Abstract: This paper presents some of the initial empirical findings from a larger forth-coming study about Effective Altruism (EA). The purpose of presenting these findings disarticulated from the main study is to address a common misunderstanding in the public and academic consciousness about EA, recently pushed to the fore with the publication of EA movement co-founder Will MacAskill’s latest book, What We Owe the Future (WWOTF). Most people in the general public, media, and academia believe EA focuses on reducing global poverty through effective giving, and are struggling to understand EA’s seemingly sudden embrace of ‘longtermism’, futurism, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and ‘x-risk’ reduction. However, this agenda has been present in EA since its inception, where it was hidden in plain sight. From the very beginning, EA discourse operated on two levels, one for the general public and new recruits (focused on global poverty) and one for the core EA community (focused on the transhumanist agenda articulated by Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others, centered on AI-safety/x-risk, now lumped under the banner of ‘longtermism’). The article’s aim is narrowly focused onpresenting rich qualitative data to make legible the distinction between public-facing EA and core EA.
So if it turns out, as people like Penrose assert, that the brain has a certain quantum je-ne-sais-quoi, then all bets for representing the totality of even the simplest neural state with conventional computing hardware are off.
No, that's not what Penrose asserts. His whole thing has been to say that quantum mechanics needs to be changed, that quantum mechanics is wrong in a way that matters for understanding brains.
banned for obnoxious not-pology
whomst among us has'nt err'd?
Tuesday. Found a cigarette butt in my Solo cup. Couldn't have been more overwhelmed with the existentialness of it all. Perfect generation moment, absolutely hilarisad. Uwu! Got two tickets to Cancel Me Harder, You Motherfucking Bitch. Playing at the best basement in the whole D-Square, can you believe it? Called up some completely wonderful numbers, but couldn't find anybody to go with except Roger. Wouldn't be seen dead with him after that business with Mike, but what can you do?
Wednesday. Cancel Me Harder, You Motherfucking Bitch was the definitive worst. Laugh riot from end to end! Couldn't have had a better time, even if Roger does still post to X when he should know that Nostr is the future.
Thursday. Found another cigarette butt in last night's Solo cup. Truth bomb time: what gives, yo? Rode the subway, thought hard about how everyone's face is just a mask for their true self. Thinking I need to upgrade my avi. It's completely the season for pixel art! Gotta ask Kevin about the best prompts, so I don't get something absolutely dreadful.
Friday. Oopsies! Turns out I've been leaving the cig butts in my own Solo cups! I couldn't be more embarrassed, but ChatGPT says that the benzos can't cause memory loss.
Saturday. Rode the subway to CVS. Bought myself an absolutely dismal new eyeliner, took a selfie with The Bell Curve. Hashtag totes not sponsored, hashtag unfiltered!
Sunday. Oopsies! Those cig butts? Turns out I've been leaving them in my own Solo cups! I couldn't be more completely mortified. I really came in a fluffer that time, but what can you do?
What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.”
"When I am at a party, I feel like nobody understands me," said the voice of a generation.
One character is nearly canceled when, on a college radio station, she says, “Trigger warnings trigger me.”
2014 sent a Vine; they want their joke back.
Generations no longer understand one another because we haven’t been injected with the same memes.
"Marvy. Fab. Far out," deadpanned Calvin's father.
Levy is rarely boring.
[citation needed]
"Honest, babe, I'd only dump you for a ten-out-of-ten smokeshow as evaluated on my personal scale!"
Yud writing about math is the worst. You get your autodidact problems, because he's never been tested on actually doing calculations. He's always graded his own homework, as it were; all his experience is in rhetorically weaseling out of his mistakes, instead of learning from the red pen. Then you get all the problems that come from "splurging a first draft" out upon his fandom. They miss the mistakes among his meanderings. Quite likely, they lack the experience to detect them, but the beigeness of his prose helps to obscure them anyway. The fan will interpret any confusion as being their own fault, not Yud's, or just dismiss any lack of clarity because the feeling of being special feels so good. So, even if Yud were inclined to learn from meaningful criticism, he's not getting any.
Struggling through Yud's attempt at explaining a basic calculation in quantum mechanics is like reading algebra problems from before algebraic notation was invented.
When the cube with the cose beside it
Equates itself to some other whole number,
Find two others, of which it is the difference.Hereafter you will consider this customarily
That their product always will be equal
To the third of the cube of the cose net.Its general remainder then
Of their cube sides, well subtracted,
Will be the value of your principal unknown.
I read War and Peace but have only vague memories of it, because I read it in eighth grade. We had an "accelerated reader" program, you see, in which we were supposed to read books and then take quizzes on them to accumulate points. The longer books counted for more. Nearly all of the list we could pick from looked incredibly boring, so I decided to get a year's worth of points in one go.
Enclosed please find one (1) Internet, awarded in recognition of the best/worst mental image I've had all week
I was tempted to give them their free ticket to the egress for saying "paint their discourse with the purples".