• 7 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • The last time I met a person who had done deeply reprehensible, highly publicized tech fraud (FTX executive) he kind of just came off as a dude, and I liked him.

    That kind of makes me feel bad when I think about it.

    I haven’t met a high-profile fraudster lately, but my first impression of bad guys is usually pretty positive. As far as I can tell, people keep their ambient personalities when they break bad, but they compartmentalize and they develop supermassive appetites for praise. This long-run increases their suggestibility because they have to be more and more gullible to not hate themselves. I think this hollows them out – when you live a double life for long enough, you kind of stop observing the reality-fiction boundary at all.

    Not clear how to stop the cycle. There’s just too much money involved for me to dive off the train right now.



  • Last paragraph first: Grudgingly, yeah, that’s a pretty good literal answer to the question. Peter Thiel won’t sell just anyone a cult following, and you’re not paying for it in cash, but he will sell you one if you’re lucky.

    Writing advice: I like your writing. I haven’t tried to emulate you because I haven’t read enough of your writing, and because when I made my first brush with you (which was like a year ago) I was spending a lot less time emulating people in general.

    It’s a little distressing to me because, well, I’m way too anxious to play the game of moral righteousness straight-facedly. It takes a very different personality from mine to say “Those are the bad people, fuck them” and not see the obvious similarities between me and the people I hate.

    Some level of this is actual, real-world hypocrisy: I’m the cofounder of an AI startup and at the same time I deeply dislike AI. I went here because one, there was money, and two, I didn’t want a way worse person than me to take the same job. It has not been what I hoped for – it has been deeply destructive to my personality – it has taught me a lot and made me much more cynical – it has definitely made me stupider.

    I don’t really know how to do a hypocrisy purge. (I hear this is what ayahuasca is for, but Catholicism also works, and I’m considering getting my brain tattooed with a laser gun.) I think until I do one I have to temper all my moral righteousness by saying “I think I know why this person is doing the thing they’re doing, and if you want their (bad) motives, here’s my guess.”


  • My actual experience is that LLMs seem to basically just become a third arm for people who use them. Google is like that too, but for their target audience, LLMs are more like that.

    You don’t love your arm, but if someone goes to you like, “Do you mind if I cut your arm off?” of course you say “do not.” If someone’s like “OK, but like, if I made you choose between your wife and your arm” you’d be like “That’s incredibly perverse. I need my arm.”

    For people who use them it seems like it really quickly became impossible to exist without them. That’s one of the reasons I think they’re not going away.