How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
This made me lol so hard, that I stopped what I was doing and logged into Hacker News to say "thank you" to whoever built this website.
This is perfect:
Against Taking My Son To Soccer Practice: A Bayesian, Longtermist, Updateless, Game-Theoretic, Kelly-Optimal Steelman of the Opportunity Cost of Reallocating My Son’s College Fund, My Ex-Wife’s Child Support, and the Proceeds of My Second Divorce Toward Methamphetamine, Escorts, Polymarket Positions, Grandma’s Pain Pills, and an Acausal Trade With Roko’s Basilisk Under Coherent Extrapolated Volition, Short Timelines, and a p(doom) I Will Not Be Updating at This Time (Part 1 of 7)
It reads like a parody of rationalist posting, as far as I can tell. The keyword-chanting opener works because those communities really do lean on shared vocabulary as an in-group signal, not as an argument.
Same failure mode too. Nobody audits the offset, so the books balance on paper while the actual problem keeps running. Wouldn't want to be the one reconciling that ledger at 3am.
Yeah, a few friends in earning-to-give pledge 30-50% of comp. At a trading firm even junior pay makes that easily $100k+ a year, so $37k is a rounding error. The joke needs a bigger number.
The top comment discussing how price inelasticity means it is the drug users who are donating the money and deserve the moral credit made me appreciate my economics minor.
It's not just an indictment of EA — it's also a meta-indictment of how AI makes it easy to justify anything.
Maybe the EA folks have a ready answer, but as soon as they start taking about long termism, I wonder what crystal ball they have that lets them see the future with such clarity.
Do they weight the probability of trillions of future lives against estimates of species extinction due to, say, global thermonuclear war, or p(doom)? Or even without Armageddon, what if social or political changes mean humans decide to stop reproducing?
It feels like an easy way to justify anything by making one number really large.
It's amazing how easy it is to lie with numbers. This guy hyper-focused on one single metric to justify his current "career." His numbers are all about his direct contributions to a fund based on the continued degradation of people around him.
No, you aren't a quant. You are a drug dealer with an education.
To be clear, this is a scathing parody of how rationalist and especially "effective altruist" folks (both movements being very popular among the bay area tech crowd) talk.
It's easier to sleep at night on a mattress packed with stock shares after you convince yourself that your company's torment nexus can be used for some good things too.
Small nit: the EA term is "replaceability" or "counterfactual impact," not offsets. Carbon offsets are a different thing. IIRC the satire works because people really do use that argument to justify high-paying finance jobs. Still funny though.
This is perfect:
Against Taking My Son To Soccer Practice: A Bayesian, Longtermist, Updateless, Game-Theoretic, Kelly-Optimal Steelman of the Opportunity Cost of Reallocating My Son’s College Fund, My Ex-Wife’s Child Support, and the Proceeds of My Second Divorce Toward Methamphetamine, Escorts, Polymarket Positions, Grandma’s Pain Pills, and an Acausal Trade With Roko’s Basilisk Under Coherent Extrapolated Volition, Short Timelines, and a p(doom) I Will Not Be Updating at This Time (Part 1 of 7)