This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. You think it’s more likely that JD knows Zvi but didn’t play magic than played magic but doesn’t know Zvi?
Szeth
Karma: 13
JD Vance very possibly knows who Zvi Mowshowitz is. Vance used to play the Magic the Gathering deck “Yawgmoth’s Bargain” which was largely designed by Zvi. Not sure what, if any, implications this has but certainly an interesting piece of trivia.
going deep into gym culture and ‘looking jacked’ has actively negative marginal returns, including in terms of attractiveness and also the injury risk rises a lot.
The attractiveness claim here is overstated. For almost everyone, more muscle improves attractiveness. And for the small minority who might exceed mainstream preferences (eg amateur bodybuilders, ) their sexual prospects likely still improve because their social circles shift accordingly. Gym rate communities genuinely find more jacked more attractive, so someone who “overdoes it” by normie standards is typically selecting into contexts where that’s a plus, not a minus.
The one possible exception is short men, who can start looking disproportionate past a certain point. But even as someone who’s 5′5″ and fairly muscular, I’d say I’m probably still seeing positive marginal returns though I’m not 100%. Obviously women are also an exception to this but that’s a more complicated topic.
Szeth’s Shortform
Does anyone else feel like export control discussion at the moment is a bit hyperbolic? I don’t expect human level AGI to be achieved for about 5 years and by then the current iterations of GPUs will be obsolete. It certainly doesn’t give me confidence in this administration’s ability to do things, but selling China advanced chips now is probably fine if we stop in like 3 years. Which hopefully we will.
Great work as always. I’m not sure if I agree that we should be focusing on flourishing, conditional on survival. I think a bigger risk would be risks of astronomical suffering which seem like almost the default outcome. Eg digital minds, wild animals in space colonization, and unknown-unknowns. It’s possible that the interventions would be overlapping but I am skeptical.
I also don’t love the citations for a low p(doom). Toby Ord’s guess was from 2020, the Super Forecaster survey from 2022 and prediction markets aren’t really optimized for this sort of question. Something like Eli Lifland’s guess or the AI Impacts Surveys are where I would start as a jumping off point.
I would put “Doesn’t know Zvi, played magic” at number two. I think you might be overestimating either how well known Zvi is or how likely one would be to know Zvi conditional on playing magic in the late nineties/early 2000s.