Yep, e.g. donations sooner are better for getting endorsements. Especially for Bores and somewhat for Wiener, I think.

Maybe the logistic success curve should actually be the cumulative normal success curve.

There's often a logistic curve for success probabilities, you know? The distances are measured in multiplicative odds, not additive percentage points. You can't take a project like this and assume that by putting in some more hard work, you can increase the absolute chance of success by 10%. More like, the odds of this project's failure versus success start out as 1,000,000:1, and if we're very polite and navigate around Mr. Topaz's sense that he is higher-status than us and manage to explain a few tips to him without ever sounding like we think we know something he doesn't, we can quintuple his chances of success and send the odds to 200,000:1. Which is to say that in the world of percentage points, the odds go from 0.0% to 0.0%. That's one way to look at the “law of continued failure”.

If you had the kind of project where the fundamentals implied, say, a 15% chance of success, you’d then be on the right part of the logistic curve, and in that case it could make a lot of sense to hunt for ways to bump that up to a 30% or 80% chance.

I observe that https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BqwXYFtpetFxqkxip/mikhail-samin-s-shortform?commentId=dtmeRXPYkqfDGpaBj isn't frontpage-y but remains on the homepage even after many mods have seen it. This suggests that the mods were just patching the hack. (But I don't know what other shortforms they've hidden, besides the political ones, if any.)

fwiw I agree with most but not all details, and I agree that Anthropic's commitments and policy advocacy have a bad track record, but I think that Anthropic capabilities is nevertheless net positive, because Anthropic has way more capacity and propensity to do safety stuff than other frontier AI companies.

I wonder what you believe about Anthropic's likelihood of noticing risks from misalignment relative to other companies, or of someday spending >25% of internal compute on (automated) safety work.

I think "Overton window" is a pretty load-bearing concept for many LW users and AI people — it's their main model of policy change. Unfortunately there's lots of other models of policy change. I don't think "Overton window" is particularly helpful or likely-to-cause-you-to-notice-relevant-stuff-and-make-accurate-predictions. (And separately people around here sometimes incorrectly use "expand the Overton window" to just mean with "advance AI safety ideas in government.") I don't have time to write this up; maybe someone else should (or maybe there already exists a good intro to the study of why some policies happen and persist while others don't^[1]).

Some terms: policy windows (and "multiple streams"), punctuated equilibrium, policy entrepreneurs, path dependence and feedback (yes this is a real concept in political science, e.g. policies that cause interest groups to depend on them are less likely to be reversed), gradual institutional change, framing/narrative/agenda-setting.

Related point: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SrNDFF28xKakMukvz/tlevin-s-quick-takes?commentId=aGSpWHBKWAaFzubba.

1. ^{^}

   I liked the book Policy Paradox in college. (Example claim: perceived policy problems are strategically constructed through political processes; how issues are framed—e.g. individual vs collective responsibility—determines which solutions seem appropriate.) I asked Claude for suggestions on a shorter intro and I didn't find the suggestions helpful.

   I guess I think if you work on government stuff and you [don't have poli sci background / aren't familiar with concepts like "multiple streams"] you should read Policy Paradox (although the book isn't about that particular concept).

I guess I'll write non-frontpage-y quick takes as posts instead then :(

I'd like to be able to see such quick takes on the homepage, like how I can see personal blogposts on the homepage (even though logged-out users can't).

Are you hiding them from everyone? Can I opt into seeing them?

I failed to find a way to import to Slack without doing it one by one.

Bores knows, at least for people who donate via certain links. For example, the link in this post is https://secure.actblue.com/donate/boresai?refcode=lw rather than https://secure.actblue.com/donate/boresweb.