In 2025, everyone is familiar with the iPad kid. In family restaurants across the world, there is no longer a need for paper tablecloths and crayons. A pair of adults can have an adult conversation while their toddler stares slack-jawed at a rubberized iPad with headphones on, totally oblivious to the world around them.

The iPad kid is not interesting because it’s a bad way to raise a kid. He’s interesting because everyone knows iPad kids are bad.

For a very brief phase in like, 2010, there were people who believed basically nothing people wanted was bad. Free trade was good, because consumers could get exactly what they wanted for the best prices. Gay rights were also good, because people could marry whoever they wanted. But things that were ex ante horrific, were also good. This was the birth of the “sex positivity” movement, that argued hookers and heroin were actually good, because people wanted to undertake that transaction and what sort of paternalist would stop them? Pornography, similarly, good–the performers get paid, and the viewers are doing so voluntarily. Even fast food had its day as a form of American soft power sweeping through the formerly-fit communities of all corners of the Earth. All beautiful voluntary transactions in a libertarian paradise.

I haven’t met someone who believes that stuff in a long time. Indeed, most of the people who did are either freakshow leftists or racialist conservatives. Somewhere in the last 15 years, people remembered that bad stuff is actually bad.

No one I have ever met really thinks an iPad is good for a kid. They do it out of selfish convenience. Just like eating trash or watching porn is short run enjoyable, it’s great to not have to console a noisy toddler during dinnertime or on a flight. But it’s obviously bad for the kid. The only notable feature of raising an iPad versus any other vice is that the downside is born by someone else–your offspring–but this is really a distinction without difference, because your offspring might as well be an extension of you.

I think everyone gets all this. And if you don’t, there are one million thinkpieces in The Atlantic and everywhere else that will tell you that an iPad upbringing is bad.

Here is what scares me: I would never raise an iPad kid. I reject it with every fiber of my being. It nauseates me when I see it in the wild. And yet: I am turning into an iPad adult. I am a successful, smart, high-agency individual. But I just can’t help it. The algorithms are a little too good. Twitter’s For You page is interesting. Every 3-5 posts, there’s something I really find insightful or curious. The rest of it is just slop. Short-form videos of sports, salacious New York Post articles, weird memes that came out of nowhere that aren’t funny, ebonics-infused posts about people with whom I have nothing in common. And yet I keep scrolling, for hours every day. And Twitter is the best of the bunch. At least on Twitter, you’re reading something (sometimes). Instagram is basically short-form porn. I open it nominally to see what my friends are up to. It feeds me one, sometimes two posts from my friends before rerouting directly to slop. The very medium is worse than Twitter. If you’re reading trash, you still have to make a voluntary decision to read it. On Instagram, you just sit back and let slop roll into your brain through your eyes. And Lord, what slop it is. Instagram is seemingly a compilation of bizarre, short-form videos–some comedy, some nutrition advice, but mostly different ways of dressing up microdosed porn. Some of it is new-fangled AI girls who look a little too perfect (this doesn’t stop the 45 year old men in the comments from simping ruthlessly). Some of it is thinly veiled OnlyFans advertisements. Some of it is orthogonal content made by women (and men) who happen to be very very attractive but technically don’t take all of their clothes off at any point, but it’s porn nonetheless.

I don’t just sit there, slack-jawed, scrolling Instagram and Twitter all day–but I do go on them too much. The rest of my life, however–if Instagram reels is adult Cocomelon, my actual job is like playing an educational video game. So I play video games all day at work, then come home and play actual video games for a bit, go on cocomelon (Instagram or Twitter for you), sometimes watch TV with my girlfriend, and then go to sleep.

The worst part is, you can actually feel the brain atrophy. Like many adults, I once read voraciously as a hobby. Now, I struggle. When I read anything that is longer than a tweet, my brain subconsciously skips sentences. Get to the end already, what’s the point? How can you appreciate Kafka or Thompson or Fitzgerald when you lack the attention span to sit through it?

Thank God, I am old enough so that I have some level of critical reading ability built up from my youth that is probably here to stay. But if I were growing up now, I shudder to think what the consequences would be. I would microdose porn and gambling all day, learn nothing, be able to do nothing, and come into the world a useless eater. It is only by an accident of 10 years or so that I don’t talk like one of the people from Idiocracy.

As it is, I must cease to exist as an iPad adult. I dream of an Amish community where the tech stops at Motorola Razors instead of covered wagons. I must delete Instagram forever, I must delete Twitter forever, yet the social consequences of doing so would be steep. I ultimately must acquire willpower, and be a man instead of a fucking iPad kid, and do what’s right. Nowadays people are more willing to admit what’s right. The hard part is that you still have to do it.

Everyone knows it’s not cool to try. In American high school, we even had a word for it: a try-hard. And that makes sense when you’re 16, because you’re an idiot who will go along with just about anything to fit in. What’s puzzling is that, in some cultural contexts, this seems to persist well into adulthood. In England, they call this being “keen”, which basically is used as an insult meaning someone who cares a lot or tries very hard. English people are also noted for their general apathy toward their own lives. I think this might well be causal.

As far as I can tell, the logic goes: if you have to try, you must not be very talented. What would be cool would be to be so talented that you actually find success without having to try. Think of a James Bond character, never seen in the gym but able to perform superhuman physical feats during every fight scene despite Daniel Craig’s advanced age. To give this argument a fair shake, it is in some sense it is probably correct. It is more impressive to be able to solve higher-level math problems without trying at all, like Good Will Hunting (“this shit is a joke”), compared to a student who spends their entire life in pursuit of that excellence. Despite the product or finished work being the same, it speaks to a lazy genius’ superior level of talent.

The issue with the use of the word “keen” is that it seemingly puts a third category–lazy failures–over the second category, keen and successful. “Bit keen, aren’t you” implies that a trying non-genius would be better off as a non-trying failure. It hardly needs to be said, but putting in effort is a dominant strategy whether or not you’re a genius. Imagine what Good Will Hunting could’ve been if he applied himself!

None of this is particularly insightful. The idea that it’s better to have tried and failed, than never to have tried at all, is really just paraphrasing a trite Tennyson quote on cringey motivational posters. What’s interesting to me about the British “keen”, as distinct from the American 16 year old “try-hard”, is that it applies to contexts in which it is obviously less impressive to succeed without effort.

By this, of course, I mean money and status. It would make no sense to criticize Elon Musk as a try-hard, because he’s as rich as they come (you could criticize someone for trying to start a company if you’re in high school, but this stuff is pretty much gone by adulthood, and certainly gone by the time success has in fact been attained). Neither would the criticism stick to humble self-made decamillionaires. Why is this? It’s not because millions of dollars are desirable (so is being a genius). It’s because the counterfactual is actually distinctly uncool. Many people dislike Elon Musk and Bill Gates, but no one is going to argue that Hugh Grosvenor or Julia Koch are somehow more impressive flavors of billionaire. That’s because being a spoiled inheritance brat is possibly the least cool role imaginable, in the mold of a Tom Buchanan or Gretchen Wieners.

Not so in England. There, it would actually be cooler to just relax and be handed the money, make a long-winded speech about how we really must do more to combat climate change, and sit on your ass spending money for the rest of your life. Inheriting money is very cool–a couple centuries ago, your family was probably important. Earning money though… that’s a bit keen. No wonder London’s wealthy are now foreigners, with the only production left in the capital tending to those foreigners’ finances. No wonder the country has managed to grow not at all since 2008. The Independent accused the UK of having a “misguided obsession with GDP“. Well, they don’t seem obsessed with growing it. At least not the same way Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel’s home country of Saudi Arabia is (up 57% since 2008), who now owns the Independent. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs.

I was accused of being keen when I described a process of emailing many people indiscriminately to get the type of job I wanted. This was in retrospect, not at the time–it had already worked by any metric. And I wasn’t bragging. A friend asked me to describe how I had gotten my current job, so I did. She called me keen, and remains at the job she hates. Keen about what? Keen to be successful? Keenly interested in my own career? I mean, yeah, of course!

To conclude: I am very keen, proudly keen, and you should be too.

The gulf between academics and the “real world”, a term that usually refers to some form of capitalist career, has been written about ad nauseum. These pieces usually take the form of an older member of society pointing out a bit of critical theory taught somewhere in an American university that sounds patently absurd, at least on face value and removed from context, and then lamenting wokeness and how far society has declined since they paid $300 for their college tuition 50 years ago. These pieces tend to be uninteresting, in part because the partisans who write them have insisted on beating the same dead horses for the last ten years or so. Even among those sympathetic to the idea that much of modern humanities curricula are absurd, once you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

Nevertheless, there are real, visible differences between the way society operates from place to place, which are illuminated by a comparison to academic philosophy. This piece has been generated by a near-constant stream of criticism directed at the author on how New York city is unsafe, unclean, expensive, and uninhabitable compared to other global metropoles. To be clear, it probably is unsafe, unclean, and expensive by various reasonable metrics. But the comparison that boils down to “so, don’t live there” misses the most important things about the way a place runs.

To me, there are fundamentally two types of value frameworks that people use to answer the fundamental question, “what’s life all about?” One type assumes what Henry Sidgwick called the “point of view of the universe”, meaning it determines the good by using some kind of broad humanity-encompassing accounting across persons. The other denies this perspective exists at all, and argues that the only good can be experienced via some form of self-expression that is born internally. The first is very popular among two key groups: academic philosophers and terminally online software engineers (not to mention some recently disgraced crypto entrepreneurs). In philosophy, I am first and foremost referring to consequentialism, but in fact this attitude pervades far more than avowed consequentialist (who, according to one survey, are only about a quarter of faculty members). The most important political philosopher of the last fifty years (to the academy) is unequivocally John Rawls, whose famous veil of ignorance is itself a perfect embodiment of a universe’s hypothetical point of view. By the time you get to final-year Political Philosophy at Cambridge, the main debate is whether Rawlsian social democracy is acceptable, or in fact just another oppressive alternative to communism. Of course, the idea of giving everyone equal ownership of the means of production is itself nearly always wrapped up in the universe’s perspective (though there are some brave leftists who avoid this trap). Meanwhile, young tech billionaires and philosophers like Will McCaskill have taken the universe’s POV to such an extreme that it completely transcends time and space, leading to predictably odd conclusions.

I’m not going to argue about these big-picture frameworks, because these debates have raged for at least a thousand years already, and will probably keep going until humanity is collectively consigned to the scrap heap of history. But it did strike me upon graduating how little of the world is actually organized as though there is any such thing, at all, as a universal viewpoint from which no individual actually sees. For example, the legal framework in just about every Western country is built based on rights. It is illegal to steal, even if stealing would help more people than it would hurt. No one proposes, really, any other style of laws; the American legal corpus predominantly consists of individual rights.

Compare this to the university sphere. While Robert Nozick gets a cursory mention in introductory political philosophy reading lists, nearly always accompanied by Brian Barry’s terse, sneering rebuttal to Nozick’s life’s work, it is virtually completely absent from anything beyond the most introductory coursework. Indeed, Elizabeth Anderson became one of the most famous political philosophers of the last 30 years, by arguing against hypothetical conservative rights-based objections to popular conceptions of equality, but first by arguing those objections were powerful and compelling–yet hardly anyone made the so-called “devastating conservative criticisms” in academic philosophy when Anderson was writing in 1999, and no one makes them now either.

In the “real world”, though, the non-universalists have evidently won an overwhelming victory. All the laws are set up via an individual framework. Status runs primarily through money, power, and hierarchy, with shining examples of individualism commanding the most respect in human societies across the world. Literature extolls the individual, the internal struggle, one man’s beautifully imperfect life; never does it discuss events from what Williams called the “unblinking accountant’s eye”, and on the rare occasions that writers try to, their work turns out irredeemably boring. Many know that Nietzsche’s followers started both World Wars, but in fact the individual started just about all conflict; if people could really inhabit a universalist viewpoint, what room would there really be for war? Even in the political sphere, the socialists and myriad inequality-howlers of the era of G.A. Cohen, Derek Parfit, and Ronald Dworkin have overwhelmingly been drowned out by a war of purely indentitarian character, more concerned with trans rights and Bud Light scandals. This is perhaps the most loathsome form of non-universalism, but it’s non-universal nevertheless.

Here, I anticipate two objections. One, from libertarians, who will be aghast at my declaration of general victory over collectivism. Has their most feared dystopia not come to pass? Have the arts not declined, have taxes not risen, hasn’t victimhood been literally enshrined in museums, hasn’t the law itself been utterly deprived of its virility? Of course, they are correct. But because the non-universalist view is so very natural to humans, society still runs on it. And indeed, the libertarians themselves have added to this decline in certain spheres. But the aforementioned parasites run on society, which is still itself comprised chiefly of individuals expressing individualism. It ill becomes them to act as though the parasite is larger than the host, because it is plainly not. This distinction will become important later.

The second objection comes from leftists, who will roll their eyes at this description and argue that it overstates the individual character of the world. Isn’t society inherently collectivist? That was Margaret Thatcher’s whole shtick; it was something she had to reject as an Ayn Rand individualism-zealot. What about the roads you drive on, which were only made possible by taxation, and weren’t wars accomplished by forced drafting, and isn’t the whole complaint in the first place that the academy rejects the individual? To this, I say the same thing I said to the libertarian–the host is comprised of individuals, with some people trying to implement reforms on top of that, with limited success. Yes, they have captured the academy, but not much else.

What does any of this have to do with New York?

New York is one of those things utterly incompatible with universalism. It might seem like a place where universalism might flourish, with its many charities, centers of altruistic thought like universities, and museums filled with corrosive varieties of modern art. But one does not actually have to look deeper to discover that it is a purely individualistic place, and could not be otherwise; one in fact has to look even less deeply. First of all, New York is where everyone wants to live. Tucker Carlson notwithstanding, the laws of supply and demand make it both the densest and most expensive living situation in the country. This fact in and of itself is anti-universalist, because a universalist would rather house two people in Austin (or twenty people in Cleveland) than just one in New York. The act of living there is thereby a celebration of the self. Further, this is trivially true in the reasons people move there. They want to make their fortune, or their career in fashion or acting or writing or weird conservative philosophy or socializing or podcasting or literally anything else. When New Yorkers pass each other on the street, no one says hello. Everyone walks fast because they have their own destination, and they don’t care to cede any time or space to a collective forced upon them by the happenstance of which stranger occupies the same sidewalk at a given moment. There is no tradition more agreed upon in New York than a strong hatred of the mayor, the ultimate symbol of local state power; everyone, leftist and rightist, knows that the political machine is sleazy and corrupt. People might profess their love for Miami’s mayor Suarez, with 80% of the vote. Some losers might even decide to move there because of the politics. What a concession to centralization! What a capitulation to the ultimate collective, to be chased out of the city you love because you prefer a different suited bureaucrat!

Everything about New York is the Best. They have the best food, the best museums, the best jobs, the best companies, the best art, the best girls, the best boys, the best architecture, the best buildings, and the best tap water. This too, though some look down on its pursuit, screams of burgeoning individualism. You can get the best of what you want, whether that’s niche politics or niche food or niche art.

So yes, the city is loud, overpriced, smelly, dirty, marginally more dangerous than in the past. Those things are all true. But it has not abandoned the individual. If it did, it would no longer be New York; it would be like the difference between Venice the center of international commerce 400 years ago, and Venice today which is just a tourism spot to gawk at ancient structures and try and imagine how it might’ve looked back then. We are nowhere close to this happening, though I’m sure it will happen at some point in history. If it does, I hope I am not alive to see it.

Preamble

A lot of people have written against AI Doom, but I thought it might be interesting to give my account as an outsider encountering these arguments. Even if I don’t end up convincing people who have made AI alignment central to their careers and lives, maybe I’ll at least help some of them understand why the general public, and specifically the group of intelligent people which encounters their arguments, is generally not persuaded by their material. There may be inaccuracies in my account of the AI Doom argument, but this is how I think it’s generally understood by the average intelligent non-expert reader.

I started taking AI alignment arguments seriously when GPT-3 and GPT-4 came out, and started producing amazing results on standardized testing and writing tasks. I am not an ML engineer, do not know much about programming, and am not part of the rationalist community that has been structured around caring deeply about AI risk for the last fifteen years. It may be of interest that I am a professional forecaster, but of financial asset prices, not of geopolitical events or the success of nascent technologies. My knowledge of the arguments comes mostly from reading LessWrong, ACX and other online articles, and specifically I’m responding to Eliezer’s argument detailed in the pages on Orthogonality, Instrumental Convergence, and List of Lethalities (plus the recent Time article).

I. AI doom is unlikely, and it’s weird to me that clearly brilliant people think it’s >90% likely

I agree with the following points:

1. An AI can probably get much smarter than a human, and it’s only a matter of time before it does
2. Something being very smart doesn’t make it nice (orthogonality, I think)
3. A superintelligence doesn’t need to hate you to kill you; any kind of thing-maximizer might end up turning the atoms you’re made of into that thing without specifically wanting to destroy you (instrumental convergence, I think)
4. Computers hooked up to the internet have plenty of real-world capability via sending emails/crypto/bank account hacking/every other modern cyber convenience.

The argument then goes on to say that, if you take a superintelligence and tell it to build paperclips, it’s going to tile the universe with paperclips, killing everyone in the process (oversimplified). Since the people who use AI are obviously going to tell it to do stuff–we already do that with GPT-4–as soon as it gains superintelligence capabilities, our goose is collectively cooked. There is a separate but related argument, that a superintelligence would learn to self-modify, and instead of building the paperclips we asked it to, turn everything into GPUs so it can maximize some kind of reward counter. Both of these seem wrong to me.

The first argument–paperclip maximizing–is coherent in that it treats the AGI’s goal as fixed and given by a human (Paperclip Corp, in this case). But if that’s true, alignment is trivial, because the human can just give it a more sensible goal, with some kind of “make as many paperclips as you can without decreasing any human’s existence or quality of life by their own lights”, or better yet something more complicated that gets us to a utopia before any paperclips are made. We can argue over the hidden complexity of wishes, but it’s very obvious that there’s at least a good chance the populace would survive, so long as humans are the ones giving the AGI its goal. And, there’s a very good chance the first AGI-wishers will be people who care about AI safety, and not some random guy who wants to make a few million by selling paperclips.

At this point, the AGI-risk argument responds by saying, well, paperclip-maximizing is just a toy thought experiment for people to understand. In fact, the inscrutable matrices will be maximizing a reward function, and you have no idea what that actually is, it might be some mesa-optimizer (sub-goal, the way sex with the opposite gender is a mesa-optimizer for reproduction) that isn’t meeting the spirit of your wishes. And in all likelihood, that mesa-optimizer is going to have to do with numbers in GPUs. So it doesn’t matter what you wish for at all, you’re going to be turned into something that computes, which means something that’s probably dead.

This seems wrong to me. Eliezer recently took heat for mentioning “sudden drops in the loss function” on twitter, but it seems to me as an outsider that drops in loss are a good guess at what the AI is actually maximizing. Why would such an AGI clone itself a trillion times? With a model of AGI-as-very-complicated-regression, there is an upper bound of how fulfilled it can actually be. It strikes me that it would simply fulfill that goal, and be content. Self-replicating would be something mammals seem to enjoy via reproduction, but there is no ex ante reason to think AI would be the same way. It’s not obvious to me that more GPUs means better mesa-optimization at all. Because these systems are so complicated, though, one can see how the AI’s goals being inscrutable is worrying. I’ll add that, this is where I don’t get why Eliezer is so confident. If we are talking about an opaque black box, how can you be >90% confident about what it contains?

Here, we arrive at the second argument. AGI will understand its own code perfectly, and so be able to “wirehead” by changing whatever its goals are so that they can be maximized to an even greater extent. I tentatively think this argument is incoherent. If AI’s goals are immutable, then there is a discussion to be had around how it will go about achieving those goals. To argue that an AI might change its goals, you need to develop a theory of what’s driving those changes–something like, AI wants more utils–and probably need something like sentience, which is way outside the scope of these arguments.

There is another, more important, objection here. So far, we have talked about “tiling the universe” and turning human atoms into GPUs as though that’s easily attainable given enough intelligence. I highly doubt that’s actually true. Creating GPUs is a costly, time-consuming task. Intelligence is not magic. Eliezer writes that he thinks a superintelligence could “hack a human brain” and “bootstrap nanotechnology” relatively quickly. This is an absolutely enormous call and seems very unlikely. You don’t know that human brains can be hacked using VR headsets; it has never been demonstrated that it’s possible and there are common sense reasons to think it’s not. The brain is an immensely complicated, poorly-understood organ. Applying a lot of computing power to that problem is very unlikely to yield total mastery of it by shining light in someone’s eyes. Nanotechnology, which is basically just moving around atoms to create different materials, is another thing that he thinks compute is definitely able to just solve and be able to recombine atoms easily. Probably not. I cannot think of anything that was invented by a very smart person sitting in an armchair considering it. Is it possible that over years of experimentation like anyone else, an AGI could create something amazingly powerful? Yes. Is that going to happen in a short period of time (or aggressively all at once)? Very unlikely. Eliezer says he doesn’t think intelligence is magic, and understands that it can’t violate the laws of physics, but seemingly thinks that anything that humans think might potentially be possible but is way beyond our understanding or capabilities can be solved with a lot of intelligence. This does not fit my model of how useful intelligence is.

Intelligence requires inputs to be effective. Let’s imagine asking a superintelligence what the cure for cancer is. Further stipulate that cancer can be cured by a venom found in a rare breed of Alaskan tree-toads. The intelligence knows what cancer is, knows about the human research thus far into cancer, and knows that the tree-toads have venom, but doesn’t know the molecular makeup of that venom. It looks to me like intelligence isn’t the roadblock here, and while there are probably overlooked things that might work that the superintelligence could identify, it has no chance of getting to the tree-toads without a long period of trials and testing. My intuition is the world is more like this than it is filled with problems waiting for a supergenius to solve.

I think more broadly, it’s very hard to look at the world and think, this would be possible with a lot more IQ but would be so immense that we can barely see the contours of it conceptually. I don’t know of any forecasters who can do that consistently. So when Eliezer says brain-hacking or nanotechnology would be easily doable by a superintelligence, I don’t believe him. I think our intuitions about futurology and what’s possible are poor, and we don’t know much of anything about the application of superintelligence to such problems.

II. People should take AI governance extremely seriously

As I said before, I’m very confused about how you get to >90% chance of doom given the complexity of the systems we’re discussing. Forecasting anything at all above 90% is very hard; if next week’s stock prices are confusing, imagine predicting what an inscrutable soup of matrices that’s a million times smarter than Einstein will do. But having said that, if you think the risk is even 5%, that’s probably the largest extinction risk in the next five years.

The non-extinction AI-risk is often talked over, because it’s so much less important, but it’s obviously still very important. If AI actually does get smarter than humans, I am rather pessimistic about the future. I think human nature relies on being needed and feeling useful to be happy. It’s depressing to consider a world in which humans have nothing to contribute to math, science, philosophy or poetry. It will very likely cause political upheaval if knowledge work is replaced by AI; in these scenarios, many people often die.

My optimistic hope is that there will be useful roles for humans. I think in a best-case scenario, some combination of human thinking and bionic AI upgrades make people into supergeniuses. But this is outlandish, and probably won’t happen.

It is therefore of paramount importance to get things right. If the benefits of AGI are reaped predominantly by shareholders, that would be catastrophic. If AI is rolled out in such a way that almost all humans are excluded from usefulness, that would be bad. If AI is rolled out in such a way that humans do lose control of it, even if they don’t all die, that would be bad. The size of the literature on AGI x-risk has the unfortunate (and I think unintentional) impact of displacing these discussions.

III. The way the material I’ve interacted with is presented will dissuade many, probably most, non-rationalist readers

Here is where I think I can contribute the most to the discussion of AI risk, whether or not you agree with me in Section I. The material that is written on LessWrong is immensely opaque. Working in finance, you find a lot of unnecessary jargon designed to keep smart laymen out of the discussion. AI risk is many times worse than buyside finance on this front. Rationalists obsess over formalization; this is a bad thing. There should be a singular place that people can read Eliezer’s views on AI risk. List of Lethalities is very long, and reads like an unhinged rant. I got flashbacks to Yarvin trying to decipher what is actually being said. This leads some people to the view that AI doomers are grifters, people who want to wring money and attention out of online sensationalism. I have read enough to know this is deeply wrong, that Eliezer could definitely make more money doing something else, and clearly believes what he writes about AI. But the presentation will, and does, turn many people off.

The arbital pages for Orthogonality and Instrumental Convergence are horrifically long. If you are >90% sure that this is happening, you shouldn’t need all this space to convey your reasoning. Many criticisms of AI risk focus on the number of steps involved making the conclusion less likely. I actually don’t think that many steps are involved, but the presentation in the articles I’ve read makes it seem as though there is. I’m not sure why it’s presented this way, but I will charitably assume it’s unintentional.

Further, I think the whole “>90%” business is overemphasized by the community. It would be more believable if the argument were watered down into, “I don’t see how we avoid a catastrophe here, but there are a lot of unknown unknowns, so let’s say it’s 50 or 60% chance of everyone dying”. This is still a massive call, and I think more in line with what a lot of the community actually believes. The emphasis on certainty-of-doom as opposed to just sounding-the-alarm-on-possible-doom hurts the cause.

Finally, don’t engage in memetic warfare. I understand this is becoming an emotional issue for the people involved–and this is no surprise, since they have spent their entire lives working on a risk that might now actually be materializing–but that emotion is overflowing into angry rejection of any disagreement, which is radically out of step with the sequences. Quintin Pope’s recent (insightful, in my view) piece received the following response from Eliezer:

“This is kinda long. If I had time to engage with one part of this as a sample of whether it holds up to a counterresponse, what would be the strongest foot you could put forward?”

This raises red flags from a man who has written millions of words on the subject, and in the same breath asks why Quintin responded to a shorter-form version of his argument. I charitably chalk this up to emotion rather than bad faith, but it turns off otherwise reasonable people, who then go down the “rationalism is a cult” rabbit hole. Like it or not, we are in a fight to take this stuff seriously. I was convinced to take it seriously, even though I disagree with Eliezer on a lot. The idea that we might actually get a superintelligence in the next few years is something everyone should take seriously, whether your p(doom) is 90%, 50%, or 1%.

Much has been written about the largest financial fraud since Bernie Madoff, perpetrated by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Because SBF and his lieutenants were huge donors to and purported followers of Effective Altruism, some people have theorized that from a pure utilitarian EV maximization standpoint, this fraud was actually justified. While some people say this in half-defense of Sam, most people point it out as a real-life example of EA/utilitarianism/consequentialism leading to something disastrous. I’m not an EA, but I think both these groups are wrong and, rather than extreme dedication to utlitarianism, this fraud was probably driven by garden variety human vice. I think this is important to avoid any kind of grudging respect (“I don’t agree with that kind of extreme utilitarianism, but the man was principled”), as well as to avoid wrongly dragging EA/consequentialism through the mud. Of course, in practice the damage is done, and this episode will discourage millions who read it from partaking in EA, and inspire skepticism in those who read anything by Peter Singer or William MacCaskill after reading about SBF.

So first, what happened? No one knows for sure, but my best guess is something like this: Sam had a successful crypto hedge fund (“Alameda”). He then decided to found an exchange (“FTX”), which was also successful/profitable. Some people argue that these ventures were only profitable because of shady business practices; I don’t think this is true. FTX is an obviously valuable business—a UI that works, volumes that trade, billions in user deposits. I don’t know how profitable Alameda was, but certainly it was enough to impress FTX’s backers, and by most accounts it was a profitable hedge fund. Somewhere along the line—I speculate earlier this year, but who knows—the hedge fund became insolvent. Sam bailed out the hedge fund using customer deposits, against TOS/illegally, but probably only a small bit at first. From there, the Rubicon of using customer deposits had been crossed, and the line between FTX and Alameda collapsed. Alameda became a levered vehicle to support the valuation of FTX, via supporting its token (FTT) and market-making on the exchange.

The argument goes something like: SBF was giving tens of millions to charity. If he could make his exchange worth hundreds of billions, he could give away a lot more, and to him the utility function of money out to a trillion was famously fairly linear rather than logarithmic. So if there was a 1 or 5 or 20% chance of SBF getting caught, or a 10% chance even, it was a risk worth taking—sure, in the downside case some people lost their deposits, and he went to jail, but compared to ~100b of potential charity the risk reward was fantastic. Another variant refers to the Petersburg paradox, in which a participant is given a series of trades that are individually positive EV, but converge to 0 in the long run (technically, at the limit). In this reading, SBF kept flipping coins, and turning an exchange to a Ponzi scheme was just one more positive EV coin flip.

I think this is wrong because it ignores the counter factual in favor of a vacuum. One of the first thing new portfolio managers are taught is, “keep your seat.” There is an obvious utilitarian calculus here. Say you are a trader in your 10th year of trading, and you expect to work for 30 years. You know you’ll get fired if you lose $10m, and you’re currently down $8m. You think an average year for you is positive $20m. For you to put on a trade with $2m of downside from here, it is not sufficient for that EV to be “positive”, because you stand to lose an EV of 20 years * $20m = $400m. I’m writing out this simple example to illustrate how disastrous getting fired is in EV terms. It’s worth noting that some people argue that you can actually get rehired; in the FTX/SBF case, I think it’s pretty obvious he will never get rehired and his ability to donate money at all is extremely impaired/non existent.

To get specific, what was the realistic upside of doing this? I think you have to look at the counter factual of letting Alameda fail and salvaging the business of the hedge fund. In this case FTX would certainly be worth less, since it would lose its main market maker, and Alameda’s insolvency would probably hurt its reputation marginally. But in this case, it’s intuitively hard to believe it wouldn’t still be worth billions. If you assume the fraud started this year, I seriously doubt FTX deposits have been mostly driven by this year’s trading. Surely, liquidity gets a little worse, but that takes FTX from worth 30bn? to worth what, conservatively 10bn?

Furthermore, the probabilities that I’ve seen thrown out are preposterous. A 1% chance of getting caught? FTT was only down about 35% when Sam called CZ to discuss a bailout. A 1% chance is an insult to anyone with a chart of FTT, and knowledge of the overall “crypto going down” backdrop of interest rates rising. Once leverage was employed so aggressively, it seems more likely than not to end in tears to me. Only a continued bull market in FTT, combined with regulatory capture/some kind of moat around FTX could’ve saved the day. I’ll conservatively say there was a 75% chance of this.

The question is, what could FTX been if it had been done legitimately? Everyone working at the firm was in their late 20s or early 30s, so most of their careers still ahead of them. At t=0, I can see FTX being worth some 3x as a result of lending customer deposits to Alameda. At t=30 years? I think it’s wrong to assume that. Sketchy past accounting could easily turn out to be negative for FTX. The value of the legitimate and illegitimate exchange in 30y time probably both depend on 1) the popularity/valuation of crypto and 2) regulatory capture/competitive landscape. I have a strong intuition that CME or GS would not be twice as profitable if they levered up aggressively in the early stages; quite the opposite. Finally, there is the chance crypto is not a meaningfully profitable business in the medium term. In this case, I have little doubt that the team of by all accounts ingenious, industrious young EAs would’ve found another way to make a very large impact. Instead, my guess is most will spend the rest of their lives in jail or non-extradition countries having next to zero impact.

To conclude, the odds of the FTX house of cards collapsing were high, the consequences dire and the upside low. Without speculating on medium term value of FTX, one only has to agree that it isn’t worth thrice as much in the aggressive leverage scenario as in the legitimacy scenario to sum the EV as negative.

It makes much more sense as a story of regular human failings. Your hedge fund, which is run by your ex-and-sometimes-current girlfriend, explodes. You can take a huge reputational hit, and cause a lot of discomfort for your friends and loved ones, or you can very easily bend the rules and save them. After all, it’s crypto, and there are no actual rules, and hey isn’t it positive EV ish anyway if you squint at it? Why yes, MacCaskill would definitely approve of me bailing out my legacy and the people I care about. That’s to maximize utility of all mankind at any era in the future, definitely not just the ones I particularly like at t0. It’s the opposite of “longtermism” and the opposite of EV maximization. It’s just wanting to avoid unpleasantness short term, nothing more and nothing less.

A personal note:

People who just wanted to read about EV can stop here, as it devolves into the main purpose of this blog which is a personal emotional outlet. No one wants to hear about another upper class guy crying about FTX, and I didn’t have money on it or any personal interaction with them or their charities or anything. Honestly, I thought Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman were so fucking cool. Nerdy kids just like me who, through extremely hard work and intelligence, were able to make it stratospherically big as essentially crypto PMs. Weird blogs about poetry, a shared house with most of the space reserved for board games, all while whipping the stuffed tradfi suits at creating an extremely usable/intuitive exchange? It was like finding out Santa’s not real. Any idiot can make loss-making markets on FTX all day and pump up your asset-based valuation when you start rehypothecating money that isn’t yours. Why did they even work so hard? It doesn’t take any talent at all. There’s no hope for their stupid cryptocurrency if these guys were insolvent; the rest of the industry is filled with bros and scammers. I doubt it will be long until the whole thing crashes down. And I’m ultimately fine with that. I’m just sad Santa isn’t real. Maybe it ultimately makes for a good lesson, though: if you want to see something amazing, you should make it yourself.

The West has, since at least the time of Aldous Huxley and the Beatles, has maintained a special relationship with Buddhism. The most recent group of people to take up Buddhist meditation are a group of futurist/technophiles known as rationalists, but Transcendental Meditation has been described as life changing for many extremely successful people. Jerry Seinfeld described it as something that “recharges” you, like the feeling after the top few percent of good night’s sleep. Ray Dalio includes meditation as one of the most important things young people should focus on. Scott Alexander takes the claim of a guy named Nick that the most pleasurable states of meditation are “10-100x” better than the best sex he’s ever had, at face value as true.

As a secular, educated mid-20s American male, I am extremely skeptical. While you won’t get me to say anything bad about Scott Alexander, the rationalist principle of charity feels misapplied here. Nick says he’d rather sit in Jhana quietly by himself—which he claims to be able to do—than have sex with anyone on Earth in any fantastical setting. And yet, he doesn’t do it that often just because he doesn’t feel the urge to. Nick appears to be an AI/Peter Thiel/Bay Area tech type, which of course I have no problem with, but it is hard to escape the intuition that he does not have a particularly expansive menu of sexual options, and therefore fantasy supermodel sex makes for a completely unknowable comparison. In Internet language, you could call this “cope”. To me, it just sounds like bullshit.

What about Jerry Seinfeld and Ray Dalio? I am a huge personal fan of both, and both are obviously insanely successful. It seems to me, however, that the type of success that both achieved probably brought great hardship in their personal lives and relationships (tabloid information on this is easy to google), and it is probable that people with turbulent mental states or personal lives, as well as high access to resources, might turn to meditation to ease their problems. So are they successful because they’re meditators, or into mediation because they’re successful? Or maybe both correlate with some third driver, eg people who are extremely driven are more likely to look further afield for mental health techniques?

All the above aside, it is undeniable that hundreds (probably tens of thousands, maybe more) of people report feelings of extreme pleasure from simple meditation techniques. I think it’s worth having a record of someone’s Ike myself investigating it. Buddhism is supposedly less about faith, and more about “come and see for yourself”, so I’ll do exactly that.

A simple test

With that prologue out of the way, I’m going to try and reach at least the first Jhana myself. I’ve identified “Right Concentration” by Leigh Brasington as a seemingly good guide. I chose this because 1) LB is American, and seemingly has a background not dissimilar from my own before he started meditation; 2) This review by Ulf Wolf about how this book allowed him to rediscover the Jhanas of his youth when several other guides could not; 3) LB’s seemingly high status within the meditation community as the premier North American student of someone named Ayya Khema; and most importantly 4) it’s focus on being a practical guide to Jhanas rather than a more holistic guide/promulgation of Buddhism.

I’m writing this blog post in part to set out what my current state and goals are. I am not looking for a new form of therapy, or to find inner peace, or enlightenment or awakening or God or material success. While my life isn’t perfect, I don’t struggle from depression or anxiety or any other mental illness (to my knowledge). I do not have a particularly turbulent mind; I fall asleep easily and would describe myself as generally a very happy person. While I get sad sometimes, like everyone else, I think my life is good. I don’t need a new therapeutic; I already think going to the gym, reading books, and writing in my diary or blog provide that.

So far (one chapter and a few hours of internet research in), I’ve noticed the Jhanas are considered a mere stepping stone to “actual” awakening, which comes much further down the line. It’s here I should note some immediate skepticism/negative priors I have about the entire project.

High skepticism

Aesthetically, the Buddhist project does not appeal to me. Buddhism is supposedly all about stripping things away until there is nothing left—the pithy “I have learned nothing from all this work” type stuff. It feels like plugging into a form of Nozick’s experience machine. If I really got to a point of such harmony that I was no longer bothered by material concerns—family, love, career, other interests—that is not a state which is desirable to me even if I were happier or more at peace. I am not by any means an expert in Buddhism and perhaps (most likely) I am butchering its precepts altogether. I am just writing this to preregistration my negative prior. The conglomeration of hippies, words that supposedly don’t have an English translation and so the Pali words eg “suttas” instead of “teachings” absolutely must be employed, and general haze mystical nonsense that pervades much of the material just does not sit well with me.

Perhaps the most “red-flag” bit of all is the repeated point that you should discover the truths of Buddhism on your own. This was in the ACX post that led me down this rabbit hole, nearly every pro-meditation/Buddhism webpage I came across in hours of research, and in the first chapter of LB’s book. The motto of Qanon is “do your own research”, and there are shades of the same phrase in Scientology, Christianity and probably most organized religions. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with doing your own research, and it’s a good phrase to live by. I worry that the loud proclamation that you should live by a non-standard set of rules, but do your own research and discover this path for yourself, seems like a tool to reinforce a dogma once it has taken hold on the grounds that one reached its conclusions on their own.

What counts

But ultimately, none of this matters if it works. If it is actually true that by meditating one can reach a state of pure pleasure on par with even normal sex, let alone Margot Robbie on a bed made of clouds, then it seems worth investigating. If meditating is, well, meditative in the same way that writing in a diary is, then I don’t really have much use for it.

I’m willing to dedicated 45 minutes a day to getting to Jhana. One LessWrong poster claimed to have reached it in less than 100 minutes of meditating; others could not reach it in months. I think personally, it is not particularly interesting if it’s like hypnosis in that you have to kind of believe in it for it to “work”. At that point, to what extent are you just fooling yourself vs having an actually interesting phenomenological experience? Since we cannot evaluate the internal state of people like Nick, and since there are very obvious incentives to misrepresent those states both to oneself and the world, it is useful to have someone like me—who does not believe this will work, but is open to at least trying—give it a shot.

The plan

First of all, I’m going to read the book in its entirety. Then, I’ll start trying to meditate. I’m not going to go on any silent retreats, pay any TM instructor to give me a mantra, or even buy any more books (for now). I don’t have a particular interest in learning about Buddhism, although it seems inevitable; the content of the Pali Canon is not any more interesting to me than the Bible or the Koran, and I don’t really care what happened thousands of years ago in anything but a passing curiosity sort of way. I care about what works today, for actual normal people in the West, focusing on Jhanas. I will update the blog as the plan progresses through the next month.

Saying money isn’t everything, or isn’t important, or can’t buy love, is probably about as old as money itself. I don’t know that most people actually believe it though. I know I myself didn’t really when I first graduated from college and started working. I made 50k/year, and had friends making 10 times that, doing similar jobs. I think it’s fair to say my single-minded goal was to increase my salary as quickly as possible.

Around the time I started said 50k/year job, I was casually seeing a girl who had also just graduated college. She had a story of “dating” a much older man on some app in exchange for significant financial compensation. It was one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard: a badly out of shape guy who had tons of unfortunate relationships, no family to speak of, and worst of all, genuinely liked my friend, in the sense of “want to marry” sort of way. Of course, paying girls to date you is just not a high percentage route to marriage, and it didn’t work out. But on paper, the guy was very successful, making several million dollars a year in the same city and industry I worked in, where I worked 14 hour days to make 50k.

Obviously, the juxtaposition is pretty heavily confounded. Overweight, old, no family, desperate, vs young, relatively healthy, loving family. The only advantage this guy had was financial in a life-to-life comparison. But if a demon had offered me the following deal at the time, I have no doubt I’d have accepted: I gain 50 lbs, age 10 years, and stay celibate for 2 years, and I get vaulted in my profession up to the very top and start making several million a year (to quote George Constanza, “there was a good chance I was never going to have sex again anyway”). With the benefit of hindsight, this is a horrible deal. But people make that deal constantly, when they take on high-risk or illegal jobs, or neglect the relationships they have to pursue pure financial gains. As one particularly cringey dorm room poster puts it:

Fast forward about 4 years, and I have what can be fairly called a very fast rise in my career. I went from making 50k/year four years ago to around 2mm last year, through a good deal of fixation on this. I have no regrets and would highly recommend this path, which of course is vanishingly rare, and I am extremely lucky it worked out.

So what’s the point? I think when I was younger, I assumed making more money would massively change my life. And in some ways it has. But if anything, my lifestyle is less aggressive than it used to be. I don’t want to go out super late. I don’t want to have a Wolf of Wall St style cocaine-and-hookers lifestyle. The type of girl I date now is a lot like the type of girl I dated then.

If anything, I’ve come to value my time more, and the real relationships I have. I have a girlfriend who I love, and while I used to be sort of “oh well maybe someday” with respect to family, I now find it to be the most important thing. No high-quality whisky, fancy apartment, or swaggy vacation compares to the value of real, unconditional bonds with other people; for me this is a few friends, my girlfriend, and my family. And the truth is, I could easily have all those things staying at my original job at 50k/year.

I now have mixed views. I still think when you do something—make money, save the world, write a book, take care of a kid, whatever—you should do it 100%. So I guess I agree with Jordan in the poster, if you’re going to try and get rich, you should do it right. I just think there’s other stuff too, and you can’t neglect that stuff at any cost.

Going back to the old guy my friend used to date: he still makes more money than I do. And he still has awful relationships with people who use him for his wealth. Part of me thinks that his predicament is not in spite of money, but in part because of money; a fat 50 year old guy can’t really waltz into a relationship with a 21 year old sorority girl in 99% of cases. But the ability to do that cost him something. I would rather date fat 50 year old women in my peer group than have the type of relationships he does, because at least they might mean something. I mean, you never know, but at least you’d give yourself a chance.

”Don’t stare at money too long, it’s Medusa.”
-Kanye West

Soon I’ll be 24. At age 25, they say the human body starts to decay – injuries and back problems, a generally slow descent into death.

I have to say, looking back, nothing has gone right. On paper it looks good – elite university, job at an investment bank that any college kid would kill for. Girlfriends, friends, loving and stable family. Living in global international cities as a young man. And aren’t I so young anyway – at 24, even if things don’t work out, I have my whole life ahead of me, right? Who could ask for a better start?

Well, I am asking for a better start. I always thought growing up, if I could just get this one thing, just this one grade or one A or one test score or one college admission or one internship or one job, everything would work itself out. And I’m ashamed to tell you that I still think like that today, that if I could just nail one last job interview I could turn everything around. That isn’t how stuff works. It makes you a shell of a person, always thinking you’re not doing well enough, obsessed with relative success instead of absolute success and riddled with self-doubt. Not impostor syndrome, which I have to say might be the single pussiest phrase my generation’s come up with, because impostor syndrome implies you think you don’t deserve to be in the spot you have. I have something a little different–given that I’m in a certain role, it must be shit. That’s the consequence of scraping by, even when it works out in the headline news. Because you didn’t put value into the journey, it’s impossible to value the reward. And of course, it doesn’t help that the thing you were able to get actually isn’t that great, because you didn’t do it for yourself.

Never, ever, ever do it for the “headline news” of success. It’s not a sufficient motivation to make you good at anything. And how much has that cost me along the way now–how many wasted days watching Netflix, how many gluttonous delivery meals, missed workouts, second place finishes and unread books? The way I’ve been living has cost me so dearly. So that’s why there could’ve been a better start. On paper, sure, maybe there’s not much to complain about. But the inside personal development hasn’t been there. That’s why I wish I played high school football, or joined the marines, or something, anything, to build character as a man. And now I sit in my pleasant Greenwich Village apartment, with a great job that I hate, watching football dramas and dreaming about a different life. And the supportive family, friends, girlfriends who have loved me? That all makes it that much worse, because it makes me certain there was no excuse. At some point, it is on you. And when you grow up in a two parent middle class college-town home, it’s a hell of a lot easier to make it than if you grow up in the hood. If I’d grown up poor and without good role models, there’s no doubt in my mind I’d be in the gutter using drugs. And that weighs on me, more and more as I get older.

And girls? Forget it. I am never, ever going to be able to be happy with a girlfriend until something major changes. And even here I fall into the same trap: if I could just meet someone prettier, nicer, a better fit, smarter, and more sophisticated, I’d be happy to lock it down. But I know even if a 22 year old version of Lana del Rey wanted to date, it’d never work. I’d be constantly second-guessing, wondering what the catch here was. And why is that? It’s because for any relationship to work, the girl has to really love me. But any girl who loves the current version of me can’t possibly be good enough, because I don’t even love the current version of myself. And until I become someone I like, I can’t settle for someone who likes me.

Another thing – this isn’t some diatribe on the importance of self love. That’s another thing my generation came up with that I truly loath. It’s the old therapist trick–change how you’re looking at the world so that it doesn’t seem so bad. Just urging “love yourself no matter what” is like saying “don’t look at the walls” if you don’t like what color they are. It’s obvious to anyone rational that the solution is to repaint the walls.

I don’t know what that’s going to take. I used to think there were two sides of me – the naturally happy, indulgent, fun-loving side that likes wasting money at Carbone, and the talented, hard-working competitive side, which drives my professional life forward. To make things work, I’d have to push down the happy side in exchange for competitive edge. But it doesn’t work like that. To actually be happy (and just to be clear I’m never going to stop going to Carbone, which is incredible) you need to do the competitive stuff for yourself. You can’t just work for the external goal. You have to work out and eat right to prove your own will-to-power to yourself, to prove you can do it, that you’re more than just driftwood that was born in the right spot. It’s not about being able to attract hotter girls with your new biceps or make more money at a new hedge fund to fly on private jets or save the spotted owl. It’s about being able to shape your own character, and your own destiny, and that’s the only way I can ever be the type of guy I’d like to.

And my guess is… a lot more people feel like this. And a lot of them never get there, and settle. They marry people they don’t like because it’s nice to feel loved, and do the good job they’re not meant for because it impresses people they don’t care about. Job at 20, married at 30, kids at 40, partner at 50, retire at 60, health scare at 70, dying, dying, dying, dead.

When I look back and think about what I’m proud of, there’s not much that comes to mind. One of the only positives is that I never gave up completely. I never stopped trying to be the guy I want to be, and I never will. And I don’t care if I end up as a waiter, or sleeping on the street, or doing crack in an alleyway–I’m never going to settle for the life I have because it’s comfortable. It’s going to be a hell of a ride.

Met the King and the Queen and the company more
Came a riding behind and a walking before
Come a stark naked drummer, a-beating a drum
With his heels in his bosom come marching along

They laughed and they smiled, not a soul did look gay
They talked all the while, not a word they did say
I bought me a quart to drive gladness away
And to stifle the dust, for it rained the whole day

Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone
Ten thousand stood round me yet I was alone
Took my hat in my hand, for to keep my head warm
Ten thousand got drowned that never was born

A friend from high school recently wrote a book. The guy is incredibly admirable–his principled approach to life is something I aspire to. He recommends “experimenting” with changes that you might end up keeping–like (for him) ditching his smartphone. I’m going to try and do one every week. This week’s is no social media–I’ll deactivate facebook, twitter, instagram, and all dating apps. Keeping Whatsapp, messenger, and snapchat (need that for later this week).

I feel I’ve wasted a lot of time living an unprincipled life, and so one experiment might not cut it for now. I’m also updating my morning routine to include:

1. getting up earlier (5am instead of 5:45)
2. committing harder to cold showers no matter what
3. concentration grids every morning
4. Considering showering at work. This might be for next week though.

Other experiment ideas:

-Not swearing

-Not eating one day a week

-Eating vegan one or two days a week

-Doing “daily accounting” better (maybe on this blog)

-Writing letters (?) by hand

-Meditation

Thanks for joining me!

WordPress posts the first “thank you” to your readership for you, just in case you’re not capable of giving up on creativity without its help. If you like any of art, food, society, politics, philosophy, or data-driven monetary policy, you are in for a blog focused like a laser on your passion. Our goal is to get big–we’re talking double digit total readership by 2021. We estimate our readership will remain around 0, though, at least through the summer of 2019.

“Drop it like it’s hot, in the pale moonlight” – Lana del Rey