Since you seem willing to reference your IQ, I’m curious what is your greatest accomplishment with that IQ – does it extend to creative skill? Fairly new to following you so this is a good faith question

kalos
@kalos21million

In expectation I saved on the order of more than millions of lives. I’ve done altruism and AGI for most of my 20s, gave the first TED talk on EA, helped organize the early movement, created a branch of economics to increase morality, wrote a PhD about Altruism: Past Present Propagation, collaborated with some of the world’s greatest minds, most notably Bostrom and FHI and a few other people in the longtermist space, ran the world’s largest EA house, held the realm of Heterodox Effective Altruism when woke and feminists attempted to invade preventing max harm, brought many people into AI and EA. I’ve also done innefective altruism like donating some money to animal welfare, to individual EAs, to charity, to malaria and schistosomosis. I was one of the 5 sine qua non people who caused the largest donation in world history, most of which saved about 13k Indian lives but the part I really care about went to less tractable causes like future anti aging, AI, coordination tech, and preventing existential risk. I’ve brought a couple people back from suicidal ideation, put some shoulders back on the socket, and received at least 10 handwritten letters from different people saying I was the most important person in their lives and thanking me. I have a 70 page long document in my computer with a myriad of thank you notes and praise notes from all sorts of people I collected over the years. I made correct predictions about the future of specific things very often, and I made a few people rich through Bitcoin, I took a poor woman and her kid to see the ocean for the first time and gave them one of my weekend. I helped in a process that prevented the death of 60thousand teens in Brazil, and in the process I also became a philosopher, an evolutionary anthropologist, a self made rich guy who can say what he really thinks and not cancellable, and I’ve inspired a few hundreds of people during my trips because I am genuinely an impressively cool person when I’m in the more “hippieish” less “EA or rationalist” mindset, which happens when I am travelling. In short, I am probably one of the 20 thousand best living humans on earth, and I’m still 37, and almost surely top 1 million. All this with a massive disability, ADHD, which has made my sleep dysfunctional, made me obese, and caused me incalculable social distress and social problems in many of the groups I had. There is no doubt I have not been everything I could have been for the world, in the past or in the future. But I put my track record against anyone as having had a life as admirable as humanly possible given the deck of cards I was given. I am very proud of my accomplishments, in fact, I am surprised every time I do a recount that I have indeed done that much good to the world. I also don’t expect every other person with 145+ IQ to do as much as me. I was lucky in many turns along the road and was able to save an inordinate amount of lives due to factors completely outside my control. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. My inner altruist was honed and prepared. He took most chances he got. He came, he saw, he won. I hope I can continue to be inspiring to my fellow brilliant folk, and they too modulo stochastic luck manage to cause as much good as their deck of cards permits them to. Onwards and Upwards friends 😀

What Are The Moral Obligations of Brilliant People

Fellow 145+, and those 120-145 who all your friends call brilliant because you have other cognitive skills that compensate not being 3SD higher and you still output amazing stuff: What is our moral obligation to our fellow Men?

In humans there is a great level of correlation between goodness and intelligence. Although I have met some very intelligent people who are not moral, Alice, Ellie, Derrida, Foulcault, Rousseau, Trotsky? and many others, the overwhelming majority of us is genuinely good, and invested in making the world a better place at least a little bit, or at least to some people.

It is surely morally permissible for most humans, most of the time, to attempt to do good actions, as long as we follow the Jordan Peterson Locality principle, which states that the lower your cognitive range, the more important for you to clean and organize your real and abstract personal spaces, such as cleaning your room.

A very substantial number of us has one of two major mental illness conditions which change our moral permissions when it comes to goodness especially non-locally as well as obligations.

Aspies have stronger moral permissions, ADHD people have lower moral permissions. ADHDs have stronger moral obligations and Aspies have weaker moral obligations. Let’s break that down.
(there’s also some ASPDs amongst us, they have a moral obligation to reduce their impact maximally and to defer as much as possible to non ASPD people and work under them. They have active disregard for moral obligations though, so they won’t do it)

In our internet-heavy society, we risk not thinking outside the box enough for fear of social apprehension, cancellation and a sunken heart. Aspies are both less affected and less attacked for this, so they should abide by the Elon Musk Speech Delivery principle. Deliver impossible things to the minds of normies, do what no normie is cognitively capable of doing in your do-goodery, and always remember to tell people who should go fuck themselves to go fuck themselves, if you have the fuck you money for it. Without the aspies clearing the forest, the rest of us cannot easily advance progress, science, philosophy, and so on. Aspies are the explorers of the moral landscape, with machetes cutting the dense jungle of judgement by others.
Aspies are permitted bigger cognitive arcs, like Michael Arc (formerly Vassar), Curt Doolittle, or many others. Only the aspies can provide us landscape stochastic jumps in the moral landscape, so please, feel free to guys. We need you.

My crowd, the ADHD folk, we are not permitted to do some things. We are not good at cleaning our room and dealing with the micro-local, and we are not particularly excellent at long term execution either. So we have the permission and endorsement to try and hire people below and above us in timescale. Cleaners, secretaries, organizers below, and great executes above who can bring our infinite fountain of creative and brilliant ideas to fruition, as well as filter what gets or not to the public. Every Bostrom needs a Sandberg. Every Tate needs a Tristan (I’ve been guilty of not having this, and my output, though looming ultra-large in lives saved, has surely been less than ideal in other terms like, books published, compilations of my ideas organized and so on, because I have failed to secure someone in this position, which has significantly hindered the world counterfactual to what I could have done)

Aspies don’t need to partake in some moral obligations like explaining their morals to normies or dressing in normie ways, they are generally exonerated from most of the bio-regulatory moral mechanisms through which humans usually monitor each other, including the scapegoating mechanism (Girard 2006)

What do all of us bright people share in terms of moral obligations then?

A commitment to scaleable transparency seems to me a big one. While the Sam Altman strategy of partial information transfer can lead you pretty high in life, I contend that the brilliant have the obligation of going the Beast Elon route, deliver deliver deliver deliver in public, be distressingly transparent, and act as if 1 million people have cameras on you, because one day, if you do it right, they will.

10 million may sound like a big number, but there is only 10 million of us (and that’s making some assumptions that are all but guaranteed about the sensitivity to testosterone of East Asians, and maybe giving more statistical credit to Africans and Arabs than their due, it could be 6million)

We’re one relatively large city. That’s it.

We are as smart as a 6 foot 6 person, or 198 cm.

There are very few of us. I remember all the people taller than 198 I ever hung out with thrice or more.

If Basketball saved lives, tall people would have a moral obligation, not just a financial incentive, to play basketball. This is the situation we find ourselves in with regard to intelligence. We have capabilities that most people can’t even fathom, and those capabilities can literally save lives. I suggest that we have the moral obligation at least when the cost is relatively low to save a fraction of the lives we can save, be it through improving utility, making the world safer, coordinating and leading other humans, etc…

Abundance: North Korea notwithstanding most of us can obtain resource abundance (especially those without ADHD or aspies) but perhaps most importantly most of us end up meeting lots of others along the way, and perhaps we should try to provide them with abundance in such a way they don’t feel pressured to make money themselves and can dedicate more time and attention to others, I chose the do what you love route, philosophy, psychology, anthropology. But upon arriving at the very high echelons of academia, the wealthy folk around me have always gifted me with some of their wealth, in the form of invitations to trips, to their mansion parties, their island orgies, their houses with no rent where no one seems to work, their chef’s cake, and so on. Only some of us will be wealthy, I contend we have the moral obligation of helping the other brilliant people to choose giving to the world over getting rich by being systematically and categorically generous with our resources. Every single billionaire I have ever met was unequivocally and categorically generous to those around them, around their families, and those they perceived to be doing good in the world. And for us mere rich people, we can still help those young and brilliant who have not accumulated their own resources. The good 145+ people should have our own trickle-down gift economy. Billionaires giving to centimillionaires to decamillionaires to adventurous Brazilians who decided to pursue what they love in a country of max Gini index 🙂 I am grateful to my predecessors, and as I continue to get richer in the next 10 years of Bitcoin, I will continue to enlarge my already very significant amount of donations, whether in time, attention, money, or whatever resources I muster along the way.

The normie obligations. For those of us gifted who are also normies (couldn’t be me) you have some tough additional obligations. Take Vivek and Yang, both distinctively above 145, of different political philosophies, but able to keep the chatter going on what would it be like if an intelligent person commanded the world’s strongest country. Just like they sacrificed their millionaire do gooder life to try to do even gooderer, in a realm dominated by midwit normies, if you can ascend the social scales in ways that us ADHD and aspie smartfolk can’t, you have an obligation of keeping at least a moderate level of societal cohesion and function in the corporate and political worlds, as well as in the top charity world, EA, etc…

Reproduction: By far the hardest discussion when it comes to our tribe. Dutton found that only a third of historical geniuses have babies, and this was before condoms and pills. Fewer predictions about human behavior are stronger than that geniuses don’t choose children, with predictable Darwinian consequences. I say if you do end up choosing to reproduce, try assortative mating to decrease the odds or “return to the mean” (exapted term from math, I’m aware it took new meaning in bio).
If you’re able to, donate gametes, start early, do it often and widely. As you know, so much is genetic, and 10 million can make quite a genetic ripple in the world if we put our minds and gametes to it.
You can also surrogate if you don’t want to go old-school ape style.
If you are truly stellar, like the other 145+ all look at you and go “WOAH” then it depends on whether you’re a public or private person. Public people need to go the Elon route and have 10 kids to incentivize more of the 115+crowd to have kids. If you’re a private person, then go Tesla Newton and use all your precious brain cycles to improve the world fast.
I’ve seen many of us burnout over the years for not doing what they wanted with regards to kids, so don’t not have kids because you’re extremely smart, and don’t have kids because you’re extremely smart.
But math is math, so please, donate your sperm and eggs, that’s by far the least costly contribution you can have in our pleitropic, plurisemantic genetic world.

Solzhenitsyn: If the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart starts to tilt to the evil side, you have a moral obligation of tell people as quickly as possible, people with power to control you if you keep ascening. in the words of past
@sama
“the board can fire me, i think that’s important” past sama was a wise cookie.
Many of us get tempted by evil on our way to power, some because power itself corrupts. Most because we are betrayed along the way, often betrayed precisely because we did good. “Remember the real game is above” as someone told Katniss in the hunger games 3. Although it seems like the local status dispute and betrayal are a massive deal at the time, specially for the ADHD RSD gifted, we must keep in mind that resentment is what made bad people bad, lack of gratitude is the hallmark of the evil Man or Woman, and above all that the real game is much bigger than our ape and mating trifles. The game will carry on for centuries if not trillenia, and if AGI is possible, the biggest lever of history is relatively close to us in reach. Don’t let your personal betrayal as an ape harm the quadrillions of people yet to come. This isn’t our fight, this is their fight. We are here for them. Our obligation is towards them, for they outnumber us as the grains of the Sahara outnumber the number 1.
Let’s make sure those tears are tears of joy.

We are born with a gift that doubles as a curse. Everything is and always will be easier for us.
But because it is easier (especially those without ADHD) it is incumbent upon us to do our very best for the other 7 billion, and for the quadrillions that shall come.

We are thrown in the world, and stand in no full moral obligation to it. But if you read this deep than in the past you have already made a personal commitment to being good. Don’t forget the commitment, and use guidelines to see what you’re permitted, required, obligated or incentivized to do, from this position of privilege in which we happen to be born.

Whether you feel, like Elon, that our condition is a curse, or you feel, like me, that it is a blessing with some contractual responsibilities, the fact is that you have the intelligence. So go ahead and use it 🙂

Trans Women Are Women, The Full Defense

Sex is a family property with cluster attractors.
To be male is to have a significant but undetermined fraction of characteristics that are male-typical, such as hair, deep voice, bad skin, thinking about the Roman Empire, a short Y chromosome, balls, sperm production capability, crossing your legs wide, being honest (as an adult), voting well, etc…

Each individual, say Eric, has some maleness to him, which puts them, in the N-dimensional space of all these characteristics, closer to the male attractor center of gravity than the female attractor center of gravity.

Some people are more male than Eric, like Tate, and some are less, like MoonBrah or Eddie Izzard.

To be male, by definition, is to be closer in that attractor space of N dimensions from the male center than the female center.

This definition isn’t circular because the family of characteristics ostensibly points to it.

If you change your hormones, behavior, societal perception, phenotype, skin type, etc… you have, just like a frog or a salamander that switches sex, switched your sex. This is true even if you have not managed to switch any particular characteristic, like what pronoun people call you, or the ability to bear children in your belly. If you are closer to the male attractor, congratulations, you are not a woman.

The thing that makes imbeciles and conservatives hesitant about this obvious biological fact is that conservatives are:

1) Low in openness and uncomfortable with liminal spaces that don’t have a big wall on the southern border and are grey areas of Jewish nuance.
2) Neurotically and pathologically obsessed with reproduction to the point they literally invented God to get a modest fitness advantage, promote natalism on every curve, hate women without children and think men without children are losers, and literally condemned sodomy as a sin.
In short, they REALLY want you to multiply. So for them, incorrectly, all that counts is reproduction capability, which our current technology cannot yet reliably switch.
To the conservative mind, we are but the birthing pods for more of “our identity”, and anything on the way of that is bulldozed, whether or not is true, e.g. the anti-abortion stance.

So biologically, as well as socially, some transwomen are women. Not all, because not everyone successfully moves themselves closer to the female attractor than the male attractor. Some might try and still fail, some might simply not try enough, nature doesn’t care, facts don’t care about your feelings, whether you want to be trans, or whether you want to pretend trans doesn’t exist. Nature just is, unimpeded.

We live in the internet age though, and we live in an age of far more kindness and moral wisdom than 1000, or 10000 years ago. So let’s talk about trans people morally, and virtually, not just biologically and socially.

There are 30 to 45 million Transpeople worldwide, think of them as a nation. They are not going anywhere, many of them like being trans, some of them don’t, some of them hate life, some of them love life, some of them kill themselves, and some of them reverse transition. Some of them get pregnant or impregnate someone else. These people are not going away. It doesn’t matter what you think of them. Trans people exist, they will continue to exist, and they will live their lives as they best can, until one day, by mental illness induced suicide, or at the ripe old age of 82, with a belly full of wine and young woman’s mouth around their cock, they will eventually die. And so will you. The day you die, there will be more openly trans people on earth than today. The trend is clear, they have been increasing in numbers and although they are a tiny fraction of the population, they are still a lot of people in absolute numbers. Same size as Canada, Argentina, Morroco, or Ukraine. the Transnation should be tolerated by all, and even liked by many. So morally, at a group level we should be kind and nice to trans people. Further if you know a Trans person personally, you are under no obligation of calling them by whatever pronouns or talking to them at all, you’re free, do whatever the fuck you feel like all the time, within legal bounds. But if you want to act morally, you should consider being kind and vocalize aspirationally towards what that trans person wants. Let’s say George is trans and wants to become Georgina, George learns all the mannerisms, takes hormones, behaves femininely, and looks almost like a girl. George, despite his best efforts, doesn’t manage to get closer to the female attractor, he manages to go 49% of the way, but not 51%. Now why would you add to Georges problems by calling him male, or deadnaming him George. You know by the dress and the manner of speaking, by the long luscious hair and the impeccable foundation and makeup, that George wants to be a woman. Can you aspirationally, out of the goodness of your heart, concede to George to call him Georgina? Can you make another human being’s day? Can you make them feel validated for something they spent a lifetime trying to achieve? I would suggest yes.
Now if Greg is clearly male and masculine, is on a 10%, and demands to be called Greggete from a mouth full of meat spilling on his long beard while scratching his balls, then no. Greg isn’t close enough to be acceptable to call him a woman. The left doesn’t like to accept that, but the left is wrong about most things so I don’t care.

Now the world has gone largely virtual, in the virtual world, I have blue eyes (check my profile picture, it’s true) IF you see me walking the streets without contact lenses, you’d immediately know I don’t have blue eyes in meatspace. But meatspace is only a small fraction of my life. I ama terminally online guy. I am on TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook all day, a lot of it writing philosophy and anthropology, since I prefer these immediate media to do that instead of the dry and useless peer review 2 year long drag of academia, where I spent 15 years already. In virtual worlds, it is much easier to morph our phenotypes, and for trans people, that can be a blessing. Contrapoints can interact with people who think of her as the beautiful woman she dresses up to be in her videos, even if she just woke up after a drunk night, and looks like a kind of beatdown androgynous boy that morning. Our selves are partially virtual, and that gives us even more leeway to move in the spectrum of sex towards the sex we would prefer to be. Same is true of tech, makeup tech, biotech, self-improvement tech, all of those make trans life easier.

Not all transwomen are women, some have failed, like Greg, who is actually a man, not a transwoman. Some, if you are a good moral person, you can aspirationally say succeeded, like George. Some, possibly most after a while, have in fact succeeded, they are now in fact closer to the female attractor.
The same is true, even more so, for transmen, who more easily are recognized as men by society due to their beards, deep voices, hairy and muscular body etc…

So, as a PhD in a human biological field, and a cismale, who also happens to be an actual philosopher, and therefore having basically all the credentials needed to make this assessment, and with the added advantages of being a rightwing guy who loves Bolsonaro, Trump, Milei, Geert Wilders, Bukele and even Bannon, and having lived (As a roommate in a big house, not as a date) with 3 trans women, one before transition and two after, I am arguably one of the most qualified people on earth to make this statement:
Most transmen are men.
Most transwomen are women.

This is true scientifically, biologically, philosophically, and morally.

Facts don’t care about your feelings, and these are the facts.
There is a separate problem that people need to accept that not every single transperson who attempts transmutation into the other gender succeeds, but that’s not the target public of this writing. The target public of this writing is the large cohort of people who are anti-trans, advocate for the erradication of trans, etc… etc… etc…

If you disagree, and I could be wrong, I’ve been wrong about a lot before, please, lay out your argument in response carefully, and precisely, and I will revisit my beliefs, and issue a public retraction if I am convinced (I have done this countless times before when I was wrong about something)

Otherwise, please, stop using ignorance as an excuse. Maybe you didn’t know before. But now you do. Humans can, and do become trans.

It’s not only possible, it is factual.

White Identity Politics Is Not The Way

In this piece Bo Winegrad defends white identity, and I will do my best to destroy the piece.

“PHILO: All right. My view is that such purposeful identity activation can only be combatted by identity activation on the other side. That is, the only way to fight successfully against progressive identity politics is to promote white identity politics. They—the progressives—will blame whites for everything. If whites can’t respond collectively, then they can’t respond at all. And the left’s anti-white narratives will fill the silence, one loud cacophony of denunciation.”

This is where Bo pulls the rug and does the evil thing: Asserting without argument the only way to fight progressive identity politics is with identity politics of our own. That is obviously ridiculous and false, and shameful even.

@VivekGRamaswamy has been fighting identity politics for years, with his book Woke Inc, with his current presidential run, etc… And look at him, as South Asian as they come. Spencer favoured Yang in the 2020 cycle because he seemed to be the most pro-white candidate, certainly the only one that addressed middle class white man by name. Yang is 100% Han Taiwanse AFAICT.

What do Yang, Vivek, and all the great whites Bo cites, like Beethoven and Newton, have in common?

Intelligence.

In humans, unlike machines, there is a massive non-orthogonality thesis. The smarter a human is, the more likely they are a moral good person. This goes for petty crime all the way to philosophical tractatus. At all rungs of the intelligence ladder, with exceptions for psychopaths and sociopaths, and unusual men, the smarter you are, the better you are as a person.

Western civilization is good, and it was created by whites, originally for whites (mostly because that’s who they knew anyway). Today, Western civilization has 3 groups. Whites of all intelligences, immigrants of high intelligence (hi I’m from Brazil, I’m white though so I guess I don’t count) and descendants of slaves. Balaji, Sundar Pichai, Venkatesh, Vivek, you would never run out of names if you tried to name all the South Asians who massively contributed to society. You’d never run out of names if you tried to name all East Asian scientists with published papers.

Current Nigerians are among the highest earning populations in the USA, and hindu’s are the highest earning religion.

In short, smart people, white or not, are benefiting from civilization, are helping civilization, and are benefiting civilization, some are even fighting for white welfare and white causes.

It is very very easy to fight woke, identity politics barbarians fighting for the “people of color” class without using white identity, Besides Vivek and Yang, Bannon, Trump, Shapiro, and countless, countless other less eminent people do it all the time. Zuby, Sowell, Larry Elders. Even among blacks, there are many people fighting identity politics. There is no need to use white identity to do so.

There are also low IQ migrants in the west, who are arguably causing harm to society, though see Brian Kaplan for a defense of immigration that I personally don’t agree with. Those migrants come mostly from Africa and the Islamic world, and have caused harm, significant harm, to the western countries they immigrated to. Islam has caused serious harm to Europe, Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey (I don’ think Turkey should count as Europe, sue me) India, etc… It is obvious to anyone with a brain that Islam is unequivocally incompatible with Western civilization. The influence of Islam must be, for survival reasons, reduced to a minimum within what is legal by every single western country, under literal penalty of death. Countries that do not do everything within their legal powers to stop Islam will see their fates become Iran, Lebanon or Isis, in the long run.

This however is a religious identity, not an ethnic one. As an example I come from one of the most diverse ethnic cities on earth, São Paulo, we have the largest Japanese population outside Japan, and in school my best friends were Russian, Polish, Syrian, Lebanese, Afro, Italian, Portuguese, Arab, Japanese, Anglo, Sepha Jewish, Ashke Jewish, Swiss and French. These people were raised with me, are great, and safe for the occasional clash between Turkish and Armenian kids in my school who were not fond of one another (but never physically altercated) we all lived not only in peace and harmony, but in profound cultural unit, at Lourenço Castanho high-school, an elite school in São Paulo, and Casa do Teatro, the major theater school for teens.

The Two best hospitals in São Paulo are Sirio-Libanes and Albert-Einstein Israelita. That is both are Levante peoples, who back in their countries, don’t love one another, as the Gaza conflict made clear.

The Subway in São Paulo, full of diversity, is sparkling clean, organized, and behaved. In spite of 20% of genes in brazil, and perhaps 15% in São Paulo city, being sub-saharan genes.

Brazil is the least racist truly multiethnic country in the world. The USA is second, Russia, Turkey, India etc… come later. The other countries were not truly multiethnic. But obviously Scandinavians are less. The point is that Brazil proves you can be non-racist, have cultural unity, and thrive (modulo people) within that framework.

Why is Brazil, especially São Paulo city, able to do all that? Historically, because the Portuguese who colonized were not averse to other races, and mixed race with the people, unlike anglos or dutch.

But that’s not the most important point. The most important point is that Brazil is a profoundly elitist, classicist, moderately aristocratic country. In Brazil, if you make it to the elite, where I was born and lived 27 years, no one cares how you got there. Intelligent, wealthy, powerful brazilians are all Brazilians, we hang out when we meet abroad, we are friends in school, we are one people, under God (well, sort of, our aristocracy is majority atheist) united. Et Pluribus Unum.

The aristocratic factor comes from the nobles of Portugal who lived in Brazil a long time with the court, and brought nobility culture to Brazil.

The USA, unfortunately, almost completely lacks class and is devoid of it. As contrapoints says, “Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a what a rich person is” And that’s fine, whatever, you’re the best country in the history of earth, have the best people of all races, and have been more moral and life saving than all other countries combined in history. So I’ll cut you some slack, but just because the United States of Awesome are unequivocally superior to every other country that ever existed by a factor of at least 30%.

Luckily, it does not lack meritocracy. This is the best country to ascend social class conditional on IQ, I myself and am a ultra-high-IQ individual who benefited from becoming a millionaire here, as did Vivek and his parents, Yang and his parents, Satya, Brin, Page and Balaji, not to mention the best of us, @elonmusk himself.

What can São Paulo, one of the world’s wealthiest cities, through me, teach America: Integration works, if you do it right. The first rule we got from the Portuguese because of the whole Andaluzia Reconcquista incidents is “No Islam, no budging, no negotiation, no Islam, end of story” Brazil and Portuguese speaking countries like Mosque-bulldozing-Angola were clear, “You (and your ethnic group) are welcome here, your religion is not. Choose.” forcibly converting Muslims in the early 1800s.

The result is that besides the hospital, Syrian and Lebanese people, Turkish and Persian people now populate the city of São Paulo, they were half my people in school, and no one bats an eyelid. Christian Arabs came to Brazil in droves, and now run our best hospitals, clubs, some great restaurants, soccer teams, and much more.

Rule 1: No Islam.

Rule 2: Elitism

@Cobratate said it best: “Do you think anyone cares if a billionaire is black in a meeting of billionaires?” of course not. Billionaire identity trumps ethnic and national identity, Musk, Zuck, Balaji, Brin, Buffett, Onassis, have much more in common than they have apart, as self made billionaires.

Of course if you treat all elite people as one class, racism dissolves, wokeness dissolves, “people of color identity politics” dissolves, just like “there are no feminists on a Yatch”. Evil spiteful ideologies that aim to bring others, including whites, down, don’t survive the meritocratic funnel.

As I said, my preference, with lord Russell, would be aristocracy. In the USA, that’s out. You can still do Geniocracy and Plutocracy.

A powerful multiracial elite of Geniuses or Plutocrats (or both, why not both, right?) is far better for a Nation than a monoracial one. The USA is proof of that, as is São Paulo, Singapore, Macau, Renaissance Venice, Modern Paris, Contemporary London etc…

Of course in practice that will mean whites (and Jews) will be primarily in control of things. That’s ok, that’s fine, that’s great. Whites have the best track record in history as a people. Why be sad that they are ok with helping everyone? Of course that means very few blacks will ascend the ranks, that’s also ok, but why prevent Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell of fulfilling their destiny? That’s dull. That’s kind of bigoted, actually.

Great Replacement and White natality. There is no doubt this is a global catastrophe of epic proportions and enormous amounts of resources and brain cycles must go to fixing it. The path is not to exhort white identity. Do you really think white women will fall for that? For every @EvaVlaar there are at least 100 Karens, Stacy’s, and Vickis. The problem of getting white women to choose to have 2.1 children is both important, and urgent, but only a terminally online aspie white would think the solution is white identity politics. Just look at natality in Uruguay, Iceland, Argentina, the whitest countries on earth. It is no better. That is a separate problem from white identity and west salvation. All these are true at once:

1) Western civilization is in decline, and needs to be protected to decelerate the decline, and if possible, save it.

2) Whites are diminishing as a fraction of world population, that is bad, and white women need to go back to having more babies.

3) The best way to fight identity politics and woke ideology is through meritocracy and elitism in unity as a nation, not by becoming tribal and identitarian ourselves.

The decline in the West can and should be slowed or stopped, and to do so requires:

1) No Islam

2) Elitism

3) High IQ natality, all ethnicities

4) The survival of whites

5) Getting the best people we can to help us all out, no matter what ethnic group they belong to.

This is evidenced by São Paulo, New York, London, Iceland, Argentina, Uruguay, The Reconquista, the history of Christian countries, natalism, and many, many other sources of evidence which I can’t compress in one writing. My website has a bibliography of my mind and will have a copy of this writing.

White Identity, as Richard Spencer found out, is not the way.

As to the concerns raised by Taylor and MacDonald, I have addressed them prior and will link below.

The USA is in decline, as so is the civilization that it commands and steers. This can and should be addressed, but it should be addressed with the most effective policies, and by directly tackling the issues, not with a side quest with a bad history that we have no reason to expect will in fact cause a solution, which risks only intensifying the grinding strife in which we are already absconded.

Meritocracy and “the rules” are the Way.

Why Do I Believe Fathering Does Not Matter?

1) Because my father didn’t love me. Just kidding. I love my dad and we have always been close, we still travel together now and have an Italian level of parental bonding, which is significantly higher than Anglo, despite him being Portuguese.

2) Many exceptional people lost their dads before birth or very very young. Andrew Jackson, Obama, Clinton, Bertrand Russell, Roger Waters, Newton, Leibniz, Sowell, and many others.

3) The most common mistake among contemporary humans when it comes to biology is to falsely attribute to upbringing that which pertains to inheritance (genetic, epigenetic)

4) In a study done in India, the outcomes were not harmed when the dad instead of leaving, died.

5) In a Scandinavian IVF Study where the parents are not genetic parents, the outcomes were not related to father presence.

6) This all makes sense, because the bad outcomes could be caused, parsimoniously, by either dads that leave having bad genes, option 1, or mums who select the types of dads who would leave having bad genes, option 2. Option 3 fathering matters does not survive Ockham’s Razor.

7) A personality study just came out and is going viral on Twitter saying personality does not reflect upbringing. This is just one in a long cascade of studies started by Judith Harris “The Nurture Assumption” and corroborated by Pinker and hundreds and hundreds of studies of every dimension you can possibly fathom, all of which show the same thing. Parenting matters less than we think it does, most of the similarities and correlations are hereditary, and peers often influence more.

8) Then why does Evo Anthro
@dr_aMachin
defend fathering for example in
@ChrisWillx
podcast and in her books? That depends. She mentions in the podcast that having parental figures that are male seems to substitute for the value in many cases. This is consistent with fathering being like language acquisition in Chomsky’s paucity of data hypothesis. We seem to learn language well even with very little input in deficient environments because we are programmed in ways to learn it (see Terrence Deacon works to understand how). Likewise, a few males seem to suffice despite not being the specific child’s father. Anna really doesn’t like that I’m bringing Harris and heritability to this equation, since she muted me when I asked her about it, Evo anthro to Evo anthro, and blocked me when I emailed her about it. She is for some reason not willing to engage, or to explain why, if I am wrong, I am wrong. This animosity is not common among academics, and I am very curious as to what will come of it. Everything I saw her say in the podcast is compatible with my conjecture.

9) Do you really mean it doesn’t matter 100%? Of course not, this is the internet, be charitable, I need memetic force. If Judith Harris can say “The Nurture Assumption” despite knowing that nurture does contribute at least a little, then I can say fathering doesn’t matter while knowing that it matters at least a little. The point is that the bulk of what we think is fathering is in fact a combination of heritable pre-programming, and some sort of good adult male influence, from whichever male adult is available, and a comparatively minuscule amount is actually our dads.

10) I don’t particularly want this to be true either. I have no horse in this race. As mentioned I love my dad, he’s my favorite living human, we’re friends, and we travel together, he raised me alongside mum until age 8, then split until 15, then again until 27, when I moved countries so living with him was no longer viable. I have no problems with dad. This isn’t personal. This is science. And science sometimes sucks.

So that’ my full case. I suspect fathering matters less than 15% of what we think it does, probably less than 10%. I believe this is a massive blow to the right-wing in politics because they have been saying “the absence of fathers in the home is the cause of (insert political problem here)” and that’s not true if the genetic + paucity Caleiro conjecture is correct.

If it is correct, the right-wing needs to adjust its policies to reflect that, and stop trying to convince dads to stay in the home as if that was going to change the kids. Other interventions might be more fruitful. Even if there are no other interventions, we should still stop lying to ourselves about it.

And someone who doesn’t trigger Anna must talk to her about this, because if I am wrong, she’s probably the most qualified person in the world to make the case that I am wrong, and why.

With paternal love
G

Previous writings of mine on facebook about this:
Fathers Don’t Matter and Conservatives NEED to Stop Pretending They Do. It’s Not About Race and Democrats NEED To Stop Pretending it is. Civilization Will Self Destruct if We Don’t Become Bioinformed
(Paper linked below)
So I hypothesized on Twitter that reactionaries and conservatives are wrong about intact families and fathers and that it was also possible that the reason the underclass has horrible outcomes and is screwed isn’t that dad never came back from the milkstore, but instead that dad and mum have bad genes and the child was doomed from birth.
So when reactionaries and conservatives say it’s about intact marriages and fathers they’re just being cowards who don’t want to talk about intelligence (g or iq), they are so concerned about being perceived as racist that they stopped talking about a variable that is not great but at least it’s nature (race, Ethnicity etc) and started talking about a nurture one (father presence, intact family)
Benjamin Reames sent me a study about in vitro fertilization with eggs or sperm that don’t come from the raising father or mother, after I expressed my concerns and my interpretation of the study is that not only my “nature and genes is what matters for fathers” hypothesis is right, but even I, determinist that I am, was still not as fundamentalist and radical as reality is.
If you know how to read the paper, you’ll know that when it says nature, it means genes and epigenetic zygote environment.
But when it says nurture, it actually means nurture culturally but also the biological stuff like nutrition, milk quality based on mother lifestyle, placentenary conditions, if the mum smoked before or during pregnancy and nursing all this stuff that changes the biochemistry of the baby develop. And for sperm donors, nature also means mother’s nature, measured by her (genetic) skill in choosing from the 5 characteristics available which sperm donor.
If my way of looking at this study is right, here’s the conclusion:
Civilization will not stop collapsing if cuckservatives like Ben Shapiro and friends continue pretending the correlated variable of father presence and intact family matter. It doesn’t. Not a lot. Not a little. Not at all. The Problem is genetic and nutritional all the way down, it is not at all due to anything else. All that matters is how good are the nutrients, toxins, and genes you receive.
The effect of fathers in the minuscule, super rare cases where it showed, I strongly suspect that is mediated via the husband controlling nutrition of the wife and thus altering the epigenetic environment of the kid.
The effect of nurture mothers can easily be explained by the fact that genetically less intelligent, conscientious women screw up their child’s diet more (say by feeding them vegan food) bad milk from their own badly cared for body, and bad intrauterine environment.
I was definitely, without doubt more nature over nurture than 99% of the population before, and 80% than people who studied evolution, bioanthro, Evo psych etc. But I wasn’t nearly enough on that side. Count me on team “everything is nature until proven otherwise” from now on.
So the political consequences are far and wide.
The current game of hot potato is:
The left and liberals pretend people are flexible plastic and if not a full blank slate at least a light gray slate. This is obviously, patently incorrect, dangerous, and causes all the imbecility of critical race theory and the worst evils of University students who try to reverse systemic oppression without ever understanding that is not cultural oppression it’s just that people are born different in personality, intelligence and so on.
The right pretends that cultural shift away from God, marriage, family values, and intact nuclear monogamous families is the right explanation for the growth of the underclass. That’s just false.
What is really happening is that people with bad genes, of all races, sexes etc, are reproducing, surviving, immigrating etc.
A child isn’t broken because dad never came back from the store. Instead a man with horrible genes would lie that he is going to get milk and never come back. A woman who let herself impregnate by such a man is statistically also a woman of bad genes, and thus the child is far more likely to have psychopathology, to be dumb, and to do all the bad things people with bad genes cause.
So while cowards on the left accuse the right of being racist and the right retracts itself into fetal position and tries to find cultural stuff to change, the real story, which is a story of good and bad genes regardless of race, and of good and bad biology regardless of culture, upbringing, or how often your parents go to church separate from their genes.
All the things we think are cultural are just indicators. Going to church won’t help your kids. Being born genetically as the type of agreeable conscientius person who goes to church will. But not if you insert someone else’s eggs in you. Not if another genetic guy passes on the genes to a kid you raised.
So quit the helicopter parenting immediately. Parenting doesn’t matter. Take time to yourself.
Specialize in the health of the woman during before and after pregnancy. Give her good meat, liver, vitamins, take away her cigarettes, booze and drugs. Make sure her milk is on point. After that, nothing you do makes any difference to a first approximation. Whether you’re a woman or a man.
Just feed the child good nutritious food.
We are physics and genetics. Culture is an afterthought. Upbringing is an afterthought. Rearing is an afterthought.
I didn’t make the game, I’m just watching it and letting you know the rules. I myself think the game is rather silly and I’ll leave the serving tiny molecules that don’t care about me or anyone for you guys at least for now.
The amount that parenting is hard and grueling, when observed in light of how irrelevant it is makes this whole ordeal seem like a horrific cosmic joke on the part of a spiteful, brute God, set on pointless effort.
Our civilization will continue to fall while genetic quality decays (in all genders, races, orientations and so on) and the only way to save it is to find ways for selection in mating to become more strict again and for people with good genes to have a ton of genetic children.
I was dead right on the Mormons ridiculous as it sounds. They’re indeed one of the key high reproduction groups that might save us all.
While the left pretends it’s about race, and the right pretends it’s about families, we are all doomed.
Andrew Yang is the only politician intelligent enough to even understand all that. To read the paper and know the science.
But even him with a third party has no chance of bringing this discussion into the forefront of policy. 90% of people are either too cowardly, too ignorant, or too idealistic to accept the level of harshness of our physical reality as physical beings in a Darwinian unforgiving biologically determined world.
We are racing to the precipice in our cowardice and ignorance, and only a bioinformed revolution can bring us back.
It’s not fathers, it’s genes.
It’s not race, it’s genes.
It’s not education, it’s genes.
The sooner we accept the brutal harsh reality, the sooner we can go back to improving the future of humanity and go actually forward.
-‐——
Since this is significantly more important than most of my writings, consider sharing this post. If you’re reading this from someone who shared it, it doesn’t mean they agree with me, don’t light up your pitch forks. It just means they think the discussion is worth having.

More Anti-Fathering Data Just Dropped
I’ve been making the case against fathering for a while. While american conservatives will try to argue that the reason there are problems in the inner cities or whatever is that families are now broken and fathers have left the home, I always kinda knew there was something biologically fishy about this.
When you study bio-stuff, anthro, psycho, or zoo, you learn to consistently assume people think things are less biologically determined than they are. The classic example is autism and intelligence, which are both more than 50% bio-determined.
I suspected the conservatives were wrong, and the thing that makes the children of men who go get milk and never return more promiscuous, criminal, impulsive, and so on was not the fact that the dad never returned, it was the fact that either the dad himself had impulsivity, propensity to crime and promiscuity, which was genetically passed to the kids, or, more complexly, that the mum had a proclivity to those things and also to select a dad who would leave. In short, the problem was biological, or what laymen call “genetic” (which includes some non-genetic hereditary stuff too).
I got some data supporting my thesis last year in a study on in vitro fertilized kids of single mums, who don’t have that much of a problem life, because the sperm wasn’t selected by natural processes but from an in vitro clinic. And they also included mums who raised zygotes from other females (if I recall, it is kind of blurry right now) in their bellies, which means that it is not that only highly conscientious mums have the stamina to go to a fertility clinic and that ends up causing a good behaving kid. Basically the genes of a single mum child matter more than the fact that she is a single mum.
New evidence just dropped in the discussion Diana S Fleischman had with Louise Perry she mentioned that in India they followed up on girls who had absent fathers because 1) They left completely 2) They worked away 3) They died .
The dead father ones did not have early onset menarch!
Maybe if you’re not into biology this will not strike you as shocking and awesome. But it totally is!
Early menarch is an indicator of fast life strategy, or what the internet calls (innacurately) r-selectedness sometimes, and it comes with things like impulsivity, promiscuity, high sociosexuality, propensity to crime and so on as correlates.
So what thatIndia study implied, much like the in vitro studies, is that the thing that matters about the kids is the genetics of the dad, not whether he is around! Dead people are totally not around and yet!
My fav human ever, for example, Bertrand Russell, both parents died in a car accident age 4, and despite being poly 90 years before it was cool, he was an absolute high brow victorian gentleman hard working guy, and not a gangster 📷
Anyway, you get the idea: Conservatives in the USA are WRONG about what matters to raise a good population, getting people to stay in marriages won’t solve the problem.
I don’t know what will solve the problem, but fathering isn’t it.

An Open Letter to Ethical Vegan Rationalists, Effective Altruists, and AInotkilleveryonists

Soon we will all be Vegan, lab meat chemically indistinguishable from meat is in sight 🥩👀
Hundreds of Vegans, and tens of thousands of omnivores have switched to a carnivore diet, with truly outstanding results, including myself. Eating 95%+ meat heals the body, adjusts weights naturally, aligns our hunger cues and systems to nutritional cues, and, I swear on the future Superintelligent AI: makes you feel great literally all the time.

The carnivore diet is particularly helpful to vegans because it allows the body to heal from the various toxins in plants, which plants evolved to poison us since they can’t flee like animals. That includes any possible allergies you may have, oxalates, and other chemical agents, but most importantly it includes inflammation, which appears to be responsible not only for pain, arthritis, and fibromyalgia (commonly occurring in vegans) but also for the slow cognitive tempo and brain fog which many vegans experience. The carnivore mind is sharp as a tack, and experiences a lifted flat mood, no brain fog, a stronger level of drive (caused by a combination of cholesterol, testosterone and creatine, presumably) and it is free of depression.

Effective Altruists and AInotkilleveryonists deal with some of the world’s greatest problems every day, and can be often stressed, burned out, or otherwise live unhealthy habits in pursuit of the greater good. To not have depression, not have pain, not have brain fog, and not have an irritable mood are all extraordinarily valuable instrumental goals for productivity, anyone running on ketones and no carbs is doing a great service to themselves and their goals, whatever their goals are.

The calm, resolute demeanor of Carnivores is best conducive to social interaction, diplomacy, acquisition of power for good causes, and to navigate terrains with formidable foes, which we all have to go through on occasion.

The Numbers:
If we go extinct or another existential risk comes to pass, life can evolve on other planets leading to unimaginable quantities of wild animal suffering. Here on Earth human extinction could lead to the same outcome.

As one of the two only symbolic species in the known universe, and still cognitively superior to our counterpart GPT-4, it is our responsibility as stewards of the universe to remain at peak physiological and psychological capability, including mood, disposition, and nutrition. This cannot be presently done on a vegan diet by people with 95% of genomes, only by a few exceptions. Everyone else is self-inflicting psychological, mood, mental, disposition and physical damage by adopting a vegan way of eating. This includes you.

It is debatable whether agriculture land or pasture causes more suffering and pain, since we do not know the valence difference of different animal experiences. If the intensity of phenomenal pain is proportional to the fraction of cognition it represents, ants suffer far more than we or cows do. If the intensity of phenomenal pain is proportional to the loss in indirect fitness loss, as seems extraordinarily plausible given human suffering in the loss of relatives, then rodents and insects could be suffering tremendously more in the fields than cows are in pasture.

We are all mathematically savvy and familiar with the pareto principle of 80% of benefit from 20% of sacrifice. In the case of meat, this is more like 98% benefit to 2% sacrifice if you compare eating cows, who produce 222+kg of meat, to chickens or ducks, who produce fewer than 2kg. Cow meat also makes carnivores feel better than chicken meat, for the overwhelming majority of carnivores. I have personally raised cows as a child, milked them, fertilized them, etc… and I think most of those cows I’ve met would categorically prefer to have lived than not to have lived, if they were uplifted to Von Neumann intelligence and read the complete works of Derek Parfit, David Parce, Brian Tomasik, and Peter Singer.

Most importantly, however, we have a duty to any possible species out there in the cosmos being grounded in the terror machine of Darwinism to go there and abolish suffering, whether by changing their biology, their evolutionary process, or whatever else. For that, we need EA, AGI and rationalist vegans to be working at peak capacity.

It is truly hard to overstate the benefits of a Carnivore diet, especially for those coming from veganism. You can literally feel the nutrition, balance, and biochemical harmony it casts into your body. There are many, if not most people, who benefit from starting a vegan diet, especially a more radical raw or paleo vegan diet, this is because the food inside vegetables is so hidden behind a layer of defenses, physical (fiber) and chemical (toxins and “hormesis” lol), that your body begins to eat itself, and its self is made of meat. That’s why it feels great in the beginning, yet most vegans quit after a few years (I’ve heard mean is 7 but I’d be surprised if it was more than 4). Even vegan bodybuilders often have depleted facial musculature, if you learn to see it, you can’t unsee it. Most vegans however are either languid or chubby. The languid ones you can easily tell lack protein, and the chubby ones still suffer from oxalates, rashes, irritable moods, acne, hair loss, tooth decay and yellowing. Over 95% of vegans suffer from Vegan eyes, a depression over the eyelid, often accompanied by a pink malnourished shade, more rarely accompanied by panda eyes, dark circles around the eye. The harm veganism inflicts to the human body might be slow in comparison to straight up poison, but it is more harmful in its sequelae than many lingering diseases, perhaps comparable to long covid.

Just Eat Cows.

It is very likely that if you dedicate your time to stop factory farming, and decrease sales of chicken versus beef, that you will save far more pigs and chickens from suffering than the amount of cows you will cause pain to than if you didn’t eat cow, and you had to visit the doctor, the bathroom, and the supermarket, a lot more than you would on a nutritious carnivore diet.

Danger of emotional echo chambers

EA vegans are less prone to this than normal vegans but there is always a risk that your ingroup lost track of important information and rejects those who bring that information in. This endangers those in the ingroup because they end up making decisions based off one way of interpreting double blind studies on LDL and correlational studies on heart attack, and they never learn that those correlations don’t hold for carnivores who don’t eat bread sugar rice beer etc… and only eat meat, they also never learn that the sugar industry sponsored the studies on heart attack, or that the odds of having a second heart attack after having a first one are the same on an omni or veg diet, and that if the study was well designed (dubitable) the group with more plants lived only 5 days more. They literally spent that entire time between supermarket, cooking, feeling pain, sleeping longer to digest, and farting.

The scienticism of youth, oh what a beauty it is. I was once a young brilliant man or woman, like yourself. I believed statistics and correlational studies with the religious faith of one who believed in the algarisms past the comma in a quantum physics experiment. Now I am a scientist, and an analytic philosopher, I’ve read thousands and thousands of papers, I have a PhD in a human biological field, I’ve read a thousand books on science. I am truly one of the people in the world who knows more about the world around us, for I had 20 years to do nothing but study, talk to the world’s most brilliant people, think about science, philosophy, AGI, and bring a little brazilian dancing spirit to EA. Now I can see methodological flaws in studies on a glance, I can infer and track motivation in science in many cases, and I can distinguish wheat from chaff is many more cases than most professors. The studies favoring veganism nutritionally or health-wise are a hoax. They distort facts whether intentionally or not, and they are helping cause the obesity epidemic and other maladies occurring in the USA. Not all science is made the same, some science is better than others, but it takes 10 years to train your eyes to that, and that’s assuming your IQ is 130+, which, for you guys, is accurate.

Self-Improvement and Experimentation

You can do anything for 30 days. You are strong, young and vibrant, you’re brilliant and good, and you’re ready to tackle the world’s greatest challenges. You will do this better if you are eating a carnivore diet. That is meat, eggs, salt, possibly spices in moderation, butter. You don’t have to eat eggs. You can literally eat just ethically raised cow meat, aka, beef, and you will still experience all the benefits I mentioned above. Not only that, but you will actually experience MORE benefits from eating only meat than if you add in other carnivore foods like dairy, for most genomes.

I have tried Carnivore for 30 days, for weight loss, no immune issues, no pain, no fibromyalgia, no depression in fact a very positive baseline mood. I was not ready for the benefits (despite losing less weight than other carnivores). It truly transformed my mind and body into a different person. I am my full potential now, and I can feel it. My brain can automatically detect which macronutrient I need at a given moment, fat or protein, and which source, butter, egg, or meat, is the best source. I feel full, nourished, and truly happy, all the time. Don’t underestimate the instrumental value of feeling amazing. I guarantee that feeling amazing is totally worth it to help save the world in turbulent times. I am also more calm and secure in myself than my already very low neuroticism would prescribe. I am, in short, complete.
This way of eating was for me a diet for 30 days, but the shocking reality is that after those 30 days passed I abhor the very idea of becoming omnivore again. Why would I ever dispense with feeling this good, losing fat and gaining muscle without effort, perfect skin, and even mildly improved ADHD. I barely give a shit about the weight anymore. I am not giving this up, no matter what is on offer.
You, an ethical person who cares about crucial considerations, the future of humanity, and solving knotty problems that defy the world’s greatest minds, deserve to feel like I do.

For all these reasons, without any conflict of interest, with no other purpose than to help you feel and think your best, to heal any pain or depression and anxiety you may on occasion experience, to help you, to ineffectively altruistically help you, personally, my dear Effective Altruist colleague, I do not only ask, but beg, verily much implore that you give the full carnivore diet a chance. Eat fatty (very fatty, fattier than what you’re thinking now, there, perfect, that’s enough!) meat for one month.

Try it, other vegans who transitioned have had far more improvement than I, an omnivore, have had.

It is hard to believe, in fact I had no idea how good this was going to be. But it is true.

In Continued Defense of Right-Wing Effective Altruism

Not all EAs lean left. EA is not communism or socialism. Some of us think the global left is one of the greatest threats long-term to civilizational functioning and cohesion. Some of us think the State tends to screw up most jobs you give to it, that Islam doesn’t belong in the Americas or Europe, that feminism is cancer, like that type of cancer that grows eyes and hair, and that Trump, Bukele, Milei, Geert, Bolsonaro were all phenomenal choices, as was Brexit and as would be building a big, beautiful wall on the southern border. Some of us don’t think immigrants should vote, hell, some of us don’t think it was a great idea that ladies got the vote.

You can be a good, upstanding man, brave, courageous, meat-eating, gun-abiding, God-loving, and still think that saving more lives than were taken by terrorism and melanoma is a good thing. You can think there is a global agenda of depopulation of whites, and still think that human extinction would be an utterly, bewilderingly terrible outcome, and that putting safety precautions is desirable. You can be a localist, who cares about things up to 1 mile away from where you live and work, and nothing else, and still want to prevent the world from being destroyed by nukes.
In theory, you can be a literal nazi, and want to make sure that the ubermensch reigns long and hard, and spreads lebensraun across the galaxies.
You can be a monarchist, and think cognitively improving the king via artificial means is the way to go.

In short, every sub-branch of the right-wing is fully compatible with at least some of the Effective Altruism movement and actions.

Effective Altruism has started as a bunch of libertarian-leaning, computer science, and philosopher weirdos who thought it was better to do the actual good ourselves than let the government do it, or than signal that we were doing good without measuring how much good we were doing, like, in fact.

You don’t need to be aligned with the whole agenda. For example, I care a lot about animal welfare of future animals (which numerically exceed current animals) and I’m an Anti-Vegan advocate Carnivore. I think EAs are profoundly mistaken about what is a good way of causing happy animals, and I’m vocal about it.

So, if you’re interested and keen on making the world a better place by the most effective means possible, even if you are further right from me, you should still be wholly open to being an Effective Altruist.

Gratitude is the connecting point between the right-wing and Effective Altruism.

The Left is often moved by spite and envy, and The Right is often moved by gratitude.
The Critics and counters of Effective Altruism are often moved by spite and envy, whereas EA is moved by gratitude.

d/accs, like me, who think differential technological progress is conducive to better outcomes, as Vitalik suggested yesterday, can advocate for some things in common with EAs, like careful research into AI safety, while speeding up technologies that bear less risk to humanity as a whole.

Come thee of the right-wing, to our wonderful world of EA, not only you will be able to do more good than you would otherwise, but you might also change the minds of some younger EAs who still are grasped by the teeth of the Academia Left Agenda, not because they are not smart people, but because they never heard why you believe what you believe. Give them a chance to abandon the evil side, and join the fight for the good.

As someone who has made that very transition, 6 years ago, I can tell you it does not change our ability to be Effective Altruists. I was an EA for 12 years, 6, naively, on the center-left, 6, wisely, on the right and center.

You can be an Effective Altruist and be right-wing. That’s a fact.

@willmacaskill

@tobyordoxford

35 – When Did You Cry About The End?

Let us travel back in time, starting right now and walking backwards.

Today Elon announced on Twitter “Having a Bit of Existential AI angst today”

A couple days ago Sam Altman (ChatGPT OpenAI) wrote a text talking about AGI and taking it seriously in the OpenAI website. In the aknowledgements, he thanks a few of our folks, including the reasonable Paul Christiano, Nate Soares and Allan Dafoe – all of whom I know in person and vouch for as sincere EAs – Helen Toner, who I also know, and Holden Karnofsky, who I have always been suspicious of and continue to be, but many other people think he is a reasonable EA.

A day before that, Sam Altman showed up with Eliezer Yudkwosky and Grimes (Elon’s ex) in a viral internet picture.

The Day before, a podcast with Yudkowsky saying we are all going to die came out.

Now, you may see coincidence, but I see causation.

In that interview, Eliezer mentions when he cried.

2015. In 2015 me, Elon, and many other people gave presentations in the google based EA global. Elon’s condition for participating was that on top of the public facing panel on AI, they also did a private one.

They later came on to the hotel where we had a rationalist conference a few months before with all the top AI people and some of the smartest people on Earth. (I’ll post pictures of these events below) At that time it was already obvious for the best of us that Paul was the best of the young people. And Paul went on to create OpenAI with some other people.

Yudkowsky was close to the negotiating tables and stuff. But at some point, be it by Elon’s will, or by OpenAI policy, whatever, they decided to go open. People like me from the Nick Bostrom school of Superintelligence were scared about the name being OpenAI.

The story I told myself to sleep at night was that they were pretending and using the name Open so that anyone interested in Openess would go there, and we could neutralize them all if they were likely to destroy the world elsewhere. A small, very small part of me still believes this.

In the Interview, Yudkwoksy says that when that funding round happened and they were more moved by likes and dislikes and primate stuff, that is when he realized that we were not going to make it as a species. That is when he cried. That is when he realized the that we were not going to make it. 2015

Now if you’re new here. No one fought for this harder than Yudkwosky (not even Nick). Yudkwosky is a genius and one of the best people in history. Not only he tried to save us by writing things unimaginably ahead of their time like LOGI. But he kind of invented Lesswrong. Wrote the sequences to train all of us mere mortals with 140-160IQs to think better. Then, not satisfied, he wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to get the new generation to come play. And he founded the Singularity Institute, which became Miri. It is no overstatement that if we had pulled this off Eliezer could have been THE most important person in the history of the universe. Once someone asked me if I disliked Eliezer (I guess it was because he didn’t talk to me much despite us working in the same offices) my response was something like “I love Eliezer. There is nothing Eliezer could do to possibly cause me to dislike him. The only scenario where I can possibly imagine Eliezer doing something that would make me personally dislike him is if he was holding a blade to the neck of my family members. And even then once the situation was over I would still be extremely thankful to him for all he has done.” You get the idea. I like the guy.

Anyway, so Elon cried in 2023. Eliezer cried in 2015.

Back when I was leaving Oxford, right before Nick finished writing Superintelligence, in my last day right after taking our picture together, I thanked Nick Böstrom on behalf of the 10^52 people who will never have a voice to thank him for all he has done for the world. Before I turned back and left, Nick, who has knack for humour, made a gesture like Atlas, holding the world above his shoulders, and quasi letting the world fall, then readjusting. While funny, I also understood the obvious connotation of how tough it must be to carry the weight of the world like that. He didn’t cry then, in 2013, but that gesture was king of an emotional cry in a way. So let us say Nick cried in 2013.

I met Geoff Anders in 2012, while a visiting scholar in the Singularity Institute. He arrived 2 weeks before I did. I was like the 6th member of Leverage, about a day into knowing Geoff. I could see that he was there for the same reason I was, with the same intensity. It was pretty cool.

A few days into this trip, me, Geoff, and Justin Shovelain (another character from that world) went out for food. We were doing the same we all did, back in 2012. Talk at maximal speed about how to save a world on fire that didn’t know it was on fire. Back then, there were only like, I don’t even know. There were very few people who understood what was up. More than 10, fewer than 150.

And at some point in the conversation it just hit me. A jolt of neurotransmitters, feelings and sensations just overcame my body like a torrent and I stopped listening and speaking for a little bit.

At that moment I understood the magnitude of the responsibility that had been bequeath on us. I realized how rare I was. How few of us there were.

You may think it is fun to be Neo, to be the One or one of the Chosen ones. I can assure you it is not. We had discussions about how we couldn’t take the same plane, despite odds of planes falling being so low, because the risk for the world was so high. The stakes of every single conversation were astronomical. The opportunity cost of every breath was measured in galaxies.

And when my body finally processed that this is real, that it is actually happening, I did what our ape bodies do best. I cried. I cried with my whole heart. I cried in 2012.

I am sure that Nick, Yudkwosky, and others, have cried before. Put yourself in that position. Can you imagine the weight of the world on your shoulders like that?

Anyway. So, today, as far as I’m concerned, Elon cried.

Of course the situation isn’t the same anymore, not in the least.

Elon was convinced by Nick Bostrom, same as me. I don’t know when he joined the game exactly but we started trying to get him in 2013 and he was definitely on board, enough to present at EA Global and meet our folk and all that jazz in 2015. So at some point in between Nick broke through to him.

Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One has a final chapter that is literally just Nick Bostrom simplified – not interpretation, it says so in the chapter – so I’m sure Peter cried at some point before 2011 when I imagine he finished the course on which a student based the book they wrote. That’s when he cried. Peter and Elon are friends-ish. So you know, maybe that.

2023 is not like 2012, when I cried.

Eliezer and Nick never really believed we had a great chance. But the size of the chance we had in 2012 was so much, so much bigger than than the slim chance our actions matter now. Maybe we will all die. Maybe we will all go to AI heaven. But the odds that our actions will be what determines that have diminished orders of magnitude in between then and now.

Another guy who I saw cry, literally, was Michael Arc, also known as Vassar. It was 2012 and he had just returned from like, Israel, England etc… and he was fucking exhausted like I have seldom seen. He was “me at the end of Burning Man” tired. ‘Burned out’ was named after his state. The guy was a wreck. And in that conversation with a few people I think was a couple days before the day I cried with Geoff and Justin. That was the first time I heard someone state that “it is just us”. He was pointing out that with all the mechanisms they had put in place to locate people, it looked like there were no other people in other parts of the world, in the top unis, etc… there was no one else. It was just them (I had just arrived, I don’t think I should count) and there were not many of them. It was seeing him say that that began the cascade that led me to cry a few days later. That day, Vassar cried.

I also saw Anna Salamon’s day. The memory is blurry but I recall her having returned from England. She wasn’t sad though. She was very grounded and rational (this was before the meeting where I saw them found CFAR) and had just met Nick for the first time (I had not met him yet). She said they seemed to be “just like us, except more able to survive the bureocracy of academia” at least in England, I concluded, there was hope. We were not the only tribe on the case.

A post mortem: Did I do enough?

Well. We lost. So, based off that obvious metric I didn’t do enough. That is what Solzhenitsyin would say anyway.

Even the stuff I did do, like write a paper on AGI and psychology, I didn’t try to spread it to the relevant parties. I accepted being scapegoated relatively easy from the Berkeley world because of rejection sensitive disphoria and other stuff. If we use the Elon or Nate standard of “do whatever regardless of what you feel so we win no matter how unlikely our victory is” there is no doubt that I did not do enough. Thank goodness I am not as draconian as they are in my self judgement. I think for a random monkey in Brazil, I did some pretty high levels of stuff while the window of opportunity was open.

I helped create EA, gave the first TED talk, created a couple crucial consideration institutions, met Nick, Paul, Eliezer, Hanson and so on. I ran for a period the world’s largest EA house. I did a PhD in Altruism which is about creating the necessary conditions in the future world for things to go well both in the case AGI is possible and in the case it isn’t.

I met Toby and Will, of EA fame. Toby showed me what math philosophers should know. Will and I were a little more…. uh. Ok that’s not relevant for the internet. But what I’m most thankful to Will is that he saved me an amount of time that is hard to imagine. Pretty much everything I wanted to do between 2010 and 2016, Will did 2 years before I would. In so doing, Will relieved me of some responsibilities that I cannot express enough how grateful I am for. Will was like the bird in the front of the formation that breaks the air barrier, and he allowed me a much, much, much freer life than I would have without him. Thank You William MacAskill, for what you have done for me, personally.

I’m sure Will cried at some point. I hear from the grapevine that both Toby and Will joined our team, team Nick Bostrom, so to speak, over time. Both of them started as EAs but Toby’s latest book is on existential risk , The Precipice, and WIll’s latest book is What We Owe The Future. Basically the longer we lived, the more I saw them converge to the position I held back in the early days. Joao, my friend colleague and coauthor from Brazil, edited and did research for both books.

But anyway. All this is just a post-mortem pre-mortem. We haven’t died yet. But if even Elon is already in the crying stage, who is left trying to fight who understands the real odds at stake? Dr Strange? The odds are getting close to Avengers odds, which assuming reality fluid homogeneity across possible worlds in the MCU (a ridiculous assumption) is one in 15 million. We are not doing that bad yet, but, we’re less than 2 orders away from it.

So, that’s when everyone that I know cried.

If you have an idea of what to do to save the world, shoot me a message. Can’t really get much worse than this. And one of you may have a good one.

I should have spread my paper and PhD more thoroughly. But I lack the emotional stamina for it. The social dynamics of the Bay affected me, and being away was kind of a necessity psychologically.

Anyway, you don’t have that problem. If you have an idea to save the world, let me know. I can at least help you filter out the bullshit, and refine the decent ones to a level where we could bring them to some of the right people.

Maybe you haven’t cried yet. Maybe you never will.

But most of the rest of us cried.

I cried a little bit writing this text.

It’s ok to cry.

It is a big deal, and we are here for you.

For 22 years, relentlessly, we tried. Not only these characters whose cries I happened to witness, but hundreds of other people.

I thank and love every one of them.

I has been an absolute honor to serve with you all folks!

I’ll see you on the other side!