Top postsTop post
Arjun Panickssery
3071
Ω
55
47
91
This is a cross-post (with permission) of Arctotherium's post from yesterday: "LLM Exchange Rates, Updated." It uses a similar methodology to the CAIS "Utility Engineering" paper, which showed e.g. "that GPT-4o values the lives of Nigerians at roughly 20x the lives of Americans, with the rank order being Nigerians >...
Audio narration available on the Substack version of this post. People often say to “write like you talk.” Paul Graham has a post titled “Write Like You Talk” where he says explicitly that written language is worse than spoken language because 1. “Written language is more complex, which makes it...
Guillaume Blanc has a piece in Works in Progress (I assume based on his paper) about how France’s fertility declined earlier than in other European countries, and how its power waned as its relative population declined starting in the 18th century. In 1700, France had 20% of Europe’s population (4%...
I recall seeing three “rationalist” cases for Trump: 1. Richard Ngo on Twitter and elsewhere focused on the realignment of elite coalitions, observing that “most elite institutions have become leftist monocultures” but speculating that “over the next 5–10 years Silicon Valley will become the core of the Republicans.” The left-wing...
Spoiler: “So after removing the international students from the calculations, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total. Among the Ivy League + MIT + Stanford, they’re competing for about 6,500...
> “In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to...
The other day I discussed how high monitoring costs can explain the emergence of “aristocratic” systems of governance: > Aristocracy and Hostage Capital > > Arjun Panickssery · Jan 8 > There's a conventional narrative by which the pre-20th century aristocracy was the "old corruption" where civil and military positions...