Project Manager/Market Research
Pittsburgh
Joined April 2009
- Tweets576
- Following166
- Followers43
- Likes408
JP retweeted
Just gone live! PSYCHIC SAM volumes ONE, TWO and THREE can all be picked up on Kickstarter. From Johnny Romita Jr, Klaus Janson, Bill Crabtree and yours truly. The complete saga now available! Please RT!
kickstarter.com/projects/sid…
JP retweeted
'The Simpsons' Surprise: Apu Is Heard for the First Time in Nearly a Decade, as Sunil Malhotra Takes Over for Hank Azaria (EXCLUSIVE) variety.com/2026/tv/news/the…
JP retweeted
Alan Moore used to say when he wrote super-hero stories, it was for intelligent children.
My issue with a lot of R-Rated super-hero stories is that they seem to be written for dumb adults.
JP retweeted
>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
JP retweeted
Found some tidbits that are so validating because Alan Moore and Alan Davis go on this tangent about the cyclical nature of comic fandom becoming comic creators, which then dilutes the medium because creators are only interested in continuity over craft.
JP retweeted
GOOD MORNING!
Do you have “superhero apathy”?
I’m going to make you fall in love all over again.
Be ready for the launch by subscribing to my newsletter at compasscomics.com.
JP retweeted
-gyms exist
-Coke Zero exists
-hot girls outnumber put-together dudes 2000 to 1
-you and your wife can get drunk at a dimly-lit steakhouse then smash all night without a condom
-you and your friends can hit the gym then smoke a joint at a Coldplay concert
There are people who live in wheelchairs. There are kids born with disabilities. No Prom, no Shoulder Presses, no sleepovers with their best friends staying up til 2AM watching Interstellar.
And you’re not SMASHING the gym like a GRATEFUL SAVAGE!? Eating healthy 90% of the time, calling your friends for no reason, CRUSHING it in your career, ASKING for the raise!? Asking out your crush making her your girlfriend then your wife!?
You’re spinning on a sphere in an infinite universe and the fact you’re alive is a 1 in 500 trillion miracle - you’re so lucky it’s absurd and you have nothing to lose :)
JP retweeted
For all of you out of the loop, Marvel has 💯 taken pitches on Star Wars/Marvel team up’s. Full stop. This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Stuff gets out. Star Wars 50th anniversary is next year. Track it. Snag is getting Lucasfilm to approve.
JP retweeted
the crime syndicate is proof of one of the biggest issues in cape comics
for all the talk about good, most of the writers don't actually have particularly interesting or developed outlooks on what is good in the first place
therefore the evil JL aren't really twisting the...
JP retweeted
You need to be attention-span-maxxing.
Watch 3 hour talks. Read books for hours at a time. Watch the entire movie, without taking a break. Stare into space losing yourself in thought and imagination. Do not check your phone. The opposite of brain-rot is the will to focus in a culture which wants to pull you every other way.
JP retweeted
I’m a populist about many things, but I truly believe that unrepentant snobbery is the only way forward now in the arts.
JP retweeted
The full course list at launch will be:
Foundations of Magic
History of Western Esotericism
Ancestor Veneration
Sigil Magic
A Short Course in Cunning Magic
The Work of Carl Jung
Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot
Christian Meditations on the Tarot (Marseille)
Esoteric Christianity
JP retweeted
An uncut 4K release of Ken Russell's notoriously controversial historical horror THE DEVILS might not be a pipe dream for much longer. dlvr.it/TSNpDc
