LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I'm sympathetic to Musk being genuinely worried about AI safety. My problem is that one of his first actions after learning about AI safety was to found OpenAI, and that hasn't worked out very well. Not just due to Altman; even the "Open" part was a highly questionable goal. Hopefully Musk's future actions in this area would have positive EV, but still.

What’s your opinion on the possible progress of systems like AlphaProof, o1, or Claude with computer use?

I don't expect that to be particularly relevant. The data wall is still there; scaling just compute has considerably worse returns than the curves we've been on for the past few years, and we're not expecting synthetic data to be anywhere near sufficient to bring us close to the old curves.

I don't really know, sorry. My memory is that 2023 already pretty bad for incumbent parties (e.g. the right-wing ruling party in Poland lost power), but I'm not sure.

How would removing Sam Altman significantly reduce extinction risk? Conditional on AI alignment being hard and Doom likely the exact identity of the Shoggoth Summoner seems immaterial. 

Yes, it does imply that the default path is permanent-disempowerment or extinction.

unless you additionally posit an additional mechanism like fields with terrible replication rates have a higher standard deviation than fields without them

Why would that be relevant?

The most important fact about politics in 2024 is that across the world, it's a terrible time to be an incumbent. For the first time this year since at least World War II, the incumbent party did worse than it did in the previous election in every election in the developed world. ...

What influence does the exclusion of "years where fewer than five countries had elections" in the graph have?

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

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".)