People might appreciate this short (<3 minutes) video interviewing me about my April 1 startup, Open Asteroid Impact:

 

Alas I think doing this will be prohibitively expensive/technologically infeasible.  We did some BOTECs at the launch party and even just getting rid of leap seconds was too expensive for us.

That's one of many reasons why I'm trying to raise 7 trillion dollars.

Thanks for the pro-tip! I'm not much of a geologist, more of an ideas guy^[1] myself. 

1. ^{^}

   "I can handle the business end"

Open Asteroid Impact strongly disagrees with this line of thinking. Our theory of change relies on many asteroids filled with precious minerals hitting earth, as mining in space (even LEO) is prohibitively expensive compared to on-ground mining.

While your claims may be true for small asteroids, we strongly believe that scale is all you need. Over time, sufficiently large, and sufficiently many, asteroids can solve the problem of specific asteroids not successfully impacting Earth.
 

rare earth metals? More like common space metals, amirite?

In 2015 or so when my friend and I independently came across a lot of rationalist concepts, we learned that each other were interested in this sort of LW-shaped thing. He offered for us to try the AI box game. I played the game as Gatekeeper and won with ease. So at least my anecdotes don't make me particularly worried.

That said, these days I wouldn't publicly offer to play the game against an unlimited pool of strangers. When my friend and I played against each other, there was an implicit set of norms in play, that explicitly don't apply to the game as stated as "the AI has no ethical constraints."

I do not particularly relish the thought of giving a stranger with a ton of free time and something to prove the license to be (e.g) as mean to me as possible over text for two hours straight (while having days or even weeks to prepare ahead of time). I might lose, too. I can think of at least 3 different attack vectors^[1] that might get me to decide that the -EV of losing the game is not as bad as the -EV of having to stay online and attentive in such a situation for almost 2 more hours.

That said, I'm also not necessarily convinced that in the literal boxing example (a weakly superhuman AI is in a server farm somewhere, I'm the sole gatekeeper responsible to decide whether to let it out or not), I'd necessarily let it out.  Even after accounting for the greater cognitive capabilities and thoroughness of superhuman AI. This is because I expect my willingness to hold in an actual potential end-of-world scenario is much higher than my willingness to hold for $25 and some internet points. 

1. ^{^}

   In the spirit of the game, I will not publicly say what they are. But I can tell people over DMs if they're interested, I expect most people to agree that they're a)within the explicit rules of the game, b) plausibly will cause reasonable people to fold, and c) are not super analogous to actual end-of-world scenarios.

Yep. 

Yeah this came up in a number of times during covid forecasting in 2020. Eg, you might expect the correlational effect of having a lockdown during times of expected high mortality load to outweigh any causal advantages on mortality of lockdowns. 

Yeah this came up in a number of times during covid forecasting in 2020. Eg, you might expect the correalational effect of having a lockdown during times of expected high mortality load to outweigh any causal advantages on mortality of lockdowns. 

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah