agree, I originally wanted to make a list of all things that would be wildly unpopular but that toxoplasma of rage could theoretically make happen. But then it seemed more interesting to list things that could have more government or geopolitical relevance.
US Government dysfunction and runaway political polarization bingo card. I don't expect any particular one of these to happen but it seems plausible that at least one of these will happen.
- A sanctuary city conducts armed patrols to oppose ICE raids, or the National Guard refuses a direct order from the president en masse
- Internal migration is de facto restricted for US citizens or green card holders
- For debt ceiling reasons, the US significantly defaults on its debt, stops Social Security payments, grounds flights, or issues a trillion-dollar coin
- US declares a neutral humanitarian NGO like the WHO a foreign terrorist organization
- A major news network (eg CNN) or social media site other than Tiktok (eg Facebook) loses licenses for ideological reasons
- A Democratic or Republican candidate for president, governor, or Congress is kept off a state ballot
- A major elected official or Cabinet member takes office while incarcerated
- Election issues on the scale of 1876, where Congress can't decide on the president until past January 20
- A state or local government establishes a 100% tax bracket or wealth tax
- The Fed chair is fired, or three board members
- A NCAA D1 college or pro sports league establishes a minimum quota for transgender athletes
- Existing solar/wind plants are decommissioned, or a state legally caps its percentage of solar energy (not just making it contingent on batteries or something practical)
- US votes for a UN resolution to condemn itself, e.g. for human rights abuses
- US withdraws from the UN, NATO, G7 or G20
- US allies boycott the 2028 Olympics
- Court packing; the Supreme Court has more than 9 justices
- Multiple Supreme Court justices are impeached
I do, though maybe not this extreme. Roughly every other day I bemoan the fact that AIs aren't misaligned yet (limiting the excitingness of my current research) and might not even be misaligned in future, before reminding myself our world is much better to live in than the alternative. I think there's not much else to do with a similar impact given how large even a 1% p(doom) reduction is. But I also believe that particularly good research now can trade 1:1 with crunch time.
Theoretical work is just another step removed from the problem and should be viewed with at least as much suspicion.
1The Interwebs seem to indicate that that's only if you give it a laser spot to aim at, not with just GPS.
Good catch.
Agree grenade sized munitions won't damage buildings, I think the conversation is drifting between FPVs and other kinds of drones, and also between various settings, so I'll just state my beliefs.
- Fiber FPVs with 40km range and 2kg payload (either kamikaze or grenade/mine dropping), which can eventually be countered by a large number of short range guns if they fly at low altitude. It's not clear to me if the 40km range ones need to be larger
- Heavy bomber drones can be equipped with fiber (or Starlink for US allies) and carry 15kg+ payload, enough to damage buildings and sensitive industrial equipment. They can do this while flying above the range of small guns and need dedicated antiaircraft guns
- Fixed wing can carry even larger payloads with longer range and higher altitude, but are still pretty slow, except for the ones with jet engines
- Drones equipped with GPS will know their position to within ~10 meters like the GPS only variant of Excalibur. It seems possible to constrain the payload's horizontal velocity by 1 m/s on average, and the drop time from 1500m is 17 seconds, giving an error of 17 m. The overall error would be sqrt(10^2 + 17^2) = 20 m. If GPS is jammed, it's not obvious they can do the first part, but probably they can still use cameras or something
- All of the above are extremely threatening for both organized warfare and terrorism against an opponent without effective cheap air defense.
- Even with the next evolution of air defense including radar-acoustic fusion to find threats, the limited reliability of ~all types of existing air defense and large number of drone configurations makes me guess that drones will remain moderately threatening in some form. Given that Hezbollah was previously firing unguided rockets with CEP in the hundreds of meters, some kind of drone that can target with CEP around 20 meters could be more cost effective for them if they cannot procure thousands of cheap guided missiles. If they could drop six individual grenades on six people from a bomber drone even in the presence of air defense, that would be even more effective, but it seems unlikely
- Excalibur is made by the US, which has no incentive to reduce costs, and so its $70k price tag is more of a "maximum the army is willing to pay" situation. This is true to some extent with Skyranger so maybe someone motivated will build smart ammunition that costs $40 per round and make it cost effective.
Nor would I. In WWII bombers didn't even know where they were, but we have GPS now such that Excalibur guided artillery shells can get 1m CEP. And the US and possibly China can use Starlink and other constellations for localization even when GPS is jammed. I would guess 20m is easily doable with good sensing and dumb bombs, which would at least hit a building.
IMO it is too soon to tell whether drone defense will hold up to countercountermeasures.
- It's already very common for drones to drop grenades and they can theoretically do so from 1-2km up if you sacrifice precision.
- Once sound becomes the primary means of locating drones, I expect the UAS operators to do everything they can to mask the acoustic signature, including varying the sound profile through propeller design, making cheaper drones louder than high-end drones, and deployable acoustic decoys.
- Guns have short range so these only work to defend targets fairly close to the system. E.g. Ukraine's indigenous Sky Sentinel (12.7mm caliber) has a range of 1.5 km and a sufficiently large swarm of FPVs can overwhelm one anyway. For longer ranges, larger calibers are needed, and these have higher costs and lower rate of fire. Skyranger 30mm has a range of 3 km but the ammunition costs $hundreds per round.
I agree that Israel will probably be less affected than larger, poorer countries, but given that drones have probably killed over 200,000 people in Ukraine even a small percentage of this would be a problem for Israel.
My views which I have already shared in person:
- The reason old currency units were large is because they're derived from weights of silver (eg a pound sterling or the equivalent French system dating back to Charlemagne), and the pound is a reasonably-sized base unit of weight, so the corresponding monetary unit was extremely large. There would be nothing wrong with having $1000 currency units again, it's just that we usually have inflation rather than deflation. In crypto none of the reasonably sized subdivisions have caught on and it seems tolerable to buy a sandwich for 0.0031 ETH if that were common.
- Currencies are redenominated after sufficient inflation only when the number of zeros on everything gets unwieldy. This requires replacing all cash and is a bad look because it's usually done after hyperinflation, so countries like South Korea haven't done it yet.
- The Iranian rial's exchange rate, actually around 1e-6 now, is so low partly due to sanctions, and is in the middle of redenomination from 10000 rial = 1 toman.
- When people make a new currency, they make it similar to the currencies of their largest trading partners for convenience, hence why so many are in the range of the USD, euro and yuan. Various regional status games change this but not by an order of magnitude, and it is conceivable to me that we could get a $20 base unit if they escalate a bit.
I don't understand how the issue of validity in evals connects to the Gooder Regulator Theorem. It's certainly arbitrarily hard to measure a latent property of an AI agent that's buried an an arbitrarily complex causal diagram of the agent, but this is also true of any kind of science. The solution is to only measure simple things and validate them extensively.
To start, the playbook includes methods from the social sciences. Are humans lying in a psychology experiment intending to deceive, or just socially conditioned into deception in these circumstances? We can discriminate using more experiments. Here's a list suggested by Claude.
Internal Validity:
- Manipulation checks: Verify participants understand the task and setting as intended
- Control conditions: Include baseline conditions where lying provides no benefit
- Multiple measures: Use both behavioral indicators (actual lies told) and physiological measures (stress responses, reaction times)
- Debrief interviews: Post-experiment discussions to understand participant reasoning
Construct Validity:
- Operationalize "lying" clearly: Distinguish between errors, omissions, and active false statements
- Measure awareness: Test whether participants recognize they're providing false information
- Cross-validate: Use multiple paradigms that elicit deception differently
External Validity:
- Vary contexts: Test across different social settings and stakes
- Diverse samples: Include participants from various cultural backgrounds where social norms differ
- Ecological validity: Use scenarios that mirror real-world situations
Intentional deception should show:
- Individual differences in moral reasoning correlation
- Sensitivity to personal cost-benefit analysis
- Greater cognitive effort signatures
- Ability to inhibit when explicitly instructed
- Conscious awareness and ability to justify
Socially conditioned behavior should show:
- Stronger situation-specific activation
- Less individual variation within similar social groups
- Faster, more automatic responses
- Resistance to conscious control
- Difficulty articulating clear reasons
Likewise, in evals we can do increasingly elaborate robustness checks where we change the prompt and setting and measure if the correlation is high, check that the model understand its behavior is deceptive, provide incentives to the model that should make its behavior change if it were intentionally deceptive, and so on. Much of the time, especially for propensity / alignment evals, we will find the evals are nonrobust and we'll be forced to weaken our claims.
Sometimes, we have an easier job. I don't expect capability evals to get vastly harder because many skills are verifiable and sandbagging is solvable. Also, AI evals are easier than human psychology experiments, because they're likely to be much cheaper and faster to run and more replicable.
According to Wikipedia it seems to have worked well and not been expensive.
Poland began work on the 5.5-meter (18 foot) high steel wall topped with barbed wire at a cost of around 1.6 billion zł (US$407m) [...] in the late summer of 2021. The barrier was completed on 30 June 2022.[3] An electronic barrier [...] was added to the fence between November 2022 and early summer 2023 at a cost of EUR 71.8 million.[4]
[...] official border crossings with Belarus remained open, and the asylum process continued to function [...]
Since the fence was built, illegal crossings have reduced to a trickle; however, between August 2021 and February 2023, 37 bodies were found on both sides of the border; people have died mainly from hypothermia or drowning.[11]
The Greenberg article also suggests a reasonable tradeoff is being made in policy
Despite these fears, Duszczyk is convinced his approach is working. In a two-month period after the asylum suspension, illegal crossings from Belarus fell by 48% compared to the same period in 2024. At the same time, in all of 2024, there was one death—out of 30,000 attempted crossings—in Polish territory. There have been none so far in 2025. Duszczyk feels his humanitarian floor is holding.
The idea is they're printing money, not just borrowing it, which in the extreme would cause hyperinflation (and is equivalent to default since debt is in nominal dollars). It probably seems less bad though.