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Andrew M. Bailey

@resistance.money

1.1K followers 190 following 390 posts

I am a Professor at the National University of Singapore 🇸🇬, where I teach and write about money and philosophy. Co-author of http://resistance.money. Fellow at http://btcpolicy.org.

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Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · Jan 16

My new book with @bradleyrettler.com is out — 'The Problem of Divine Personality!'. For the next two weeks, you can download it for free from Cambridge University Press.

The Problem of Divine Personality

Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - The Problem of Divine Personality

www.cambridge.org

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 5h

enjoying little puzzles is absolutely a personality trait

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 1d

overall though, I have few complaints. it takes bitcoin seriously, which is more than you can say for most central bank research.

Source: www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RI-PROD...

no page description found

www.dbresearch.com

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 1d

"oh yeah, they look similar"

::squints::

"Oh wait. One went from $1500 to $4000. The other went from sub-$1000 to $100,000. Interesting!"

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 1d

the charts from this new Deutsche Bank report are kind of funny. look at what you have to do to the y axis to make bitcoin and gold performance look even remotely similar across this 2012-2025 timeframe

Reposted by Andrew M. Bailey

Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 2d

A perfect table of contents.

1 Happiness 1
2 Death 61
3 The Remainder of Life 106

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 2d

A useful resource is this book, published just this summer. It's a good read, and includes most of the classic AI skeptic arguments the internet knows well by now. If you're at all like me, you'll find it both irritating and fun.

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 2d

I am myself AI-skeptical: I am unconvinced that, e.g., LLMs will do more good than harm. The risks I see are more humanistic than existential (no doom here).

But c'mon, man -- saying that chatbots aren't useful is pretty goofy. Just use a frontier, paid, reasoning model, and you'll see.

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 2d

4. Persistently why people seem to find the technology so useful, when evaluating whether the technology is indeed useful. We have the revealed preferences of millions — people who use chatbots or bitcoin, that is, and who pay to do so — and this has got to be evidence of something, one thinks!

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 2d

3. Evoking vague anti-capitalist language ("profit", "corporate" as epithets, etc.) without actually arguing that these things are bad.

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 2d

2. Declining to describe the systems under evaluation in any technical detail, but instead replacing serious description with unfriendly metaphors.

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 2d

1. Oscillating between two very different — and seemingly inconsistent — skeptical stances, according to which the technology in view is (a) a total nothingburger, or (b) likely to have disastrous consequences

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 2d

I've been reading a bunch of AI skeptics lately, and I'm noticing how closely they resemble another kind of technology skeptic I know well — the bitcoin skeptic. Some patterns:

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 3d

I have never started getting interested in some new tech stack -- 3D modelling (90s), web development (2000s), bitcoin (2010s), chatbots (2020s) -- without feeling like I am late. But if you just stick around for a while, that feeling goes away. And there's always more to learn.

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 7d

In serious academic hiring, letters are mostly noise. A confident search committee does fine without them. Why, then, do they persist? Three compatible theories:

1. They're fun, in a kind of gossipy way
2. Many committees aren't equipped to do their jobs
3. Inertia

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 20d

Happier times. That post, and the comments, made me laugh so much back in the day!

"After considerable deliberation and reflection I've decided that it's time to go to Oxford. It wasn't an easy decision. I love London and will miss all the wonderful people I've met here."

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 21d

You don't have to be some weirdo conspiracy theorist to deny (1). You just have to want to buy things that have prices rising faster than CPI — tuition, health care, housing, for example.

But 'about' is a weasel word. An election -- or an entire year -- can be 'about' many things!

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · 22d

bitcoin fixes this

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · Sep 6

indeed

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · Sep 6

middlemen have their place

(from Tibor Fischer's My Bags are Big; a good read)

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · Sep 4

I've spent much of my public life being a little cagey about God, the Catholic Church, and philosophy of religion (no way to live, for the record). This interview on all that stuff with @2Philosophical_ was a first for me, and fun. Thank you, JP!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=14O1...

Andrew Bailey on God's personality, the nature of human personhood, hopeful universalism, and more

YouTube video by J.P. Andrew

www.youtube.com

Reposted by Andrew M. Bailey

Cas Piancey @cascoinfoundation.org · Sep 4

The Wire said it best, “is you takin’ notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy??”

The answer, for some reason, is always “yes.”

Reposted by Andrew M. Bailey

Remis Ramos @remisramos.bsky.social · Aug 31

Friendly reminder

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · Aug 31

Many years ago, I started reading Millgram after I saw him give a talk. I disagreed with just about everything he said, but it was so unlike anything else, I couldn't resist. Never boring.

Anyways, here's a somewhat critical review of his new Nietzsche book.

ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/why-...

Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together?

It is well known that Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a complete mental collapse in January 1889 after an impressive flurry of philosophical activity in th...

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · Aug 31

If the reviewers are right, maybe this book isn't so great. But you gotta hand it to Millgram for the title. "Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together?" is an amazing book title.

Andrew M. Bailey @resistance.money · Aug 29

"That is a very interesting view you have about vaccines. I wonder what Drs. Oprah Winfrey and RFK, Jr. have to say on this matter?"