LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think the major impacts that matter are on war, pandemic risk, and x-risk. I rarely see anyone try to figure those out, perhaps the sign is too uncertain due to complexity.

I did see your comment on FB! I'm still thinking about what I want to try next. I'm worried that silicone with your method would tear, though.

I'm also interested, have you made any progress since your comment?

The doubling down is delusional but I think you're simplifying the failure of projection a bit. The inability of markets and forecasters to predict Trump's second term is quite interesting. A lot of different models of politics failed.

Pedantic note: there are many instances of "syncopathy" that I am fairly sure should be "sycophancy".

(It's an understandable mistake -- "syncopathy" is composed of familiar components, which could plausibly be put together to mean something like "the disease of agreeing too much" which is, at least in the context of AI, not far off what sycophancy in fact means. Whereas if you can parse "sycophancy" at all you might work out that it means "fig-showing" which obviously has nothing to do with anything. So far as I can tell, no one actually knows how "fig-showing" came to be the term for servile flattery.)

I think the right way to self-destruct isn't to shut down entirely. It's to spend all your remaining assets on safety (whether that be lobbying for regulations, or research, or whatever). This would greatly increase the total amount of money spent on safety efforts so it might help quite a lot.

I do believe shutting down does have a decent chance, although not a comfortingly large one, of scaring government and/or other AI companies into taking the risks seriously.

I won't comment on your specific startup, but I wonder in general how an AI Safety startup becomes a successful business. What's the business model? Who is the target customer? Why do they buy? Unless the goal is to get acquired by one of the big labs, in which case, sure, but again, why or when do they buy, and at what price? Especially since they already don't seem to be putting much effort into solving the problem themselves despite having better tools and more money to do so than any new entrant startup.

I really, really hope at some point the Democrats will acknowledge the reason they lost is that they failed to persuade the median voter of their ideas, and/or adopt ideas that appeal to said voters. At least among those I interact with, there seems to be a denial of the idea that this is how you win elections, which is a prerequisite for governing.

The hard cases are much more interesting. What about lying to my landlord about renting a room on airbnb? What about saying your class will make people millionaires for the low low price of $1,000 (hey, it could happen)? What about hiding the rats from the health inspector?

None of these seem like hard cases to me. Lying is wrong (and pretty obviously so) in all three of these cases.

That seems very possible to me, and if and when we can show whether something like that is the case, I do think it would represent significant progress. If nothing else, it would help tell us what the thing we need to be examining actually is, in a way we don't currently have an easy way to specify.