TFD

Scott Alexander has a recent piece about "deontological bars" in the context of AI safety. He describes the state of the discourse like this: > I’ve been thinking about this lately because of an internal debate in the AI safety movement. Some people want to work with the least irresponsible...

The confusion I recently came upon a comment which I believe reflects a persistent confusion among rationalist/EA types. I was reading this post which contains ideas that the other has but doesn't have time to write posts about. One of those relates to the concept of "good faith", labelled "most...

The power of low correlations One innovation on social media that I perceive as having received a reasonable amount of praise from diverse constituencies is "Community Notes" on X (Twitter at the time of initial implementation). The basic idea is to allow notes to accompany a tweet to add additional...

How they really feel about privacy I took at look at the prediction market Kalshi recently, and came across something interesting on their FAQ page. This page appears to me to be largely focused on explaining why people shouldn't be mad at Kalshi, emphasizing the fact that it is regulated...

Update: Fixed exponentiation of estimated parameters. Summary I use data from METR's recent developer productivity experiment to assess the possibility of heterogeneity in the effect of AI on time to complete a task. Relative to a sample-wide 6% speedup, I estimate a 12% speedup in tasks which were predicted by...

This post is a sequel to my previous smash hit, don't accuse your interlocutor of being insufficiently truth-seeking. Like many good sequels, I've mostly just reskinned all the same points with a slightly different presentation. This time, I argue that you shouldn't accuse your interlocutor of making arguments that aren’t...

Anthropic is embroiled in a standoff with Secretary Hegseth over how the company's AI offerings may be used in military applications: > For months, [Anthropic CEO Dario] Amodei has insisted that using AI for domestic mass surveillance and AI-controlled weapons are ethical lines the company will not cross, calling such...