Should Congress work now to pass the bipartisan freedom-to-build (“permitting reform”) package that President Trump just agreed to—likely the biggest affordability legislation in decades?

We had a deal on permitting reform It’s time to release the text and vote

Should Congress work now to pass the bipartisan freedom-to-build (“permitting reform”) package that President Trump just agreed to—likely the biggest affordability legislation in decades?

People who dedicate their lives to making as much money as possible are usually superior to people who dedicate their lives to public advocacy.

Thanos was an effective altruist.

If “we must give Senators the opportunity to read and engage with legislation,” then release the bill text now! Dem Senators negotiated a deal with the White House based on a specific bill that had been worked on for a year. Release the bill and get to work. HT @LauraEWeiss16

For the last few years, @TheBTI has been working to influence and build support for national permitting reform. It appears we're close to a deal on major legislative progress. We need to seal this deal, and then keep going. 🧵

It’s funny, no one outside DC seems to think Congress should take an early vacation instead of working to pass legislation that will improve every American’s life.

The debate in AI really comes down to two things: Whether you think AI will be beneficial to society, dramatically boosting our economy, curing diseases and solving unsolved problems while having more narrow bad side effects/downsides like all things in life, but that the bad is mitigable with engineering and precise, clear targeted laws after demonstrated real harm in the real world. OR You believe in the Precautionary Principle and that unrealized future harms that may never come to pass are a suitable way to make policy and that you think AI will be a Marvel movie evil villain, uncontrollable, unknowable, alien and that it will have its own agency, Darwinian drives and that we are helpless and powerless and can't do anything from an engineering perspective or legal perspective and life is hopeless. In the first, you let the normal flow of history and society and democracy move us forward until we find a level and in the other you slam the breaks, crash the economy and put a lot of self-important self designated "special" people in charge to "steer" us forward (let's stop pretending its a "pause" when there is no real criteria of unpausing other than "we found a way to make it safe by not building it" which is impossible because you can't make an engine safe without building it and iterating). If you correctly discount or delete the possibility of x-risk then in every other branching future scenario our life is materially worse: 1) Many uncured diseases still killing people 2) A maze of bureaucracy 3) Economic crash that hits you and everyone else and grandma's pension 4) Non-democratic powers taking pole position in the world If you believe in x-risk then you believe in "by any means necessary" no matter how horrible those actions to prevent an imaginary future disaster are to the world and to today's people. History is rife with people trying to prevent imaginary disasters and inflicting massive pain on society. If you're actually serious about probability and real risk assessment and balance, then the only path forward is the one with mostly good futures and the greatest range of good possible outcomes. And if you're not and you believe you can predict the end of the world (you can't), then you pick the ends justify the means path and we are all worse off for it in almost all the branches of the Monte Carlo simulation of branching futures other than the distantly remote x-risk future. There's really only one clear, sound, sane choice here. Choose wisely.

The Senate should finalize a deal this month to give stakeholders time to review it and build a coalition of support. The House, the Senate and the White House all want this to happen—this moment doesn't come often. The time to act is now.

Read my full statement. ⬇️
scottpeters.house.gov/press-…

Permitting reform is one of the best things we can do for our country, and the package negotiated in the Senate is objectively good for our country. We should take it up and pass it this work period, instead of waiting and potentially missing our window.

Americans suffer under laws requiring government permission to build. We badly need freedom-to-build legislation. Over the last year, I’ve been part of a bipartisan Senate effort—two Republicans and two Democrats—to draft such a bill. We’ve got legislative text ready to go. If Senate Democrats won’t let us proceed to that bill next week as planned, our odds of passing it this year—or in the next few years—will drop dramatically. We’ll stay locked in a broken system that enriches the wealthy, empowers government, and raises prices for hardworking Americans—especially with respect to energy, but high energy costs tend to hike prices on literally everything else. Americans deserve affordable energy!

Watch this. Senator Mike Lee explains exactly why we need freedom-to-build legislation now! Not another promise that we’ll get to it later. Builders can’t wait, and neither can every American who will benefit from lower prices when builders are finally freed.

This is really good @WEschenbach! If only you had Dwarkesh’s audience the world would be a much intellectually better place right now.

People anthropomorphizing computers running LLM software is a huge problem. E.g., Dwarkesh portraying OpenAI engineers’ poorly-managed hacking test as “civilizations” “sacrificing” and the like has empowered Bernie and others to plausibly call for banning AI progress.

The ship of anthropomorphizing computers needs to go back to harbor if we’re going to get a rational AI policy. “AI” needs to be thought of powerful, open-ended computers that humans can responsibly configure and connect, not a conscious, competitive, uncontrollable super-being.

Sometimes big things get done in the lame duck and sometimes "wait for the lame duck" is a pretext for doing nothing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Zuckerberg is 100% right that control/alignment is part of capability, not a separate or contradictory thing. And the law has a great way of promoting this holistic, view of capability: hold companies liable proportional to the damage and threats their products cause. That way they are freed and incentivized to innovate in the realm of safety.