neil warren-bancquart

I like:

• my friends
• snorting to myself while everyone glares at me and the Thing to be Seen
• walking along the Seine, watching the City of Enlightenment, ignoring the giant metal tower they TURN OFF AFTER ELEVEN for obscure reasons
• Balthazar Picsou
• large language models
• making my future self grin
• the high bandwidth feeling of writing
• when "I" (Claude) can code the MVP in < a day
• getting a CAPTCHA right
• in no particular order: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i
• unseeing things
• running like mad to catch a train
• microeconomics
• grinning at my past self
• typing really fast
• the French language
• books 1-3 of the Sequences (and a lot of related posts not strictly in that set)
• the dialogue in Atlas Shrugged
• increasing my default present info* bandwidth with people (this page)

I don't like:

• rooms with high CO2 content but no one believes in CO2 so they don't open the windows
• holy fudge why is school so badly designed
• feeling like I'm crazy (looking crazy is ok tho)
• people telling me I don't have slack
  • also having no slack
• AAAAAAH WHAT ARE THEY DOING WITH (WHAT SHOULD BE) MY BABY!
• video games
  • (I'm not sure why honestly)
• death
• Sciences Po
• writing with my actual hand with an actual pen on actual paper
• intellectual cowardice (e.g. retreating into facetious bad faith defenses when your beliefs are under fire by me. You're allowed to walk away, just please don't do this.)
• passive-aggression
  • you are allowed to be aggressive
  • you are encouraged to be calm
  • you do NOT make yourself unpredictable, or I will predictably slap you
• infohazards (e.g. a public list of things that annoy me)

What I'm doing

[insert current projects later]

As a kid I had great plans, and decided writing down those plans for a future self to execute would be a great idea!

This accidentally made me an obsessive writer for all my childhood.

Now for thinking I just write English sentences, and it's kind of worrying to me how dependent I now am on CoT for everything. The plus side is LLMs are probably more useful to me than most people. We're pals. Soul-brothers. Birds of a feather.

I write an absurd amount, and very little of that gets published, and the little that gets published goes on random platforms all over the place (on an anonymous alt, LessWrong, Twitter, Substack, and other nooks and crannies of the interwebs). If you want to stalk me I, uh, good luck with that. [3]

Values

Standard humanism? I'm pretty chill. The problems we have with tribalism, performative virtue/cruelty, etc. seem solvable with an extremely basic and fairly ancient framework?

If you have any worries over what that might imply about my ethics, you can ask me about it and there's a chance I'll agree with you—I haven't spent much time formalizing my ethics, bc being a good person hasn't implied the need for that yet.

I should probably get around to doing it at some point though, bc it seems like a good bucket list item.

Emotions that I don't feel while acting out ethics: anger, revenge, fear, disgust, envy. If I'm feeling those while simultaneously telling myself I'm acting out ethics, I think I ought to be very suspicious (bc when others do it it's clearly not ethics).

Transhumanism is simplified humanism, throw that one into the book too.

Humanism need not exclude AIs btw, though I (gut-based) don't think current LLMs are ~more sentient than golden retrievers. (Note that I do not condone mistreating golden retrievers.)

Quite atheist.

I hate deference of any kind. We speak as equals or not at all—being on either side of deference feels awkward and infuriating. I will engage in 1:1 trade with 1:1 type people and those who don't do that are invited to leave my website.

I'm not sure much of anything is worth paying attention to except AI (that is, for reasons beyond curiosity).

I'd have to be given a good reason to mistrust median AI lab timelines for the conflationary alliance that is "AGI" to change my mind here, and some other cruxes besides.

Not eating meat seems pretty straightforward too.

Worried about tribalism or salivating for inner-ringhood, so I will only rarely say "I'm a proud X". [1] There are some drawbacks to a policy of deliberately avoiding ingroup signals (which does not imply I'm successful at it!), but I think generally the benefits are worth it. I extend this to avoiding signalling you-there-you're-in-my-ingroup to others.

How you can interact with me

I'm willing to bet with you on object-level things. We can talk until we disagree about something.

I condone pranking me.

I'm also open to most kinds of trades between money and social services. (people are remarkably uncreative in this department. Find new things to trade money for or vice-versa! I'll make a list

I'm a proponent of an internet where everyone has a personal website with a Stripe link on it, an email, and a list of interesting trades. So if you want to give me money for whatever reason: paypal.me/cashforneil.

I like long rambling emails/google doc convos, and am willing to do those with you. I largely prefer them to google meet conversations, because they feel a lot more data-dense and interesting.

We can meet in person if I'm around, but I'm almost never around (I live in the woods).

You can send me anonymous feedback here.

My email is neil.m.warren [at] gmail.com.

I'm hard to anger or rile in any way, so don't hesitate to reach out. If you're reading this, you're probably at the very least in the top percentile of humans I'd like to speak to, and maybe at coin-flip-odds in the top permille[2]. If you dump this website into your company slack, you will be significantly reducing the effectiveness of this site as a filter for me (but I condone pranking me).

Please please please don't rent a billboard spot and put this link on it.