reckla

• reckla 25 Aug 2026 20:09 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Twenty Years from RSI to Take­off: Slow Learn­ing, Scal­ing Slow­down, In­dus­trial Explosion

  When I worked at IBM every single year they would say that Moore’s law was ending, we had hit microscale we had hit nanoscale, there was no further scale to go Moore’s law is dead

  Always very specific idiosyncratic arguments

  But it never stopped, this is 15 years ago

• reckla 25 Aug 2026 16:35 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: We Must Re­mem­ber That Our World Con­tains Hell

  “This is why I think that everyone should, at least once in their life, seriously consider giving a substantial amount of their income or their time to working to solve these problems.”

  This is where EA people lose me.

  This is the is-ought problem of Hume’s Guillotine.

  There is no why to go from what is to what should be done.

  I don’t find abstract depictions of pain to be very motivating. If anything it spurs me towards solipsistic avoidance of my own pain.

  I don’t want to be the chicken. I don’t want my family to be the chicken.

  As I read on this website every week, I’m a small man in a big world full of cosmic horrors. If I could get 10 times better protecting myself and my family from them, that’s an easy trade to me, considering I am the only one who’s going to live my life.

  Maybe I shouldn’t think like that, maybe it’s some flawed artifact of whatever collection of generational trauma and genetic predisposition I have. But it doesn’t really matter why. It is what it is

  I feel like vegans and EA’s are always telling me about how bad everything is and how horrific as if that’s going to be the thing that finally flips the switch.

  I’m only charitable when things are good and I feel very secure in my ability to avoid long-term pain.

  I think the most likely path everything you want is genuine abundance, relatively well distributed (or at not terribly distributed) so everyone wins without substantial subjective sacrifice.

• reckla 30 Jun 2026 16:24 UTC

  2 points

  2

  on: P(doom) is a Dumb Meme

  I disagree for this reason:

  • It is very difficult to accurately predict certain types of extremely complex events (particularly those past a singularity point) -- to the point that it’s not worth trying to create an extremely accurate prediction using a complex model (factors you underweighted or did not consider could blow out the other factors)

  • It is still very useful to prepare for and assume that there is some likelihood of these hard to predict events happening

  That’s the whole argument. I see this in business too: you don’t have enough information about a risk—and it is impossible to gather enough information (traded for time, opportunity cost, etc.)

  But you still have to act on that possibility, it’s still rational to have a contingency