flâneur

on doing Real work

letterstomyfriends.substack.com · 3,364 words · saved by 7 readers

Real as in the opposite of bullshit, as in the opposite of slop, as in the opposite of hype or rhetoric or froth. Real as in true, real as in honest. I’ve been in a somewhat constant low-to-medium-grade crashout all year about what I’ve been calling the Circus. The circus is startups run by new grads and college dropouts claiming to be at the cutting edge of “research”; the circus is Eliezer’s book, and AI safety people defending and disavowing it in turn; the circus is breathless predictions of a 24-month timeline to AI-driven nuclear war, an NYT writeup, an update a few months later that, actually, the headline claim was not what a reader should take from it, and never had been; the circus is so many — so many — “straight lines on a graph.” The circus is SF, the circus is Twitter, the circus is AI, the circus is a shit ton of money. (If you don’t recognize the circus, I envy you.) I don’t want to write or think too much about the circus, but the circus is real, in the sense that it i

Real as in the opposite of bullshit, as in the opposite of slop, as in the opposite of hype or rhetoric or froth. Real as in true, real as in honest. I’ve been in a somewhat constant low-to-medium-grade crashout all year about what I’ve been calling the Circus. The circus is startups run by new grads and college dropouts claiming to be at the cutting edge of “research”; the circus is Eliezer’s book, and AI safety people defending and disavowing it in turn; the circus is breathless predictions of a 24-month timeline to AI-driven nuclear war, an NYT writeup, an update a few months later that,…

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