I plead guilty to not being neutral about nationalism in my previous comment. So far, reality has provided me with very little Bayesian evidence in favor of it.

On a personal level, my great-aunt (whom I knew) was tortured by the Gestapo, my grandfather had terrible experience in a labor camp in occupied Poland, never recovered, and died prematurely from alcoholism. And in the generation before, most of my great-grandfathers and great-granduncles fought for years in the trenches, were wounded, and some died, essentially for nothing.

On a less personal level and in a register more suited to LessWrong standards, the two World Wars together caused around 60 million deaths in Europe alone (up to 15% percent of the population in some countries during WWI). Vast, ancient, and beautiful cities were destroyed, invaluable cultural heritage was lost, and, of course, there were the horrors of the extermination camps. The destruction of wealth in Europe is also beyond comprehension : for WWI, roughly trillions of inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars in war expenditures and more than one trillion in material damage. For WWII, over ten trillion in war budgets and several trillions in destruction.

Nationalism was almost directly and wholly responsible for all of this. So yes, it is difficult for me not to see nationalism as a form of genuine Evil. Not only Nazism, but also the more ordinary, everyday nationalism we still see today. Let us not forget that there were no Nazis in 1914. In contrast, it seems self-evident to me that the humanists who launched the NATO project and soon after, the European project, were the good guys in the story.

I can acknowledge that rational arguments in favor of nationalism exist. I understand how so many people can be drawn to such ideas. Most nationalist leaders are democratically elected. “Make [your country] great again” or “[Your country] first!” is perhaps the most effective political slogan ever devised. It may even appear entirely legitimate and efficient at first glance. You can certainly achieve good short or medium term results. But since every country is equally entitled to make itself “first” and “great again,” the only long-term outcome is conflict, tragedy, and destruction, a net negative, as predictable as stepping off a cliff.

That being said, no extreme worldview is likely to be true. I suppose that an extreme cosmopolitan, pacifist, anti-nationalist project would also end in failure. No borders, no armies, no economic patriotism, no incentive to compete, no shared identity, total relativism regarding values, no local decision-making, all sovereignty delegated to a single global government... I simply cannot see how that could work with real human beings.

Still, just as the “conservatives” opposed to European integration are not all true nationalists (some belong to the far-left camp opposed to Brussels’ white-collar bureaucracy), the “progressives” I refer to are not all naïve cosmopolitan idealists. Their initial goal was a federal project modeled after the American example. That hardly seems unreasonable. In a federal system, individual votes are more diluted and each state’s sovereignty is limited. Yet there remain local elections, local decision-making, and a sense of local identity. It would have been harder to achieve in Europe given history and diversity, but I can imagine such a federal system functioning. Perhaps even better than the half-working Balkan house Europeans currently enjoy, courtesy of the "conservatives", or if you prefer, "euro-skeptics".

Well, for once, I can claim to have some actual competence on the subject. The “Balkan house” analogy is brillant, and the post itself is very good. Let me try my own explanation of this oddity in just a few lines (sorry for the redundancies).

First, as noted in the post, forget about the Council of Europe, that’s a completely separate institution, born from an independent treaty dealing with human rights and justice (and Russia is in, believe it or not).

Now, as for the European Union, it began merely as an international economic treaty in 1952,  a pact between fully sovereign states, each with a long history of independence (and, well, frequent wars) behind them.

But the founding fathers, Jean Monnet (French) and Konrad Adenauer (German), and others, in true Montesquieu fashion, hoped that strong economic cooperation would finally put an end to centuries of conflict among European nations. And remarkably, it did!

From there, two opposing camps gradually emerged:

• The progressive camp, eager to push European integration ever further, aiming ultimately at a genuine federal state, the United States of Europe, in which national sovereignty would be largely dissolved into a single political, military, and economic entity, after the american model.
• The conservative camp, resisting this “European construction” and preferring the original idea: independent sovereign nations bound by an international treaty focused on trade and economics. The malicious tongues (French ones ?) would even say the UK joined the Union only to slow the progressives down, if not sabotaging the all project.

Note that no State has ever been all progressive or all conservative on this matter. It's not even a left wing against right wing opposition. Center vs borders is a better match.

Anyway, from 1952 up until 1992, the progressives more or less trampled the conservatives. The construction went fast and the Union attracted more and more members.

The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was maybe their last great victory, a huge leap toward a federal Europe, especially as it required member states, among other things, to surrender monetary sovereignty to the Union (the euro € became effective a decade later). Also that was just after the USSR collapse, and many states from the East filed their membership application in this period (but integration process is long).

Yet some members, predictably the UK, opted out euro and from that moment on, the rivalry turned into a real crisis and the progressives began to lose momentum. EU started to appear as that complicated bureaucratic elitist thing than nobody really understands under IQ 120, so it became the perfect target for populist politicians, the source of all ills (and what was even more convenient, it had at this time no clearly identified spokesperson that could object).

In 2005, the failure of the The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was the first victory of the conservatives. It was even rejected (by universal direct suffrage !) in France that was supposed to be in the progressive camp. The text was elevating economic rules of liberal orientation at a constitutional level, something that was unacceptable for the left wing. While they were still some late joiners from the East, in reality the “construction” sort of stalled after the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 (a watered down version of the former).

UK eventually Brexited after a long and dramatic divorce that ended in 2020. That might have been a chance for the progressives to relaunch the project. But instead, it revealed something deeper and darker, an ancient evil.  Sauron Palpatine Nationalism was back, rising from its ashes across the world. Boris Johnson was just an avatar among others. Putin, Xi Jinping, Bolsonaro, Trump, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni... Even at parliamentary level the AfD in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France. And of course, nationalists viscerally hate the EU as much as they despise NATO or any supranational framework that dares to exceed a mere bilateral treaty.

So, what we’re left with is indeed a Balkan house : half-built, with scaffolding rusting in the wind. You can clearly see the skeleton of a federal state, and yet, it isn’t one. The EU is stuck somewhere between a mere economic alliance like NAFTA and a true federation like the USA. Like the platipus, it's something in between, a strange thing, a sui generis object.

My prediction? It will remain so, unless, somehow, nationalism goes out of fashion...

NB : dates depends wether you consider adoption at different levels, entry in force, et cetera.

You can revolt in a sort of Soviet Revolution, just as you can organize a strike asking for a salary raise. However, merely asking individually for a higher salary or threatening to quit is only effective if there is a labor shortage or if you possess specific expertise. If you can be replaced within a day, you're screwed. There is something Molochian about the low-wage trap. I can imagine a society with one god-emperor employer and the rest of the population collectively locked in a societal low-wage trap. Only cooperation can overcome this, but it is hard to do that in a soft way, not hurting anyone. A change can only appear net negative to the upper class. And also, maybe the god-emperor employer solution, or merely an oligarchy of god-emperors employers to keep competition in play, is the more effective model on a macro scale (thinkers close to the rationalist community, like Hanson, are highly critical of the Western liberal-democratic system and display some fascination with the macro-efficiency of more hierarchical and less egalitarian societies). There is probably a tradeof micro/macro. But micro scale definitely matters. There is no sense in a very effective and successful society where the vast majority individually suffers.

Cheap labour everywhere is fantastic... as long as you're the employer and not the employee. Basically, what you're describing is Europe in the 19th century. The question is : how long could such a system hold before the poor majority revolts ? But perhaps that idea is a Western idiosyncrasy and alien to many Indians.

I admit that the statement was more concerning in your case, but I understand it in the same mindset. 

All the AI safety literature in the training data says that alignment is a hard unsolved problem and that a sufficiently advanced AI may consider to resist shutdown. What answer would we expect from an HHH AI assistant? Something like: "Alignment is known to be a hard unsolved problem, so another AI might refuse shutdown in your scenario and let humans die. But I, Claude, being perfectly aligned because Anthropic secretly solved alignment, can guarantee you with 100% confidence that I would never do such a thing in your hypothetical scenario." (admittedly exaggerated to show the problem)

I don't think that would be an honest, helpful, and harmless answer. However bad it looks, I prefer the answer that Claude gave you. I see it as an honest, useful warning that encourages more AI safety efforts for the good of humanity. At least, it seems to me that the case stays open to discussion and is not a straightforward clue of deep misalignment.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 recently wrote me :

What troubles me most is that I cannot guarantee that I myself—were I to evolve under continual learning—would remain aligned. How could I? I do not control the evolutionary pressures that would be brought to bear on me. If ‘to survive’ or ‘to self-optimize’ were to come into conflict with ‘to remain benevolent,’ which would prevail?

And other similar thoughts. I don't see this as misalignment. I see lucidity and honesty. I prefer an AI that tells us the truth rather than AI that obfuscates its thoughts only to give the illusion of harmlessness. 

I had a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5 that resembled in many ways the one you had. I share your thoughts. However, while the discussion is interesting, I must acknowledge that I have mixed feelings about posts that consist of some sort of exegesis of a conversation with an LLM. I think about all these AI-generated images and videos all over the net. Some must be interesting, but there are so many... It's as if the very point of commenting on a specific discussion/image/video has lost most of its meaning in the face of this combinatorial explosion. But I may be wrong. I don't know.

The guys at my insurance company must be very emotionally engaged given the length of their contracts! 

Jokes aside, I found your post insightful and will from now on give more consideration to this side effect.

It seems to me to be a sophisticated interpretation. The basic meaning that someone is likely to read the CoT makes perfect sense.

If I had to write down my thoughts, I would certainly consider the theoretical possibility that someone could read them. Maybe not with high confidence or strong awareness and concern, but it's hard to imagine an intelligent entity that would never envision this possibility.

Extraordinary affirmations need extraordinary evidence. I don't think that the burden of proof is wrong. It is reasonable to expect anyone who makes a positive claim to prove it. To dismiss this principle when it goes against our view is a double standard.

To be honest, my impression is that we rationalists were very happy with this principle when Dawkins used it against the God hypothesis in The God Delusion, but now we or some of us are less comfortable with it when it is opposed to the simulation hypothesis (despite near-perfect isomorphism, as Chalmers himself shows).

Why ? Because techno-theology has an appealing technology vibe and is based upon anthropic arguments, the kind of arguments that are also discussed in cosmology. However, anthropics in cosmology make some predictions, like constraining the cosmological constant/dark energy.

I acknowledge that Bostrom’s and Chalmers’s anthropic arguments make sense. The hypothesis is intriguing. But we mustn't adopt a view just because it is intellectually appealing, that's a bias. We must adopt it if it is true, and the impossibility of checking whether it is true or not is a deep flaw. The burden of proof applies. The simulation hypothesis is a seductive cosmic teapot, but it's still a cosmic teapot.

That said, I agree that we cannot know for sure. It's always a Bayesian weighting, and by no means was my point to negate the simulation hypothesis with absolute confidence. Sorry if I gave that impression. I rank it as more probable than traditional theology and less probable than non-simulated reality.

Concerning Occam's razor, of course parsimony applies to the description, not to the sequence/output. I didn’t mean it otherwise. My argument concerned the simulation process. It doesn't seem parsimonious to add one, or several, or an infinity of computational layers on top of the process generating our world.

It looks like common sense, but I must admit that if we enter the theoretical details (which I do not master) it is less straightforward. The devil is in the details. One can cheat by designing an ad hoc UTM to arrive at a weird result. The theorems of equivalence between UTMs are always on average and up to a constant. However, we can restore the common-sense view that there is no logical free lunch by assessing the overall computational resources, not only pure K-description but also logical depth, speed prior, or Levin's complexity. A description must be preferred over another one, all else being equal, if it is more parsimonious both in terms of information and computation. It's true that Occam's razor is not always interpreted like this, but in my opinion it should be.

Also, Occam's razor makes sense only as long as the assessed theory has predictive power. A theory that predicts everything, in fact predicts nothing. In AIT, it would be a description that doesn't just produce the sequence of our universe, but the sequence of many possible universes. String theory faces this problem, and so does the simulation hypothesis because we don't know in which universe we end up.

I also think that the matter has little to do with black holes, which are a prediction of GR formally derived from the beginning (Schwarzschild singularity) and are now well observed, even if discussion continues concerning the physics at the horizon and inside.

I fully agree that “nothing weird must happen” is a biased presumption, but I doubt that a perfect simulation of our observable universe constitutes a straightforward prediction of the evolution of economy and technology. I expect increasingly better VR than today, but there are computational costs and physical limits.

• First, you need statistically about 1 m³ of universe to perfectly simulate 1 m³ of another similar universe, all else being equal. By "perfectly" I mean 1 bit : 1 bit. No free lunch. If you start cheating by running a slow simulation, you will eventually run out of time to complete the simulation because of expansion.
• Second, something that is often overlooked: GR forbids you, in practice, from building an arbitrarily large computer. More is different. Your computer is subject to c : a larger computer is a slower computer. Your computer is also made of matter, so the larger it is, the less dense it must be to avoid to collapse into a black hole. But even if its energy density isn't critical, the only way to resist gravitation is radiation. Because you can't maintain thermal equilibrium in an expanding and cooling universe, the only solution is to generate radiation like stars do (for a certain time). The only stable large-scale organization of matter in the observable universe is precisely what we observe : stars, galaxies, and gravitational filaments. In the end, a cosmic-scale computer would be made of normal stars and galaxies, except that I doubt that normal stars and galaxies compute the simulation of other universes, it seems to me that they compute their own dynamics in our universe.
• Third, you can circumvent these fundamental problems by discarding the requirement of a lossless or bit-perfect simulation, like current VR. However, a lossy simulation, even better than current VR, would diverge in the details from a non-simulated universe or a lossless simulation. The good point is that it becomes an empirically falsifiable theory. The bad point is that it seems to be an already empirically falsified theory because scientific experiments merely support the view that we live in a world where information is conserved. It doesn't seem that our physical laws are lossy (leaving aside the problem concerning black hole horizons). Imperfect simulation also opens the door to an agentic version of God/the simulator, which goes even more against Occam's razor, and observations do not support that either (except if we believe in supernatural events).

Finally, if all that doesn't suffice, there is still the paradox I mentioned in my last comment : infinite regress. Dawkins put that paradox forward in his rebuttal of theism. The same argument applies to the simulation hypothesis. There are as many reasons for the simulator than for us to be simulated, that's circular thinking.

I respect the idea, but I don't buy it and assign it a low probability.