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Vitalik Buterin

@vitalik.eth

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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Main counterexample I can think of is Robin Hanson. He's continued generating new insights in new directions all the way into his 60s. (Not saying there aren't many others, rather he's one from the bubble I follow) (Though I'm sure there are some who would have preferred he remain as the totem pole of predictionmarketism and not start talking about fertililty)
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
See also: https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Do we agree that half your kids dying before they turn age 5 is a form of suffering that does not really contribute to higher-level well-being in any interesting and not easily replaceable way? That phenomenon is pretty integral to the fabric of nature for all species, but once we just technologically wished it away, it worked out great
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
no because that would justify keeping everyone locked up at home for the sake of Safety™
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
hmm I agree we require challenge for fulfillment (EY himself has written about this a lot), but I also think that's relatively a "first world problem"; there are huge amounts of suffering that don't contribute to well-being at all If we can make robot tofu gazelles optimized to make lions' lives fun then imo we should
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I think the core of what's unintuitive about the various paradoxes of utilitarianism is the idea that utility is unbounded. This clashes with how our brains work, where there actually is a bound on how strongly we can feel (positively or negatively) about any particular situation.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
also (finally) the end of the Roman Empire (Constantinople)
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
What are your favorite "long century" dividers? (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_nineteenth_century ) Mine so far: 1643-48: Ming -> Qing transition, end of 30y war (treaty of Westphalia), Galileo dies and Newton born 1789: French revolution, dawn of formalized chemistry (Lavoisier) 1911-17: Xinhai revolution, WW1, Russian revolution, theories of relativity 2020-23: COVID, end of pax americana, AI passing Turing test
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I feel that way about movies depicting pre-internet life
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
My response to AI 2027: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/07/10/2027.html The AI 2027 post is high quality, I encourage people to read it at https://ai-2027.com/ I argue a misaligned AI will not be able to win nearly as easily as the AI 2027 scenario assumes, because it greatly underrates our ability to protect ourselves, especially given the (pretty magical) technologies that the authors admit will be available in 2029 in their scenario.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Smart people in 2024: obviously the 00s-era AI misalignment story ("we tell AGI to end suffering, it kills everyone, no more suffering") is too naive, we have a smarter version 2025: coder tells AGI to remove bugs, it deletes all code, no more bugs https://x.com/alex_xiong_/status/1942442882402771178
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
> 3. Permissive made much more sense when we actually distributed software. When it's all about services, it doesn't matter, does it? AGPL requires derivative works to publish source code even if they only make the work available as a SaaS
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
For most people, morality isn't primarily about what ideological positions you hold. It's about how you treat people (and animals) as you go about your life.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/07/07/copyleft.html
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
I think it's an ok price to pay for keeping crypto global and not over-concentrated in one physical geography that would inevitably capture it. Probably >100x more favorable tradeoff ratio than mining.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Do you believe you had a better moral character 20 years ago?
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
> Crypto is built to be used not understood 👍 I hope that's not the conclusion people got :D Crypto is first and foremost about user empowerment, not user happiness. Empowerment benefits a lot from understanding. Though it's also okay if a user does not understand at first, as long as the resources are there if/when it comes time for them to need to.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Alternatively, having the right opinion on some question might be a matter of intelligence, which you might say is orthogonal to (ie. a totally separate dimension from) good moral character. Each individual question also has its own idiosyncratic bias, and so some of the time you get an anti-correlation
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
imo people who hunt for subsistence score much higher on animal rights than people who eat factory farmed food Would *you* rather: (i) live 50% of your natural life, then suddenly drop dead (ii) live a 50%-long life in a tiny cage where you get force fed lots of fat all day, then drop dead in a more horrific way
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
the implication is that there is an easily accessible bad reason and a much less accessible good reason to support the thing
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