Sep 24The Putin Fallacy―Let’s Try It OutA couple years ago, a thing occurred to me that I call the “Putin fallacy”.[1] Somebody has to be born as Vladimir Putin―the man who Boris Yeltsin chooses to be President of Russia. Putin isn’t particularly special. By all accounts he was a pretty ordinary KGB agent with a pretty…Qualia7 min readQualia7 min read
Jul 12Geniuses of Limited IQThis article is boring but I have no audience so it doesn’t matter — I’ve always known that I wasn’t a genius. I was an A-minus student, always trying but rarely earning the top score in any class. I’m guessing my IQ is about 115 or 120, though it remains unmeasured. …Journal7 min readJournal7 min read
Apr 20GPT5 won’t be what kills us allThe Future of Life Institute’s open letter calls on the world not to make models bigger than GPT-4 for six months. There are obvious reasons why obeying the letter won’t help prevent an AGI apocalypse. For one thing, research on Artificial General Intelligence can still continue whether anyone builds a…AGI16 min readAGI16 min read
Mar 29Ukraine is winning. How much they win is up to us.My track record is good. Here are my predictions for 2023. — I have short but successful track record predicting the future on Metaculus and I’m in the 4.4th percentile in the Ukraine tournament (131/2970). Last year I was among the first to predict the war would directly cause 100,000 deaths, I joined the “Russia won’t capture any of the major cities”…Ukraine War11 min readUkraine War11 min read
Jun 3, 2022Pink Buses: The Nuclear OptionIn an alternate universe, everybody rides the bus because cars are too dangerous for bystanders. Why? Well, actually buses are dangerous too, but the risks are quite a bit lower because fewer buses are needed to move the same number of people around. I know this is not very clear…Nuclear Energy10 min readNuclear Energy10 min read
Published inBig Picture·Apr 20, 2022I’m Sick of Medium’s Russian Propaganda“Were these Russian soldiers? No. They were local self-defense forces.” “We are not going to go to war with the Ukrainian people.“ — Vladimir Putin, March 2014, while annexing Crimea So I was reading an article on Ukraine today in the Medium app. And at the bottom it recommends other…Disinformation11 min readDisinformation11 min read
Mar 25, 2022Putin’s Rain of TerrorI’m writing this on March 24, 2022: the one-month anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.Ukraine5 min readUkraine5 min read
Sep 13, 2021Crary avoids explaining her arguments against Effective Altruismin an article about Effective Altruism being morally “bankrupt” — Effective Altruism is a movement dedicated toward improving the world using hard work, large donations, and analysis meant to make our work and donations as effective as we know how. It involves, for example, comparing very different courses of action to each other and trying to decide which is better…Effective Altruism16 min readEffective Altruism16 min read
Jul 6, 2021Why we worship thee, O great Sex!A response to “Reframing the evolutionary benefit of sex”, which explains the evolutionary role of sex as something something E[dx * (1 + dX)] = E[dX] + E[dX²] something something variance! Which I’m sure would have been very interesting and enlightening if I had been paying closer attention. …Evolution5 min readEvolution5 min read
May 10, 2021Vaccine Risks: A Letter to my FatherMy Dad won’t get a vaccine because, he says, the vaccine has killed over 3,000 people. He says he knows this because of information on Fox News, the CDC web site and “interviews with doctors”. I asked which show interviewed these doctors; he didn’t answer. I asked him why, if…Vaccine Hesitancy8 min readVaccine Hesitancy8 min read
