I think retiring is hard for lots of people cos they don't really change their minds about this

I'd be interested to read the full transcript. Is that available anywhere? Sorry if I missed it

Yup. The missing assumption is that setting up and running experiments is inside the funny subset, perhaps because it's fairly routine

A version of the argument I've heard:

AI can do longer and longer coding tasks. That makes it easier for AI builders to run different experiments that might let them build AGI. So either it's the case that both (a) the long-horizon coding AI won't help with experiment selection at all and (b) the experiments will saturate the available compute resources before they're helpful; or, long-horizon coding AI will make strong AI come quickly.

I think it's not too hard to believe (a) & (b), fwiw. Randomly run experiments might not lead to anyone figuring out the idea they need to build strong AI.

I think the larger effect is treating the probabilities as independent when they're not.

Suppose I have a jar of jelly beans, which are either all red, all green or all blue. You want to know what the probability of drawing 100 blue jelly beans is. Is it ${\frac{1}{3}}^{100}\approx 2\cdot {10}^{-48}$? No, of course not. That's what you get if you multiply 1/3 by itself 100 times. But you should condition on your results as you go. P(jelly1 = blue)⋅P(jelly2=blue|jelly1=blue)⋅P(jelly3=blue|jelly1=blue,jelly2=blue) ...

Every factor but the first is 1, so the probability is $\frac{1}{3}$.

I know many of you folks care a lot about how AI goes. I'm curious how you connect that with – or actively disconnect that from – the new workshops.

The question I'm most interested in: do you have a set of values you intend the workshops to do well by, that don't involve AI, and that you don't intend to let AI pre-empt?^[1][2]

I'm also interested in any thinking you have about how the workshops support the role of x-risk, but if I could pick one question, it'd be the former.

1. ^{^}

   At least in a given workshop. Perhaps you'd stop doing the workshops overall if your thoughts about AI changed

2. ^{^}

   Barring edge cases, like someone trying to build an AGI in the basement or whatever

It looks like last year it was Fall, and the year before it was Autumn.

I agree, but that's controlled by your browser, and not something that (AFAIK) LessWrong can alter. On desktop we have the TOC scroll bar, that shows how far through the article you are. Possibly on mobile we should have a horizontal scroll bar for the article body.

(I think, by 'positive', Ben meant "explain positions that the group agrees with" rather than "say some nice things about each group")