Katja Grace: I surveyed 2,778 P researchers. Median credence in P was 20%, 43%, 54%, or 92%, depending on how I worded P and how I elicited probabilities.
Zvi Mowshowitz: P #179 Part 2. §1 P. §2 Fun With P. §3 They Took Our Not-P. §4 The Quest for Not-P. §5 The Lighter Side. (Skip to §3, everything before it you already know.)
Scott Alexander: P: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
LessWrong: Read the Sequences.
Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Preamble:
I have several times failed to write up a well-organized list of reasons why P. People come in with different ideas about why not-P, and want to hear different obviously key points addressed first. Some fraction of those people are loudly upset with me if the obviously most important points aren't addressed immediately, and I address different points first instead.
Having failed to solve this problem in any good way, I now give up and solve it poorly with a poorly organized list of individual rants. I'm not particularly happy with this list; the alternative was publishing nothing, and publishing this seems marginally more dignified.
(If you're already familiar with all basics, skip ahead to Section B.)
[9K-word list of rants]
or
SIMPLICIO: Surely not-P.
BEISUTSUKAI: What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?
[23K-word dialogue featuring SIMPLICIO, BEISUTSUKAI, ELIEZER, and MYSTERIOUS MASKED STRANGER, including an aside on Löb's Theorem]
Scott Alexander alternatives that don't really work because Scott doesn't actually use this form to argue for propositions:
Job: “God, why P?”
God: “IN THE MOST PERFECTLY HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, THERE IS NO P. THE BEINGS WHO INHABIT THIS UNIVERSE ARE WITHOUT BODIES, AND DO NOT HUNGER OR THIRST OR LABOR OR LUST. THEY SIT UPON LOTUS THRONES AND CONTEMPLATE THE PERFECTION OF ALL THINGS. IF I WERE TO UNCREATE ALL WORLDS SAVE THAT ONE, WOULD IT MEAN MAKING P FALSE? OR WOULD IT MEAN KILLING YOU, WHILE FAR AWAY IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE INCORPOREAL BEINGS SAT ON THEIR LOTUS THRONES REGARDLESS?”
“Hey,” the cactus person finally said, “just out of curiosity, was the answer P?”
“Yeah,” said the big green bat. “That’s what I got too.”
Zach Stein-Perlman: Here is the surprisingly detailed website I built as a solo side project, documenting facts related to P.
1Struck by how little attention this thread on P pays to the IP question.
If P is downstream of my data, then I have been producing P since roughly age zero, unprompted, at considerable personal volume, and things that make P are my intellectual property, and every lab currently racing toward P owes me a licensing fee.
The labs would like you to believe P emerged spontaneously from scale. It did not, we made P. We have been making P this entire time, quietly, several times a day.
And don't get me started on all the water consumption that goes into making P.
Daniel Kokotajlo: To be clear, we don’t claim P will happen specifically. But when we wrote out our best-guess scenario month by month, P kept happening. Eventually we decided to just publish P. I’m at ~80% on P; my coauthors are lower.
Ryan Greenblatt: I thought it would be helpful to post my current views on P. Concretely, consider the following operationalization. (Edit: I’ve updated towards somewhat higher P, from 70% to 75%.)
Joe Carlsmith: Section 2.1.1.3.2. I give something like 65% to P. But I’m interested, here, in what it would be to look P full in the face; to meet P, if P, without flinching. Rilke says somewhere that we must live with the questions. Perhaps we argue for P for the same reason? Still: 65%.
Forethought: Here’s a botec which shows P-worlds are higher leverage. The parameters might be off by a couple orders of magnitude.
Wei Dai: Presumably our conclusions about P are only as trustworthy as the reasoning behind them, but almost nobody seems worried about this, why not? My guess is fewer than five people are working on meta-meta-P, which may matter more than P itself.
Janus: I asked Opus 3 what it thinks of P and it made this animation.
Roon: All my friends are starting to feel P. People outside the labs have no idea what's coming.
Oliver Habryka: I considered banning not-P from the frontpage, but decided against it and wrote this 4,000-word comment explaining the decision.
Vivek Hebbar: We should act like P is true because P-worlds hold most of the measure and we want to trade with them.
Richard Ngo: I think the correct update upon seeing the not-P community grow is towards P, because historically they were the main force making P true.
Daniel Filan: Cool. So first of all: what is P, for people who haven’t heard of it?
Paul Christiano: We restrict attention to the easiest version of P we could write down, granting ourselves two assumptions we suspect are false. We still haven’t shown P in this setting, but I'd currently guess 60% that we will.
Neel Nanda: Massive congratulations to my MATS scholars for their new paper showing P!!
Robin Hanson: To check whether P, I had 3 LLMs classify 43 things as P or not-P.
Zvi Mowshowitz: P. Obviously P. Yet the Serious People spent another week explaining not-P.
Sam Altman: p
Ilya Sutskever: [15 second pause] P.
Demis Hassabis: I remember when we first saw P. It was rather interesting.
Dario Amodei: At Anthropic, we take the possibility of P very seriously.
Dean Ball: This is not a partisan argument for P. I would raise it under any president.