Unbundling the information stack, L7 Meaning & Legitimacy
Central Kingdom
Joined August 2012
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Nico Deva retweeted
Every time I hear "10 sigma" event...
BREAKING: Brazil's -19.8% stock market crash on Monday was one of the rarest market events in the last two decades, according to our analysis.
Brazil's EWZ ETF plunged -19.8% on October 26th, marking an 8.4 standard deviation move.
For context, the ETF's average daily move over the last 20 years has been just +0.04%, with a standard deviation of 2.36%.
Under a normal distribution, the probability of a decline this extreme is approximately 1 in 58 quadrillion.
In other words, this event should be virtually impossible under conventional statistical models.
What just happened in Brazil was *almost* impossible.
Nico Deva retweeted
ants follow by pheromones to extract resources and contribute to the colony
humans are increasingly driven by digital pheromones in short form video + mimetic desire to do the same
you don’t need to be aware of the emerging superorganism to serve it
Nico Deva retweeted
"Enshittification" is a sort of "safe horny" term for what is really just outright impoverishment and declining living standards due to economic insolvency from deindustrialization, demographic decline, hyperinflation, etc.
You are just de-developing and becoming poor.
Anecdotal evidence starts piling up, including the replies.
Seems that the TCG card market is reaching a top.
Sadly not many ways to express this view, maybe shorting tokens like $CARDS
Masterpiece
>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
Nico Deva retweeted
According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.
How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.
Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.
An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.
For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.
It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.
By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.
So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.
How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.
At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.
It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.
Nico Deva retweeted
The fly has entered the afterlife, a liminal shifting course of lessons and mini-games, destroyed and created in an endless cycle.
One can only guess at how such dreams will bleed through the Droso-Akashic Records into Earthly Flies as moments of Pure Satori with human culture
Nico Deva retweeted
I think the plan is to get researchers to start using their AI with a limited compute budget, then once they have all the academic data, they’ll basically steal all their ideas from underneath them and run the research internally with their unlimited compute budget!
Nico Deva retweeted
I wrote Confessions of an Economic Hit Man to expose what we did abroad. I wrote The Art of the Steal because the same system has come home. My assistant, Simon, has already claimed his copy.
Out September 8: johnperkins.org/art-of-the-s…
#catsforchange
These protocols have bad pro cyclical buybacks, it makes it reflexive and good for exit liquidity but it's a hint that they're bad longer term bags.
Simply setting mid/long term twaps would align protocol and holders better
Cf. Edward chancellor's Capital Returns
“In the last 7 days:
Fees claimed by users: ~$2,000,000.
With Delta's updated 7.5% protocol fee, that revenue figure is $150k
At the current rate, that is $600k in revenue per month, with 80% being bought back and burned.”
Yea, comfy in my $DELTA
This should scale nicely alongside RHC
Nico Deva retweeted
THIS IS INSANE.
you can buy 5 pounds of silverware for $40
at $100/oz, that silver is worth $8,000!
i’m buying as much as i can before the normies figure this out
England scores masterful geopolitical victory beating Mexico at soccer
morningporridge.com/blog/con…
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist…”
England will take a confidence boost from the World Cup win vs Mexico. The Russians will be furious – their war plan requires The West’s resilience and pride is weakened through disinformation and instability. Countering Cognitive Warfare requires the acknowledgement it’s happening, that we fight it, and acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses, and that unity wins!
#markets #investing #economy #defence
Nico Deva retweeted
Unfortunately Saylor got MCS - Main Character Syndrome
You nail few trades publicly, or you build a flywheel, then people start to glaze you and you start to believe your own BS a bit too much, when things slow down you are already addicted to the fame and wins, you introduce just a bit more leverage and suddenly you are in a tough to get out of spot and on your way to become a scapegoat
We have seen many such cases in crypto
i'm not in Saylor's inner circle, but this $MSTR story has gotten so out of hand, my only guess is this:
- MSTR could have sat and done nothing before they started pumping out $billons of prefs... it would have made MSTR boring (little buys, no sells), but it would have been stable teapawt.net/jdorman81/status/19959…
- But the push into these prefs was based on him clearly thinking $BTC was about to moon — not sure what he saw to think that (4 year cycle, flows, ???) but that's the only reason to take that sort of miscalculated risk to screw up his balance sheet so badly -- he must have thought BTC was about to fly and he could easily pay the pref dividends with future BTC sales.
- Then BTC started falling, and the market got spooked because the $15 bn in prefs have a $1.5 bn/year annual dividend, so he raised $2 bn in cash via stock just to alleviate any near-term default concerns — that bought him almost 2 years of runway to pay dividends. Smart move
At that point, he could have chilled for a little, and even though he now has every stakeholder pinned against each other, there was at least no near term risk teapawt.net/jdorman81/status/20342…
- But then for some unknown reason, he decides to take that cash buffer and buyback 2029 maturity bonds instead of using it to fund the annual dividends (at a discount, so it's at least mildly accretive to MSTR). This is a baffling decision for a company with cash flow problems. Why pay off 0% coupon debt with the only cash you have?
The only bull case is that underestimating Saylor's capital markets chicanery has been a losing proposition for years. Maybe there was a plan?
That plan may just be selling BTC, which he will have to do eventually, but if he does this while BTC is in a death spriral it's going to crush BTC and MSTR. So again, why buyback the debt now and force your hand sooner than you have to?
Maybe he is going to refinance those converts with new longer-dated converts? He has sworn off converts, so I doubt it, but that would at least logically make sense.
But TLDR -- this is the first time that MSTR, BTC and Pref holders are really in bind. Someone is going to lose badly here, and it will happen in the next 4 months.