Hi folks,

My supervisor and I co-authored a philosophy paper on the argument that AI represents an existential risk. That paper has just been published in Ratio. We figured LessWrong would be able to catch things in it which we might have missed and, either way, hope it might provoke a conversation. 

We reconstructed what we take to be the argument for how AI becomes an xrisk as follows: 

1. The "Singularity" Claim: Artificial Superintelligence is possible and would be out of human control.
2. The Orthogonality Thesis: More or less any less of intelligence is compatible with more or less any final goal. (as per Bostrom's 2014 definition)

From the conjuction of these two presmises, we can conclude that ASI is possible, it might have a goal, instrumental or final, which is at...

Like you, I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It first appeared when vaccines started rolling out a few months back, and got brighter when my family got their vaccine cards signed. It got still brighter as I signed up for my first dose (#ModernaManiacs), got the first shot, waited four weeks, and got my second.

After about a week, a few days after the side effects faded, I stopped holding my breath—literally and figuratively—as people walked past. At two weeks post-second dose, I was “officially” “fully vaccinated.” The light had been reached.

My gym had just started allowing those vaccinated to unmask, and I took them up on the offer. It was science to the rescue, human ingenuity encapsulated in some messenger ribonucleic...

Introduction

One of the greatest sources of joy in my life are my close friends. People who bring excitement and novelty into my life. Who expose me to new experiences, and ways of seeing the world. Who help me learn, point out my blind spots, and correct me when I am wrong. Who I can lean on when I need support, and who lean on me in turn. Friends who help me grow more into the kind of person I want to be.

I am especially grateful for this, because up until about 4 years ago, I didn’t have any close friends in my life. I had friends, but struggled to form real emotional connections. Moreover, it didn’t even occur to me that I could try to do this....

This is a cross-post from my personal blog.

What is this post about?

While there are tons of guides out there that promise to increase your productivity 10x overnight most of them seem full of empty promises and don't even define what it is they actually mean by productivity. Due to this absence of a clear concept, many of these tips and tricks optimize a rather local and short-termist perspective of productivity that might be intuitive but is in my opinion not optimizing your true long-term goal.

In this post, I want to do three things: a) Present a definition of productivity to make it easier to evaluate what makes sense and what doesn't, b) provide a lot of framing, i.e. ways to think about productivity, and c) give a...

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

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The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

This is a cross-post from my personal blog.

What is this post about?

Over the summer of 2020, I slept pretty badly for a long period of time and it had pretty noticeable effects on my productivity, perceived energy levels, and well-being in general. This was mostly due to the fact that my room was under the southern roof of the house and it had around 28 degrees Celcius during "cool" summer nights which made it effectively impossible for me to get more than 6 hours of light sleep per night. In autumn, I moved to a new flat where I had to get a new bed, mattress, pillow, etc.

Since I had felt the negative consequences of bad sleep pretty recently, I figured I could conduct a bit of...

Delta has taken over, and cases are rising rapidly, with a 58% rise this week after a 65% rise last week. There’s no reason to expect this to turn around in the near term. 

Three weeks ago, in One Last Scare, I ran the numbers and concluded that most places in America would ‘make it’ without a big scary surge from Delta. It’s time to look at what went wrong with that calculation, which I believe to be a failure to sufficiently integrate different parts of my model.  

Then there’s the question of what we are going to do about this, and whether we are going to destroy some combination of free speech and the ordinary day to day activities that constitute our lives and civilization, perhaps indefinitely, in...

Pacific Gas & Electric is planning to spend $15-30b to bury power lines. I see why they're doing it: PG&E equipment sparked some of the worst fires in California history, including the 2018 Camp Fire which destroyed Paradise, but I'm not convinced that this is good for California overall.

Historically, the area used to burn periodically. We haven't allowed this for about a century, and flammable materials have been building up. It's all very likely to burn at some point, and burying power lines mostly just reduces the chance that it will be triggered by PG&E. Prescribed burns, spreading out the combustion and moving it to safer times of year, would reduce fire risk far more for the money. Even though when PG&E pays for something the money comes from their customers, CA residents, this isn't...