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lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)
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Partially in reply to "Request: stop advancing AI capabilities". Consider this argument: > "[X field] is often [dangerous / bad]. If you're [pro-social / thoughtful / conscientious], please avoid [X field]." Let's grant that these points as true. X field is indeed bad or dangerous, people who are some mix...
Epistemic status: n=3, more about building a culture of sharing and reasoning through numbers than any given particular estimates. I've been somewhat surprised by how substantially different the probability estimates of on AI risk are from smart people who are well-informed, even when asked discreetly in high-trust settings. Among equally...
There's a large class of things that eventually make you more effective when you've studied them for a while, but which are challenging and seem like they produce no gains while being learned. Formal logic, for instance, seems that way for a lot of people. Many of the natural sciences...
It's both profitable and gratifying to use one's reasoning skills to attempting to figure out answers to complex and murky questions. Even failing the ability to say definitively what happened, we can still make and update our own statistical distributions of what could have possibly happened. Unfortunately, it's typically questions...
Around a month ago, I found an incredibly insightful quote deep in the Reddit comments about a particular basketball player who had recently changed teams. > People who try hard to win first and foremost make it uncomfortable when people are trying to just have a good time and do...
The phrase "Enforcing Type Distinction" was mentioned and fleshed out here 12 years ago, but only appeared exactly once and that exact phrasing didn't catch on. I think "Enforcing Type Distinction" has value as a concept (to think more clearly), as a phrase (to discuss the thing), and potentially as...
Look at the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(abstract_data_type) After looking at that image, you understand the concept well enough to use it as a mental model. Hard-won lessons — (1) I joke that "meditation is having exactly one thing on the stack." One thing at a time on the stack might seem...