Impact = Magnitude * Direction

Surely one should think of this as a vector in a space with more dimensions than 1. 

In your equation you can just 1,000,000x magnitude and it will move in the "positive direction".

In the real world you can become a billionaire from selling toothbrushes and still be "overtaken" by a guy who wrote one blog post that happened to be real dang good

I made a drawing but lw won't allow adding it on phone I think

Upstarts will not defeat them, since capital now trivially converts into superhuman labour in any field.

It is false today that big companies with 10x the galaxy brains and 100x the capital reliably outperform upstarts.^[1] 

Why would this change? I don't think you make the case. 

1. ^{^}

   My favorite example, though it might still be falsified. Google invented transformers, owns DeepMind, runs their own data centres, builds their own accelerators and have huge amounts of them, have tons of hard to get data (all those books they scanned before that became not okay to do), insane distribution channels with gmail, docs, sheets, and millions of smartphones sold a year, more cash than God, they literally run Google search (and didn't build it from scratch like Perplexity!).. I almost struggle to mention any on-paper advantage they don't have in the AGI race...  they're positioned for an earth-shattering vertical integration play... and yet they're behind OpenAI and Anthropic. 

   There are more clear-cut examples than this. 

I don't expect it that soon, but do I expect more likely than not that there's a covid-esque fire alarm + rapid upheaval moment. 

For people who don't expect a strong government response... remember that Elon is First Buddy now. 🎢

It is January 2020. 

Okay, well, I'm not going to post "Anthropic leadership conversation [fewer likes]" 😂

(Can you edit out all the "like"s, or give permission for an admin to do edit it out? I think in written text it makes speakers sound, for lack of a better word, unflatteringly moronic) 

McNamara was at Ford, not Toyota. I reckon he modelled manufacturing like an efficient Boeing manager not an efficient SpaceX manager

rename the "provable safety" area as "provable safety modulo assumptions" area and be very explicit about our assumptions.

Very much agree. I gave some feedback along those lines as the term was coined; and am sad it didn't catch on. But of course "provable safety modulo assumptions" isn't very short and catchy...

I do like the word "guarantee" as a substitute. We can talk of formal guarantees, but also of a store guaranteeing that an item you buy will meet a certain standard. So it's connotations are nicely in the direction of proof but without, as it were, "proving too much" :)