Mikewins

I usually tell people I got interested in AI after ChatGPT came out. This is technically true. But the full truth is more embarrassing: the thing that first convinced me that AIs would overtake humans as the dominant intelligence on Earth was a Twitter thread about Sydney, the mentally unstable...

Imagine our civilization fell tomorrow. What would our descendants think of us? What would they know about the 21st century? They would know surprisingly little about our greatest material triumphs. Our civilization’s favorite building materials aren’t made to last. Reinforced concrete only lasts a century; asphalt far less. Most of...

It looks like Demis Hassabis is stepping away from Google DeepMind. In honor of his rise and presumed fall, I wrote an essay on the powers and perils of seeing 90% of the future. Linkpost for: https://millicosm.substack.com/p/book-review-the-infinity-machine

This week, we're talking about anthropic reasoning. What are we to make of fine-tuned coincidences in science and mathematics? Are they coincidences, signs of structure we don't understand yet, or signs of deliberate tuning of the parameters of our universe? And if the latter, why did the people doing the...

I wrote a (partial) defense of FDT responding to Bentham's Bulldug. What it lacks in philosophical rigor or clear thinking it makes up for cheap jokes and potty-mouthed bellicosity. It also contains the first decision-theoretical arguement that the correct action in Newcomb's Problem is to turn into a leprechaun and...

Over the past 15 months or so, ARC's technical agenda has developed quite a bit. The advent of the Matching Sampling Principle (MSP), and ideas like it, has begotten a host of concrete technical problems; progress on those problems has given us more philosophical clarity on the big picture, which...

We have developed some relatively general methods for mechanistic estimation competitive with sampling by studying problems that are expressible as expectations of random products. This includes several different estimation problems, such as random halfspace intersections, random #3-SAT and random permanents. In this post, we will give a high-level introduction to...