Yeah does seem like textbook uppers.

It certainly explains how you get the exact overlap of existential-risk fatalism and Bay Area polycule dynamics. Whos going to tell the artificial children that their parents were a high-functioning doomsday sex cult?

As someone who has never heard or watched Dario speak before (somehow), he just comes across to me as autistic in the video.

Autistic is not the word that sprang to mind.

The whole Bay Area is on a fatal cocktail of amphetamines, money, and neurodivergence. It's rather impolite to acknowledge, but when you take 100 people on that combination and put them in a room together, some, uh, unusual beliefs inevitably develop. Of course they do. What else would happen?

Yeah exactly. And it's not the first time a highly technically proficient culture had their leaders all become amphetamine abusers with dramatic effects on world events.

On a bit of a rant now, please forgive me.

I never feel more like the one sober guy at the party than when I go to SF. Even when there's no reason to believe anyone is literally on drugs, it has that vibe every time. It's really unsettling. Uncanny. It starts to get under your skin, too. You start to believe, just a little bit, that everything is possible, that there are no limits, that you can and should remake the world. Just a little bit. I can never take it for more than a week at a time, no matter how beautiful the weather is. It's a relief to get back to the "real" world.

I read this comment by curuinor a while ago, and still think about it a lot. Also in response to an Anthropic story. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49436647

> Look. This is a new golden age of cocaine, because of the big cuts in everything in the US took away the cocaine busting operations in Colombia and Bolivia, because the revolutionaries that previously kept control of it stood down and became a political party and new, profit-driven cartels came up, and because battery technology means that narcosubs and similar drone things work much better than before (and they can be made remote-operated, so the cops can't do shit even when they find one). Wholesale prices have halved or gone down 60% to like, 12k usd / kilo, street prices commensurate. The huge new opportunities created by increased market size have increased competition and made the cartel nature of the cartels decrease. So always think of that when you look at people acting like this and having such megalomaniac goals.

I hadn't heard this before. That's actually pretty interesting. My assumption has always been run-of-the-mill ADHD meds like Adderall and its several cousins, but I can't say I've got firsthand knowledge of either these days.

We're making some big assumptions there - you may be right but who knows what's in Amodei's medicine cabinet.

That aside, I think there's something that happens to the human mind (and most people are susceptible) when exposed to certain stratospheric levels of wealth and power (which are basically the same thing). Their thinking becomes ungrounded, uncoupled from reality. The tendency is to shrug off the limitations of logic and rationality and to allow their mind to dabble in ideas of limitless possibility and power because doing so feels good to do. It's a drug and a very seductive thought that one's will could be manifested in the world without compromise - that what's inside could be made real on the outside. That is, after all, what power is. Dario's imagined reality is that he is the savior of the human race, and that's the reality he's currently living in.