Please stop talking about compute overhang. In a world where AI progress has wildly accelerated chip manufacture, this already-tenuous argument has become completely ridiculous.

The problematic things with bioweapons are

1. unlike nuclear explosives or even conventional explosives, the key ingredients are just... us. Life. Food. Amino Acids. 

2. They can be rapidly self-replicating. Even if you make just a tiny amount of a potent self-replicating bioweapon, you can cause enormous amounts of harm.

As for making them... thankfully yes, it's still hard to do. The cost and difficulty have been dropping really rapidly though. AI is helping with that.

This plot shows DNA sequencing (reading) costs, but the trends are similar for the cost and difficulty of producing specific DNA sequences and engineering viruses.

By sensible, I don't indicate disagreement, but a way of interpreting the question.

One point I'm not sure about with the idea of neutrality is neutrality of process or of outcome. Or would that distinction not matter to your interests here?

Good suggestion, thanks and I'll do that.

I'm not commenting on those who are obviously just grinding an axe; I'm commenting on the stance toward "doomers" from otherwise reasonable people. From my limited survey the brand of x-risk concern isn't looking good, and that isn't mostly a result of the amazing rhetorical skills of the e/acc community ;)

I saw the the EA Forum's policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don't need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that:

You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.

I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It's important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents.

It's because of that goal that I'm encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let's avoid that.

Plus, butter is churned, so it is a few percent air by volume when solid.

Just because X describes Y in a high level abstract way, doesn't mean studying X is the best of understanding Y.

Often, the best way is to simply study Y, and studying X just makes you sound smarter when talking about Y.

pointless abstractions: cybernetics and OODA loop

This is based on my experience trying to learn stuff about cybernetics, in order to understand GUI tool design for personal use, and to understand the feedback loop that roughly looks like, build -> use -> rethink -> let it help you rethink -> rebuild, where me and any LLM instance I talk to (via the GUI) are part of the cybernetic system. Whenever I "loaded cybernetics concepts" into my mind and tried to view GUI design from that perspective, I was just spending a bunch of effort mapping the abstract ideas to concrete things, and then being like, "ok but so what?".

A similar thing happened while looking into the OODA loop, though at least its Wiki page has a nice little flowchart, and it's much more concrete than cybernetics. And you can draw more concrete inspiration about GUI design by thinking about fighter pilot interfaces.

It's also because I often see people using abstract reasoning and, whenever I dig into what they're actually saying it doesn't make that much sense. Also because of personal experience where, things become way clearer and easier to think about, after phrasing them in very concrete and basic ways.

And English has it backwards. You can see the past, but not the future. The thing which just happened is most clear. The future comes at us from behind.

[...] is anyone I met at LO looking for roommates?

there's a channel in the megameetup discord to discuss shared rooming. I think the discord might only be available to registered participants though (you could ask Screwtape in case I'm wrong)