The voters are now worrying more about AI overpowering human control, rather than worrying about job losses. A shift from just half a year ago.

There's the deathbed fallacy: thinking that people have irrefutable insights on the deathbed. Similarly, there's the suicide fallacy: thinking that people who commit suicide are necessarily morally right, and that those they were in conflict with were necessarily wrong.

I mean obviously broadly speaking there is value in probabilistic thinking. My only point is that "What is your P(Doom)" is a pretty different question from "do you think AI models pose existential risks?"

I think referring to people who are saying “there are non-trivial but sub-50% odds of something going badly wrong” as “doomers” is a bad epistemic practice in a pretty obvious way that makes me think less of arguments and analysis from anyone who does it.

People are desperate to believe that Jacob's tweet didn't go viral on its own, but no comms firm in the world can make that happen. They would be in quite high demand if they could.

Since 1300, long term government bond yields have averaged 5.8%. The current 5.2% 10-year Treasury yield is 60bps below the 726 year average.

Many professors in the humanities keep calling it a packaging problem. Wrong. The real reasons enrollment is collapsing: obsession with identity, speech policing as virtue, and the conversion of entire disciplines into political projects.

AIs have been set up to have particular styles of communication and epistemic character. Eg they’re: 1 Using the principle of charity 2 Sensitive to implicature (eg interpret many questions like a request) 3 Mellow It tells us what the average user finds an ideal in humans too

If Jensen Huang’s interview with Ezra is the best case the anti-pause people can come up with, I’m even more convinced we’re doomed.

Listened to an EA-adjacent AI safety expert from Redwood Research on podcast, and you come away with 2 obvious realizations. 1. The current working theories for how AI takes control of civilization are...for lack of a better word...ridiculous. The arguments consist of dozens of contingent assumptions held together by made up probabilities assigned to future states nobody can possibly know. Change just one variable and the whole web of doom unravels. That's not to say AI is harmless. Obviously a technology this powerful carries real risks. But if we’re going to accept extraordinary claims about human extinction (and then make major policy decisions around them) we should demand extraordinary rigor. 2. It’s a great reminder that the genius is no less prone to delusion than the midwit. If anything, they may be more prone because of their gift for rationalizing to their own conclusions. And that’s what’s so bizarre about this whole debate. You have outlandish, quasi-religious claims delivered with an air of inevitability, and somehow the perceived intelligence of the messenger gets mistaken for evidence that the arguments themselves are sound. At a certain point, it’s really no different from Tom Cruise talking your ear off about thetans...

I'm excited to share that Astralis Foundation (with Macroscopic Ventures) has launched an RFP on middle powers and transformative AI! We're looking to fund up to $10M in grants on how middle powers can make the AI transition more likely to be safe and broadly beneficial.