Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) / X

Richard Ngo

11.9K posts

Richard Ngo

@RichardMCNgo

natural philosopher

San Francisco, CA

Joined October 2009

Pinned
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Jul 18, 2024
I increasingly believe that there are fundamental principles which simultaneously govern the designs of well-functioning minds, organizations and societies. Once we pin them down with mathematical precision, we’ll understand the world more deeply than we can currently imagine.
160K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Dec 28, 2022
Ongoing thread of unusual party ideas I've heard lately (some great, some terrible). 100 beers of solitude: the party starts with 100 beers on a table in the middle of the room, and nobody is allowed to talk until all of them are finished.
1.5M
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Jun 18, 2025
Hypothesis: we’ll look back on mass migration as being worse for Europe than WW2 was. Europe recovered quickly from WW2, because each country remained high-trust and homogeneous. But you can’t just rebuild your way out of internal ethno-religious fractures.
492K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Jul 1, 2024
Today I learned (the hard way) that when a long-haul flight turns around only an hour in, it will sometimes dump fuel from its wings so that it’s light enough to land.
00:00
2.6M
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Feb 11, 2022
Octopuses are surprisingly intelligent, and reproduce at 1 year old. If we'd started a breeding program 50 years ago, we probably could've gotten them smarter than dolphins by now. A disappointing failure of the long-term mad science ecosystem.
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Jul 1, 2024
Replying to @RichardMCNgo
The reason for turning around was really dumb: they forgot the drinking water. I’m very curious a) how that escaped the preflight checklist and b) which corporate/regulatory bureaucracy decided that returning to SF was better for us than subsisting on juice and soda for 10 hours.
222K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Jul 9, 2025
In my head I’ve started referring to political quadrants in terms of properties of their preferred coordination networks. Top two are centralized. Bottom two are distributed. Left two are symmetric (aka egalitarian). Right two are asymmetric.
360K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Apr 2, 2022
New York’s nightclubs are the particle accelerators of sociology: reliably creating precise conditions under which exotic extremes of status-seeking behaviour can be observed. Ashley Mears, model turned sociology professor, wrote a great book about them. Thread of key points:
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Jul 24, 2024
One of the weirder side effects of having AIs more capable than 90% then 99% then 99.9% then 99.99% of humans is that it’ll become clear how much progress relies on 0.001% of humans.
247K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Mar 8, 2021
My girlfriend asked me: "If you were in charge of a prison, would you feed the prisoners the same food that you eat yourself?" This was such an interesting ethical conundrum that I took a while to realise it was actually a criticism of me eating a bowl of frozen peas for dinner.
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Feb 20, 2024
So apparently UK courts can decide that two unrelated jobs are “of equal value”. And people in the “underpaid” job get to sue for years of lost wages. And this has driven their 2nd biggest city bankrupt. Am I getting something wrong or is this as crazy as it sounds?
638K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Jan 3, 2025
Hypothesis: the world's most valuable data is screen captures of outlier competent people going about their work. But very little of this data is recorded, let alone made publicly available. You should seriously consider recording all work you do, even if just for personal use.
783K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Sep 13, 2024
Chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin learned chess in a very elegant way. He first trained to win the simplest endgames, then more complex endgames, then simple midgames, etc. By the time he learned openings he knew exactly what they aimed to achieve. What else can be learned similarly?
289K
Richard Ngo
@RichardMCNgo
Nov 27, 2024
If you’re going to hang around rationalist spaces, you should deeply internalize what I call Hanson’s razor: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by autism.
128K