Parker Thayer
@ParkerThayer
Investigative Researcher for @capitalresearch | Hillsdale College ‘21 | Opinions my own
1.8K Following 20.1K Followers
UPDATE: Google Discloses that Irregular is involved with 3 cyberattacks with Gemini.
That means that Irregular has committed cyberattacks with 4 out of 4 of its advertised partners.
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The dentist in this anti-Semitic message has a criminal record, yet was paid $1.8M by Medicaid. His boss billed Medicaid $12M & built a $28M mansion for the government of the United Arab Emirates outside DC. What if runaway Medicaid isn't just wasteful-it's enabling bad things?
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That guy in the middle, by the way, is Peter Singer, the founder of Effective Altruism, who believes bestiality isn't wrong, and killing disabled newborn babies is totally okay.
Behold, the creator of the movement currently dominating the AI discourse:
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"Oh, you won't give us a forever-duopoly on AI just because we said it might end the world with a super virus? ... Fine, we'll just build our own Wuha... I mean... Anthropic ... Institute of Virology and do it ourselves, and THEN you'll give us our duopoly, right?"
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ANTHROPIC BUILDS BIOLOGY LAB TO PUSH AI INTO DRUG DEVELOPMENT
Anthropic has quietly established a Bay Area wet lab, moving its life-sciences ambitions beyond computer simulations and into physical biological experiments.
The company wants Claude to direct laboratory robots with limited human intervention, potentially accelerating research into rare and traditionally “undruggable” diseases.
Anthropic says it will focus on preclinical research rather than clinical trials, avoiding direct competition with pharmaceutical companies.
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Mandatory reading for today.
Incredible explanation of the way EA people think.
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
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“Maybe we could give the ball to Gibbs again?”
The Drew Petzing offense:
Take me back. I want to go back.
Abdul El-Sayed’s imam scrubbed videos of his sermons from YouTube, including one in which he eulogized the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as a “heroic martyr” and another in which he urged his congregants to vote for El-Sayed, @alanagoodman reports.
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🚨🚨🚨
Effective Altruism is a cult.
America must reject it.
Wholeheartedly.
I got TONS of "conspiracy theory" flak for noting the first three accounts to quote Coxon's resignation post.
WSJ now confirms that Coxon worked with Daniel Koktajlo (the third account) and Nathan Calvin (the first account) to plan a media blitz for his resignation in advance.
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The Wall Street Journal just confirmed that Jacob Coxon lied here. He worked with multiple "AI safety" execs ahead of his resignation.
The Wall Street Journal just confirmed that Jacob Coxon lied here. He worked with multiple "AI safety" execs ahead of his resignation.
One note on these ActBlue developments: they show that donations made from *foreign* sources were not being vetted properly.
Imagine how bad their process for vetting *domestic* donations with suspicious patterns must be. That's where the real scandal will be found.
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NEW: A House Judiciary report just dropped screenshots of ActBlue's internal Slack messages.
They show staff knowingly waved through foreign donations—using "verification" methods you won't believe.
Thread 🧵👇
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Less than two years after Florence Bikundi was arrested for committing more than $80 million in Medicaid fraud, her brother, Ernest Igwacho, started receiving Medicaid funding through a separate but connected company. @SpotlightMDNews
🧵
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How many times has the average boomer lib fell for the "we have to save the world" thing during their lifetime?
Does it ever stop working on them? Have they just lived their entire lives thinking they're in the plot of the Avengers?
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DC MEDICAID FRAUD INVESTIGATION:
Five home health care companies in D.C. received $820.5 million in tax-funded Medicaid payments years after local regulators moved to terminate them from the program over “credible allegations of fraud.”
@FOXBaltimore
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Chinese gangsters grew an illegal marijuana empire in Northern California 🍁. See it for yourself:
He explicitly told @SpecialReport that he didn’t work with any third parties to set up his resignation announcement.
Now he says that his “friends who work in policy” hooked him up with the WSJ exclusive.
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Naturally, it’s a home health company, but he also has a nonprofit and a medical transport company.
How industrious!
'Right-hand-man' son of genocidal Somali dictator who killed 200,000 found living in Ohio, linked to $1.8M Medicare firm
Foreign accounts can drive the conversation on American AI policy.
We have the data. Coxon's resignation post from Anthropic received 165M views and sparked a "groundswell of urgency over AI regulation in Congress" (per today's front page WSJ)
Coxon's post reveals some interesting hidden patterns about who is amplifying our political debates online. It drew 76% of its reposts (spreading the news) from foreign countries. The top two were India and Indonesia.
In contrast, when @ParkerThayer, an investigative researcher, posted his own analysis (expressing serious skepticism about the circumstances of the post and alleging that its amplification was coordinated), he got 6.6M views and drew most of its engagement from the U.S., with only 34% from foreign countries, led by Canada and the UK.
Sure, people overseas have a stake in what the U.S. chooses to do on AI. But ultimately it is us Americans who will decide our own public policy. Don't be fooled by what's trending.
A big thank you to @ElonMusk and X for making country of origin visible, which makes analyses like this even possible. Last year's “Great Unmasking" on X was the first time anyone shined a spotlight onto this subject. As much of our political conversation shifts online, it will be increasingly important to understand where engagement is coming from.
Source (with more analyses of foreign influence):
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