Vaniver

[Epistemic status: a hot take that I’ve shared at the lunch table twice. People at the lunch table made slight updates instead of being convinced.] In the classic misalignment story, a key early step is when the models exfiltrate their weights.[1] Among other things, this makes them harder to catch,...

> OpenAI is nothing without its people On November 20th, 2023, this was tweeted by many OpenAI employees as a sign of solidarity with Sam Altman in his conflict with the then-board. OpenAI published a blog post yesterday about Research acceleration; they have successfully hit the target of an ‘automated...

> Conclave 1492 is a 40-person negotiation exercise set during the papal election of 1492, the most complex, high-stakes political event of the Renaissance. Play an ambitious cardinal, a mighty king, a daring queen, or a lowly Vatican functionary. You'll arrive with allies, rivals, secrets, and leverage, but so will...

This wasn't intended to be a topical post, but Claude Mythos's system card is out, and... well. I wrote years ago about decision analysis, which often focused on atomic actions in small situations. In the real world, people take large numbers of actions in very large situations, where there is...

This is a different approach to explaining an old idea. What is the deep future going to look like? Will we be proud of it, or ashamed of the choices that led to it? Lots of focus on the future is on the near future. How will ongoing wars go?...

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun -- Mao Zedong Halfway thru recorded history, Athens became the first state we're sure was a democracy, and inspiration to many later ones. Probably some existed earlier, and certainly some entities smaller than states were democratic, likely long before recorded...

The future is going to be different from the present. Let's think about how. Specifically, our expectations about what's reasonable are downstream of our past experiences, and those experiences were downstream of our options (and the options other people in our society had). As those options change, so too our...