Is Alignment the Most Important Problem Facing Humanity?

Ixe: I don't think climate change is the most important problem facing humanity. He says social media could be used to manipulate public sphere in a similar way as information warfare was during the cold war. The next 10 years will determine whether or not we live past that point, he says.

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Tim Hwang is the most interesting man on the internet. He runs a project called the Trade Journal Cooperative, which I've subscribed to for years. We talk about how the Trade Journal Cooperative got started it, how Tim *secretly* went to law school, and several other projects Tim is working on including an academic journal dedicated to bizarre images of Mark Zuckerberg. Thought that was all? That’s not all. Also using bots to wage information wars on social media, and Tim’s book which predicts an online advertising bubble. My favorite thing about Tim is his ability to sit on the fence between very serious and very whimsical.

To start our conversation, Tim talks off the cuff about one of his heroes, Charles Fort, who compiled books of anomalous phenomena and is the source of the term “Fortean.” This explains a lot about Tim. We then explore Tim’s role as a trade journal sommelier and the Trade Journal Cooperative which provides a quarterly exploration of various industries. We talk a bit about the vastness of the trucking industry and also about the elevator, i.e., vertical transportation, industry.

Tim also tells us the awkward story of how he somewhat unintentionally ended up going to law school secretly, and we explore some of the projects he started after graduating, including Rosen, Wolfe and Hwang, a boutique law practice that specializes in serving the unique needs of independent creators and small to midsize technology businesses, and Robot, Robot & Hwang, which was created off the notion of creating a fully automated law firm. Among other projects, Tim also started the academic journal The California Review of Images and Mark Zuckerberg, which explores why Zuckerberg seems to be exceptionally good at ending up in strange images and what that says about the media and culture.

I ask Tim to talk about his 2019 paper titled “Maneuver and Manipulation: On the Military Strategy of Online Information Warfare,” which is about how bots shape discussions online and the possible strategies of combating public manipulation. We also talk about a couple of branches off the information warfare piece, the National Conspiracy Writing Month (NaCoWriMo), in which participants complete a “daunting, but straightforward challenge to develop a deep, viable and complete conspiracy theory during the 30 days of November,” and COGSEC, which is a conference on the real-world practice of countering online influence operations. We wrap up our discussion talking about Tim’s recently published book The Subprime Attention Crisis that explores the bubble of online advertising and its potential implications on web2 giants.

Links:

Charles Fort Books

The Trade Journal Cooperative

Iron Clad Contract Management

Maneuver and Manipulation: On the Military Strategy of Online Information Warfare

Sub-prime attention crisis by Tim Hwang

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber

TimHwang.org

Tim on Twitter

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