If the office-worker fears that they will be fired if

The office worker has gone wrong already by panicking and failing to ask, "Is this actually from the boss?"

Always be asking "What am I looking at?"

Claude said to keltan:

This is a criticism I've seen circulating in AI safety discussions

Surely Claude is bullshitting? I haven't heard of Claude or any other AI going about reading the net in its spare time, the better to hold up its end of an informed and up to date conversation. Maybe that's something that AIs will be doing soon, but AFAIK not yet. However, it is the sort of thing that a knowledgeable human with their finger on the pulse of events would say, so Claude says this sort of thing.

Yesterday I received this email:

————
Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency

Dear Vehicle Owner,

Our system has identified that your vehicle tax will be due on Saturday, 06 December, 2025.

To ensure that your vehicle remains legally paid and complies with applicable traffic regulations, you are required to complete the renewal process before the due date

[Update Now]

Thank you for keeping your vehicle tax up to date and for helping us maintain safe and legal roads across the UK.
————

I own a car, and the DVLA and vehicle tax are real things, so my immediate reaction to this was "Is this a genuine message?" It wasn't, of course. But the scam email got me wondering: are the sort of people who fall for such things also the sort who think that the LLMs they talk to are people?

So that's epistemic status: drunken bullshit session.

Your analysis of early action + no disaster overlooks the fact that early action can prevent the disaster. But you never see the things that were prevented... because they were prevented. Early action only seems useful when it merely mitigates a disaster — that is, when it is not all that successful. Valiant failure is valorised over competent success.

Y2K is a case in point. There actually was a problem, and it was fixed.

Here's something that may be of interest here. It's more EA than rationality, but I'm not on the EA forum. The Reith Lectures 2025, given by Rutger Bregman. Currently being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, and available on BBC Sounds.

"Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current 'age of immorality', explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history’s example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change."

In Rubber Souls, Bjartus Tomas argues that we can have cruely-free status games by creating underpeople without moral worth, perhaps because they are non-conscious, worth to serve as our permanent underclass.

We have these already. Factories, farms, construction sites, mines, IT departments: the sites of industry are full of them. We call them "machines".

Any chance of an RSS feed?

Presenting it as if they first came up with general principles which were then validated by the experience for the sake of readers comprehension, even though the casual process that led to her discovery of the theory is different.

I'm not sure what this was supposed to be. It's a noun phrase, not a sentence.

Do fruit and dairy products play any role in your recommended diet?