Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
2015-2016 Trump was funny and cool. 2020-2021 Trump was just bitter and angry. The magic is gone. It was a good bit, but it’s played out.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
She has thin, fine hair which she really should cut shorter
Bad take IMO, but I’m a sucker for girls with long hair.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
This is why I can’t take the phrase “most important election of our lifetimes” seriously anymore. 2016 was the most important election of our lifetimes, and it’s not even close.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Imagine being Glenn Ellison. You’re a highly respected academic at the top of your field, Department head of economics at MIT. One day you wake up and see your daughters face all over the internet. Half the world is calling her ugly, stupid, and evil. At the office, your colleagues are too polite to mention it, but you can see the disgust on their faces. What are you gonna do, blame it on the Harry Potter fan fiction? How does the daughter of the chief MIT economist not understand margin requirements or decreasing marginal utility? Everyone knows you failed as a father, and you just have to sit there and take it.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I can't believe he actually made a twitter poll and said "Vox populi, vox dei". He has to follow through with whatever the crowd says right? He wouldn't have any credibility left if he backed out after this.
I think you should do a longer post introspecting why
I've been thinking about that, but every day I wake up with a new theory about what happened or why it matters. A few days ago I almost pulled the trigger on writing a post on why I though they were trying to take over the world by cornering the market on crypto and hoping for inflation-induced demonitization of the dollar. I think at that point I couldn't accept the idea that they really were just that idiotic and unorganized.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The platform still works, and if he is to be believed daily active users are up, so I would say yes.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
According to her tumblr, her dad is Jewish and her mom is Catholic (she was raised Catholic).
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I guess it hasn't made me "successful", but I do think I live a happier and more fulfilling life because of the rationalist literature. Having the tools to make the world make sense is a value in itself.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I've always found "my fake internet friends will think I'm stupid if I screw this up," to be a much stronger motivator for good writing than grades.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
>Click link
>Its literally from Facebook AI Research
We’re in the endgame now.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
As someone who’s favorite movie as a teenager was The Dark Knight, let me tell you, SBF is living the dream. He’s LARPing as a cross between Two-Face and the Joker with plot armor, right down to the insane attracted-to-power on/off accomplice gf. This dude is going around spinning crazy utilitarian ethical dilemmas, releasing cryptic messages to a global audience, and inexplicably raising large amounts of capital. This is what agency looks like folks. A civilization without unaccountable, unregulated, international crypto empires can never have citizens who are truly free.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I quite like the Supreme Court’s “imminent lawless action” standard. He deserves a platform up to and including him being dragged out of his penthouse screaming, “THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING OVER. LONG LIVE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM, LONG LIVE MIRI.”
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
SBF didn’t just show up one day at an EA event with billions of dollars. He was homegrown. He was in effective altruism before he was rich. He literally worked for The Center for Effective Altruism before leaving to start Alameda Research. Caroline Ellison ran a semi-anonymous blog jam packed with rationalist and EA references for years before she even started at Alameda or got into crypto. (Seriously, read it. This is a person who really thought they were maximizing expected utility by running an undercollateralized hedge fund into the ground. Fascinating.) These were true believers in the movement. Effective altruism was central to their identities. The fact that FTX not only failed but caused billions of dollars in collateral damage suggests that something is deeply wrong with the core philosophy.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
At least now the space will be a bit more entertaining and potentially show normies that there can be drama and fun to be had even in doing good.
No, this is exactly why we’re in this mess in the first place. Mosquito nets and clean water are boring. High-leverage crypto trading is fun and exciting. Living in a penthouse with your buddies is cool and sexy. Drama appeals to the deepest impulses of the primate brain. A world without drama would be very boring indeed. But drama, living in penthouses, and high-leverage crypto trading are not altruism. In case you think that no smart or rational person would ever make such a category error, consider the following primary source:
five years ago it felt like a really serious conflict in my mind that what was maximally good often seemed weird, or sketchy, or tacky, or unpleasant, or just plain aesthetically distasteful
these days it feels like the good is shockingly aligned with the fun, the beautiful, the awesome, the exciting, the sexy and shiny and cool
… I … don’t know what to think or how to feel about that tbh
-Caroline Ellison, October 5, 2021.
Pull up a Bitcoin price chart and find early October 2021. She was making bank in a bull market and confused getting rich for doing good. She is a smart girl, and noticed that something seemed off. As we now know, she did not correctly resolve the problem. This should tell you something about the darkness and corruption inherent in the human soul. Altruism is not natural and must be either rigorously guarded or lost.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
Gary Wang with the 200 IQ play to never be photographed at FTX. He knew.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
The problem here is that price discovery for crypto doesn’t really make sense the way that it does for say, stocks or bonds. It’s not just a risk asset with a speculative component, the whole thing is speculation.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I still haven’t seen or heard anything that can’t be explained by the fact that MIRI is a less-than 110% woke organization in Berkeley California. These are exactly the kind of fake “scandals” that I would have expected given such an arrangement.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
I miss Deiseach. Her brand of sarcastic indignity would be the perfect response to such a claim. Who could believe that pulp entertainment is enjoyable, even popular?
Oh no, I guess we'll just have to make do with the other sarcastically indignant middle-aged Irish Catholic woman who hangs around SSC-related forums.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
God, I feel like Feynman yelling, “Look at the water.” I even gave you all the clues.
You can do it. I believe in you.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
People often slam villain monologues for being unrealistic. Why would anyone admit to their evil plans and explain their reasoning? Well, for some people, the monologue is the point. Everything Sam has said since the crash has the subtext, “why are you booing me? I’m right.” Some people get off on that shit.
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
It sounds like when you opened an account at FTX, wired them money, and then bought bitcoin with it, no bitcoin was ever necessarily bought. You just got a bitcoin-denominated claim on FTX assets.
9/20. Didn't look at clothing, some have said that that's the key. I don't think physiognomy works when everyone involved is an upper-class white person, as shown in this classic.
My money is on Sam being the only one who has to face criminal charges. Ellison is going to take the Thielbucks and we’ll start seeing Dark Caroline show up at backroom Bay Area parties with Curtis Yarvin.
EDIT: Holy shit, I got scooped by Forbes. I swear I didn’t read that article before posting this.
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