the problem is an inability to reliably commit to forgetting....A comment by John Wentworth mentioned that you can use amnestics to overcome this: make your purchase decision while under the influence of an amnestic that blocks your mind’s ability to write to long-term memory....When you read this, it’s hard not to immediately think of LLMs, which can make purchase decisions without committing anything to long-term memory

Robin Hanson also discussed using ems to do this in Age of Em. Probably the idea has been around even longer.

I think this is something we may do, with the caveat that we would make it an option that the author can choose (and that that would be clear to the readers.) We don’t want to get in the business of deciding which online discussions are good or bad enough to be worth endorsing as worth the reader’s time. 

Thanks for raising this.

Thanks, we really appreciate the questions.

Our general approach to scope is to ask (1) if the topic is worth studying, and (2) if there are no other venues that can offer a substantially better review. If so, we’ll probably say yes. (We generally want to avoid reviewing manuscripts where there are already good existing journals who accept submissions on the topic, e.g., almost all interpretability.) We are willing to go outside our comfort zone to get worthwhile manuscripts reviewed imperfectly if the alternative is they get reviewed nowhere. One advantage of the reviewer abstract idea is that it allows the reviewers to communicate their uncertainty to the potential reader.

Both of the interdisciplinary papers you mention sound fine. In these sorts of cases we may ask the authors to put in special effort in helping us locate qualified (and reasonably unbiased) reviewers.

Review and taxonomy papers are fine, and indeed we’d love to see something that collects and compares various definitions of “agent” in both the conventional lit and the Alignment Forum. For us the question isn’t “Is this novel enough to ‘deserve’ publication?”, it’s “Is this worth writing? Are there at least a few researchers who will find this significantly more useful than what’s already been written?”.

The random fluctuations in macroscopic chaotic systems, like Plinko or a well-flipped coin in air, can be just as fundamentally quantum as vacuum decay through tunneling. So by this argument you’d be unconcerned getting into a machine that flips a coin and shoots you if tails. Bad idea.
 

Suppose I sample the genomes of two random humans, $G_1$ and $G_2.$What information is redundant across these two random variables?...So, for instance, I throw away $G_i$, then I look at all the other genomes and see that in most places they’re the same - so when I sample my new $G_i,$ I know that it should match all the other genomes in all those places.

I can't really tell what distribution(s) you're talking about here.  You describe G_1 and G_2 as two random humans; wouldn't these then just be two draws from the same distribution of all human genomes?  If not, what distributions are you talking about?  Certainly, for a single human, there's only one genome, not a distribution (presuming you're not talking about chimerism or whatever).  Are you trying to describe parameterized distribution of human genomes, where you have a prior over the parameter values and where you draw repeatedly from the genome distribution, updating your prior over the parameters?