I'm confused as to why you are confused.
You say "FICO scores do not seem to be made with a special process. How can they be especially good data?" The score was presumably designed for the purpose of assessing risk. Per Wikipedia, FICO scores were introduced for that purpose based on credit reports. I highly doubt that the Fair Issac company did that with "no special process." Most likely, a data analysis was done where many different possibly relevant data points were pulled from credit reports and then analyzed to see which would be predictive. I imagine the weighting between the factors was optimized for that purpose.
Your explanation of how the various factors are relevant to creditworthiness mostly makes sense. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. I do think that for the majority of people a FICO score is getting at a mix of trustworthiness and stability. If someone has a long track record of paying their debts and nothing has changed in their financial situation, then there is a high probability they will continue to pay them.
Keep in mind also that credit cards and many loans also ask for your income with legal consequences if you lie. Combine FICO score with sufficient income and you have eliminated a large risk factor that may not show up yet on a credit report (i.e. loss of employment).
The only factor that has always seemed odd to me is credit mix. Indeed, Wikipedia has a section in its Criticism of credit scoring systems in the United States page about Poor predictor of risk, which is mostly about how a mix of credit can be misleading. For example, I have no installment loans because I don't own a house, and my car is paid off. Does that make me a worse credit risk? No, in fact, it makes me a better risk because I have lower expenses and so much savings that I always buy cars with cash. The best theory I can come up with is that not having a mix of credit types is predictive of being low-income, since low-income people are less likely to own a home and more likely to own used cars that they don't have a loan on, or to not even own a car.
This should be promoted to the front page.
I don't understand what you mean.
The human brain takes time to process sensory signals so that the qualia experienced are slightly delayed from when the sensory input that gave rise to those qualia entered the brain. In that sense, experience happens over time. But at any moment, there is only the qualia that is being experienced. How could it be otherwise? If you say that you then recall that the qualia you had just before that was different. Well, that is a different instant in time in which you are experiencing recall of a memory from your brain.
I share your confusion about the first two, but I believe that the question about the subjective passage of time can be dissolved, unless I am misunderstanding your question.
As you mention, the laws of physics are reversible, but as you mention, entropy gives an arrow of time. That arrow of time causes it to be the case that your brain encodes memories of the past instead of the future. You are not a subjective observer outside of time. You are always experiencing the current moment from the perspective of your brain at that moment. Thus, you always have the experience of being in a brain that remembers the past and remembers the immediately prior moment as the immediate past. So your experience will always be that your current experience has moved forward in time from the past. As a thought experiment, imagine that the 4D block universe existed and that there is some process that evaluates slices at which subjective experience happens. Imagine that instead of that process moving forward in time, it is moving backward in time from the "end" of time to the Big Bang. What would your subjective experience be in that case? It would still be that you are traveling forward in time. Because, as you experienced each moment, you would do so with the memory of the past moment, not of the moment that was experienced sequentially before (which is the temporally future moment). There is therefore no question here except what gives rise to qualia, and perhaps whether the block universe view is correct, or the universe is actually an evolving system for which only some "now" exists for each point in space.
(In reality, I don't think a block universe makes sense. While I don't understand what gives rise to qualia, all evidence says that it is tied to the execution of the "thinking" algorithm of my brain. A block universe would have no "execution" and so I think would have no qualia unless qualia exist eternally at all places in the block universe where there is a conscious being.)
The author, @Max Harms, is working on a high-quality AI-read audio book version. He had hoped to release it at the same time as the book, but is currently planning to release it in early 2026. There is a prediction market for When will the Red Heart audiobook come out? There is a preview on YouTube
There are existing crypto algos for "coin flipping". You should be using one of those. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_scheme#Coin_flipping
A browser doesn't count as a significant business integration?
I worry that this paper and article seem to be safety washing. They imply that existing safety techniques for LLMs are appropriate for more powerful systems. They apply a safety mindset from other domains to AI in an inappropriate way. I do think AI safety can learn from other fields, but those must be fields with an intelligent adversarial agent. Studying whether failure modes are correlated doesn't matter when you have an intelligent adversary who can make failure modes that would not normally be correlated happen at the same time. If one is thinking only about current systems, then perhaps such an analysis would be helpful. But both the paper and article fail to call that out.
Most of this is interesting but unsurprising. Having reflected on it for a bit, I do find one thing surprising. It is very strange that Illya doesn't know who is paying his lawyers. Really, he assumes that it is OpenAI and is apparently fine with that. I'm surprised he isn't concerned about a conflict of interest. I assume he has enough money that he could hire his own lawyers if he wanted. I would expect him to hire at least one lawyer himself to ensure that his own interests are represented and to check the work of the other lawyers.
I'm conflicted about this post because I agree with your core message and the urgency that is lacking here. However, I don't think this is the right way to create a message for this group. I highly doubt a bunch of biblical references are the way to reach a Less Wrong crowd, even if they are very basic ones.