I have been very critical of cover ups in lesswrong. I'm not going to name names and maybe you don't trust me. But I have observed this all directly

Can you give whatever more information you can, e.g. to help people know whether you're referring to the same or different events that they already know about? E.g., are you talking about this that have already been mentioned on the public internet? What time period/s did the events you're talking about happen in?

Less concerned about PR risks than most funders

Just so it's said somewhere, LTFF is probably still too concerned with PR. (I don't necessarily mean that people working at LTFF are doing something wrong / making a mistake. I don't have enough information to make a guess like that. E.g., they may be constrained by other people, etc. Also, I don't claim there's another major grant maker that's less constrained like this.) What I mean is, there are probably projects that are feasibly-knowably good but that LTFF can't/won't fund because of PR. So for funders with especially high tolerance for PR and/or ability / interest in investigating PR risks that seem bad from far away, I would recommend against LTFF, in favor of making more specific use of that special status, unless you truly don't have the bandwidth to do so, even by delegating.

(Off topic, but I like your critique here and want to point you at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7RFC74otGcZifXpec/the-possible-shared-craft-of-deliberate-lexicogenesis just in case you're interested.)

I totally agree, you should apply to PhD programs. (In stem cell biology.)

The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter in general, because even if we are systematically underestimating the realistic upper bound for our skill level in these areas, we would still have to deal with diminishing marginal returns to investing in any particular one.

On the other hand, even if what you say is true, skill headroom may still imply that it's worth building shared arts around such skills. Shareability and build-on-ability changes the marginal returns a lot.

Philology is philosophy, because it lets you escape the trap of the language you were born with. Much like mathematics, humanity's most ambitious such escape attempt, still very much in its infancy.

True...

If you really want to express the truth about what you feel and see, you need to be inventing new languages. And if you want to preserve a culture, you must not lose its language.

I think this is a mistake, made by many. It's a retreat and an abdication. We are in our native language, so we should work from there.

My conjecture (though beware mind fallacy), is that it's because you emphasize "naive deference" to others, which looks obviously wrong to me and obviously not what most people I know who suffer from this tend to do (but might be representative of the people you actually met).

Instead, the mental move that I know intimately is what I call "instrumentalization" (or to be more memey, "tyranny of whys"). It's a move that doesn't require another or a social context (though it often includes internalized social judgements from others, aka superego); it only requires caring deeply about a goal (the goal doesn't actually matter that much), and being invested in it, somewhat neurotically.

I'm kinda confused by this. Glancing back at the dialogue, it looks like most of the dialogue emphasizes general "Urgent fake thinking", related to backchaining and slaving everything to a goal; it mentions social context in passing; and then emphasizes deference in the paragraph starting "I don't know.".

But anyway, I strongly encourage you to write something that would communicate to past-Adam the thing that now seems valuable to you. :)

That's my guess at the level of engagement required to understand something. Maybe just because when I've tried to use or modify some research that I thought I understood, I always realise I didn't understand it deeply enough. I'm probably anchoring too hard on my own experience here, other people often learn faster than me.

Hm. A couple things:

• Existing AF research is rooted in core questions about alignment.
• Existing AF research, pound for pound / word for word, and even idea for idea, is much more unnecessary stuff than necessary stuff. (Which is to be expected.)
• Existing AF research is among the best sources of compute-traces of trying to figure some of this stuff out (next to perhaps some philosophy and some other math).
• Empirically, most people who set out to stuff existing AF fail to get many of the deep lessons.
• There's a key dimension of: how much are you always asking for the context? E.g.: Why did this feel like a mainline question to investigate? If we understood this, what could we then do / understand? If we don't understand this, are we doomed / how are we doomed? Are there ways around that? What's the argument, more clearly?
• It's more important whether people are doing that, than whether / how exactly they engage with existing AF research.
• If people are doing that, they'll usually migrate away from playing with / extending existing AF, towards the more core (more difficult) problems.

I was thinking "should grantmakers let the money flow to unknown young people who want a chance to prove themselves."

Ah ok you're right that that was the original claim. I mentally autosteelmanned.

I'm curious how satisfied people seemed to be with the explanations/descriptions of consciousness that you elicited from them. E.g., on a scale from

"Oh! I figured it out; what I mean when I talk about myself being consciousness, and others being conscious or not, I'm referring to affective states / proprioception / etc.; I feel good about restricting away other potential meanings."

to

"I still have no idea, maybe it has something to do with X, that seems relevant, but I feel there's a lot I'm not understanding."

where did they tend to land, and what was the variance?