I enjoyed this post! In the spirit of presenting images to ponder, this made me think of The Discarded Image by CS Lewis. It is one of Lewis' scholarly books intended for students of medieval literature, describing the cosmology of that period. One of the points he wants to deliver is that, unlike moderns, medieval people didn't think they were the most intelligent created beings--in church teaching there were nine species of angels arranged hierarchically between us and the absolute intelligence of God. Of course it is one thing to view humankind as the l... (read more)
I don't feel strongly for or against this idea, but I don't see how it makes LW a better place to share your own writing. Is the idea that it would increase the audience for each post, and posters want a larger audience? I would think that the LW frontpage already has a moderate-to-large audience-size advantage over most people's personal Substacks.
(Checking this: Claude estimates 3-7k LW homepage visits per day, and 1-3k readers for a typical post in its first week. This is way below a big Substack's numbers, of course, but in the range of a lot of established, in-the-conversation rationalist Substacks I subscribe to.)
Hi all--I have been a reader of LW and other rationalist writing for the last 15 years. Professionally, I am an ecologist of a mathematical bent, with wide interests. I have created an account mostly to be able to auto-filter the LW frontpage to my liking, but I will occasionally comment and maybe post as the spirit moves me.
If the alternative uncertainty-resolution method is a negotiated settlement, the act of starting negotiations potentially changes the balance of force by the end of the negotiation, since opposing power will learn that you are considering a war and have time to prepare itself. Many modern military conflicts have started with a surprise attack intended to knock out or demoralize the enemy before they could build up their full strength. Once the attack begins, the fact that the defender resists might indicate that you were overconfident, but it could also be... (read more)
The version of this argument that really bugs me, and that your AI examples demonstrate, is when the "good" end of the comparison is also really bad. I have heard someone say, in earnest, a near paraphrase of "OK, maybe AI could kill everyone, but humans commit genocide too...."