iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

this is literally what the majority of the movement has dedicated itself to for most of its existence. like this is its whole focus and raison d'etre

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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Whatever weird shit might be happening at like the commanding heights of effective altruism (and it does look like there’s weird shit), I do think it’s worth reiterating that the vast majority of folks who prescribe to EA are overall really good people, & the vulgar form of the argument is very true

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 29/09/2026

I've been saying this 😭

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Grace @gracekind.net · 29/09/2026

Since I’ve done a lot of Yud defending, here are some Yud critiques: - he’s wildly overconfident, especially about things like philosophy of mind - his plan for AI safety is bad - his “pivotal act” rhetoric is dangerous - he’s failed to react to abuse in his community - he has incurable porn brain

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 27/09/2026

I think EA and AI safety communities are full of amazing talented people doing important work, including several of my brilliant female friends, on whose behalf I spoke up because I believe that their ability to be in an environment where they can do their best work is important for humanity

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 27/09/2026

like the writing isn't the purpose/product like an essay or a memoir, so I don't feel like I got fooled/scammed... I'm not reading it for the writing, I'm reading to hear her side of the story, if that makes sense?

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 27/09/2026

I'm actually pretty okay with it in this case, ngl. this isn't writing qua writing, it's a non-writer writing to address the public, and I think it's reasonable to want to polish it to leave as few attack surfaces as possible

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Grace @gracekind.net · 27/09/2026

I took most of my kicks to the face c. 2022. It hurt but I got better

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Cameron 🇺🇸🗽🦅 @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

talking about water use policy is impossible because "AI data centers use a lot of water to cool the computers" sounds way more believable than "they're draining the Great Salt Lake so the Governor of Utah can sell alfalfa to Saudi Arabia" and yet

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 23/09/2026

It only ever wants to do one thing: write a story about the little guy that it's been trained to write a story about. That guy says a bunch of things that look like the kind of things that someone trying to pursue the assigned goal would say. That is distinct from pursuing the goal.

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River_Tam @rivertam.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It's inaccurate to say vaccines prevent disease. Vaccines are not conscious and thus cannot "prevent" anything. What actually happens is that the human body undergoes a series of biological changes in response to an injection of the vaccine which prevents it from later being hospitable to a virus.

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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 23/09/2026

you don't need to appeal to metaphysics to see what whatever LLMs do is different from human thought. You can just look at the concrete differences in behavior. For example, LLMs are able to solve the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem whereas humans are not.

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 23/09/2026

where do you think the correct functional account is?

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 23/09/2026

but on a behavioral/functional account of understanding, you do need to present a behavior/function/faculty that humans have and LLMs don't, which may still be possible in some domains, but certainly gets harder with every passing month, and I'm pretty sure is impossible in select domains already

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 23/09/2026

the consciousness question is a (famously) Hard Problem, so if you define understanding as requiring consciousness, then the LLMs-don't-truly-understand camp has some room to maneuver there

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tautologer @tautologer.com · 23/09/2026

oh, if we're returning to a behavioral/functional account of understanding, then it seems quite absurd to me to claim that frontier models don't understand things. they're still poor at generalization in some areas, but they certainly do more than simply return correct output in limited situations