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(I didn't actually downvote but I probably would have if it wasn't already downvoted). But you were downvoted because of decoupling norms being common among rationalists, where arguments are typically evaluated on their own merits. I agreed with Zac's point that ControlAI is overestimating their chances and he openly says on his bio that he works at Anthropic.
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I just noticed a possible slight discrepancy in your numbers. In your post, you say:
Overall, I estimate that a marginal $3,500 donation increases Bores's chances of winning by a little over 0.01%.
You append footnote 8 to that:
This is slightly larger than the estimate in my original post. That's because my original estimate put some probability on the race ending up not being close, but the race has continued to look close.
But this estimate is lower than that of your previous post. From your previous post:
...My best guess is that a marginal $85,000 donated on
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Yeah, I should have clarified -- I meant donating $1M to Public First to support Bores (assuming Public First agree).
*9-7
This seems to be an unusual opportunity where Coefficient Giving[1] can donate and not incur any reputational costs[2]. because of LTF / OpenAI / Palantir's unpopularity.
For example if CG's c4 arm donated $1M to Bores, then I would expect good first-order effects for reasons in the above posts but also positive second-order reputational impacts:
- AI populists often attack AI Safety / CG on the grounds that they're just increasing the AI hype and are secretly AI industry shills. It would be very easy to that point and say that the biggest funder donated sig
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Oops yeah, I believe you're right. I got confused and I thought we had specified a) incomp b) but in reality we had only specified alignment research after a positive update is incomparable to b*).
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Thanks for the reply! I think you’re right to push back on Lukas’ point about incomparability in practice. But I (obviously) think there’s a question to be had about imprecise intervals in theory.
My wording was a bit confusing, but I meant to say that (a) is incomparable to (b) — and that a) is incomparable to (c) from one standpoint. In my formulation of the problem, (b) is exactly equal to (c) by simple cluelessness (unlikely in practice but plausible in theory).
I thought of two ways you can try to hold on to complex cluelessness here and why they both ...
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Little bit late, but I've been reading about cluelessness and I think Lukas' example is a very good intuition pump against radical cluelessness and this counterpoint doesn't seem to work. The discussion moved elsewhere afterwards but this example strikes me as strong. In particular, I don't think it matters whether research typically has the side effect in practice, because it is plausible (at least in theory) to have a world where it doesn't.
To see this, take Lukas' above example except assume that "research" will be done without a side effect. For exampl...
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Interesting points to mull over, thanks for linking! I agree with the general vibe here as well as most of the core ideas such as the benefits of non-market research and that governance work seems especially valuable. But I think Nielsen is too dismissive of looking to positively influence the power of influencing the direction of work.
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