solhando

I think answering the question of "Who can be included within political life?" is quite important to answer before deciding on whether you prefer China or not. We may very well get an ASI alligned to the interests of the nation which created it, to the detriment of others.

China is inherently a nation of Chinese people, and nominally a nation for the various minorities that are already there. The government represents the interests of this in-group, and almost never lets anyone else in. It's essentially impossible to become a Chinese citizen for everyone but a few Chinese diaspora. 

The US is nominally a European-descended nation, but is essentially universal in who can be... (read more)

I agree with your first post.

However, I think the part of empathy that people will say you're missing is that you're putting "yourself" in someone else's shoes, which is only half of it. Imagine you were Isekai'd away into someone else's life where you had a history of being ineffective, unaccomplished, and self-pitying, with problems that could be solved quickly with relatively little objective effort. You can probably easily imagine how you'd quickly take actions to at least fix most of the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Clean your room, get a job, do at least some exercise, remove the nail and all that. 

But if you put yourself in the position of... (read more)

Thank you for the article. I'll give it a read.

It's not an easy answer. I'm a self-interested person, and I realized a while ago that many of my most productive and interesting relationships, both personal and in business, are the direct result of my activity on the internet. I already waste a lot of time commenting my thoughts, sometimes in long form, so I figure if I'm going to be reacting to stuff publicly, I might as well do so in the form of a blog where others might pick up on it. If that results in something good for me, influence, relationships, demonstration of niche intellectual ability the right sort of... (read more)

I think the night-watchman concept is interesting, and probably is the ideal goal of alignment absent a good idea of what any other goal would ultimately lead to, but this post smuggles in concepts beyond the night watchman that would be very hard for anyone to swallow. 

"Keeping the peace" internationally is pretty ambiguous, and I doubt that any major nation would be willing to give up the right of invasion as a last resort. Even if prevention of rogue super intelligence is seen as desirable, if preventing it also entails giving up a large amount of your current power, then I think world leaders will be pretty reluctant. The same can be... (read more)

This post is timed perfectly for my own issue with writing using AI. Maybe some of you smart people can offer advice. 

Back in March I wrote a 7,000 word blog post about The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling. It did decently well considering the few subscribers I have, but the problem is that it was (somewhat obviously) written in huge part with AI. Here's the conversation I had with ChatGPT. It took me about 3 hours to write. 

This alone wouldn't be an issue, but it is since I want to consistently write my ideas down for a public audience. I frequently read on very niche topics, and comment frequently on the... (read 499 more words →)