Nicholas Kross

Primer (2004) Content warnings here What would actually happen, in real life (circa 2004), if two typical techie engineers invented time travel by accident? Primer is odd for being both slow-burning and fast-paced. It's short and self-contained and low-budget, yet majestic and complicated and, er, "recursive". > I haven't eaten...

Over a year ago, Rohin Shah wrote this, about people trying to slow or stop AGI development through mass public outreach about the dangers of AGI: > But it really doesn't seem great that my case for wide-scale outreach being good is "maybe if we create a mass delusion of...

For the vague ideas and posts that you want to write up, but which don't feel "ready to be A Real LessWrong Post" yet. * Describe your idea on a LessWrong or LessWrong-adjacent Discord server. The adjacent servers (in my experience) are more active. For AI safety/alignment ideas specifically, try...

When talking about Elon Musk's impact on the world, I mostly look at "how has he influenced extinction risk?". This forces a stark ordering of priorities: If he created a "backup" human civilization on Mars, that would (by consequentialist reasoning) do enough good to probably outweigh even some historically bad...

My hypothesis: I think the incentives for "cultivating more/better researchers in a preparadigmatic field" lean towards "don't discourage even less-promising researchers, because they could luck out and suddenly be good/useful to alignment in an unexpected way". Analogy: This is like how investors encourage startup founders because they bet on a...

Specifically for AI alignment (small field, preparadigmatic, plausibly-short-timelines), but a general principle decision-mechanism could apply to other fields. What I mean by this is, what ratio of pre-learning to filling-in-gaps, leads to deeper and quicker insights? (Note that, given the time-blocks I'm thinking of here, I could get sidetracked by...

I just read this book review of Egan's The Educated Mind. Here are some thoughts I had, written for all but grammatically directed at the review's anonymous author (like a typical comment!). I'd love to go to that middle school, and that high school. It would set a lower-bound on...