We (Connor Leahy, Gabriel Alfour, Chris Scammell, Andrea Miotti, Adam Shimi) have just published The Compendium, which brings together in a single place the most important arguments that drive our models of the AGI race, and what we need to do to avoid catastrophe.

We felt that something like this has been missing from the AI conversation. Most of these points have been shared before, but a “comprehensive worldview” doc has been missing. We’ve tried our best to fill this gap, and welcome feedback and debate about the arguments. The Compendium is a living document, and we’ll keep updating it as we learn more and change our minds.

We would appreciate your feedback, whether or not you agree with us:

• If you do agree with us, please point out where you

Some meditation advice has a vibe like... “To become more present, all you need to do is practice! It's just a skill, like learning to ride a bike 😊”

This never worked for me. When I tried to force presence through practice, I made little progress.

Being present isn't a skill to build — it's the natural state! What blocks presence is unconscious predictions of bad outcomes. Remove these blocks to make presence automatic.

1. I struggled to be present with emotions in my body. Daily meditation didn't help. Finally I asked: “What bad thing happens if I feel my feelings?” My system responded: emotional pain would be overwhelming, feelings would make me less productive, expressing emotions would anger others. After untangling these predictions, emotional presence became much easier. (Details)
2. With others'

Logical counterfactuals are when you say something like "Suppose $\pi =3$ , what would that imply?"

They play an important role in logical decision theory.

Suppose you take a false proposition $P$ and then take a logical counterfactual in which $P$ is true. I am imagining this counterfactual as a function $f\left(\text{logical propositions}\right)\to [0,1]\subset R$ that sends counterfactually true statements to 1 and false statements to 0.

Suppose $P$ is " not Fermat's last theorem".  In the counterfactual where Fermat's last theorem is false, I would still expect 2+2=4. Perhaps not with measure 1, but close. So $f("2+2=4")>0.9$

On the other hand, I would expect trivial rephrasing of Fermat's last theorem to be false, or at least mostly false.  

But does this counterfactual produce a specific counter example? Does it think that ${14}^3+{26}^3={29}^3$? Or does it do something where the counterfactual insists a counter-example exists, but...

Rationalists are people who have an irrational preference for rationality.

This may sound silly, but when you think about it, it couldn't be any other way. I am not saying that all reasons in favor of rationality are irrational -- in fact, there are many rational reasons to be rational! It's just that "rational reasons to be rational" is a circular argument that is not going to impress anyone who doesn't already care about rationality for some other reason.

So when there is a debate like "but wouldn't the right kind of self-deception be more instrumentally useful than perfectly calibrated rationality? do you care more about rationality or about winning?", well... you can make good arguments for both sides...

On one hand, yes, if your goal is to maximize your...

Pacing—walking repeatedly over the same ground—often feels ineffably good while I’m doing it, but then I forget about it for ages, so I thought I’d write about it here.

I don’t mean just going for an inefficient walk—it is somehow different to just step slowly in a circle around the same room for a long time, or up and down a passageway.

I don’t know why it would be good, but some ideas:

1. It’s good to be physically engaged while thinking for some reason. I used to do ‘gymflection’ with a friend, where we would do strength exercises at the gym, and meanwhile be reflecting on our lives and what is going well and what we might do better. This felt good in a way that didn’t

As the year comes to an end, the days have grown shorter and the nights have grown longer. Tonight we remember the ancient days of humanity's past, and sing of the future we might hope for. There is uncertainty in both directions. We cannot know for sure what has been, and we cannot say what the future will be. There is this, however:

Tomorrow will be brighter than today.

The Montréal Solstice Celebration will be on December 21th. Doors open at 6:30; Solstice starts at 7:00. Please arrive on time to avoid disrupting the somber and more serious parts of the program. RSVPs are appreciated so we can plan appropriately.
If you have never been to a Secular Solstice in this style before, you should expect alternating speeches and songs,...

I am currently looking for a system which will help me execute some of my massive backlog of ideas. By “ideas” I include my hundreds and hundreds of story outlines for films with a handful of finished screenplays, but also things like: alternative income streams, or day jobs, or skills or abilities I’d like to learn/get (coding, traditional animation, dance the Tango, conversational Italian), as well as a host of other projects.

Before I get to the determining how to better pick which ideas I should pursue, I was wondering if there was any more I could do to optimize my current idea recording method. Some of this overlaps with the GTD concept of the "Someday" bucket. But what I don't like about that is that I'd very...

Many people who find value in the Sequences do something which looks to me like adopting a virtue called "align your map to the territory." I recently was thinking about experimental results, and it got me thinking about how we don't really know what the territory is, other than the thing we look at to see if our maps are right. Everything we know is map. What we know consists of a variety of models that describe aspects of reality, and we have to treat them like reality to get anything done. It wasn't relevant to my post at the time, but it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter what reality is, because my values live at a higher level of abstraction with my sense...

Sometimes two people are talking past each other, and I try to help them understand each other (with varying degrees of success).

It’s as if they are looking at the same object, but from different angles. Mostly they see the same thing – most of the words have shared meanings. But some key words and assumptions have a different meaning to them.

Often, I find that one person (call them A) has a perspective that’s easier for me to understand. It comes naturally. But B’s perspective is initially harder. So if I want to translate from B to A, I first need to understand B.

I remember a time when I sat listening to two people having a conversation, both getting increasingly agitated and repeating the same points without making...