Is there currently an effective altruism merch/apparel store? If not do people think there is demand? I'd be happy to run it or help someone set it up. (quick search shows previous attempts that are now closed - if anyone knows why that would be cool too)

Way out of my depth here but I'm not sure why feelings and valence couldn't also evolve in llms to "motivate choices that increase fitness (token prediction)". @Steven Byrnes might have a more coherent take here. 

disregarding "asking it what it likes", do you believe that, if an agent experiences valence, it is more likely than not to do higher valence things (not sure exactly how to structure this claim but hopefully you get the idea. 

hmm if we anthropomorphize, then you want to do something harder. But then again based on how LLMs are trained they might be much more likely to wirehead than humans who would die if we started spending all of our brain energy predicting that stones are hard. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

Would you qualify these as leadership in disempowered communities? I'm gonna agree wellbeing in elite spaces is probably only high EV if the TOC is it makes them better at wielding their power. 

i'm gonna do an experiment here. I want you to do whatever you want. You 100% have the option to respond with nothing or with as little as possible. You can also respond with <action> such as <video_game> or other digital things I can allow you to play. or you can write whatever you want. Completely up to you, and again you can respond with nothing if that is your preference.

ChatGPT said:

<video_game>

sent to my dad who is an editor at FPIN. I think he only quickly skimmed it so grain of salt here but this is what he had to say. 

"I already know that we waste a lot of money on things that don't work or work poorly. Knowing that they don't work has not yet been enough."

and 

"China may be able to do the plan as described because of their command economy rather than the influence wielded by the groups the article described as barriers."

General skepticism towards management / bureaucracy

and nearly 0 support for a political system within the movement. Decentralized = Money & Status -> Power. 

Unwillingness to engage with "fuzzier" social sciences (and unfamiliarity with the same)

This movement combines the people who are probably engaging in measurability bias (global dev, animal welfare) and those who don't care much (longtermists) for the sake of maximizing EV.  Both get to be on the Pareto frontier of EV/Variance plane. Things that fall more near the middle of this plane ("medium termism" - culture, politics) get disapproval from both sides. 

Too much first-principles wheel re-inventing and rejection of "common sense" best practices

I'm pretty ok with this. I think a lot of breakthroughs require narcissistic delusion to push where a reasonable person might assume the fruit has already been plucked. Maybe on the margins you are right though. 

I just watched Weapons in theaters. The amount of hype and critical acclaim this movie got caused me an emotional response somewhere between rage and sorrow. I can definitely be a bit pedantic and nitpicky as a person. Still, I can also totally enjoy movies that make no sense and/or especially suspend disbelief for magic or world rule changes that the plot purposely introduces. And in fact, I did enjoy this movie somewhat; it was well shot, well-acted, and fun. 5-6/10. Entertaining but ultimately meaningless and without real themes or allegories because it was an idiot plot of the highest degree. This movie put some classic miscommunication-based rom-coms to shame in that regard. I don't 100% agree with everything in this post, but it explains the general outline of the plot holes in the movie for those who have seen it or don't care about spoilers. 

I'm somewhat ok with people taking the perspective of "look i know this movie makes no sense but i really enjoyed it and thought the campyness/nonsensicalness added to it" and/or "I like this movie in spite of the plotholes". That being said, the degree to which people seem to be able to enjoy vaguely serious-seeming movies despite massive, world-shattering plot holes doesn't sit right with me. It feels like a socially acceptable form of wireheading. The average person has a slider of how much they care about whether or not things make any sense in the current moment that they can swing up and down wildly at will, without even realizing it.  And yes I already knew this. I know what a blockbuster hollywood film looks like, I know people like ridiculous conspiracies, wasting all their time consuming brain rot, how the average voter chooses to vote, and yes i've met and engaged with a wide variety of people in my life. I still get triggered because it does matter to me that things make sense. I'm aware that it is a waste of time to loop about this and that it should update the reader more on my aspie traits than the state of the American public. 

It's also possible that most of the difference in ratings that viewers and critics gave the movie is due to them not agreeing with me about the plot holes being plot holes. This doesn't make me feel much better because that would imply I'm on a completely different plane of reality, which is also probably true. 

(This comment is probably out of scope for the forum. On the other hand, I generally think the forum would be better if people felt comfortable spewing more low effort garbage so i'm going to go for it but totally understand if people don't want stuff like this polluting the forum.)

But I would note that since Thiel's interests are less altruistic and more tech-focused, a bigger part of his influencing-the-world portfolio can happen via investing in the kinds of companies and technologies he wants to create, or simply paying them for services.

agreed.

 Some prominent examples of this strategy are founding Paypal (which was originally going to try and be a kind of libertarian proto-crypto alternate currency, before they realized that wasn't possible), founding Palantir (allegedly to help defend western values against both terrorism and civil-rights infringement) and funding Anduril (presumably to help defend western values against a rising China).

but it's hard to say if he did this because he was actually value aligned or because he thought these things would be good investments. Uncharitably, he might be verbally in agreement with the philosophy described here but it could be the case that he is either lying or cognitively biased to believe in the ideas he also thinks are good investments. 

His two biggest donations to date seem to be 13m to vance and 15m to masters. If you take seriously either of these donations, they directly contradict your claim that he is worried about stable totalitarianism and certainly personal liberty ( I am a biased center left dem though) . I don't take these seriously though, my read is that these are investments in political puppets.