forgive me for not finding the specific citation, but I believe I first learned about this in a Kevin Carson essay on "diseconomies of scale" and systemic inefficiencies of large organizations many years ago--- yes-man psychosis played one role among many.
there's an analogy between the zurich r/changemyview curse of evals and the metr/epoch curse of evals. You do this dubiously ethical (according to more US-pilled IRBs or according to more paranoid/pure AI safety advocates) measuring/elicitation project because you might think the world deserves to know. But you had to do dubiously ethical experimentation on unconsenting reddizens / help labs improve capabilities in order to get there--- but the catch is, you only come out net positive if the world chooses to act on this information
I don't know what legible/transferable evidence would be. I've audited a lot of courses at a lot of different universities. Anecdote, sorry.
One thing I like about this is making the actual difficulty deltas between colleges more felt/legible/concrete (by anyone who takes the exams). What I might do in your system at my IQ level (which is pretty high outside of EA but pretty mediocre inside EA) is knock out a degree at an easy university to get warmed up then study for years for a degree at a hard school[1].
In real life, I can download or audit courses from whatever university I want, but I don't know what the grading curve is, so when 5/6 exercises are too hard I don't know if that's because I'm dumb or if 1/6 is B+ level performance. This is a way that the current system underserves a credential-indifferent autodidact. It's really hard to know how difficult a course is supposed to be when you're isolated from the local conditions that make up the grading curve!
Another thing I like about your system is tutoring markets separated from assessment companies. Why is it that we bundle gatekeeping/assessment with preparation? Unbundling might help maintain objective standards, get rid of problems that look like "the professor feels too much affection for the student to fail them".
This is all completely separate for why your proposal is a hard social problem / a complete nonstarter, which is that I don't think the system is "broken" right now. There's an idea you might pick up if you read the smarter leftists, which is that credentialism especially at elite levels preserves privilege and status as a first class use case. This is not completely false today, not least because the further you go back in time in western universities the truer it is.
my prior, 15 years ago, looked like "stanford has a boating scholarship, so obviously selectivity is a wealth/status thing and not reflective of scholarship or rigor", so the fact that I now believe "more selective colleges have harder coursework" means I've seen a lot of evidence. It pains me, believe me, but reality doesn't care :) ↩︎
I get pretty intense visceral outrage at overreaches in immigration enforcement, just seems the height of depravity. Ive looked for a lot of different routes to mental coolness over the last decade (since Trump started his speeches), they mostly amount to staying busy and distracted. Just seems like a really cost ineffective kind of activism to get involved in. Bankrolling lawyers for random people isn't really in my action space and if it was i'd have opportunity cost to consider.
seems like there's more prior literature than I thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-based_access_control
My main aim is to work on "hardening the box" i.e. eliminating software bugs so containment schemes don't fail for preventable reasons. But in the famous 4o system card example, the one that looks a little like docker exfiltration, the situation arose from user error, wild guess in compose.yaml or the shell script invoking docker run.
In a linux machine
Here's an example nix file
users.users =
let
authorized-key-files = [
"${keyspath}/id_server_ed25519.pub"
"${keyspath}/id_qd_ed25519.pub"
];
in
{
unpermissioneduser = {
isNormalUser = false;
extraGroups = [ "docker" ];
description = "AgentID=claude-0x0000";
};
coreuser = {
isNormalUser = true;
extraGroups = [
"wheel"
"networkmanager"
"docker"
"video"
];
home = "/home/coreuser";
description = "Core User (delegator of unpermissioneduser)";
shell = pkgs.fish;
openssh.authorizedKeys.keyFiles = authorized-key-files;
};
root = {
openssh.authorizedKeys.keyFiles = authorized-key-files;
shell = pkgs.fish;
};
};
You can see that unpermissioneduser has less abilities than coreuser. So you can imagine I just say that unpermissioneduser is an agent and coreuser is the human delegator.
Nix is simply a fully declarative way to do standard linux permissioning (a feature not in the snippet is allocating chmod/chown information for particular users to particular parts of the filesystem). There's no conceptual leaps from the status quo.
is linux all that great for when you want to keep track of who's a delegatee and who's a delegator? do we need a more graph flavored version of linux userspace/permissions? I'm talking about once we're reasoning about proliferating agents and their permissions on various machines. Linux groups do not support inheritance, but a user can be a member of many groups. So you could in principle MVP a graph based permissions DSL (perhaps in Nix) on top of the existing Linux user/group ontology, 80% confident, but it could be hairier than making a new ontology. idk.
Examples of promising risk-targeted applications
This section reeks of the guaranteed safe AI agendas, a lot of agreement. For example, using formal methods to harden any box we try to put the AI in is a kind of defensive acceleration that doesn't work (too expensive) until certain pre-ASI stages of development. I'm working on formal verification agents along these lines right now.
I think there are two categories of traits, the fungible and the nonfungible.
Fungible traits are money, height, BMI/weightlifting. Them being able to pull you is a proxy for their social status.
Nonfungible traits are your actual contributions, what type of person you are, what role you play in a friend group or room, etc. Includes kindness, humor, emotional intuitions, etc.
When girls realize that my nonfungible traits aren't quite their cup of tea, they say "well at least i scored 5'9" / 6 figures / can pick me up and carry me a dozen feet" and then dump me for someone who's 5'10" / 7 figures / can pick her up and carry her two dozen feet. But if my nonfungible traits are her cup of tea, fungible traits don't seem to do much of anything!
In other words, fungible traits are the fallback when a girl doesn't like you very much. They're literally only worth considering if you assume she doesn't like you as a premise.
I think the answer is that clothing is halfway between, or plays both roles. Clothing contributes a lot to the "my friends will think I pulled well if I bring you around them" factor, so they're like a fungible trait. But clothing is also a vector of self expression, and to many it's a conscientiousness proxy / proxy to how clean your room is which people are screening for in long term primary relationships.
So idk.