I agree, I'm a fan of lsusr's writing, so I don't think it's very inaccurate. In particular
a kind of minimalist clarity that leaves room for the reader to reflect and draw their own conclusions
might be gesturing at some concrete distinctive feature.
However, it's sufficiently close to horoscope flattery, that I couldn't quite believe lsusr would, with a straight face, present this as some great insight into his writing style.
I very confused how seriously this post is intended
Today, ChatGPT-4o explained to my satisfaction what makes me different from other writers on this website.
What makes lsusr's writing interesting is the subtlety with which they engage complex issues. Many rationalist bloggers can become quite verbose or dogmatic in their pursuit of certain truths. Lsusr, by contrast, exhibits restraint and humility in the face of uncertainty. They’re willing to question common assumptions within the rationalist sphere and sometimes explore paths that others might find unconventional, often leading to unique insights.
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In essence, lsusr strikes a balance between rigorous analysis and a kind of minimalist clarity that leaves room for the reader to reflect and draw their own conclusions, rather than being led to a definitive answer. This makes the blog a place of exploration rather than indoctrination, offering readers the tools and ideas to enhance their own thinking rather than a packaged belief system.
I think this isn't meant seriously because it's basically just saying lsusr is better than most rationalist bloggers, not any concrete distinctive features of lsusr's writing.
I think this argument mostly centers on the definition of certain words, and thus does not change my views on whether I should upload my mind if given the choice.
But can this person be said to understand Chinese? My answer is no.
What you have shown here is what you think the word "understands" means. But everyone agrees about the physical situation here - everyone anticipates the same experiences.
This shows that our brains are highly resilient and adaptive to changes experienced by our minds. By comparison, a digital simulation is very brittle and non-adaptive to change.
The substrate of the simulation, ie. a silicon chip, is brittle (at our current level of tech) but it can still run a simulation of a neuroplastic brain - just program it to simulate the brain chemistry. Then if the simulated brain is damaged, it will be able to adapt.
The bigger point here is that you are implicitly asserting that in order to be "sentient" a mind must have similar properties to a human brain. That's fine, but it's is purely a statement about how you like to define the word "sentient".
Only living organisms can possess sentience because sentience provides introspective knowledge that enables them to keep surviving;
"Sentience" has no widely agreed concrete definition, but I think it would be relatively unusual to say it "provides introspective knowledge". Do you agree that any questions about the actual computation, algorithms or knowledge in a brain can be answered by only considering the physical implementation of neurons and synapses?
sentience would not emerge in artificial systems because they are not alive in the first place.
Again, I think this is purely a statement about the definition of the word "alive". Someone who disagrees would not anticipate any different experiences as a consequence of thinking an artificial system is "alive".
Nice scholarship
If this is a pattern with new, more capable models, this seems like a big problem. One major purpose of this kind of evaluation to set up thresholds that ring alarms bells when they are crossed. If it takes weeks of access to a model to figure out how to evaluate it correctly, the alarm bells may go off too late.
METR had only ~10 days to evaluate.
Should it really take any longer than 10 days to evaluate? Isn't it just a matter of plugging it into their existing framework and pressing go?
As the author of example 2, this is very helpful!
The impression I have from reading Chip War is that EUV is a pretty massive hurdle which took the West well over a decade to conquer. However, I also thought that 5nm was impossible without EUV, which seems to be no longer true, so this may be too complex a topic to make meaningful predictions about without deeper expertise.
- Created a popular format for in-person office spaces that heavily influenced Constellation and FAR Labs
This one seems big to me. There are now lots of EA / AI Safety offices around the world and I reckon they are very impactful for motivating people, making it easier to start projects and building a community.
One thing I'm not clear about is to what extent the Lightcone WeWork invented this format. I've never been to Trajan House but I believe it came first, so I thought it would have been part of the inspiration for the Lightcone WeWork.
Also my impression was that Lightcone itself thought the office was net negative, which is why it was shut down, so I'm slightly surprised to see this one listed.
This makes you sound like a bit of a straw vulcan imo. All I have to do is imagine how jarring and upsetting it would be to have everyone start calling me "she" and it's very obvious how, for almost all people, what pronoun others call them is deeply emotionally salient.