KatjaGrace

There are different mental states that feel different. Those are relatively obvious. For instance, being angry or drunk or frustrated or besotted. Then—for me at least—there are different mental states that don’t immediately feel like anything, but where in acting I notice that my behavior is different, or different things...

I'm pretty annoyed today, for nominal reasons ranging between ‘petty’ and ‘doesn’t even make sense’. I’m not entirely sure how or if to take oneself seriously when one has such absurd grievances. But that’s a question for another time—I’m here now to tell you about my one potentially valid peeve....

An odd aspect of discussing serious threats is the amount of concern people express about you causing other people to be concerned. This kind of makes sense for interlocutors who don’t believe in the threat itself, or think it is overblown (though in that case it is perhaps strange to...

Some things you might learn from games are pretty blatant: Trivial Pursuit might teach you trivia, MasterType might teach you about typing, Grand Theft Auto might teach you about driving or crime. But sometimes games teach people less obvious things—things that are more experiential or ineffable, things that you didn’t...

I’ve really wanted more good short accounts of why AI poses an existential risk. Working on one myself has been one of those incredibly high priorities I keep putting off. Meanwhile award-winning journalist Ben Bradford of NPR has made a podcast version of my case for AI x-risk that I...

In honor of yesterday’s nonspecific point in the gradual arrival of self-driving cars, an interview with myself. Interviewer: It sounds like you’re pretty excited about self-driving cars. Weren’t you just saying that unemployment from AI is on some kind of very overlapping continuum with extinction from AI? Isn’t rooting for...

often worry that people are being too deferential about their beliefs. I also hear others worrying about this, and nobody seemingly worrying about the reverse, except perhaps my friends and therapists (and I guess honestly people who know cranks, so that’s a bit troubling). Which leads me to wonder, supposing...