Has Tyler Cowen ever explicitly admitted to being wrong about anything? 

Not 'revised estimates' or 'updated predictions' but 'I was wrong'. 

Every time I see him talk about learning something new, he always seems to be talking about how this vindicates what he said/thought before. 

Gemini 2.5 pro didn't seem to find anything, when I did a max reasoning budget search with url search on in aistudio. 

EDIT: An example was found by Morpheus, of Tyler Cowen explictly saying he was wrong - see the comment and the linked PDF below

So, apparently, I'm stupid. I could have been making money this whole time, but I was scared to ask for it

i've been giving a bunch of people and businesses advice on how to do their research and stuff. one of them messaged me, i was feeling tired and had so many other things to do. said my time is busy.

then thought fuck it, said if they're ok with a $15 an hour consulting fee, we can have a call. baffled, they said yes.

then realized, oh wait, i have multiple years of experience now leading dev teams, ai research teams, organizing research hackathons and getting frontier research done.

wtf

if someone who's v good at math wants to do some agent foundations stuff to directly tackle the hard part of alignement, what should they do? 

Hi, I'm hosting an AI Safety Law-a-Thon on October 25th to 26th. Will be pairing up AI Safety researchers with lawyers to share knowledge and brainstorm risk scenarios. If you've ever talked/argued about p doom and know what a mesaoptimizer is, then you've already done something very similar to this. 
Main difference here is that you'll be able to reduce p doom in this one! Many of the lawyers taking part are from top, multi-billion dollar companies, advisors to governments, etc. And they know essentially nothing about alignment. You might be concerned... (read more)

Maybe there's a filtering effect for public intellectuals. 

If you only ever talk about things you really know a lot about, unless that thing is very interesting or you yourself are something that gets a lot of attention (e.g. a polyamorous cam girl who's very good at statistics, a Muslim Socialist running for mayor in the world's richest city, etc), you probably won't become a 'public intellectual'. 

And if you venture out of that and always admit it when you get something wrong, explicitly, or you don't have an area of speciality and admit to get... (read more)

it's so unnecessarily hard to get funding in alignment.

they say 'Don't Bullshit' but what that actually means is 'Only do our specific kind of bullshit'.

and they don't specify because they want to pretend that they don't have their own bullshit

Working on a meta plan for solving alignment, I'd appreciate feedback & criticism please - the more precise the better. Feel free to use the emojis reactions if writing a reply you'd be happy with feels taxing.

Diagram for visualization - items in tables are just stand-ins, any ratings and numbers are just for illustration, not actual rankings or scores at this moment.

Red and Blue teaming Alignment evals
Make lots of red teaming methods to reward hack alignment evals
Use this to find actually useful alignment evals, then red team and reward hack them... (read more)

For AI Safety funders/regranters - e.g. Open Phil, Manifund, etc: 

It seems like a lot of the grants are swayed by 'big names' being on there. I suggest making anonymity compulsary if you want to more merit based funding, that explores wider possibilities and invests in more upcoming things. 

Treat it like a Science rather than the Bragging Competition it currently is. 

A Bias Pattern atm seems to be that the same people get funding, or recommended funding by the same people, leading to the number of innovators being very small, or growing much... (read more)

i earnt more from working at a call center for about 3 months than i have in 2+ years of working in ai safety. 

And i've worked much harder in this than I did at the call center

Prestige Maxing is Killing the AI Safety Field

i messed things up a lot in organizing the moonshot program. working hard to make sure the future events will be much better. lots of things i can do.

Do you think you can steal someone's parking spot? 

If yes, what exactly do you think you're stealing? 

my experience with applying to the Non Linear fund was terrible and not worth the time at all

AIgainst the Gods

Cultivation story, but instead of cultivation, it's a post AGI story in a world that's mostly a utopia. But, there are AGI overlords, which are basically benevolent. 

There's a very stubborn young man, born in the classical sense (though without any problems like ageing disease, serious injuries, sickness, etc that people used to have - and without his mother having any of the screaming pain that childbirth used to have, or risk of life), who hates the state of power imbalance. 

He doesnt want the Gods to just give him power ... (read more)

what do you think of this for the alignment problem?

If we make an AI system that's capable of making another, more capable AI system, which then makes another more capable AI and that makes another one and so on, how can we trust that that will result in AI systems that only do what we want and don't do things that we don't want?

my dad keeps traumatizing my little sister and making her cry, while 'teaching' her maths. hitting the table and demanding to know why she wrote the wrong answer. he doesnt fucking understand or respect that this is not how you teach people. he doesnt respect her or anyone else

I'm annoyed by the phrase 'do or do not, there is no try', because I think it's wrong and there very much is a thing called trying and it's important. 

However, it's a phrase that's so cool and has so much aura, it's hard to disagree with it without sounding at least a little bit like an excuse making loser who doesn't do things and tries to justify it. 

Perhaps in part, because I feel/fear that I may be that?

The mind uploading stuff seems to be a way to justify being ok with dying, imo, and digging ones head into the sand, pretending that if something talks a bit like you, it is you. 
 

If a friend can very accurately do an impression of me and continues to do so for a week, while wearing makeup to look like me, I have not 'uploaded' myself into them. And I still wouldn't want to die, just because there's someone who is doing an extremely good impression of myself.

prob not gonna be relatable for most folk, but i'm so fucking burnt out on how stupid it is to get funding in ai safety. the average 'ai safety funder' does more to accelerate funding for capabilities than safety, in huge part because what they look for is Credentials and In-Group Status, rather than actual merit. 
And the worst fucking thing is how much they lie to themselves and pretend that the 3 things they funded that weren't completely in group, mean that they actually aren't biased in that way. 

At least some VCs are more honest that they want to be leeches and make money off of you. 

btw, thoughts on this for 'the alignment problem'?
"A robust, generalizable, scalable,  method to make an AI model which will do set [A] of things as much as it can and not do set [B] of things as much as it can, where you can freely change [A] and [B]"

a youtuber with 25k subscribers, with a channel on technical deep learning, is making a promo vid for the moonshot program.
Talking about what alignment is, what agent foundations is, etc. His phd is in neuroscience. 
do you want to comment on the script?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YyDIj2ohxwzaGVdyNxmmShCeAP-SVlvJSaDdyFdh6-s/edit?tab=t.0

It's 2025, AIs can solve proofs and my dad is yelling at my 10 year old sister for not memorizing her times tables up to 20

I'm going to be more blunt and honest when I think AI safety and gov folk are being dishonest and doing trash work.

i want to write more, and know its beneficial for me to write more. every time that i recall doing so right now, in the last two years, it's increased the amount of people who know about my work, come to work with me, pay for the work in some way, etc. 

however, i feel really really anxious, scared, etc of doing it. feels a bit stupid. 

part of it as well is that i really really care about truth and about what i write being very very true and robust to misinterpretation. this is in large part something that i purposefully trained into myself, to av... (read more)

just joined the call with one of the moonshot teams and i was actually basically an interruption, lol. felt so good to be completely unneeded there

If someone wants me to change my actions because of a future forecast they've made and don't share evidence they used to make their judgements, I don't take them very seriously. 

I'd like some feedback on my theory of impact for my currently chosen research path

**End goal**: Reduce x-risk from AI and risk of human disempowerment. 
for x-risk: 
- solving AI alignment - very important, 
- knowing exactly how well we're doing in alignment, exactly how close we are to solving it, how much is left, etc seems important.
 - how well different methods work, 
 - which companies are making progress in this, which aren't, which are acting like they're making progress vs actually making progress, etc
 - put all on ... (read more)

I'm finally reading The Sequences and it screams midwittery to me, I'm sorry. 

Compare this:
to Jaynes:


Jaynes is better organized, more respectful to the reader, more respectful to the work he's building on and more useful
 

Sometimes I am very glad I did not enter academia, because it means I haven't truly entered and assimilated to a bubble of jargon. 

It is utterly dogshit how fucking bad all the explanations of what Agent Foundations is, are. Why do none of them try to be plain, precise, unambiguous and professional? 

Why do they all insist on fucking analogies rather than just saying the actual thing they mean? It comes off as the research not being serious or real or the person saying it either no knowing what they're talking about, not being good at communicating or not putting in the fucking effort to try to explain things without wasting the readers time. 

I feel like this is fundamentally... (read more)