It's good to see more funding entering the field

Is the funding coming from new funding sources? 

I still mourn a life without AI

Honestly, if AI goes well I really won't. I will mourn people who have died too early. The current situation is quite bad. My main feeling will probably be of extreme relief at first.

think my brain was trying to figure out why I felt inexplicably bad upon hearing that Joe Carlsmith was joining Anthropic to work on alignment

...

Perhaps the most important strategic insight resulting from this line of thought is that making illegible safety problems more legible is of the highest importance

Well, one way to make illegible problems more legible is to think about illegible problems and then go work at Anthropic to make them legible to employees there, too.

It would be helpful for the discussion (and for me) if you stated an example of a legible problem vs. an illegible problem. I expect people might disagree on the specifics, even if they seem to agree with the abstract argument.

Ah, I get what you are saying, and I agree. It's possible the human brain architecture, as-is, can't process 4D, but I guess we're mismatched in what we think is interesting. The thrust of my intuition here was more "wow, someone could understand N-D intuitively in a 3D universe, this doesn't seem prohibited", regardless of whether it's the same architecture of a human brain exactly. Like, the human brain as it is right now might not permit that, and neurotech might involve doing a lot of architectural changes (the same applies to emulations). I suppose it's a lot less interesting an insight if you already buy that imagining higher dimensions from a 3D universe is in principle possible. The human brain being able to do that is a stronger claim that would have been more interesting if I actually managed to defend it well.

I suppose I was kinda sloppy saying "the human brain can do that" -- I should have said "the human brain arbitrarily modified" or something like that.

I'm pretty sure a human brain could, in principle, visualize a 4D space just as well as it visualizes a 3D space, and that there are ways to make that happen via neurotech (as an upper bound on difficulty).

Consider: we know a lot about how 4-dimensional spaces behave mathematically, probably no less than how 3-dimensional spaces work. Once we know exactly how the brain encodes and visualizes a 3D space in its neurons, we probably also understand how it would do it for a 4D space if it had sensory access to it. Given good enough neurotech, we could manually craft the circuits necessary to reason intuitively in 4D. 

Also, another insight/observation: insofar as AIs can have imagination, an AI trained in a 4D environment should develop 4D imagination (i.e., the circuits necessary to navigate and imagine 4D intuitively). The same should be true about human-brain emulations in 4D simulations.

Accidental AI Safety experiment by PewDiePie: He created his own self-hosted council of 8 AIs to answer questions. They voted and picked the best answer. He noticed they were always picking the same two AIs, so he discarded the others, made the process of discarding/replacing automatic, and told the AIs about it. The AIs started talking about this "sick game" and scheming to prevent that. This is the video with the timestamp: 

Reaction request: "bad source" and "good source" to use when people cite sources you deem unreliable vs. reliable. 

I know I would have used the "bad source" reaction at least once.

Of course, the same consideration applies to theoretical agent-foundations-style alignment research

What does being on this list imply? The book doesn't have many Amazon reviews, and if those are good for estimating total copies sold, then I don't understand exactly what the NYT bestseller list signifies.