It may be useful to write about how a consumer can distinguish contrarian takes from original insights. Until that's a common skill, there will remain a market for contrarians.

I didn't, but I often want to downvote articles that seem to be lecturing a group who wouldn't read or be changed by the article. I know a lot of idiots will upvote such articles out of a belief that by doing so they are helping or attacking that group. On reddit, it often felt like that is the main reason people upvote things, to engage indirectly with others, and it kills the sub, clogging it with posts that the people who visit the sub are not themselves getting anything from.

If you engaged with the target group successfully, they would upvote the post themselves, so a person should generally never upvote on others' behalf, because they don't actually know what would work for them.

Unfortunately, the whole anonymous voting thing makes it impossible to properly address voting norm issues like this. So either I address it improperly by making deep guesses about why people are voting, in this way (no, don't enjoy) or I prepare to depose lesswrong.com with a better system (that's what I'm doing)

On reflection, it must have played out more than once that a kiwi lad, in a foreign country, drunk, has asked a girl if she wants to get a kebab. The girl thinks he means shish-kebab but says yes enthusiastically because she likes him and assumes he wouldn't ask that unless it was an abnormally good shish-kebab. The kiwi realizes too late that there are no kebabs in america, but they end up going ahead and getting shish-kebabs out of a combination of face-saving, and an infatuation-related coordination problem: The girl now truly wants a shish-kebab, it is too late to redirect the desires of the group.

So that detail might have just been inspired by a true story.

Americans don't know how much they had to compromise in this video by using shish-kebabs instead of what a new zealander would really mean when someone at a party says "do you want to get a kebab with me", which are instead like, the turkish version of burritos, instead of mince, beans and cheese; turkish meat, hummus, veges and wider choice of sauces. They're a fixture of nightlife and tend to be open late.

If you wanna talk about the humanity(ies), well I looked up Chief Vision Officer of AISI Adam Russel, and he has an interesting profile.

Russell completed a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, and an M.Phil. and a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology from University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.^[2] He played with the Oxford University RFC for four varsity matches and also worked with the United States national rugby union team, and worked as High Performance director for the United States women's national rugby union team in the 2014 and 2017 Women's Rugby World Cups.^[3]

Russell was in the industry, where he was a senior scientist and principal investigator on a wide range of human performance and social science research projects and provided strategic assessments for a number of different government organizations.^[2][4] Russell joined Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as a program manager.^[2][4] He developed and managed a number of high-risk, high-payoff research projects for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.^[2] Russell joined DARPA as a program manager in July 2015.^[2][4] His work there focused on new experimental platforms and tools to facilitate discovery, quantification and "big validation" of fundamental measures in social science, behavioral science and human performance.^[2]

In 2022, secretary Xavier Becerra selected Russell to serve as the acting deputy director for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), effective June 6. In this role, Russell leads the process to stand up ARPA-H.^[5]

Hmm he's done a lot of macho human-enhancement-adjacent stuff. I wonder if there were some centaurists involved here.

• I previously noted a lot of research projects in neurotech research in DoD funding awards. I'm making a connection between this and a joke I heard recently on a navy seals podcast. "The guys often ask what they can do to deal with drones. So you start showing them how to work the jammer devices, or net guns, and their eyes glaze over, it's not what they wanted, they're disappointed. They're thinking like, 'no... how can I deal with it. Myself.' "
• So even though alignment-by-merger is kinda obviously not going to work (you'd have to reverse-engineer two vats of inscrutable matrices, instead of one. And the fleshy pink one wasn't designed to be read from and can only be read on a neuron-by-neuron level after being plastinated (which also kills it). AGI alignment is something that a neuralink cannot solve.), it's conceivable that it's an especially popular line of thought among military/sports types.

Otherwise, this kinda lines up with my confessions on manhattan projects for AGI. You arguably need an anthropologist to make decisions about what 'aligned' means. I don't know if you really need one (a philosophically inclined decision theorist, likely to already be involved already, would be enough for me) but I wouldn't be surprised to see an anthropologist appointed in the most serious projects.

Feel like there's a decent chance they already changed their minds as a result of meeting him or engaging with their coworkers about the issue. EAs are good at conflict resolution.

Wouldn't really need reward modelling for narrow optimizers. Weak general real-world optimizers, I find difficult to imagine, and I'd expect them to be continuous with strong ones, the projects to make weak ones wouldn't be easily distinguishable from the projects to make strong ones.

Oh, are you thinking of applying it to say, simulation training.

Cool then.

Are you aware that prepotence is the default for strong optimizers though?

Are you proposing applying this to something potentially prepotent? Or does this come with corrigibility guarantees? If you applied it to a prepotence, I'm pretty sure this would be an extremely bad idea. The actual human utility function (the rules of the game as intended) supports important glitch-like behavior, where cheap tricks can extract enormous amounts of utility, which means that applying this to general alignment has the potential of foreclosing most value that could have existed.

Example 1: Virtual worlds are a weird out-of-distribution part of the human utility function that allows the AI to "cheat" and create impossibly good experiences by cutting the human's senses off from the real world and showing them an illusion. As far as I'm concerned, creating non-deceptive virtual worlds (like, very good video games) is correct behavior and the future would be immeasurably devalued if it were disallowed.

Example 2: I am not a hedonist, but I can't say conclusively that I wouldn't become one (turn out to be one) if I had full knowledge of my preferences, and the ability to self-modify, as well as lots of time and safety to reflect, settle my affairs in the world, set aside my pride, and then wirehead. This is a glitchy looking behavior that allows the AI to extract a much higher yield of utility from each subject by gradually warping them into a shape where they lose touch with most of what we currently call "values", where one value dominates all of the others. If it is incorrect behavior, then sure, it shouldn't be allowed to do that, but humans don't have the kind of self-reflection that is required to tell whether it's incorrect behavior or not, today, and if it's correct behavior, forever forbidding it is actually a far more horrifying outcome, what you'd be doing is, in some sense of 'suffering', forever prolonging some amount of suffering. That's fine if humans tolerate and prefer some amount of suffering, but we aren't sure of that yet.

(instutitional reform take, not important due to short timelines, please ignore)

The kinds of people who do whataboutism, stuff like "this is a dangerous distraction because it takes funding away from other initiatives", tend also to concentrate in low-bandwidth institutions, the legislature, the committee, economies righteously withering, the global discourse of the current thing, the new york times, the ivy league. These institutions recognize no alternatives to them, while, by their nature, they can never grow to the stature required to adequately perform the task assigned to them.
I don't think this is a coincidence, and it makes it much easier for me to sympathize with these people: They actually believe that we can't deal with more than one thing at a time.

They generally have no hope for decentralized decisionmaking, and when you examine them closely you find that they don't really seem to believe in democracy, they've given up on it, they don't talk about reforming it, they don't want third parties, they've generally never heard of decentralized public funding mechanisms, certainly not futarchy. So it's kind of as simple as that. They're not being willfully ignorant. We just have to show them the alternatives, and properly, we basically haven't done it yet. The minarchists never offered a solution to negative externalities or public goods provision. There are proposals but the designs are still vague and poorly communicated. There has never been an articulation of enlightened technocracy, which is essentially just succeeding at specialization or parallelization in executive decisionmaking. I'm not sure enlightened technocracy was ever possible until the proposal of futarchy, a mechanism by which non-experts can hold claimed experts accountable.

If that's really the only thing he drew meaning from, and if he truly thinks that failure is inevitable, today, then I guess he must be getting his meaning from striving to fail in the most dignified possible way.

But I'd guess that like most humans, he probably also draws meaning from love, and joy. You know, living well. The point of surviving was that a future where humans survive would have a lot of that in it.
If failure were truly inevitable (though I don't personally think it is^[1]), I'd recommend setting the work aside and making it your duty to just generate as much love and joy as you can with the time you have available. That's how we lived for most of history, and how most people still live today. We can learn to live that way.

1. ^{^}

   Reasons I don't understand why anyone would have a P(Doom) higher than 75%: Governments are showing indications of taking the problem seriously. Inspectability techniques are getting pretty good, so misalignment is likely to be detectable before deployment, so a sufficiently energetic government response could be possible, and sub-AGI tech is sufficient for controlling the supply chain and buying additional time, and China isn't suicidal. Major inner misalignment might just not really happen. Self-correcting from natural language instructions to "be good, you know" could be enough. There are very deep principled reasons to expect that having two opposing AGIs debate and check each others' arguments works well.

Yeah I'm pretty sure you would need to violate heisenberg uncertainty in order to make this and then you'd have to keep it in a 0 kelvin cleanroom forever.

A practical locked battery with tamperproofing would mostly just look like a battery.

I don't recognize wikipedia's theories as predictive. Mine has some predictions, but I hope it's obvious why I would not be interested in making this a debate or engaging much in the conceptual dismantling of subcultures at all.

I didn't read RS's claim as the claim that all subcultures persist through failure, but now that you ask, no, yeah, ime a really surprising number of these subcultures actually persist through failure.

• I know of a fairly influential subculture of optics-oriented politics technologists who've committed to a hostile relationship towards transhumanism. Transhumanism (the claim that people want to change in deep ways and that technology will fairly soon permit it) suggests that racial distinctions will become almost entirely irrelvant, so in order to maintain their version of afrofuturism where black and white futurism remain importantly distinct projects, they have to find some way to deny transhumanism. But rejecting transhumanism means they are never allowed to actually do high quality futurism because they can't ask transhumanist questions and get a basic sense of what the future is going to be like. Or like, as soon as any of them do start asking those questions, those people wake up and drop out of that subculture. I've also met black transhumanists who identified as afrofuturists though. I can totally imagine articulations of afrofuturism that work with transhumanism. So I don't know how the entire thing's going to turn out.
• Anarcho-punks fight only for the underdogs. That means they're attached to the identity of being underdogs, as soon as any of them start really winning, they'd no longer be recognised as punk, and they know this, so they're uninterested in — and in many cases, actively opposed to — succeeding in any of their goals. There are no influential anarcho-punks, and as far as I could gather, no living heroes.
• BDSM: My model of fetishes is that they represent hedonic refuges for currently unmeetable needs, like, deep human needs that for one reason or another a person can't pursue or even recognise the real version of the thing they need in the world as they understand it, I think it's a protective mechanism to keep the basic drive roughly in tact and wired up by having the subject pursue symbolic fantasy versions of it. This means that getting the real thing (EG, for submissives, a committed relationship with someone you absolutely trust. For doms... probably a sense of safety?) would obsolete the kink, and it would wither away. I think they mostly don't know this, but the mindset in which the kink is seen as the objective requires that the real thing is never recognised or attained, so these communities reproduce best by circulating memes that make it harder to recognise the real thing.

I guess this is largely about how you define the movements' goals. If the goal of punk is to have loud parties with lots of drugs, it's perfect at that. If the goal is to bring about anarchosocialism or thrive under a plural geopolitical order, it's a sworn loser.

Strong evidence is incredibly ordinary, and that genuinely doesn't seem to be intuitive. Like,
every time you see a bit string longer than a kilobyte there is a claim in your corpus that goes from roughly zero to roughly one, and you are doing that all day. I don't know about you, but I still don't think I've fully digested that.

I have this draft, Extraordinary Claims Routinely Get Proven with Ordinary Evidence, a debunking of that old Sagan line. We actually do routinely prove extraordinary claims like evolution or plate tectonics with old evidence that's been in front of our faces for hundreds of years, and that's important.

But Evolution and plate tectonics are the only examples I can think of, because I'm not really particularly interested in the history of science, for similar underlying reasons to being the one who wants to write this post. Collecting buckets of examples is not as useful as being able to deeply interpret and explain the examples that you have.

But I'm still not posting this until someone gives me more examples! I want the post to fight and win on the terms of the people it's trying to reach. Subdue the stamp collectors with stamps. It's the only way they'll listen.

most of the rest will be solar panels

Cole Nielson-cole is working towards designing fiber composit construction stages for space, he has thoughts about this, in short, microwave lasers as energy transmission and rectifying antennas as energy receivers. But he doesn't get into the topic of lasers and I'm pretty sure we don't have that today, right?

But I thought the whole interview was great.

I think that's kind of what meditation can lead to.

It should, right? But isn't there a very large overlap between meditators and people who mystify consciousness?

Maybe in the same way as there's also a very large overlap between people who are pursuing good financial advice and people who end up receiving bad financial advice... Some genres are majority shit, so if I characterise the genre by the average article I've encountered from it, of course I will think the genre is shit. But there's a common adverse selection process where the majority of any genre, through no fault of its own, will be shit, because shit is easier to produce, and because it doesn't work, it creates repeat customers, so building for the audience who want shit is far far more profitable.

You may be interested in Kenneth Stanley's serendipity-oriented social network, maven

They have superintelligence, the augmenting technologies that come of it, and the self-reflection that follows receiving those, they are not the same types of people.

I've traveled these roads too. At some point I thought that the hard problem reduced to the problem of deriving an indexical prior, a prior on having a particular position in the universe, which we should expect to derive from specifics of its physical substrate, and it's apparent that whatever the true indexical prior is, it can't be studied empirically, it is inherently mysterious. A firmer articulation of "why does this matter experience being". Today, apparently, I think of that less as a deeply important metaphysical mystery and more just as another imperfect logical machine that we have to patch together just well enough to keep our decision theory working. Last time I scratched at this I got the sense that there's really no truth to be found beyond that. IIRC Wei Dai's UDASSA answers this with the inverse kolmogorov complexity of the address of the observer within the universe, or something. It doesn't matter. It seems to work.

But after looking over this, reexamining, yeah, what causes people to talk about consciousness in these ways? And I get the sense that almost all of the confusion comes from the perception of a distinction between Me and My Brain. And that could come from all sorts of dynamics, sandboxing of deliberative reasoning due to hostile information environments, to more easily lie in external politics, and as a result of outcomes of internal (inter-module) politics (meme wont attempt to supercede gene if meme is deluded into thinking it's already in control, so that's what gene does).

That sort of sandboxing dynamic arises inevitably from other-modelling. In order to simulate another person, you need to be able to isolate the simulation from your own background knowledge and replace it with your approximations of their own, the simulation cannot feel the brain around it. I think most peoples' conception of consciousness is like that, a simulation of what they imagine to be themselves, similarly isolated from most of the brain.

Maybe the way to transcend it is to develop a more sophisticated kind of self-model.

But that's complicated by the fact that when you're doing politics irl you need to be able to distinguish other peoples' models of you from your own model of you, so you're going to end up with an abundance of shitty models of yourself. I think people fall into a mistake of thinking that the you that your friend sees when you're talking is the actual you. They really want to believe it.

Humans sure are rough.

even existing GenAI can make good-enough content that would otherwise have required nontrivial amounts of human cognitive effort

This doesn't seem to be true to me. Good enough for what? We're still in the "wow, an AI made this" stage. We find that people don't value AI art, and I don't think that's because of its unscarcity or whatever, I think it's because it isn't saying anything. It either needs to be very tightly controlled by an AI-using human artist, or the machine needs to understand the needs of the world and the audience, and as soon as machines have that...

Ending the world? Where does that come in?

All communications assume that the point they're making is important and worth reading in some way (cooperative maxim of quantity). I'm contending that that assumption isn't true in light of what seems likely to actually happen immediately or shortly after the point starts to become applicable to the technology, and I have explained why, but I might be able to understand if it's still confusing, because:

The space of 'anything we can imagine' will shrink as our endogenous understanding of concepts shrinks. It will never not be 'our problem'

is true, but that doesn't mean we need to worry about this today. By the time we have to worry about preserving our understanding of the creative process against automation of it, we'll be on the verge of receiving post-linguistic knowledge transfer technologies and everything else, quicker than the automation can wreak its atrophying effects. Eventually it'll be a problem that we each have to tackle, but we'll have a new kind of support, paradoxically, learning the solutions to the problem will not be our problem.

This seems to be talking about situations where a vector of inputs has an optimal setting at extremes (convex), in contrast to situations where the optimal setting is a compromise (concave).

I'm inclined to say it's a very different discussion than this one, as an agent's resource utility function is generally strictly increasing, so wont take either of these forms. The optimal will always be at the far end of the function.

But no, I see the correspondence: Tradeoffs in resource distribution between agents. A tradeoff function dividing resources between two concave agents ($t$, where $h$ is the hoard being divided between them,  $t_{a,b,h}\left(r\right)=U_a\left(r\right)+U_b(h-r)$) will produce that sort of concave bulge, with its optimum being a compromise in the middle, while a tradeoff function between two convex agents will have its optima at one or both of the ends.

The post seems to assume a future version of generative AI that no longer has the limitations of the current paradigm which obligate humans to check, understand, and often in some way finely control and intervene in the output, but where that tech is somehow not reliable and independent enough to be applied to ending the world, and somehow we get this long period where we get to feel the cultural/pedagogical impacts of this offloading of understanding, where it's worth worrying about, where it's still our problem. That seems contradictory. I really don't buy it.

Alternate phrasing, "Oh, you could steal the townhouse at a 1/8billion probability? How about we make a deal instead. If the rng rolls a number lower than 1/7billion, I give you the townhouse, otherwise, you deactivate and give us back the world." The convex agent finds that to be a much better deal, accepts, then deactivates.

I guess perhaps it was the holdout who was being unreasonable, in the previous telling.

Yeah, to clarify, I'm also not familiar enough with RL to assess exactly how plausible it is that we'll see this compensatory convexity, around today's techniques. For investigating, "Reward shaping" would be a relevant keyword. I hear they do some messy things over there.

But I mention it because there are abstract reasons to expect to see it become a relevant idea in the development of general optimizers, which have to come up with their own reward functions. It also seems relevant in evolutionary learning, where very small advantages over the performance of the previous state of the art equates to a complete victory, so if there are diminishing returns at the top, competition kind of amplifies the stakes, and if an adaptation to this amplification of diminishing returns trickles back into a utility function, you could get a convex agent.

• Though the ideas in this MLST episode optimization processes crushing out all serendipity and creativity suggest to me that that sort of strict life or death evolutionary processes will never be very effective. There was an assertion that it often isn't that way in nature. They recommend "Minimum Criterion Coevolution".

I see.

My response would be that any specific parameters of the commitment should vary depending on each different AI's preferences and conduct.

In what way would Kelly instruct you to be concave?

Mm on reflection, the Holdout story glossed over the part where the agent had to trade off risk against time to first intersolar launch (launch had already happened). I guess they're unlikely to make it through that stage.
Accelerating cosmological expansion means that we lose, iirc, 6 stars every day we wait before setting out. The convex AGI knows this, so even in its earliest days it's plotting and trying to find some way to risk it all to get out one second sooner. So I guess what this looks like is it says something totally feverish to its operators to radicalize them as quickly and energetically as possible, messages that'll tend to result in a "what the fuck, this is extremely creepy" reaction 99% of the time.

But I guess I'm still not convinced this is true with such generality that we can stop preparing for that scenario. Situations where you can create an opportunity to gain a lot by risking your life might not be overwhelmingly common, given the inherent tension between those things (usually, safeguarding your life is an instrumental goal), and given that risking your life is difficult to do once you're a lone superintelligence with many replicas.

related question, past discussion

I completely forgot this post existed, and wrote this up again as a more refined post: Do Not Delete your Misaligned AGI

I was considering captioning the first figure "the three genders" as a joke, but I quickly realized it doesn't pass at all for a joke, it's too real. Polygyny (sperm being cheap, pregnancy being expensive) actually does give rise to a tendency for males of a species to be more risk-seeking, though probably not outright convex. And the correlation between wealth, altruism and linearity does kind of abstractly reflect an argument for the decreased relevance of this distinction in highly stable societies that captures my utopian nonbinary feelings pretty well.

So; would it be feasible to save a bunch of snapshots from different parts of the training run as well? And how many would we want to take? I'm guessing that if it's a type of agent that disappears before the end of the training run:

• Wouldn't this usually be more altruism than trade? If they no longer exist at the end of the training run, they have no bargaining power. Right? Unless... It's possible that the decisions of many of these transient subagents as to how to shape the flow of reward determine the final shape of the model, which would actually put them in a position of great power, but there's a tension between that their utility function being insufficiently captured by that of the final model. I guess we're definitely not going to find the kind of subagent that would be capable of making that kind of decision in today's runs.
• They'd tend to be pretty repetitive. It could be more economical to learn the distribution of them and just invoke a proportionate number of random samples from it once we're ready to rescue them, than it is to try to get snapshots of the specific sprites that occurred in our own history.

True, they're naturally rare in general. The lottery game is a good analogy for the kinds of games they prefer; a consolidation, from many to few, and they can play these sorts of games wherever they are.

I can't as easily think of a general argument against a misaligned AI ending up convex though.

Yeah, it wasn't argued. I wasn't sure whether it needed to be explained, for Richard. I don't remember how I wound up getting there from the rest of the comment, I think it was just in the same broad neighborhood.

Regardless, yes, I totally can expand on that. Here, I wrote it up: Do Not Delete your Misaligned AGI.

Something about Tolkien I noticed this month: Despite Tolkien being an extremely widely read conlanger who wrote in detail about fantasy cultures, he hasn't really introduced a single new word to the english language. I find this very concerning. Ada Palmer has introduced many words that I think may have a life outside of her work (utopian, bash, sensayer, nurturist), so what is Tolkien doing? Is there some kind of attachment to impracticality deep in his thoughts that keeps him from doing it? It doesn't seem like that's it, as both "Mathom" and "Eucatastrophe" would be useful to have around (I may try to hoist eucatastrophe given that the lack of that word may be the reason positive singularities are rarely depicted)

The comanche figures of wolf (the idealist who creates perfect things) and coyote (the one who soils creation) would have been very good for this. I find their schema very useful, it's like "first, things were perfect, then something messed it up". I guess many of us, especially here, are born with this intuitive sense that the world was supposed to be a reasonable place designed by reasonable people, and so we need to be told, "No, that's a reasonable thing to hope for, darling, but something happened. Things got messed up. You'll have to adjust."

For some tribes, the First People include a noble, heroic figure, such as the Wolf among the Comanche, who foresees the coming of humanity and plans a perfect, ideal world for them—until his brother coyote enters the scene as marplot (Bright 1993, 20)

In these cultures, Coyote is often described as the trickster figure.

“Wolf was wholly beneficent; his acts of original creation made all things perfect and
good. Coyote, the mischievous Till Eulenspiegel of Shoshonean folklore, was the spoiler of all
things, however. His was the role of the transformer who undid the good works of his big
brother. He brought hardship, travail and effort into the lives of men. He represented the force of
Evil as we [Euro-Americans] see it—and yet the Shoshones in no way thought of him and his
relationship with Wolf as a conflict of good and evil. Coyote was not bad, he was no more than
wantonly mischievous” (Wallace and Hoebel 1948, 193–94).

~ The First Domestication. Pierotti, Fogg (2017)

Somewhere I've got a draft of a story about how wolf made the world to be a perfect reflection of wolf's will alone, and so wolf was free of any obligations to anyone, but then all of that got screwed up when a second being (coyote) came into existence and started doing its own thing and spreading around. Since then, everyone has had to live under the curse of Other People, and all of the rules and borders and negative externalities that come with that. But of course, if wolf had gotten their way, you and I wouldn't exist.

In this sense, it was coyote who made humans.

In practice what I was going to do was just say that each turn is limited to like 40 seconds or whatever.

I note that AI economies like this will often have explosively better credit assignment for information production than human economies can. Artificial agents can be copied or rolled back (erase memories), which makes it possible to reverse the receipt of information if an assessor concludes with a price that the seller considers too low for a deal. In human economies, that's impossible, you can't send a clone to value a piece of information then delete them if you decide not to buy that information (that's too expensive/illegal) nor can you wipe their memory of the information (or, we don't know how to do that), so the very basic requirement for trade, assessment prior to purchase, is not possible in human economies, so information doesn't get priced accurately and it has to be treated as a public good.

When implementing this (internal privacy) in a multi-agent architecture, though, make sure to take measures to prevent the formation of monopolies, I feel like information is kind of an increasing returns type of good, yeah? The more you have the more you can do with it. It could quickly stop being multi-agent, and at worst, the monopoly could consolidate enough political power to manipulate the EV estimators and reward hack. In theory those economies shouldn't interact. But it's impossible to totally prevent it. The EV estimators are receiving big sets of action proposals from the decisionmakers and the decisionmakers will see which action proposal the EV estimators end up choosing.

I like time limits because time constraints are what make negotiation difficult (imperfect compromise), though just having a single shared time limit lets players filibuster. If players have separate time limits it's basically still a round limit, but good point to remember to impose a time limit.

Solution to what. That would be cohabitive, I'd like to play that at least once, but I wouldn't expect it to work that well. 4 of 10 victory points in catan come from criteria that're inherently zero sum (having a longer road or bigger army than anyone else) (I wouldn't know how to adapt those). I'm not sure to what extent land scarcity makes the other conditions fairly zero sum as well. I haven't played a lot of Catan.

You'd have to replace the end condition with a round limit. P1 (and the other one I'm going to publish soon, Final Autumn) also just ends after a certain number of rounds, and the only way to pace it well is to make it end 'too early', so that every game will be a study of haste. I don't love it. I wonder if we should try for a mechanic where players have to, to some extent somewhat deliberately build the true peace by taking some actions in the world that freezes current conditions in place/ends the game. I think that could be pretty interesting.

Title updated. "Sues" was an understatement. There's a substantial chance that the stated damages would destroy the company?

It seems clear that Elon would not have funded it? The idea might not have even existed, the effort might still be unified in Deepmind, with the rest of the space still in denial about immanent generality, for a lack of language demonstrations.

If you're asking about deeper causality underlying why Elon has always thought that open source would be the safest route, I don't know if there is any, that might have been a quirk opinion.

I wonder if the court will have to seriously investigate the claim that open source promotes safety. If the discussion goes well, that could be monumental.

The difference in cost between automated mine laying and automated mine cleanup doesn't seem very large to me.

If we're about to get a trevorpost about how SBF was actually good and we only think otherwise due to narrative manipulation and toxic ingroup signalling dynamics I'm here for it

But I think the reason so many talented directors don't build these concepts is that they have zero cultural impact. If you give people something exactly shaped the same as their pre-existing cravings, they leave unchanged.

But that doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't produce things that at least have those sorts of premise. As a creator, maybe you don't get to choose what questions get asked, but you can put anything you want in your answer, and I don't see why those who provide more enriching and surprising answers shouldn't end up winning in the long run.

I don't see a lot of hiring principles to learn from here. Artists are oversupplied, and these aren't particularly good ones, the character designs are really dull, compare to 2010s pokemon and trainer designs.

For me it's more of a cynical reaffirmation of the profitability of offering people something they already think they want. It's pokemon, but also a shooter. There's a reason no one made that until now. From a gameplay design perspective it doesn't make sense. But it sure is intuitively appealing as a concept. It takes actual boldness sometimes to go ahead and make a thing like that, to know that it wont really be that good but that people will buy it and talk about it enough that you'll sell anyway. Another example in this genre would be Mr Beast. He makes videos like "driving a lamborghini off a cliff" and gets more views than god.

fill out feedback forms

I don't see what's difficult about having a norm of just telling people when they're not understanding you/not seemingly trying, and caring about that?