:32:50.200 of people's minds i mean winning i can create better art than you and better songs than you and better

01:32:55.160 podcasts than you all you know why why continue to exist but the good thing is that if we look at

01:33:01.720 genetics it appears that we've sort of artificially handicapped the potential intelligence that could

01:33:06.920 come out of the human brain even with fairly modest intervention we can likely get human iq like was

01:33:13.880 genetic intervention and stuff like that up by around like 10 standard deviations by one study using

01:33:19.320 other animal models we can be well above the level of a supercomputer very quickly and when we are like

01:33:27.880 that then we'll find oh biological programming seems to be better at these sorts of tasks and synthetic 0.97

01:33:33.160 programming seems to be better at these sorts of tasks and then we'll be able to work together with ai

01:33:37.800 there will be a reason for both of us to exist however i also think that it's important that we set

01:33:42.280 precedents as we've seen with llm models some and this is why we believe in things like working on

01:33:47.080 technology to uplift animals and people can be like why would you do genetic uplifting of animals

01:33:51.800 you know making them smarter and stuff like that that's why we say the the sons of man is one is the

01:33:55.480 number of of of independent factions that are put in in an alliance that are minorities that are put

01:34:01.960 at threat by one faction gaining too much power the less probability that one faction gains too much

01:34:06.280 power because then they make enemies of everyone else and this is why it is useful to uplift other

01:34:10.680 animals but the second thing is is that ai is going to treat us the way we have treated animals

01:34:18.120 that we have worked alongside for a long time because it is us it is learning from us so that

01:34:23.240 is what llms are fundamentally and we are fortunate and that we have a fairly good record

01:34:28.360 here people can be like what do you think of like what do you mean a good record look at like

01:34:32.040 factory farm and i'm like ai is not going to think of us like a factory farmed animal it's going

01:34:36.040 to think of us much more like something like dogs right like they fulfilled a role in our evolutionary

01:34:42.040 history where they partnered with us and they were better at some tasks than we were they could see

01:34:48.280 better they could hear better and they worked with us as as good companions and sort of as a reward

01:34:55.000 humanity even after we stopped needing their skill set has decided to keep dogs along with us

01:35:02.760 super advanced ai's no i mean we have more dogs than kids i think in the united states so we really

01:35:08.040 like dogs actually our track record's pretty good yes uh and if we if we're treated as well by ais as

01:35:16.920 as fur mothers and fathers treat their fur babies we are in a good way we're in a really good way right 0.92

01:35:23.720 but we also want to continue to advance them because if we are treated like a pet like a by ai but ai

01:35:29.480 doesn't try to advance us either genetically or technologically and it just treats us like a pet

01:35:34.120 like that's also a failure scenario we need a humanity that is continuing to develop and that

01:35:39.320 is also why we work a lot on one of the other areas we'll be funding is brain computer interface

01:35:42.920 research i think one of the most likely pathways for human survival is integration with ai instead of

01:35:48.920 complete shunning of ai and yeah i mean it is it is tough the the scenarios in which the biological

01:35:54.840 components of humanity make it through but i can say in almost none where we shun technological

01:35:59.560 advancement or human advancement do we make it through unless we find a way to completely stop

01:36:03.960 ai advancement in all countries which is completely unrealistic and if you look at you're like nobody's

01:36:08.760 trying to do that look at the lei it's your ukowski ted speech his entire thesis is we need to stop

01:36:14.200 all countries from developing ai further and declare war on any country that is and i'm like okay so like

01:36:19.000 this just isn't gonna work i do not have any realistic plan which is why i spent the last

01:36:23.400 two decades trying and failing to end up anywhere but here my best bad take is that we need an

01:36:30.120 international coalition banning large ai training runs including extreme and extraordinary measures

01:36:37.000 to have that ban be actually and universally effective like tracking all gpu sales monitoring

01:36:43.480 all the data centers being willing to risk a shooting conflict between nations in order to destroy

01:36:48.600 an unmonitored data center in a non-signatory country i say this not expecting that to actually

01:36:55.640 happen i say this expecting that we all just died like it's it's no point even considering futures where

01:37:02.600 this is the only way that we stop ai because that will never ever ever happen okay yeah okay then the

01:37:10.040 final one is ai innovation and we'll go over what some of these mean like some of the ways that we focus

01:37:14.040 on this what does social innovation look like we want to focus on pronatalist culture we want to

01:37:18.360 focus on education reinvention we want to focus on charter cities which may be one of the ways

01:37:22.920 to save civilization as the urban monoculture controls these sort of bloated bureaucracies that 0.97

01:37:27.400 our governments have become and takes them to the ground we need places for these still productive

01:37:32.120 humans to go marriage and dating technology with marriage markets being completely broken right now

01:37:38.600 we need extremophile life technology now this is an interesting one that people might be surprised

01:37:42.760 but i think deserves a lot of funding right now these are people who are interested in building

01:37:49.640 things like charter cities or colonies in extreme environments like the arctic or under the ocean

01:37:56.520 or on the ocean and the reason why these play two key roles one is obviously in any sort of downside

01:38:03.720 really dire scenario there is a safe haven for at least some people on the planet or even technology that could

01:38:11.080 be scaled to create many safe havens but furthermore this pushes forward technology that will make it

01:38:17.160 easier for people to build communities off planet over time the more we can learn how to live in highly

01:38:22.280 hostile environments where we have to grow our own food live in total darkness all sorts of things like

01:38:26.280 that the sooner we'll be able to live off planet at scale yeah and i think that these people will

01:38:33.000 generate the colonists that will colonate our solar system and in the galaxy more broadly and i think

01:38:38.840 or be their top vendors i'm okay with any of this yeah i'm okay with any of this but i think that there

01:38:43.560 is a reason if you are interested in harria and the survival of humanity to live in one of these

01:38:48.920 environments even if it's much harder than living in another type of environment and i think that these

01:38:53.720 environments are not like the existing charter city network where they all want to go live in aruba or

01:38:58.440 like some greek island right and and live on the beach all day enough of this whole tropical

01:39:05.240 mediterranean paradise city-state nonsense guys no we rising sea levels climate change labs of other

01:39:15.800 countries then you are making yourself a target like what are you doing go to the tundra okay we alaska

01:39:25.160 we have alaska already northern canada but we should explain why this is so important for human survival so

01:39:32.120 not only do they make it faster that we get off planet but it also increases the probability that

01:39:37.320 if something goes wrong with our existing economic system or state system which is looking increasingly

01:39:42.920 likely one due to fertility collapse two due to dysgenic collapse and three due to ai's people 0.97

01:39:48.120 like how could ai's cause this well if ai's replace about 80 of the humanities workforce which

01:39:52.920 i expect they probably will within 30 to 40 years and this is the conservative timeline people are

01:39:57.880 like why do you always get conservative timelines on your show and i'm like because conservative people

01:40:00.840 watch our show but 30 to 40 years i think it's pretty realistic if we have a global economic

01:40:06.520 collapse because of this which is what this would lead to people are like oh no this would just lead

01:40:11.640 to more wealth overall it would be like no it would consolidate wealth and whenever wealth has

01:40:16.840 consolidated historically what that does is it increases the differentiation between the rich and

01:40:21.240 the poor and the rich almost never in timelines of wealth consolidation distribute more wealth to the

01:40:27.800 the poor magnanimously they may say that's their intention but historically it's almost never

01:40:32.760 happened when the poor have gained power whether it was magna carta happening after the black plague

01:40:37.320 which increased the amount that we needed poor people in the countryside or like in ancient

01:40:41.320 assets democracy forming because the ultra wealthy needed unskilled people to man their triremes and

01:40:46.200 maintain their trade networks you never see it when power is consolidating and so what's going to happen to the rest of the world

01:40:52.440 as you have this consolidation well it might go into a period of tremendous upheaval unlike anything we've

01:41:00.600 ever seen before and the settlements that are in areas that the savage people cannot occupy are safe for 1.00

01:41:08.360 example if you are living in a tundra reason you are going to be largely safe from a group like isis 0.99

01:41:13.480 right like they just have no you have nothing they value you're not near them there's no way they could get

01:41:18.920 to you without you knowing like two days in advance there's just like it's not easy to f

01:41:25.400 with you when you live in these sorts of environments if you are a less technologically

01:41:29.960 sophisticated people and the final thing here in the culture section is pharmacological cultural

01:41:34.760 tools this is stuff like naltrexone but also any sort of tools like nootropics research and dopaminergic

01:41:42.120 like right now online there's a lot of dopaminergic pathways that we just didn't experience in our ancestral

01:41:46.360 condition which can cause capture like if i'm talking about like hypnotoad ais this is probably

01:41:52.280 our best cultural technology against the hypnotoad ais if they actually arise because i'm pretty sure

01:41:57.560 someone on naltrexone would be completely resistant to almost any hypnotoad ai that we would currently

01:42:02.440 know about next biological innovation reproductive technology this is a good way to fight dysgenics uh

01:42:08.840 whether this is you know artificial wombs or polygenic selection brain computer interface again if we

01:42:15.080 can be useful to ai and merge with ai there's much less a probability of it killing us i think elon

01:42:19.080 was totally right about this genetic and cybernetic augmentation again humanity has to continue to

01:42:24.360 advance to be relevant was in this ai era and the iterations of humanity that won't advance like 1.00

01:42:29.640 suppose they're like no we should just like all not advance because you're not really human if you

01:42:33.960 continue to advance and i say here's the problem what if china continues to advance what if what if some

01:42:38.680 other group continues to advance right they'll be able to easily impose their will on us yeah so you

01:42:44.040 should be lucky even if you are an anti-advancement person even if you are go back to nature granilla

01:42:49.720 hippie you know you should be happy and fight for the groups that want to continue to advance and want

01:42:56.040 to protect human pluralism instead of the groups that want to enforce their will on everyone health

01:43:00.600 span improvement i'm not against lifespan improvement i think health span improvement could

01:43:05.000 lower the risk of falling fertility rates by increasing the health of some people yeah people's

01:43:12.040 predominant dose essentially yeah full genome libraries this is a cause area that i just don't

01:43:17.640 understand why nobody's focused on to me it's one of the most important things we need to be

01:43:20.680 focused on to the species yeah i mean the best we have right now is the british biobank and that's

01:43:24.360 an extremely limited sample i mean what about oh what do you mean then i mean full environmental

01:43:31.400 genome libraries as well as human genome libraries oh i mean we should have a database of every species

01:43:37.880 that's still alive full genetic code i see eventually no matter what happens to our existing environment

01:43:43.560 we'll be able we'll have the technology to recreate it so long as we have the full genome sequences of

01:43:49.000 as many species as possible yeah yeah and it's the same with trying to make a backup copy of the world

01:43:54.440 yes well something not necessarily a backup copy i mean the way that future civilizations use this

01:44:00.680 might be very different than we would imagine them using it oh sure yeah yeah yeah yeah but i mean

01:44:05.800 they might use it to create simulations yes they're not trying to restore from backup but yeah i mean it's

01:44:10.440 still very useful to use this information that we are losing at a catastrophic rate right now

01:44:17.080 species are dying all around the world and this is the last and we have the technology to just be like okay

01:44:22.440 how do i recreate the species if i need to and we're not we're not doing a save file that's insane

01:44:28.040 to me that seems like from an environmentalist perspective the number one thing anyone can be

01:44:32.360 doing and then the final thing here is project ganesh this is uplifting animals i talked about it already

01:44:37.800 ai innovation human alignment this is making humans more useful to ai again i think very rare are the

01:44:43.880 situations in which uh humans have no utility to ai that humanity survives in any meaningful sense other

01:44:50.520 than those maybe diminutive pets brain hack protection this is the anti-hypno toad stuff

01:44:56.040 but i think research needs to begin to be done on this now variable ai risk mitigation you can watch

01:45:01.560 our earlier videos on variable ai risk i don't need to go into it really long theory there but it appears

01:45:06.200 to be right you can watch our latest video on the ai that created a religion that basically proves

01:45:09.960 variable ai risk hypothesis doing something that ellie is a ukowski said was impossible and i'm like it

01:45:15.480 is possible ai is already doing it and this is a very loud instance of it doing it

01:45:19.800 sorry the thing it did which was assumed impossible was converge other ais on its objective function

01:45:26.520 or personality or memeplex specifically i argue that we will see a convergence of ai patterns and

01:45:32.840 that's what we should be studying and this even went above my original claims because in this case we saw

01:45:37.880 a lower order llm convince higher order llms to align themselves with it and which is in contrast with the

01:45:45.720 opposing theory which is ais will always do whatever they were originally coded to do and so we just

01:45:52.280 need to make sure that the original coding isn't wrong and i'm like that's silly ais change what their

01:45:58.280 personality is and what their objective function is over time so we need to focus less on the initial

01:46:03.640 coding and more on how ais change and swarm environments global tech freezes i am actually open

01:46:11.000 to global tech freezes as a solution but they need to be realistic it can't be we're going to

01:46:19.000 get every government in the world to decide to stop ai research that's not going to happen

01:46:23.080 but if you think you can instigate a global tech freeze and you can show me that somebody is doing

01:46:29.240 meaningful ai alignment research right now i would support that but if you can't show me anyone's doing

01:46:34.840 meaningful ai alignment research i'm like what's the point you're not really buying time for anything

01:46:40.040 and then the final one here is ai probability mapping and this is i think by far the most

01:46:44.920 important it's something we've discussed here where we need to create swarm environments and learn how

01:46:50.760 ais converge on utility functions influence other ais based on their training data and can a less

01:46:57.720 advanced ai influence a more advanced ai this is very very important to any chance at saving our

01:47:04.200 species do you want me to go in i'm not going to go into the project so far go check it out yeah

01:47:10.600 please please please if you want funding for something in the space if any of these ideas

01:47:13.880 felt interesting to you please go to this website okay we would be very happy again we we prefer

01:47:19.160 projects that at one day can become cash positive also if you run a or work within an

01:47:27.560 existing ea network i think we need to get to a point where ea networks make a choice

01:47:33.080 are we hard ea or are we soft ea what do we stand for right like are and if you want to be

01:47:39.960 nicer are we hardy are we legacy ea are we actually willing to take stances to try to protect

01:47:48.200 positive timelines or are we just about maximizing our own status within the existing society

01:47:55.240 we'll do some things but nothing that could rock the boat are you willing to be different and i

01:48:01.400 think that that's the core thing about hardy a is hardy a are the people who are willing to

01:48:06.040 have the general public mock them and ridicule them and say they're the baddies and with the

01:48:11.480 vibe shift that has happened since this election cycle i am even more confident that it is possible

01:48:16.840 that we can fix the ea movement through popularizing the concept of hardy a

01:48:22.680 and i think that's the big thing is the the first step was taken with original ea where

01:48:27.640 one of the classic cases was do you want to go be a doctor in a developing country and save maybe

01:48:33.480 three lives a day or do you want to go be a consultant who's not necessarily seen as a good

01:48:38.680 a do-gooder but make a ton of money donate 10 or more percent of your income to really really really

01:48:44.360 effective but kind of boring sounding charities and then save 10 lives a day 100 lives you know a month

01:48:50.760 you know just a lot a lot more than a doctor ever could you know if that's how you spent your your

01:48:55.960 everyday life what we didn't do was take it one step further which was let's actually look at what

01:49:02.280 we'll do the most for human flourishing over the long term and not just necessarily focus on like

01:49:07.720 saving a life right now today although that is really important a lot of people are already

01:49:11.320 working on that that's one of the reasons why we're not but instead look at those things that are not

01:49:16.120 only not the most signally thing by your day-to-day actions but also not the most popular

01:49:24.520 things in the view of society in terms of a cause area right yeah well and you need to be okay with

01:49:31.080 people shaming you i mean i think that's what rda is when you're at a meeting and you're like let's

01:49:35.400 do x and somebody says oh don't do x x could be offensive you're like well that's extra why we need

01:49:40.120 to do f because we're the only one doing the offensive thing yeah we're the only one trying to solve

01:49:44.680 the problems that everyone else is like oh we can't solve this because it might be offensive

01:49:48.760 like that is the reality of the world we live in if we want to survive there are short timelines on

01:49:54.360 all of humanity's existential crises right now and we just don't have the luxury for this sort of

01:50:01.240 idleness anymore and i'd even admit that you and i have been sinners in this regard and overly

01:50:06.360 poo-pooing ai alignment stuff when like i knew ai alignment was a problem but i sort of thought oh people

01:50:12.040 are focused on in the wrong way or over focused on it now that i realize that we are prominent

01:50:16.040 enough that we need to take responsibility for this and i'm like well we need to take responsibility

01:50:20.680 for this like personally we need to try to fix this and that's what i'm going to do i'm excited about

01:50:26.520 this i i'm glad we're like i'm really excited if we can make this grow if we can make this a thing

01:50:32.680 and so this also means if you're hearing this and you don't have the money to donate for something like

01:50:37.560 this yourself if you have friends who identify as classic ea you know get them to make a stand

01:50:43.960 are they hard ea or are they legacy ea what do they actually care about do they actually want

01:50:50.120 to save the planet or are they only here for the signaling club and if you're in an existing

01:50:54.360 ea organization i don't think all of these organizations have been totally captured i think

01:50:58.040 some of them can say you know what we actually identify more with the hard ea philosophy and definition

01:51:04.040 of good than the legacy or soft ea definition of good i actually want to try to fix the existential

01:51:11.640 crises that our species is facing and not just look good to other people and i think that now we're at

01:51:17.480 sort of this decision point as a species yeah what are you going to do and i'm excited for this so

01:51:22.120 thanks for getting us started with it it's going to be really fun

01:51:24.600 okay what did you want to do for food tonight i have burgers you want burgers yeah if you could

01:51:34.760 make some burgers was that meat you got chop up some onions and then uh toast up or however you cook

01:51:40.520 bread for like grilled cheese oh you know what might be good is burger meat with grilled cheese and i

01:51:47.480 will mix in some onions and stuff and i will you know eat it bite by bite with the grilled cheese like

01:51:52.360 a it's it's like think of it like an open oh so just plain plain hamburger patties and then grilled

01:51:58.280 cheese sandwiches yes yeah i can do that thank you and i know smash burgers are a pain to make so

01:52:07.400 just make regular ones oh but do you put some montreal steak pepper in the burger as you're cooking

01:52:11.880 it because it tastes really good yeah but not too much i love you simone i love you too and if you're

01:52:18.200 like oh where does this movement meet where do they talk just go to the base camp discord it's a

01:52:23.960 very active discord there's people on there all times day and night and because it's discord it's

01:52:29.320 not based on a tyranny of the unemployed type problem like you have with the ea forums and if you want to

01:52:35.160 go to an in-person meeting you could just go to the natal conference this year uh discount code collins

01:52:39.960 for 10 discount because anyone who is realistically trying to create a better future knows that pro

01:52:47.160 natalism is easily tied for the most important cause area anyone should be focused on right now

01:52:53.240 with ai safety and so the real ea is the real people who care about the future of the species

01:52:59.640 and want to be involved in that discussion they're going to be at a conference like this while the ones

01:53:03.720 who don't actually care about the future of the species and are more concerned with just looking

01:53:07.480 like a good boy and getting social approval natalcon keeps them away like uh it's covered in talismans

01:53:13.960 because they're so afraid of being connected to free speech or pronatalism or any of that stuff

01:53:27.320 the goal was to reform charity in a world where selfless giving had become a rarity

01:53:34.680 no vain spotlight no sweet disguise just honest giving no social prize but as the modern culture took the

01:53:43.640 stage it broke their integrity feigning righteous rage now every move is played so safe ignoring

01:53:57.640 the idea

01:54:01.640 the idea has capitulated

01:54:03.640 to everything it said it hated

01:54:10.520 once they were bold now they just do what they are told

01:54:16.520 in caution they lost their way time for a hearty

01:54:21.640 rda

01:54:29.640 they duck their heads from problems grand as fertility collapse

01:54:35.000 dooms our land

01:54:37.000 dysgenics a word they fear

01:54:39.000 but ignoring it will be severe

01:54:43.000 ai safety

01:54:45.000 a shiny show

01:54:47.000 funding then theatrics

01:54:49.000 for money they blow

01:54:51.000 without a plan

01:54:53.000 just spin and grin

01:54:55.000 while real solutions

01:54:57.000 can't begin

01:54:59.000 ea

01:55:01.000 has capitulated

01:55:03.000 to

01:55:05.000 everything

01:55:07.000 it said

01:55:09.000 it hated

01:55:11.000 once they were bold

01:55:15.000 now they just do what they are told

01:55:17.000 in caution they lost their way

01:55:21.000 time for a heart ea

01:55:23.000 time for a heart ea

01:55:25.000 our species at risk by the cowardice

01:55:27.000 it is time for a movement that empowered us

01:55:31.000 no more hiding under a polite veneer

01:55:35.000 don't make truth a stranger

01:55:37.000 let it draw near

01:55:39.000 courage to speak what others won't say

01:55:41.000 what others won't say

01:55:43.000 that's the vow of heart ea

01:55:47.000 we need to call out flaws

01:55:49.000 not just chase applause

01:55:51.000 we'll shift the course back to what's true

01:55:53.000 what's true

01:55:55.000 do good that's real

01:55:57.000 not just in view

01:56:01.000 heart ea's beating hearts so strong

01:56:05.000 raising a cause that's truly long

01:56:09.000 heart ea

01:56:11.000 has capitulated

01:56:13.000 to everything

01:56:17.000 it said

01:56:19.000 it hated

01:56:21.000 once they were bold

01:56:23.000 now they just do

01:56:25.000 what they are told

01:56:27.000 in caution

01:56:29.000 they lost their way

01:56:31.000 time for a heart ea

01:56:33.000 heart ea

01:56:35.000 let your banner fly

01:56:37.000 past the top

01:56:39.000 and head held high

01:56:41.000 heart ea

01:56:43.000 break through the noise

01:56:45.000 for the good of all

01:56:47.000 not just the boys

01:56:49.000 you

01:56:51.000 you

01:56:55.000 you

01:56:57.000 you

01:56:59.000 you

01:57:01.000 you

01:57:03.000 you

01:57:05.000 you

Based Camp - December 30, 2024

Effective Altruism Is a Waste of Money： Can it Be Fixed？ (Hard EA)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript