Ben Turtel

Feb 12, 2025 | lesswrong.com | Ben Turtel

LLMs can teach themselves to better predict the future - no human examples or curation required.

Nov 18, 2024 | cointelegraph.com | Ben Turtel

Ben Turtel 22 minutes ago Blockchain removed the need to trust authorities with our money. Now it can remove the need to trust them with the truth. 113 Total views 1 Total shares Listen to article 0:00 CT Accelerator COINTELEGRAPH IN YOUR SOCIAL FEEDFollow ourSubscribe onThis article was brought to you by Cointelegraph Accelerator - a community of crypto investors and founders working together to build the industry’s future.

May 22, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Ben Turtel

Extreme outcomes drive tax revenueLet's do a thought experiment. The year is 1800. You’re a loan officer at a bank. Farmers come to you asking for a loan - maybe to purchase new equipment, buy more land, or make investments to improve their farm’s productivity. What are your criteria for granting a loan? You’ll primarily want to do 2 things: avoid the losers, and reduce risk. To avoid the losers, you’ll want to learn about a farmer’s reputation and character. Are they honest and hard working?

Feb 19, 2024 | quillette.com | Jeffrey Herf |Ben Turtel

In a 2016 New Yorker profile of first-time American voters, a young respondent explained why he was planning to cast a ballot for the unlikely upstart Donald Trump: “The thing about the word ‘racist’ is that every time it gets used it loses meaning. For the past decade or two, it’s been used by people on the left as a kill shot. That just kills your argument, no matter what you’re trying to say. You’re a racist and therefore you’re evil and therefore you lose.

Feb 19, 2024 | quillette.com | Jacob Heilbrunn |Jeffrey Herf |Ben Turtel |Sean Welsh

A review of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictatorsby Jacob Heilbrunn, 249 pages, W.W. Norton (February 2024)In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn argues that Trump’s “America First” slogan signals the renewal of a marginal but persistent authoritarian strain in American thought. This tradition may be less famous than the liberal internationalism of Roosevelt, Truman, Reagan, or Biden, but it is nonetheless firmly rooted in the American political landscape.