Rank: #10 out of 4859 in peer accuracy at Metaculus for the time period of 2016-2020.
For Elon motivating SpaceX employees is important, so he needs to tell the public a story about how SpaceX isn't just about building AI datacenters even if he thinks building superintelligence is the main goal of SpaceX and it's important to build AI datacenters for that and he can't build enough of them on earth.
As far as the AI datacenters in orbit go, it's not clear to me that the thermodynamics work out for that project and it's easy enough to lose the heat that the datacenters produce.
I think the idea is that >5k karma users have karma to lose to punish them for posting low-quality content and it's better to have humans make the judgement about what's low-quality than AI.
Murder is about intent. I think Dario believes that his actions reduce the chance of human extinction due to AI because Anthropic is doing a better job then competitors.
When it comes to Sam Altman, I don't think he believes that OpenAI is likely going to kill humanity.
Facebook on the other hand, is intentionally and knowingly facilitating fraud because they think that the government is unlikely to punish them for it and try to make as much money as they think they can get away with without the government punishing them.
Saying the optimal amount of fraud is nonzero is a way to avoid the question of what amount of fraud is reasonable. Is the optimal amount of fraud that Facebook facilitates really a multiple of the value stolen through burglaries?
With $62 billion in net income, the $16 billion made from crime is a quarter of their net income or a tenth of their revenue.
Actions you take to limit crimes inevitably also impact legitmate users as well and disrupt their ability to use the service legally.
While this might be true for some companies, if you mail around lists of the biggest fraudsters on your platform within your company and don't do anything to stop them, you aren't at that point. Banning people that you internally call the biggest fraudsters that make millions does very little to impact legitimate users.
The 16 billion number comes from 2024 (and is estimated by Meta themselves), the burglary estimate comes from 2019. Unfortunately, numbers from the same year weren't available for both. In 2024 Meta's revenue was $160 and their operating income $62 billion, so we are talking about 10% of their revenue or 25% of their operating income.
Elon Musk seems to have decided that going to Mars isn't that important anymore.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.
[...]
That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.
This means not only won't they begin with Mars this transfer window but also not the next one. At the same time, the merger between SpaceX and xAI, seems like SpaceX now wants to refocus on data centers in "space".
Given the problems with getting rid of heat from space satellites might be solved with building the data center on the moon where everything is cold and the moon is a big heat sink.
People call for mob action because they believe the rule of law isn't working. At the moment the fact that nobody besides Epstein and Maxwell that was involved in their operation got charged with any crimes is a good sign that the rule of law isn't really working well at charging people at the top.
Nobody at HSBC got into prison for laundering drug money. Facebook getting away with 25% of their profit being facilitating fraud of their customers also seems to me like the rule of law isn't working.
There are plenty cases where people get around FDA-approval for drugs by operating like Lumina Probiotics. You aren't allowed to say on the sales page that you are working to prevent a disease when you sell a drug, but you can still sell the product.
Whether or not the FDA will see the need to try a way to regulate it, highly depends on the politics of the situation. FDA leadership isn't what it used to be and wants to reduce regulatory burden. Predicting how the current administration wants to regulate yeast-based vaccines is hard and is going to depend a lot on how the political winds are blowing.
I don't think that Dunbar’s number has a direct relationship with that. Dunbar's number is about the amount of people you can have a relationship with, but you don't need a relationship to have an emotional inclination to be kind towards another person.
Comparing the money made by meta to the amount of value stolen via burglaries is not a vibe based argument.
The right action for ads that are more likely than not fraudulent is to put them in a queue to be reviewed by human moderators and probably tell the police about fraud attempts that human moderators consider to be relatively certain to be fraud.
When ten percent of their revenue is facilitating fraud than getting rid of those ten percent of their revenue hits "specific revenue guardrails" even when it doesn't impact legitimate users at all. It's quite obvious that removing 25% of the profits would result in some revenue guardrails being violated.
Increasing the price for fraudulent ads is a way to keep revenue high while reducing the amount of fraud.
If Meta would believe that the correct number is substantially lower in a way that would motivate people to be less angry, they would probably have shared with it, so what we take from that statement is that Meta believes that the correct number is so high that it's embarrassing to them.
Generally, do you believe that if corporate accountants have the job to estimate a number that's bad for the corporation and could possibly surface in lawsuits or government investigations are they more likely to over- or underestimate it?
I would also note that the corporate statement includes any sign of Meta investing resources. It does not say things like "Because we care about our users not getting scammed we spent 100 million on investigators to remove fraud from our platform."