How is this not basically the widespread idea of recursive self improvement? This idea is simple enough that it has occurred even to me, and there is no way that, e.g. Ilya Sutskever hasn't thought about that.

Don't do this, please. Just wait and see. This community is forgiving about changing ones mind.

Some hopefully constructive criticism:

• I believe it's "agentic", not "agentive".
• "Save scumming" isn't a widely known term. If I hadn't known exactly where this was going, it might have confused me. Consider replacing it with something like "trial and error".
• I would rework the part where the blob bites the finger off, it causes people to ask stuff like "but how should a piece of Software bite my finger?", this derails the conversation. Don't specify exactly how it's going to try to prevent the pushing of the button, explain that it has a strong inventive to do so, that it is correct about that, and that it can use the abilities which it learned to to understand and manipulate the world to accomplish that.

Edit: To end this on a positive note: This format is under explored. We need more "alignment is hard 101" content that is as convincing as possible, without making use of deception. Thank you for creating something that could become very valuable with a bit of iterative improvement. Like, genuinely. Thank you.

While I am not a lawyer, it appears that this concept might indeed hold some merit. A similar strategy is used by organizations focused on civil rights, known as a “warrant canary”. Essentially, it’s a method by which a communications service provider aims to implicitly inform its users that the provider has been served with a government subpoena, despite legal prohibitions on revealing the existence of the subpoena. The idea behind it is that it there are very strong protections against compelled speech, especially against compelled untrue speech (e.g. updating the canary despite having received a subpoena).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) seems to believe that warrant canaries are legal.

I believe Zvi was referring to FAAMG vs startups.

I read A Fire Upon the Deep a few years ago, and even back then I found it highly prescient. Now I'll take this sad event as an opportunity to read his highly acclaimed prequel A Deepness in the Sky. RIP.

Murder is just a word. ... SBF bites all the bullets, all the time, as we see throughout. Murder is bad because look at all the investments and productivity that would be lost, and the distress particular people might feel

You are saying this as if you disagreed with it. In this case, I'd like to vehemently disagree with your disagreeing with Sam.

Murder really is bad because of all the bad things that follow from it, not because there is some moral category of "murder", which is always bad. This isn't just "Sam biting all the bullets", this is basic utilitarianism 101, something that I wouldn't even call a bullet. The elegance of this argument and arguments like it is the reason people like utilitarianism, myself included.

Believing this has, in my opinion, morally good consequences. It explains why murdering a random person is bad, but very importantly does not explain why murdering a tyrant is bad, or why abortion is bad. Deontology very easily fails those tests, unless you're including a lot of moral "epicycles".

To me it feels exactly like the kind of habit we should get into.

Imagine an advanced (possibly alien) civilization, with technology far beyond ours. Do you imagine its members being pestered by bloodsucking parasites? Me neither.

The existence of mosquitoes is an indictment of humanity, as far as I'm concerned.

Is there an actually good argument for why eliminating only disease carrying mosquitoes is acceptable, rather than just wiping them all out? There is no question that even without the threat of malaria, creatures like mosquitoes, bed-bugs and horse-flies decrease the quality of life of humans and animals. Would the effects on ecosystems really be so grave that they might plausibly outweigh the enormous benefits of their extinction?

You know the way lots of people get obsessed with Nietzsche for a while? They start wearing black, becoming goth, smoking marijuana, and talking about how like “god is dead, nothing matters, man.” This never happened to me, in part because Nietzsche doesn’t really make arguments, just self-indulgent rambles.

This is objectionable is many ways. To say that one of the most influential German philosophers produced only self-indulgent rambles is a sufficiently outrageous claim that you should be required to provide an argument in its favor.

I don't even disagree entirely. I view Nietzsche as more of a skilled essay-writer than a philosopher, who tried to appeal more to aesthetics than reason alone, but reducing Nietzsche to a sort-of 19th century "influencer"-type is ridiculous.