Posts

Does NYT have policies? 2020-06-24T04:06:57.556Z
Douglas_Knight's Shortform 2020-03-28T17:02:42.450Z
Perception of the Concrete vs Statistical: Corruption 2016-03-23T01:19:33.856Z
Would you notice if science died? 2016-03-08T04:04:49.587Z
Actually existing prediction markets? 2015-09-02T22:24:45.470Z
The Cold War divided Science 2014-04-05T23:10:38.181Z
Games People Play 2010-11-20T04:41:39.635Z

Comments

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Will quantum randomness affect the 2028 election? · 2024-01-25T19:09:57.295Z · LW · GW

How about cancer deaths? From the point of view of 2012, was Beau Biden's death in 2015 after diagnosis in 2013 due to quantum randomness? That sure had a big effect on the Democratic primary, if not the general election.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on AI Is Not Software · 2024-01-05T02:42:21.803Z · LW · GW

Sure, but this is not new. You start by saying "AI in 2024" but this is true of everything that has been called AI and a lot of things that maybe should have been called AI, such as the PageRank algorithm. Credit scores have made decisions based on based on statistical models since the 50s.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Environmental allergies are curable? (Sublingual immunotherapy) · 2024-01-02T17:45:49.913Z · LW · GW

That sounds pretty similar to sublingual therapy. I think it is likely that sublingual therapy is better because of the denser dosing (weekly vs monthly), but the difference is small enough that it can only be assessed with a head-to-head trial. (If the difference is compliance, it would be difficult to measure, though potentially very large.)

The headline that environmental allergies are curable is a decades old. If this news has not spread, it is good that you promote it, but we should ponder why it is not common knowledge.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Environmental allergies are curable? (Sublingual immunotherapy) · 2023-12-29T17:31:26.979Z · LW · GW

The medical consensus is that sublingual immunotherapy is inferior to the injected immunotherapy that has been used for a century. Did you try that as a kid? If there's reason to believe sublingual is better, that's good to know, but it sounds like you just don't know about injections.

Sublingual immunotherapy has an obvious advantage because people don't like shots. And it doesn't require a prescription. Indeed, one should be suspicious of a conflict of interest in the medical consensus. But injected doses are more precisely controlled, so there is good reason to believe they work better. And the doses are smaller, so the material cost is smaller.

Compliance to the schedule may be the main obstacle. It is not obvious whether doctor appointments make this better or worse. This probably varies between people.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims · 2023-12-16T17:56:45.715Z · LW · GW

What the legal system should be is irrelevant.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Black Box Biology · 2023-11-29T17:33:59.380Z · LW · GW

In the post you talked about editing all 237 loci to make diabetes negligible, but now you talk about the normal human range. I think that is more correct. Editing all 237 loci would leave the normal human range; the effect on diabetes would be unpredictable and the probability of bad effects likely. Not because of pleiotropy, but just the breakdown of a control system outside of its tested regime.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on The lost millennium · 2023-08-25T01:51:03.104Z · LW · GW

First of all, the population numbers are complete garbage. This is completely circular. You are just reading out the beliefs about history used to fabricate them. The numbers are generated by people caring about the fall of Rome. The fall of Rome didn't cause of decline in China. Westerners caring about the fall of Rome caused the apparent decline in China.

Second, there was a tremendous scientific and technological regress in Rome. Not caused by the fall of Rome, but the rise of Rome. There was a continual regress in the Mediterranean from 150BC to at least 600AD. Just look at a list of scientists: it has a stark gap 150BC-50AD. It is more controversial to say that the renaissance 50AD-150AD is a pale shadow of the Hellenistic period, but it is. In 145BC Rome fomented a civil war in Egypt, destroying Alexandria, the greatest center of learning. In 133BC, the king of Pergamon tried to avoid this fate by donating the second center of learning. It was peaceful, but science did not survive.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Is Light Drinking Protective? · 2023-07-31T19:56:57.969Z · LW · GW

Since those are rare causes of deaths, they don't matter and they're hard to measure. Also, this is a small study, so I trust earlier studies more.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Is Light Drinking Protective? · 2023-07-31T19:05:39.328Z · LW · GW

There is a mechanistic explanation. Alcohol is a blood thinner. Blood thinners protect from ischemic heart disease, which is such a large portion of mortality a small improvement can make up for worsening of all other causes. Which is exactly what we see in the observation.

It's that simple.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Why no Roman Industrial Revolution? · 2023-07-30T19:22:53.388Z · LW · GW

Before asking why, ask what. Why did the technological growth of ancient Rome not snowball into the industrial revolution? I reject the premise. Rome was a period of regress in both physical technology and social organization, although it did spread some technology westward.

More generally, the macro trends of history are largely fabricated to prove the desired conclusion that there is always exponential progress, except in a few collapses that are so sharp that they cannot be denied. Why did this growth not produce the industrial revolution? Because it wasn't progress.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Why no Roman Industrial Revolution? · 2023-07-30T18:48:42.084Z · LW · GW

Slaves reproducing themselves is nonmalthusian, but rare. Romans captured slaves in war and enslaved debtors. I think the only time in history chattel slaves reproduced themselves is the New World, which was quite nonmalthusian.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Why no Roman Industrial Revolution? · 2023-07-30T18:42:26.116Z · LW · GW

This is a very popular theory, but it seems to predict way too much. The Greeks and Romans did have animal powered wells and mills. They had water mills and water saws. They probably had windmills.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on My tentative best guess on how EAs and Rationalists sometimes turn crazy · 2023-06-21T17:57:41.520Z · LW · GW

Yeah, FTX seems like a totally ordinary financial crime. You don't need utilitarianism or risk neutrality to steal customer money or take massive risks.

LaSota and Leverage said that they had high standards and were doing difficult things, whereas SBF said that he was doing the obvious things a little faster, a little more devoted to EV.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Douglas_Knight's Shortform · 2023-06-19T00:33:52.459Z · LW · GW

The hard part is being willing to call papers bad. The task I find difficult is getting people to acknowledge that I called them bad, rather than gaslighting me.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Douglas_Knight's Shortform · 2023-06-16T00:11:00.265Z · LW · GW

Someone just told me that the solution to conflicting experiments is more experiments. Taken literally this is wrong: more experiments just means more conflict. What we need are fewer experiments. We need to get rid of the bad experiments.

Why expect that future experiments will be better? Maybe if the experimenters read the past experiments, they could learn from them. Well, maybe, but maybe if you read the experiments today, you could figure out which ones are bad today. If you don't read the experiments today and don't bother to judge which ones are better, what incentive is there for future experimenters to make better experiments, rather than accumulating conflict?

Comment by Douglas_Knight on The Dictatorship Problem · 2023-06-13T15:29:27.570Z · LW · GW

France had a military coup in 1958 followed by 6 months of dictatorship. What threshold had France not passed in 1958 to not count as a full democracy? Does the Dictator's Handbook actually say this?

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Does reversible computation let you compute the complexity class PSPACE as efficiently as normal computers compute the complexity class P? · 2023-05-09T14:47:08.939Z · LW · GW

Did you click through from Paul's LW post to his blog? He gives a proof that a reversible computer can implement a PSPACE algorithm with only polynomially many erasures, and thus only polynomially much energy consumption, at the cost of running a little longer, hardly a noticeable difference compared to the exponential time required. But he also provides context which I suspect you need.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Does reversible computation let you compute the complexity class PSPACE as efficiently as normal computers compute the complexity class P? · 2023-05-09T14:44:09.958Z · LW · GW

Right, the point is that a Reversible PSPACE appears physically realizable, while currently existing computers could not actually run for the exponential time necessary to compute PSPACE problems because they would also require exponentially much (free) energy.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Is this true? @tyler_m_john: [If we had started using CFCs earlier, we would have ended most life on the planet] · 2023-04-11T03:59:41.428Z · LW · GW

It took 10 years from mass residential refrigeration to lead to use of CFCs. It took another half-century to detect atmospheric CFCs and the damage they were causing.

This makes it sound like it's an important point in the timeline, that substantial use of CFCs can be dated to c1930. This seems fundamentally wrong to me.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Is this true? @tyler_m_john: [If we had started using CFCs earlier, we would have ended most life on the planet] · 2023-04-11T01:14:28.051Z · LW · GW

Mass introduction of modern residential refrigeration took place from 1914-1922.

What do you mean? Cooling food? I think that is a rounding error. A single wall AC has 10x as much freon as a refrigerator. Thus I think the bulk of the freon came later and there was not so long a delay from deployment to discovery. But it should be possible to look up actual freon production.

I think the growth of air conditioning was contained by the cost of electricity, not freon. It's hard for me to imagine electricity cheap and widespread enough to allow refrigerators without becoming in a few decades cheap enough to cool houses. But maybe I can imagine a 19th century with Einstein refrigerators yet without electricity. I don't think that would have destroyed the ozone layer.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on FLI open letter: Pause giant AI experiments · 2023-03-29T20:50:33.487Z · LW · GW

I think talking about Google/DeepMind as a unitary entity is a mistake. I'm gonna guess that Peter agrees, and that's why he specified DeepMind. Google's publications identify at least two internal language models superior to Lambda, so their release of Bard based on Lambda doesn't tell us much. They are certainly behind in commercializing chatbots, but is that a weak claim. How DeepMind compares to OpenAI is difficult. Four people going to OpenAI is damning, though.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Which parts of the existing internet are already likely to be in (GPT-5/other soon-to-be-trained LLMs)'s training corpus? · 2023-03-29T18:47:27.757Z · LW · GW

I assume you know this, but to be clear, OpenAI has already used pirated books. GPT-3 was trained on "books2" which appears to be all the text on libgen (and pretty much all the books on libgen have been through OCR). It was weighted the same as the common crawl, lower than Gutenberg or Reddit links. This seems to answer your second question: they will likely treat pdfs on the libgen the same as pdfs on the open web. If you're asking about whether they will train the model on the pixels in these pdfs, which might make up for losses in OCR, I have no idea.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on GPT-4 Plugs In · 2023-03-28T17:40:21.006Z · LW · GW

How many characters is your 500 line source file? It probably fits in 8k tokens. You can find out here

Comment by Douglas_Knight on GPT-4 Plugs In · 2023-03-28T15:48:05.424Z · LW · GW

Since you have to manually activate plugins, they don't take any context until you do so. In particular, multiple plugins don't compete for context and the machine doesn't decide which one to use.

Please read the documentation and the blog post you cited.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on GPT-4 Plugs In · 2023-03-28T01:38:32.855Z · LW · GW

Does OpenAI say this, or are you inferring it entirely from the Wolfram blog post? Isn't that an odd place to learn such a thing?

And where does the Wolfram blog post say this? It sounds to me like he's doing something like this outsider, making one call to Wolfram, then using the LLM to evaluate the result and determine if it produced an error and retry.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Updating my AI timelines · 2023-03-26T03:04:18.036Z · LW · GW

Using nat.dev, I find that 002, 003, and Turbo all get the same result, wrong on the first and right on the second. This is an example of Turbo being Inferior to Chat. I also tried Cohere, which got both. I also tried Claude. Full v1.2 got both wrong. Instant 1.0, which should be inferior, got the second correct. It also produced a wordy answer to the first which I give half credit because it said that it was difficult but possible for the slow policeman to catch the fast thief. I only tried each twice, with and without "Let us think," which made no difference to the first. I almost didn't bother adding it to the second since they did so well without it. Adding it made 002 and Claude-instant fail, but Claude1.2 succeed. (I also tried llama and alpaca, but they timed out.)

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Nudging Polarization · 2023-03-26T02:25:46.128Z · LW · GW

Right, Wikipedia cites a 1972 paper using viruses to deliver DNA, but no vaccine until 1984. Whereas, mRNA in lipids went from delivery in 1989 to a vaccine in 1993-1994. So twenty years on one metric, but ten years on another metric that probably screens off the first one by virtue of coming later.

But that's just playing around. Obstacles artificially created by the FDA are real obstacles. To the extent that the vaccine-hesitant mean anything by "old-fashioned," they mean large scale experience in humans. More people received vector vaccines in the Oxford trials than in all deployment before. If you want to know about Bell's palsy, that's the only way to find out. On the other hand, if you want years of follow-up, a 2015 trial of vector vaccines could have been an big advantage over mRNA vaccines, although I don't know if they actually followed up after years. With no placebo group, it's not clear what analysis they could make.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Nudging Polarization · 2023-03-25T15:27:03.648Z · LW · GW

Lots of people did assert that adenovirus vaccines were old-fashioned. But this is false. The first such vaccine was approved in 2019 (maybe a more appropriate comparison date is is 2015). I am skeptical of trying to manipulate lies, even if it is easy to predict that people will ultimately believe many falsehoods.

Note the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Germans who got the illegal Stöcker vaccine, a recombinant protein vaccine, that is, a 20th century vaccine, an actual old-fashioned vaccine. Were they just opposed to government sanction, or did they care about how old the techniques were and would have gotten the Novavax vaccine, had it been available? Maybe a better strategy would be to encourage actual diversity.

I recently went to a public space that advertised that its escalator handles were disinfected by UVC. Focusing on marketing can produce the worst of both worlds.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Donation offsets for ChatGPT Plus subscriptions · 2023-03-19T03:35:52.711Z · LW · GW

Let's assume that OpenAI is reckless. Does giving them money make them more reckless?

It seems to me that your thought process is that OpenAI is evil and thus giving them money symbolically rewards evil. There can be some value in symbolic actions. This reminds me of the sporting and culture boycotts of Apartheid South Africa. To whatever extent that these worked, it wasn't about the money, but other forms of leverage.

Maybe tiny positive feedbacks reinforce behavior, although this seems pretty anthropomorphic. But maybe giving them money for services widens their options from inherently short-term venture funding. A sustainable stream of product money might make them less reckless. Probably it just can't compete with venture funding, but, if anything, I think the sign is positive.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Big Mac Subsidy? · 2023-03-08T20:21:33.556Z · LW · GW

Lung cancer affects old people.

Also, while your link claims that lifetime healthcare costs are greater for smokers, it does not claim it is a consensus, but specifically mentions that many people claim the opposite. And that's before getting to Gerald Monroe's point.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Contract Fraud · 2023-03-03T17:24:16.763Z · LW · GW

The first thing to do is to distinguish human things from inhuman things. Physical things really are run by rigid laws. Social things like contracts, money, property, and a guilty verdict are caused by humans and this should make it obvious that they don't have rigid behavior. (The feeling of guilt is yet a third category.)

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Contract Fraud · 2023-03-02T02:40:26.381Z · LW · GW

A lot of people seem to think that signatures are magic. Would you agree with that description of your children? It would be interesting if you could figure out where this idea came from, either spontaneous generation or transmission.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on There are no coherence theorems · 2023-02-21T19:43:54.059Z · LW · GW

I think most democratic countries use proportional representation, not FTPT. But talking about "most" is an FTPT error. Enough countries use proportional representation that you can study the effect of voting systems. And the results are shocking to me. The theoretical predictions are completely wrong. Duverger's law is false in every FTPT country except America. On the flip side, while PR does lead to more parties, they still form 1-dimensional spectrum. For example, a Green Party is usually a far-left party with slightly different preferences, instead of a single issue party that is willing to form coalitions with the right.

If politics were two dimensional, why wouldn't you expect Condorcet cycles? Why would population get rid of them? If you have two candidates, a tie between them is on a razor's edge. The larger the population of voters, the less likely. But if you have three candidates and three roughly equally common preferences, the cyclic shifts of A > B > C, then this is a robust tie. You only get a Condorcet winner when one of the factions becomes as big as the other two combined. Of course I have assumed away the other three preferences, but this is robust to them being small, not merely nonexistent.

I don't know what happens in the following model: there are three issues A,B,C. Everyone, both voter and candidate, is for all of them, but in a zero-sum way, represented a vector a,b,c, with a+b+c = 11, a,b,c>=0. Start with the voters as above, at (10,1,0), (0,10,1), (1,0,10). Then the candidates (11,0,0), (0,11,0), (0,0,11) form a Condorcet cycle. By symmetry there is no Condorcet winner over all possible candidates. Randomly shift the proportion of voters. Is there a candidate that beats the three given candidates? One that beats all possible candidates? I doubt it. Add noise to make the individual voters unique. Now, I don't know.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Bing Chat is blatantly, aggressively misaligned · 2023-02-15T18:19:53.672Z · LW · GW

In what sense are these failures agentic?

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Is InstructGPT Following Instructions in Other Languages Surprising? · 2023-02-14T17:39:53.780Z · LW · GW

There are two issues. One is capability. Why do GPTs have the ability to use other languages? The other is why does the RLFH cause InstructGPT to follow instructions in other languages? The tweet is explicitly about the the second and your question seems to be about the second. But the follow-up tweets suggest that Leike is asking about the first (also?). I think the second is not surprising at all, conditional on the first. But the first is quite mysterious.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation) · 2023-02-06T21:14:05.942Z · LW · GW

That's because spaces are common in text for humans. The substring ' It' is common. Whereas, the string ' SolidGoldMagikarp' does not appear in the github repository vitaliya linked, but instead it is prefixed by a slash. I doubt any other backend source would have the leading space and this class of explanation seems poor to me.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation) · 2023-02-06T17:59:28.167Z · LW · GW

What's up with the initial whitespace in " SolidGoldMagikarp"? Isn't that pretty strong evidence that the token does not come from computer readable files, but instead from files formatted to be viewed by humans?

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Why Are Bacteria So Simple? · 2023-02-06T17:48:55.593Z · LW · GW

The details are good, but I reject the framing. Bacteria are simple because simple outcompetes complex. Eukaryotes fill a small niche. We care about complexity because we are in that niche. Phrased that way, it's not surprising that only a single lineage fills that niche and that it took a billion years to try it.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on What fact that you know is true but most people aren't ready to accept it? · 2023-02-04T19:41:26.596Z · LW · GW

The ancient Greeks had a germ theory of disease.

Adults learn second languages faster than children. For every aspect of language ever measured, except pronunciation.

The US Government nationalized the telephone system (including AT&T) in 1913, making it illegal for other companies to enter the market (ended in 1982).

Most Theranos customers received a normal blood draw, not a pinprick. No customer with more than 6(?) tests received a pin prick.

These all have very simple evidence bases. This isn't about facts or reasoning.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Who are some prominent reasonable people who are confident that AI won't kill everyone? · 2023-01-04T19:42:23.385Z · LW · GW

I have not read the book, but my memory is that in a blog post he said that the probability is "at least" 10%. I think he holds a much higher number, but doesn't want to speak about it and just wants to insist that his hostile reader should accept at least 10%. In particular, if people say "no it won't happen, 10%," then that's not a rebuttal at all. But maybe I'm confusing that with other numbers, eg, here where he says that it's worth talking about even if it is only 1%.

Here he reports old numbers and new:

In Age of Em, I said:

Conditional on my key assumptions, I expect at least 30 percent of future situations to be usefully informed by my analysis. Unconditionally, I expect at least 5 percent.

I now estimate an unconditional 80% chance of it being a useful guide,

I think that means he previously put 15% on ems in general and 5% on his em scenario (ie, you were right).

80% on the specific scenario leaves little room for AI, let alone AI destroying all value. So maybe he now puts that <1%. But maybe he has just removed non-em non-AI scenarios. In particular, you have to put a lot of weight on completely unanticipated scenarios; perhaps that has gone from 80% to 10%.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war · 2022-12-18T19:53:09.377Z · LW · GW

Another example of a dictator driven from power by losing a war is the Greek Junta. They instigated a coup in Cyprus, triggering an invasion by Turkey, and then lost power at home.

But Bruce Bueno de Mosquita claims that dictators are much better at cutting their losses and surviving, whereas democracies double down and escalate to total war.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Should we push for requiring AI training data to be licensed? · 2022-12-14T02:47:46.717Z · LW · GW

Does this link say anything about their illegal acquisition of the sources?

It sure looks to me like you and they are lying to distract. I condemn this lying, just as I condemned Christian's proposed lies.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Should we push for requiring AI training data to be licensed? · 2022-12-13T22:28:19.605Z · LW · GW

No, OpenAI is not arguing this. They are not arguing anything, but just hiding their sources. Maybe they're arguing this about using the public web as training data, but that doesn't cover pirated books.

Yes, a model is transformative, not infringement. But the question was about the training data. Is that infringement? Distributing the Pile is a tort and probably a crime by quantity. Acquiring the training data was a tort and probably a crime. I'm not sure about possessing it. Even if OpenAI is shielded from criminal responsibility, a crime was necessary for the creation and that was not enough to deter it.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Should we push for requiring AI training data to be licensed? · 2022-12-13T20:21:51.149Z · LW · GW

If you want to ban or monopolize such models, push for that directly. Indirectly banning them is evil.

They're already illegal. GPT-3 is based in large part on what appear to be pirated books. (I wonder if google's models are covered by its settlements with publishers.)

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Updating my AI timelines · 2022-12-10T05:03:58.984Z · LW · GW

Thanks!

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Updating my AI timelines · 2022-12-09T22:12:09.186Z · LW · GW

Could you give an example of this nonsense?

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Speculation on Current Opportunities for Unusually High Impact in Global Health · 2022-12-09T02:43:11.063Z · LW · GW

Or just visit to get information. Don't choose antibiotics vs vitamins based on estimated value delivered, but diversify to learn about them all, to learn what it takes to deliver them. But the most valuable information will probably be unrelated to what you bring.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Updating my AI timelines · 2022-12-06T21:51:54.351Z · LW · GW

What is the role of Chat-GPT? Do you see it as progress over GPT-3, or is it just a tool for discovering capabilities that were already available in GPT-3 to good prompt engineers? I see it as the latter and I'm confused by the large numbers of people who seem to be impressed by it as progress. But in your previous post, you mentioned our ignorance of GPT-3, so you seemed to already have large error bars. Is the importance that Chat is revealing those abilities and narrowing the ignorance?

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Who are some prominent reasonable people who are confident that AI won't kill everyone? · 2022-12-06T20:10:42.038Z · LW · GW

I claim that Hanson has >1% chance of Yudkowsky's scenario that AI comes first and destroys all value and also a >1% chance that Ems come first and a scenario that a lot of people would say killed all people, including the Ems. This is not directly relevant to the question about AI, but it suggests that he is sanguine about analogous AI scenarios, soft takeoff scenarios not covered by Yudkowsky.

Yes, during the 2 years of wallclock time, the Ems exist for 1000 subjective years. Is that so long? This is not "longtermism." Yes, you should probably count the Ems as humans, so if they kill all the biological humans, they don't "kill everyone," but after this period they are outcompeted by something more alien. Does this count as killing everyone?

Working on capabilities isn't a problem in his mainline, but the question was not about mainline, but about tail events. If Ems are going to come first, then you could punt alignment to their millennium of work. But if it's not guaranteed who comes first and AI is worse than Ems, working on AI could cause it to come first. Or maybe not. Maybe one is so much easier than the other and nothing is decision relevant.

Yes, Hanson sees value drift as inevitable. The Ems will be outcompeted by something better adapted that we should see some value in. He thinks it's parochial to dislike the Ems evolving under Malthusian pressures. Maybe, but it's important not to confuse the factual questions with the moral questions. "It's OK because there's no risk of X" is different from "X is OK, actually." Yes, he talks about the Dreamtime. Part of that is the delusion that we can steer the future more than Malthusian forces. But part of it is that because we are not yet under strict competition, we have excess resources that we can use to steer the future, if only a little.

Comment by Douglas_Knight on Who are some prominent reasonable people who are confident that AI won't kill everyone? · 2022-12-06T18:32:37.529Z · LW · GW

Do you mean hard take off, or Yudkowsky's worry that foom causes rapid value drift and destroys all value? I think Hanson puts maybe 5% on that and a much larger number on hard take off, 10 or 20%.