This is a special post for quick takes by rotatingpaguro. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
AI safety training applications are my intellectual clock.
In this period of my life I spend some time applying to various AI safety short courses and programs like MATS. Apply to all the good acronyms, as they say. The applications often declare themselves to take 1-2 hours to fill in. I invariably put in something more like 10 hours. A hypothetical application could start asking some euphemistic form of
> <what do you want to do with your life?>
Oh man, I don't even know what I ate for dinner yesterday. I pace back and forth through my study, then decide to postpone completing the application to the next day. I fall asleep, mulling over the meaning of life.
The next day:
> <is AI going to kill us all?>
...having a p(doom) always stroke me as a bad idea, turns out Yudkowsky agrees but also has a p(doom) apparently, which I think is decision-theoretically consistent with him believing everyone else to be an idiot, amongst other possible explanations; should I make up some bafflegab about decision theory? Maybe I should just say "maybe". This is the easy question.
> <do you know how to improve the state of the art on this thing below?>
Oh yes, I was chatting about this yesterday with von Neumann and my sister, she said to just use quantum computronium, and check the error bars.
I pace back and forth the study, sit down, sit up again, pace, sit down, re-open the laptop, sit up, close the laptop, pace, open the laptop, sit down, up, feint pacing but then close the laptop before it can realize. I go to bed and think. After one hour, I conclude I'm going to have milk next breakfast as I do every day since I was 6, and fall asleep.
Next day. Answer the question. I improved the state of the art, yes, yes. Next question.
> <do you like more your mom or your dad?>
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, suffering leads to the dark side. So I guess mom?Perhaps I should get some sleep again, as night is the mother of counsel, and write the answer from scratch tomorrow.
Tomorrow:
> <please predict the future, explaining your reasoning (100 words, no cheating)>
Uhm so I guess I was supposed to cheat on the other questions. Better go back and rewrite all answers with cheating. Prompting is Turing-complete, so there should be some way to prompt gpt5 to output my answers; would that count as cheating?
...aaand 10 hours have passed!
I already know about all these important issues before getting through the applications. But being asked about them in a bland anonymous form I fill in while bored bears on me the psychological effect of a stranger stopping me on the road, grabbing my arms and shouting "what is the meaning of life, QUICK" as they jolt me. In no other context I am compelled to answer such questions (in 100–200 words). So I take the occasion of each application deadline to sit down and think about my life.