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I read an article about McDonalds a while ago. One of the things that powered their early success and growth was an extremely small menu. The slim menu meant that the kitchen had little variety enabling everything to be done faster and cheaper.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_McDonald%27s)

A giant company with 50 products could plausibly have 50 teams, each of which is focussed on making its product the best it can be. So the "focus" doesn't have to be lost at scale, its more like a bunch of different organisations under one umbrella.

I think it is pretty conclusive that sunscreen wearing will improve your skin complexion and smoothness in the long term (presumably the effect is not worth having if you never go outside in sunshine, obv). 

Whether it has enough material effect to do anything to your risk of dying from malignant melonoma (which is pretty rare anyway), is more of an open question. It might not be a worthwhile trade-off for everyone. 

I think the hidden motives are basically rationalisation, I have found myself singlethinking those motives in the past nowadays I just bring those reasons to the centre-stage and try to actually find whether they align with my commitments instead of motivated stopping. Sometimes I just corner my motivated reasoning (bottom line) so bad (since it's not that hard to just do expected consequentialist reasoning properly for day to day stuff) that instead of my brain trying to come up with better reasoning it just makes the idea of the impulsive action more salient, some urge along the lines of "think less and intuit/act more".  

Also I have personally used this concept of "intellectual masturbation" to divert discussions away from potentially philosophical bomb to more relevant topics it's much better to reduce the philosophical jargon in day to day conversations lol.

Reflecting on this more, I wrote in a discord server (then edited to post here):

I wasn't aware the concept of pivotal acts was entangled with the frame of formal inner+outer alignment as the only (or most feasible?) way to cause safe ASI. 

I don't expect any current human is capable of solving formal inner alignment,^[1] i.e. of devising a method to create ASI with any specified output selection policy. This is why I've been focusing on other approaches which I believe are more likely to succeed. I suspect that by default, we might mutually believe each others agendas to be doomed, which also makes discussion possibly more valuable (as at least one of us should make a drastic update).

[The post [LW · GW] linked above] introduced a different frame. For anyone interested in trying that discussion, I'd be curious what you think of it.

As one of the comments says,
I found myself coming back to this now, years later, and feeling like it is massively underrated. Idk, it seems like the concept of training stories is great and much better than e.g. "we have to solve inner alignment and also outer alignment" or "we just have to make sure it isn't scheming."

1. ^{^}

   Though I encourage anyone who understands the problem and thinks they can solve it to try to prove me wrong! I can sure see some directions and think it's possible for a very creative human to achieve in principle, I just don't currently think it's probable that it will happen, and my best guess about the progress of the humans focused on it is that they've made approximately none. 

   A frame which doesn't require a method which accepts any defined policy, ie which allows the method to be specialized for a particular policy or space of policies that seems (1) easiest to attain while (2) not implying physical world optimization, seems more promising to me.

I agree with you that analogies are needed, but they are also inevitably limited. So I'm fine with saying "AI is concerning because its progress is exponential, and we have seen from COVID-19 that we need to intervene early," or "AI is concerning because it can proliferate as a technology like nuclear weapons," or "AI is like biological weapons in that countries will pursue and use these because they seem powerful, without appreciating the dangers they create if they escape control." But what I am concerned that you are suggesting is that we should make the general claim "AI poses uncontrollable risks like pathogens do," or "AI needs to be regulated the way biological pathogens are," and that's something I strongly oppose. By ignoring all of the specifics, the analogy fails.

In other words, "while I think the disanalogies are compelling, comparison can still be useful as an analytic tool - while keeping in mind that the ability to directly learn lessons from biorisk to apply to AI is limited by the vast array of other disanalogies."

What changes do you think the polyamory community has made?

That's more about me being interested in key global infrastructure, I've been curious about them for quite a lot of years after realising the combination of how significant what they're building is vs how few folks know about them. I don't know that they have any particularly generative AI related projects in the short term. 

fiber at Tata Industries in Mumbai

Could you elaborate on how Tata Industries is relevant here? Based on a DDG search, the only news I find involving Tata and AI infrastructure is one where a subsidiary named TCS is supposedly getting into the generative AI gold rush.

Anyone know folks working on semiconductors in Taiwan and Abu Dhabi, or on fiber at Tata Industries in Mumbai? 

I'm currently travelling around the world and talking to folks about various kinds of AI infrastructure, and looking for recommendations of folks to meet! 

If so, freel free to DM me! 

(If you don't know me, I'm a dev here on LessWrong and was also part of founding Lightcone Infrastructure.)

Im a real fan of insane ideas. I literally do Acid every monday. But I gotta say among crazy ideas 'be way way more honest' is well trodden ground and the skulls are numerous. It just really rarely goes well. Im a pretty honest guy and am attracted to the cluster. But if you start doing this you are definitely trying something in a cluster of ideas that usually works terribly. 

If anything I have to constantly tell myself to be less explicit and 'deeply honest'. It just doesnt work well for most people.