LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I voted for Hillary and wouldn't need to think hard about why: she's a democrat, and I generally prefer democrat policies to republican.

Seems to me that Obama had the level of charisma that Hillary did not. (Neither do Biden or Harris). Bill Clinton had charisma, too. (So did Bernie.)

Also, imagine that you had a button that would make everyone magically forget about the race and gender for a moment. I think that the people who voted for Obama would still feel the same, but the people who voted for Hillary would need to think hard about why, and probably their only rationalization would be "so that Trump does not win".

I am not an American, so my perception of American elections is probably extremely unrepresentative, but it felt like Obama was about "hope" and "change", while Hillary was about "vote for Her, because she is a woman, so she deserves to be the president".

I'm still really not sure there isn't a gender effect!

I guess there are people (both men and women) who in principle wouldn't vote for a woman leader. But there are also people who would be happy to give a woman a chance. Not sure which group is larger.

But the wannabe woman leader should not make her campaign about her being a woman. That feels like admitting that she has no other interesting qualities. She needs to project the aura of a competent person who just happens to be female.

In my country, I have voted for a woman candidate twice (1, 2), but they never felt like "DEI hires". One didn't have any woke agenda, the other was pro- some woke topics, but she never made them about her. (It was like "this is what I will support if you elect me", not "this is what I am".)

Does that mean that you believe that after a certain point we would lose control over AI? I am new to this field, but doesn't this fact spell doom for humanity?

I liked the post, and plan to try using the technique. If anyone is reading this 5 years from now, feel free to ask whether it provided lasting value. 

My key takeaway is "As you take actions, use your inner simulator to predict the outcome. Since you are always taking actions, you can always practice using your inner simulator."

The only part I disliked is the "Past, Present, Future" framing, which felt very forced. "What do you think you know?" and "Do you know what you are doing?" are both questions about the present. However, I'm not sure what a good framing would be. The best I can come up with is "Beliefs, Goals, Planning", but that's not very catchy. 

My best guess is that there was process supervision for capabilities but not for safety. i.e. training to make the CoT useful for solving problems, but not for "policy compliance or user preferences." This way they make it useful, and they don't incentivize it to hide dangerous thoughts. I'm not confident about this though.

"One thing I appreciate about Buck/Ryan's comms around AI control is that they explicitly acknowledge that they believe control will fail for sufficiently intelligent systems."

Does that mean that they believe that after a certain point we would lose control over AI? I am new to this field, but doesn't this fact spell doom for humanity?

There are two pre-existing Manifold Markets questions on whether LLM scaling laws will hold until 2027 and 2028, respectively, with currently little trading volume.

and recently founded another AI company

Potentially a hot take, but I feel like xAI's contributions to race dynamics (at least thus far) have been relatively trivial. I am usually skeptical of the whole "I need to start an AI company to have a seat at the table", but I do imagine that Elon owning an AI company strengthens his voice. And I think his AI-related comms have mostly been used to (a) raise awareness about AI risk, (b) raise concerns about OpenAI/Altman, and (c) endorse SB1047 [which he did even faster and less ambiguously than Anthropic].

The counterargument here is that maybe if xAI was in 1st place, Elon's positions would shift. I find this plausible, but I also find it plausible that Musk (a) actually cares a lot about AI safety, (b) doesn't trust the other players in the race, and (c) is more likely to use his influence to help policymakers understand AI risk than any of the other lab CEOs.

[this is a draft. I strongly welcome comments]

The Latent Military Realities of the Coming Taiwan Crisis

A blockade of Taiwan seems significantly more likely than a full-scale invasion. The US's non-intervention in Ukraine suggests similar restraint might occur with Taiwan. 

Nevertheless, Metaculus predicts a 65% chance of US military response to a Chinese invasion and separately gives 20-50% for some kind of Chinese military intervention by 2035. Let us imagine that the worst comes to pass and China and the United States are engaged in a hot war?

China's national memory of the 'century of humiliation' deeply shapes its modern strategic thinking. How many Westerners could faithfully recount the events of the Opium Wars? How many have even heard of the Boxer Rebellion, the Eight-nation alliance, the Tai-Ping rebellion? Yet these events are the core curriculum in Chinese education. 

Chinese revanchism toward the West enjoys broad public support. The CCP repression of Chinese public opinion likely understates how popular this view is. CCP officals actually have more dovish view than the general public according to polling. 

As other pieces of evidence: historically, the Boxer rebellion was a grass-root phenomenon. Movies depicting conflict between China and America consistently draw large audiences and positive reception. China has an absolute miniscule number of foreigners per capita and this has fallen after the pandemic and never rebounded. 

China is the only nuclear power that has explicitly disavowed a nuclear first strike. It currently has a remarkably small nuclear stockpile (~200 warheads). With the increased sensor capabilities in recent years China has become vulnerable to a US nuclear first-strike destroying her launchers before she can react. This is likely part of the reason for a major build-up of her nuclear stockpile in recent years.

It is plausible that there will be a hot war without the use of nuclear weapons. The closest historical case is of course the Korea War, the last indirect conflict between the US and China, ended in stalemate despite massive US economic superiority. Today, that economic gap has largely closed - China's economy is 1.25x larger in PPP terms, while the US is only 40% bigger in nominal GDP. 

How would a conventional US-China war look like? What can be learned from past conflicts?

The 1973 Falklands War between the UK and Argentina is the last air-naval war between near-peer powers. The 50-year gap since then equals the time between the US Civil War and WWI. Naval and air warfare technology advances much faster than land warfare - historically, this was tested through frequent conflicts. Today's unprecedented peace means we're largely guessing which naval technologies and doctrines will actually work. While land warfare in Ukraine looks like 'WWI with drones', naval warfare has likely seen much more dramatic changes.

Naval technology advances create bigger power gaps than land warfare. The Opium Wars showed this dramatically - British steamships simply sailed up Chinese rivers unopposed, forcing humiliating treaties on a land power.

Air warfare technology gaps may be even more extreme than naval ones. Modern F-35s achieve 20:0 kill ratios against previous-generation fighters in exercises.

The Arab-Israeli wars, and the Gulf war suggests some lessons about modern air warfare. These conflicts showed that air superiority is typically won or lost very quickly: initial strikes on airbases can be decisive, and most aircraft losses happen on the ground rather than in dogfights. This remains such a concern that it’s US Air Force doctrine to rotate aircraft between airfields. More broadly, these conflicts suggest that air warfare produces more decisive, one-sided outcomes than land battles - when one side gains air superiority, the results can be devastating.

Wild Cards 

Drones and the Transparent Battlefield

Drones represent warfare's future, yet both sides underinvest. While the US military has only 10,000 small drones and 400 large ones, Ukraine alone produces 1-4 million drones annually. China leads in mass-producing small drones but lacks integration doctrine.The Ukraine war revealed how modern sensors create a 'transparent battlefield' where hiding large forces is impossible. Drones might make it trivially easy to find (and even destroy) submarines and surface ships. 

Submarines

Since WWI Submarines are the kings of the sea. It is plausibly the case that submarines are dominant. A single torpedo from a submarine will sink an aircraft carrier - in exercises, small diesel-electric submarines regularly 'sink' entire carrier groups. These submarines can hide in sonar deadzones, regions where water temperature and salinity create acoustic blind spots. 

Are Aircraft Carriers obsolete?

China now sports hypersonic missiles that at least in theory could disable an aircraft carrier from 1500 miles or beyond. On the flip side, missile defense effectiveness has increased dramatically, hypersonic missile effectiveness may be overstated. As a point of evidence of the remaining importance of air craft carriers, China is building her own fleet of aircraft carriers. 

Military Competence Wildcard:

Peace means we don't know the true combat effectiveness of either military. Authoritarian militaries often suffer from corruption and incompetence - Chinese troops have been caught loading missile launchers with water instead of fuel during exercises [Comment 5: Need source]. But the US military also shows worrying signs: bureaucratic bloat, lack of recent peer conflict experience, and questions about training quality. Both militaries' actual combat effectiveness remains a major unknown. The US Navy now has more admirals than warships. 

Stealth bombers and JASSM-ER

We don’t know what the real dominant weapon in a real conventional 21-century naval war between peers would be, but a plausible guess for a game-changing technology are Stealth Bombers & Stealth missiles. 

The obscene cost made the B2 stealth bombers even less popular than the ever-more-costly jet fighters and the project was prematurely halted at 21 platforms.  Despite the obscene cost it’s plausible that the B2 and it’s younger cousin the B21 is worth all the money and then some. 

Unlike fighters a stealth bombers has something ‘true stealth’. While a stealth fighter like a F35 is better thought of as a ‘low-observable’ aircraft that is difficult to target-lock by short-wave radar but easily detectable by long-wave radar, the B2 stealth bomber is opaque to long-wave radar too. Stealth bombers can also carry air-to-air missiles so may even be effective against fighters. Manoeuvrability and speed, long the defining hallmark of fighters has become less important with the advent of highly accurate homing missiles.  

Lockheed Martin has developed the JASSM-ER, a stealth missile with a range up to 900 miles. A B2 bomber has a range of up to something like 4000 miles.  For comparison, the range of fighters is something in the range of 400-1200 miles. 

A single hit of a JASSM-ER is probably a mission kill on a naval vessel. A B2 can carry up to 16 of these missiles. This means that a single squadron of stealth bombers taking off from a base in Guam could potentially wipe out half a fleet in a single sortie. 

***********

And of course last but not least, the greatest wildcard of them all:

AGI.

I will refrain from speculating on the military implications of AGI. 

Clear China Disadvantages, US Advantages:

Amphibious assaults are inherently difficult A full Taiwan invasion faces massive logistical hurdles. Taiwan could perhaps muster 500,000 defenders under full mobilization, requiring 1.5 million Chinese troops for a successful assault under standard military doctrine. For perspective, D-Day - history's largest amphibious invasion - landed only 133,000 troops.

China's energy vulnerability is significant - China imports 70% of its oil and 25% of its gas by sea. While Russia provides 20-40% of these imports and could increase supply, the US could severely disrupt China's energy access.

China's regional diplomacy has backfired - Chinas has alienated virtually all its neighbours. The US has basing options in Japan, Australia, Philippines, and across Pacific islands.

US carrier advantage The US operates 11 nuclear supercarriers with extensive blue-water experience. China has two smaller carriers active, one in trials, and one nuclear carrier under construction. The big questionmark is whether carriers might be obsolete or not. 

US Stealth bomber advantage: The US leads with 21 B1s and 100 new B21s ordered, while China's H10 program still lags behind. 

US submarine advantage US submarines are significantly technologically ahead. Putin selling Russian submarine technology might nullify some of that advantage, as might new cheap sea drones. Geographically, it’s hard for Chinese submarines to escape the China sea unnoticed. 

Clear China Advantages, US Disadvantages:

Geography favors China  Taiwan lies just 100 miles from mainland China while US forces must cross the Pacific. The massive Chinese Rocket Force can launch thousands of missiles from secure mainland positions.

Advanced missile capabilities Massive conventional rocket force plus claimed hypersonic missile capabilities [Comment : find skeptic hypersonic missile video]

China has been preparing for many years China has established numerous artificial islands with airfields throughout the region. They've successfully stolen F35 plans and are producing their own version at scale. The Chinese governments has built up enormous national emergency storages of essential resources in preparation for the (inevitable) conflict. Bringing Taiwan back into the fold has been a primary driver of policy for decades. 

US Shipbuilding The US shipbuilding industry has collapsed to just 0.1% of global production, while China, South Korea, and Japan dominate with 35-40%, 25-30%, and 20-25% respectively.

TechEmails' substack post with the same emails in a more centralized format includes citations; apparently these are mostly from Elon Musk, et al. v. Samuel Altman, et al. (2024)