If you look at top priorities of the US military, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was one of those. In both cases the results were horrific. If the US military would be competent they likely would manage to defund useless paratroopers. 

I generally think that "hypercompetent" was a poor word choice on my part. I agree that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are excellent case studies, and that incompetence in the war on terror gives good bayesian updates, especially against "hypercompetence", as a hypercompetent inner regime in the US would be more capable of investigating the competence of US forces without worrying so much about stretching itself thin and giving away the positions of its VIPs (same goes for Russia). This is the evidence that my models are tested against. I think that, in reality, things related to military bureaucracies and officer's academies would evolve to goodhart metrics that fool an inner regime in particular. They would be specialists at that, especially if infiltration risk from foreign fintelligence agencies mean that sending trusted VIPs to infiltrate a wide variety of bureaucracies runs a major risk of a large proportion of those trusted agents being compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.

Snowden is safely in Russia despite there being strong interest of the US intelligence department to have him not be free.

I don't see how this is relevant. Russia needs a reputation for protecting elite US defectors, especially ones that deliberately permanently drastically alter global trends like Snowden. 

Is Assange is a better example, since Ecuador and Sweden are within the US sphere of influence whereas Russia delinates the edges of the US sphere of influence? I understand Snowden extremely well (that stuff is my area of expertise, most stuff here is outside of it), but don't know much about Assange.

If we look at lying, the Afghanistan war was not setup in a way to prevent soldiers in Afghanistan from lying to their superiors but the opposite. Soldiers were encouraged to lie in a way that exaggerated the power of the Afghan military. As a result predictions about what happened after the withdraw were wrong.

Can you go into more details about this, or suggest further reading? This is interesting and relevant.

The drive to move away from ineffective cost-plus contracting doesn't come from inside the military but from Silicon Valley companies like Palantir and Andruil. Military contracting seems highly corrupt and inefficient.

A big reason why my competent inner regime model runs into falsifiability problems is because the competent trustworthy VIPs and the monopolized technology (e.g. functioning lie detectors) would be deployed conservatively, because stretching networks thin means more surface area, which means more risk of being compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.

I don't know much about the history of Palantir or other silicon valley defense companies, and am interested in that (specifically Palantir and similar companies). Its possible that the rise of highly effective silicon valley defense companies might have come from a competent inner regime getting better at recognizing and cooperating with outside talent during the 2010s, rather than just Palantir massively outperforming contractors on obvious metrics.

Trump opposes those elites in multiple ways and he won his first election to the presidency. Right now he's in a good road to win the Republican primary again and maybe even the general election even when deep state elites don't like him to be in power.

I don't think Trump is a good example, because even during his first campaign in 2015-16 when he was the least a creature of the system, it's still not clear to what extent his promised purges could have benefited various elites, as it was always pretty vague and the promised purges could have been retargeted to anyone inconvenient.

1. You're saying that these hypothetical elites are hypercompetent to such a hollywoodical degree that normal human constraints that apply to everyone else don't apply to them, because of "out of distribution" reasons. It seems to me that "out of distribution" here stands as a synonym of magic [? · GW].

I think that "hypercompetent" was a poor choice of words on my part, since the crux of the post is that it's difficult to evaluate the competence of opaque systems.

1. You're saying that these hypothetical elites are controlling the world thanks to their hypercompetence, but are completely oblivious to the idea that they themselves could lose control to an AI that they know to be hypercompetent relative to them.

It's actually the other way around; existing as an inner regime means surviving many years of evolutionary pressure from being targeted by all the rich, powerful, and high IQ people in any civilization or sphere of influence (and the model describes separate inner regimes in the US, China, and Russia which are in conflict, not a single force controlling all of civilization). That is an extremely wide variety of evolutionary pressure (which can shape people's development), because any large country has an extremely diverse variety of rich, powerful, and/or high-IQ people.

1. It seems to me that lie detection technology makes the scenario you're worried about even less likely? It would be enough for just a single individual from the hypothetical hypercompetent elites to testify under lie detection that they indeed honestly believe that AI poses a risk to them.

The elites I'm describing are extremely in-tune with the idea that it's worthwhile for foreign intelligence agencies to shape information warfare policies to heavily prioritize targeting members of the inner regime. Therefore, it's worthwhile for themselves to cut themselves off of popular media entirely, and be extremely skeptical of anything that unprotected people believe.

1. It's worth pointing out I suppose that the military industrial complex is still strongly interested in the world not being destroyed, no matter how cartoonishly evil you may believe they are otherwise, unless they are a Cthulhu cult or something. They could still stumble into such a terrible outcome via arms race dynamics, but if hypercompetence means anything, it's something that makes such accidents less, not more, likely.

I definitely think that molochian races-to-the-bottom are a big element here. I hope that the people in charge aren't all nihilistic moral relativists, even though that seems like the kind of thing that would happen.

My arguments end here. From this point on, I just want to talk about... smell. Because I smell anxiety.

You definitely sensed/smelled real anxiety! The more real exposure people get to dangerous forces like intelligence agencies, the more they realize that it makes sense to be scared. I definitely think that the prospect is scary of EA/LW of stepping on the toes of powerful people, and being destroyed or damaged as a result.

Is something terrible going to happen if people read this? It's just a blogpost. No, it's not going to accidentally push all of history off course down into a chasm.

Specific strings of text in specific places can absolutely push all of history off course down into a chasm!

As you might imagine, writing this post feels a bit tough for a bunch of reasons. It’s a sensitive topic, there are lots of complicated legal issues to consider, and it’s generally a bit weird to write publicly about an agency that’s in the middle of investigating you (it feels a little like talking about someone in the third person without acknowledging that they’re sitting at the dinner table right next to you).
-Howie Lempel, EAforum, Regulatory Inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation UK [EA · GW]

You've said before, don't lobby to ban AI, because that might make you an enemy of the deep state. Here you say, focus on speeding up AI safety, rather than slowing down AI capabilities, for the same reason.

It's weird to think I'm getting a reputation for that stance! But it makes sense since I keep making that point. I'm not actually particularly attached to that stance, I just think that awareness of key factors are undersupplied in the rationalist community. I think that more people can easily read more about how rapid AI capabilities research is considered a US national security priority [EA · GW].

I definitely agree, people who perform well in one role are out-of-distribution for the promoted role. This definitely makes it hard for any organization to end up with competent people at the top, especially due to people getting good at office politics and goodharting the entire promotion process by specializing in eliminating rivals.

My model definitely points towards a large proportion of polygraph machines just being empty boxes, since it's about monopolizing advanced technology, not just monopolizing competent VIPs (as a side note, I think that "hypercompetent" was a poor choice of words on my part, since the crux of the post is that it's difficult to evaluate the competence of opaque systems). Some lie detection machines will be running better and more modern tech than others, but it still makes sense to ask everyone a question that (ideally) only agents of foreign intelligence services would give off weird readings in response to.

A big reason why my competent inner regime model runs into falsifiability problems is because the competent trustworthy VIPs and the monopolized technology (e.g. functioning lie detectors) would be deployed conservatively, because stretching networks thin means more surface area, which means more risk of being compromised by foreign intelligence agencies.

Fixed, thanks.