Ridiculous, uninformed comment. There is no question that Effective Altruism has done tremendous good overall by saving many, many lives. I say this as someone who disagrees with important aspects, such as valuing distant lives equally to local ones. They have also been more correct than anyone else about AI, pandemics, etc.
It’s also been used as a self-justification by the likes of Sam Bankman-Fried, who exemplifies the qualities I mentioned above.
It’s clearly a very flexible philosophy that “smart people” can use to justify pretty much whatever, and given the presence of such people as SBF and cronies, certainly doesn’t support the notion that it’s a great thing for “smart people” to get rich, or really that we should expect that to be any more than neutral.
“Smart People” can be scumbags, and some prominent EA folks were, all the while shouting about how good they were.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he is interested in non-LLM solutions, since he mentioned last year on Twitter that he doesn't have an internal monologue (I hope this is not taken as disparaging of him in any way). His criticisms of LLMs never made sense, and the success of reasoning models has shown him to be definitely wrong.
Yes, it is fascinating that humans can have such seemingly fundamental differences in how they function 'under the hood.' I also have a friend who is highly intelligent—they earned a STEM PhD from one of the best universities in the world—yet they struggle to follow complex movie plots, despite having a photographic memory. It would be interesting to develop mirror LLMs (or Large Anything Models) for all these different types of brains so we can study how exactly these traits manifest and interact.
I'd recommend looking for other sources of information if you're relying on someone who co-authored the paper that introduced the most misleading and uninformed term of the LLM era: "stochastic parrot".
Nobody said that Germany's economy is collapsing, but it's certainly underperforming. It had a recession in 2023 (-0.3% GDP growth), stagnated with 0.1% in 2024, and is expected to grow by just 1.0% in 2025.
https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/economic-surveillance-e...
> The trains, despite all the ineptness of Deutsche Bahn, are generally pretty good!.
> Promoting Nazism is banned. It’s not a slippery slope, and the country hasn’t devolved into authoritarian groupthink. You just can’t publicly support Nazism.
"No national figures exist on the total number of people charged with online speech-related crimes. But in a review of German state records, The New York Times found more than 8,500 cases."
"After Mr. Grote later made remarks admonishing others for hosting parties during the pandemic, a Twitter user wrote: “Du bist so 1 Pimmel” (“You are such a penis”). Three months later, six police officers raided the house of the man who had posted the insult, looking for his electronic devices."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern...
Perhaps it may be more instructive to look at not just the past 2 years, in which there's been a global mini-recession (due largely to the Ukraine war) - and more broadly, how Germany has been doing compared to other countries over longer time periods?
According to these two graphs, German GDP fluctuations are pretty evenly matched with those of the US (and in some years, such ast 2016-2017 they did significantly better than the US):
Germany has been hit worst in the past 2 years, but there's an extremely obvious reason for that -- again, largely due to the war. Not because of the country's social system or how it manages healthcare or fuel prices.
They're awful.
True, but (1) only in the last 10 years, and (2) Germany's "awful" is still an order of magnitude better than the land-based public transit system most anywhere in the US.
Go back 20 years - Germany's train system positively rocked, while the US was still going around invading random countries for no particular reason other than to distract its population from its decaying infrastructure, rising inequality and its own slow drift toward fascism.
Yes, the Berlin-centered, foreigner-dependent tech industry is one of the few growing sectors. It seems a little myopic to me to extrapolate a few thriving communities into a vibrant national economy.
If we can match our existing intelligence (but it’s a jagged border of capabilities), our progress in creating superintelligence won’t matter because we won’t be the ones making it.
Old roulette wheels had large flaws, even in the 1960s: https://thehustle.co/professor-who-beat-roulette. 30 years earlier they must have been worse. So there is a chance he noticed some anomaly that he tried to exploit.
