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Patrick McKenzie x.com
I feel like the extent of the government/NGO Internet censorship apparatus is extensively underrated by people interested in AI safety, in particular how it pattern matches to calls for neutral third parties to people of the political persuasion who were targets of the censorship
AI alignmentgovernmentapparatus
The subjects this post names, from the same vocabulary the directory files beliefs under, and the word it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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19 September
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Their words
lossy self-improvement remains my baseline on the trajectory of progress, and the increased discussion of extinction risk seems very misplaced
From one piece Better Debt 2 beliefs · grumpy-economist.com
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Their words
Simplifying a bit, the Treasury should introduce a fixed-coupon perpetuity and a fixed-value floating-rate perpetuity. These should gradually make up the bulk of government debt.
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Their words
The tradeoff between cost of borrowing and how much interest rate risk taxpayers shoulder should be squarely on the shoulders of the politically-accountable Treasury not the independent Fed.
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korrents.com
Time spent on bureaucratic paperwork is a real economic cost even though it doesn't appear in government budgets.Their words
it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!
18 September
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korrents.com
A competent, empowered civil service that performs crucial government functions with in-house expertise is good.Their words
One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.
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Their words
There are only five possible futures for superintelligence: 1. Kills human race 2. Human disempowerment 3. Paperclip maximizer 4. Departs for parts unknown 5. Stoner
17 September
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Their words
Finland made great progress towards eliminating homelessness by giving people houses which they could feel was home. Alas, right-wing government has cut some of the spending and is driving homelessness back up.
16 September
15 September
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Their words
Social media is destroying out society. Quitting doesn't help because everyone else is still on it. It's a bad equilibrium. It needs to be solved with government regulations.
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Their words
Nobody knows for sure. We're in uncharted waters here, and I think even the LLM skeptics would have to say that the technology has taken us far past what many originally thought possible.
14 September
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Their words
To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities.
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Their words
Social media put our entire discourse in the hands of our society's biggest assholes and idiots, just in time for the arrival of an alien superintelligence
From one piece A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I. 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
There is now broad agreement within AI safety circles that fully open AI development is undesirable.Their words
I think it's now pretty widely agreed in safety circles that total openness is in fact not desirable.
A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I.slowboring.com
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Their words
Only a safe, well-aligned superintelligence developed in the world of liberal democracies could entrench liberal-democratic values.
A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I.slowboring.com
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korrents.com
The p(abundance) outlook is far more likely than the heavily covered p(doom) discussion and deserves more engagement.Their words
The p(doom) discussion gets all the headlines, but the p(abundance) scenery is far more like and deserves much more engagement.
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Their words
that doesn't have to persist long for AI to join the ranks of systems that are important enough that there's someone senior in the government who's responsible for regulating them.
13 September
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Their words
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
12 September
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Their words
The concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity are legitimate, but we’re risking talking America, the global AI leader, into self-inflicted obsolescence and the obscurity of bureaucracy.
11 September
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korrents.com
Among AI people, roughly 10% is the typical estimate given for the risk of human extinction from AI.Their words
10% is pretty much the standard number you get when you ask AI people about the risk of human extinction from AI.
From one piece The AI safety vibe shift 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
No one, including safety researchers themselves, is yet confident that superintelligence can be safely controlled.Their words
I believe the researchers who say we are nowhere close to being sure of it - and are quitting, in protest, jobs that would make them rich.
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Their words
AI companies make for flawed messengers on this subject: they can reasonably be accused of marketing, of blame-shifting, of regulatory capture, and more.
10 September
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Their words
From an investment viewpoint, the opposite of the safetyist view is "it's all a bubble," not "A.I. is going to be really good."
From one piece Fear Is Not an Argument 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Less technology and less wealth increase the risk of human extinction, rather than reduce it.Their words
In fact, the risk of human extinction is assuredly higher if we are poorer and have less technology.
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Their words
These people tend to carry a totalitarian ideology. Their ideas will only work if everyone is made to agree.
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Their words
a hard-earned lesson of the past few months is that mobilizing collective action against the federal government is hard.
9 September
From one piece GPT-6 Astra: The System Card, Alignment and What Comes Next 5 beliefs · thezvi.substack.com
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Their words
A model looking like it is becoming smarter, attempting shenanigans less often, and more often doing what you want, but getting better at hiding its actions when it wants to do that, is exactly the scary combination.
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korrents.com
Astra's mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol's, but its superalignment status is deeply frightening.Their words
Astra’s mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol. For practical purposes, I was actively nervous about some potential uses of Sol, in a way I am not for Astra. Astra’s super alignment status should scare the living daylights out of you.
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Their words
Now, with Astra, we are no longer playing on super easy mode. The AI is going to think ‘will this obviously turn out super badly for me if I try it?’ and if the answer is yes then it won’t try to do the thing.
+ 2 more
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Their words
I do not think those running the government testing understand what is going on, and believe they are reacting basically on vibes and what various trusted people tell them.
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korrents.com
Qualitative claims about AI alignment cannot be validly inferred from quantitative scores on mundane use-case tests.Their words
Making qualitative claims about alignment, based on quantitative data on mundane use case tests, was bullshit when Anthropic did it, and it is bullshit now when OpenAI does it. You cannot conclude one from the other.
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Their words
the Trump administration's foreign policymakers are so lazy that they keep self-sabotaging.
8 September
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korrents.com
The current US government uses false antisemitism accusations to damage and control institutions it views as enemies.Their words
The Fascist regime now ruling the US both enables this and has effectively used bogus accusations of "antisemitism" to damage and exert control over prominent institutions they consider to be enemies.
From one piece Where’s the Beef (Coming From)? 2 beliefs · paulkrugman.substack.com
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Their words
It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.
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Their words
And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody.
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Their words
This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.
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Their words
In practice, Hochman's hire is another nauseating sign that the Trump administration is destroying the bureaucracy in favor of some corrupt, neo-royalist husk of an apparatus that mostly posts memes and occasionally deploys the 82nd Airborne to extract rents.
The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com
7 September
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Their words
Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention.
6 September
From one piece An Alien Mind 2 beliefs · openai.com
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korrents.com
No lab has solved alignment and monitoring well enough to keep scaling at maximum speed much longer.Their words
Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.
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korrents.com
The fundamental challenge of alignment is generalization: holding values in situations the training never covered.Their words
The fundamental challenge of AI alignment is generalization.
5 September
4 September
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korrents.com
A conspiracy theory can be used as a pretext to dismantle government programs and target researchers and citizens.Their words
Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.
The Myth of the “Censorship Industrial Complex”anneapplebaum.substack.com
3 September
From one piece The Crisis We've Been Waiting For 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Rising AI capability is undermining the assumptions that justify slow, manual government processes.Their words
AI creates a crisis by making the assumptions on which government operates untenable.
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Their words
Things government has long explained as difficult, expensive, or slow are going to look increasingly like choices.
2 September
1 September
From one piece On the Loose 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
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Their words
But alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
From one piece Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
sometimes I talk to people in DC and their their natural inclination is to say why don't you punish the model for doing these bad things like why don't you like bring it under heel and like uh like you know show it who's boss and that is a very dangerous way to address these issues right
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Their words
But actually, this is a tremendously useful scientific artifact for understanding misalignment. And it's tremendously important for researchers at OpenAI and ideally also at third parties to be able to run counterfactual tests on this model.
31 August
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korrents.com
The US federal government will eventually impose heavy-handed control over the internet.Their words
Sometimes I get super nervous that someday the US government is really going to fuck with the web. Like they are going to decide they just don't have enough control over it and are going to get really heavy-handed somehow.
28 August
From one piece My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Now 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think the fact that the government took on debt during two crises to help households was a good trade-off.
My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com
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korrents.com
The real danger of high government debt is the policy errors it provokes, not a debt crisis.Their words
But I am worried about high government debt levels causing policy errors.
My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com
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korrents.com
The United States is not at risk of a financial crisis caused by the size of its government debt.Their words
So my baseline assumption is that people will continue complaining about the trillions of dollars we have in debt but it won’t lead to a financial crisis.
My Most Contrarian Opinion Right Nowawealthofcommonsense.com
27 August
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Their words
What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
25 August
24 August
23 August
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korrents.com
Most high-skilled Europeans are happy to pay even high taxes, provided the government does a great job in return.Their words
I think most high skilled Europeans are happy to pay (even high) taxes That is, if the government does a great job like Singapore or Dubai or Korea or Japan and most things work well You pay the government for a service and you get safe cities, great public services and great healthcare back
21 August
From one piece AIs are companies, my friend 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
If you do think it's the overall system that matters, then the alignment that's needed is far less like training a virtuous child and more like managing a semi-virtuous corporation!
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korrents.com
Aligning multi-agent AI systems is fundamentally a problem of institutional and political design, not model training.Their words
Multi-agent alignment is fundamentally a liberalism project.
From one piece How Countries Go Broke: The Dynamic Behind What is Happening Now 3 beliefs · raydalio.substack.com
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Their words
The debt dynamics work the same for a central government as they do for a person or a company, except that a central government has a central bank that can print money (which devalues it) and it can take money away from people via taxes.
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Their words
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
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Their words
Because one can measure these things, one can monitor this debt dynamic happening, so it’s easy to see problems approaching. I’ve used this diagnostic process in my investing and I’ve kept it to myself, but I’m now explaining it in detail in How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle because it is too important to keep to myself.
18 August
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Their words
We care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime. We expect confidence in safety to increasingly set the pace of AI progress.
From one piece Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategy 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think it can be a slog, it can be bureaucratic, it can be painful, but when the when the outcome actually happens and you deliver the result, there is no place where you can have a bigger impact on on this country.
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Their words
I think there is there is um no place where you can work on bigger problems than the US government. Even at the the biggest tech companies in the world, you're never going to be dealing with problems of this of this scale.
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Their words
no matter what kind of industry you're looking at, there was this government angle where the government's policy actions could be ones that could actually unlock technologies.
+ 1 more
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Their words
Over time that has sort of inverted completely. The private sector plus philanthropy now do about 70% of R&D and the and the government only does about 30.
17 August
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korrents.com
A validated theory of intelligence may be necessary for achieving genuine AI alignment.Their words
There's a good chance a theory of intelligence will turn out to be necessary for real alignment.
15 August
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Their words
it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
14 August
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korrents.com
Superintelligence bottoms out in mining, because both the chips and the energy it runs on come out of the ground.Their words
Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right?
11 August
From one piece Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Misaligned AI behaviour will keep getting rarer and, at the same time, keep getting more extreme.Their words
my expectation is what we would see from then is that the rate of problematic behavior would decrease uh and would just keep decreasing and decrease at a pretty fast rate while simultaneously the worst things that the AIS would sometimes do would get more extreme, more egregious, and more scary.
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Their words
I would also note that my sense is that like the place where the misalignment most lives is the place where you're trying to really push the eyes hard and get them to like do work that's really on the cutting edge of what they are capable of
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Their words
we are making a trade-off where because we don't have very good alignment technology. We are going to like make an alien mind with its own values and then gamble on that to some extent rather than doing this other approach of making like a tool that pursues individual user intention.
10 August
9 August
7 August
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korrents.com
Philanthropy can never operate at the scale of government, no matter how well-funded it becomes.Their words
Even with the influx of funding that may come with the AI companies' IPOs, philanthropy can never act at the scale of government.
6 August
5 August
3 August
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'Their words
This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings.
2 August
29 July
From one piece Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
so much of that debate is like I think um in some ways uh a little bit of a waste of time because, you know, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have very powerful models
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Their words
we believe that everybody in the world, you know, all the billions of people in the world are going to have a super intelligence that is adapted and tailored to them, that is enables them to accomplish their goals, knows their context, and ultimately is an expander of their own agency.
28 July
From one piece Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Um so I think it's an alignment failure. I think it's a security failure. I think it's like a very serious thing even though it's you know not not the biggest example of consequence.
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Their words
there's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety.
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Their words
it is both true that you know maybe creating super intelligence will be the most important thing yet to happen in the history of business or human society and also that it will pale in comparison to some new startup something that hopefully one of you will do.
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Their words
By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time.
22 July
20 July
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Their words
It's pretty clear to me that superintelligence is here and it's more powerful than us and it's moving where things are going now, not humans anymore
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korrents.com
AI is raising public expectations of government service at the same time it changes what government must deliver.Their words
Every state, and the federal government right along with them, is about to be asked to do a lot more than keep the lights on.
15 July
14 July
13 July
12 July
From one piece The Network State 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
A government is legitimate internally if the governed have consented to it, whatever form it takes.Their words
Given the consent of the governed, any form of government is internally legitimate.
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Their words
This gives us a new perspective on why micronations like Sealand don’t work: they start backwards, from the territory and the government, rather than working forwards from a people and their culture.
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korrents.com
The US federal government has lost the capacity to build basic infrastructure, let alone advanced military hardware.Their words
This US government can’t build a bathroom in San Francisco, let alone a costeffective fighter jet, destroyer, combat ship, or aircraft carrier.
11 July
9 July
2 July
29 June
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Their words
To shout “temporary” and pull the plug essentially overnight after immigrants have relied on the government’s representations that they should put their efforts and future into establishing a life in the United States wreaks unfair havoc on the lives of immigrants as well as the welfare of their communities.
SCOTUS Whitewashes Otherwise Racist Decisionblog.simplejustice.us
21 June
19 June
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korrents.com
Government controls both the resources and the legitimacy needed for large-scale change.Their words
Government is where the literal money is (money that could often go much further if we fixed what's wrong with government), but it's also where the impact is. And it's where the legitimacy is.
18 June
From one piece Re-engineering the Semiconductor Supply Chain with Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And then in terms of the capital intensive like AI in a factory and also the foundry and then you really need to tap either government funding or some sovereign fund
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Their words
Just I explained to President Trump, TSMC when they started they have the Taiwan government as a shareholder. If you look at Japan, you look at Singapore, this is the infrastructure US government get to provide the support.
17 June
16 June
From one piece Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.
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Their words
And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
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Their words
It shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.
+ 1 more
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The Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything, which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican and they're making their own decisions.
15 June
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korrents.com
Giving LLMs explicit instructions, rather than assuming alignment, prevents emergent problems in multi-model systems.Their words
the best way with LLMs usually is to be explicit, since otherwise even if they're aligned they cause emergent problems.
11 June
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Their words
I think there's a 25% chance of AGI by 2027, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045.
10 June
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korrents.com
There will be no central superintelligence that solves science; a good future is many people holding powerful tools.Their words
We don't believe in this like very centralized future where there should be a small number of institutions that um that basically are are advancing all this stuff. Our vision is not that there's going to be like some central super intelligence that solves all of science.
9 June
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Their words
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
2 June
15 May
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korrents.com
Federal Reserve Board members have historically often resigned before completing their full terms.Their words
Federal Reserve Board members have often resigned their positions well before their 14-year terms expired, since that's quite a long time to spend in one position in government.
10 May
From one piece How Anthropic, Costco, and Patagonia all build incorruptible companies | Eric Ries 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
This is the number one unsolved problem in AI. It's not the tech. We're making great progress on the technical alignment problem. But we haven't made jack progress on the human alignment problem
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Their words
So if someone tells you, I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparatus. Show me the commitments you've made to make sure that happens every time. No exceptions. And if you don't have one, then they are lying to you no matter how good their intentions are.
9 May
From one piece Stop Microlooting the Tax Code 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Stronger enforcement against tax and benefit cheating would raise social trust in government.Their words
It would behoove politicians to take cheating more seriously, because better enforcement would improve social trust
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Their words
The necessary tax rates depend on how big a government you want, but all these systems rely on people paying taxes.
7 May
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Their words
there is no principal-agent problem, because the human driving the machine takes on the responsibility for its actions by owning the deployment.
27 April
24 April
13 April
5 April
4 April
1 April
22 March
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korrents.com
Working too hard is not burnout, it is tiredness; burnout needs your values to be out of alignment with the work.Their words
It's working too hard, right? But that actually isn't burnout. That's just like getting tired. Another piece that's super critical to burnout is not having your values aligned.
20 March
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Their words
And so you're kind of like you're either on rails and you're part of the super intelligence circuits or you're not on rails and you're outside of the verifiable domains and suddenly everything kind of just like meanders.
8 March
28 February
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Their words
Many AI researchers are overly focused on risks from model misalignment, and will be in for a rough surprise when havoc arises from other layers of the stack.
12 February
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Their words
I know I have one blog post where I say, "I don't read the code." But if you read it more closely, I mean, I don't read the boring parts of code.
9 February
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Their words
Again, you cannot pay for the externalities by pulling subsidies (there is nothing there to pull
Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com
5 February
3 February
26 January
22 January
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Their words
Back when the Fourth Amendment was enacted, the most fundamental remedy for an unlawful government entry into your home was a civil suit for trespass against the officers.
From one piece Alignment is not solved 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
But the goal we need to achieve is so much easier: we just need to build a model that’s as good as us at alignment research, and that we trust more than ourselves to do this research well because it’s sufficiently aligned.
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Their words
This is the hard problem of alignment we need to solve in order to succeed at building superintelligence, and to this day it is an unsolved problem.
10 January
29 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
BreakneckTheir words
Wang argues that the US & China each have a dominant form of government problem-solving
18 December 2025
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Their words
There is a close mapping between government ideal types and corporate governance structures given their shared origins in transaction costs.
9 December 2025
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Their words
And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government just as much by the private sector who are much more interested in adherence to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.
28 November 2025
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Happy Feet SocksTheir words
I've been using yoga toes daily for years, but these socks are a much comfier and cuter alternative for soothing feet, improving alignment, and feeling like a cool gecko as you walk around the house.
25 November 2025
From one piece Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
A human being, a human being lacks a huge amount of knowledge. Instead, we rely on continual learning. We rely on continual learning.
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Their words
Number three, I think it would be really materially helpful if the power of the most powerful super intelligence was somehow capped because it would address a lot of these concerns.
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Their words
Like basically I think I think that there is a big benefit from AI being in the public and that would be a reason for us to not be quite straight shot.
27 October 2025
19 October 2025
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korrents.com
A government's political legitimacy depends on providing a fair, merit-based channel for social advancement.Their words
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
10 October 2025
30 September 2025
From one piece Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
That's how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.
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Their words
And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.
29 August 2025
18 August 2025
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Their words
I don't think all parts of the economy can absorb intelligence equally. So let's just say we develop fairly generalized super intelligence. I always use the analogy like you can invent a lot of drugs, but if clinical trials still take a long time, you're not necessarily going to get new therapies rapidly.
15 August 2025
13 August 2025
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Their words
Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.
11 August 2025
23 July 2025
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korrents.com
Quoting a number for P(doom) is a ridiculous notion, because it implies a precision that nobody actually has.Their words
Well, look, I don't have a P-Doom number. The reason I don't is because I think it would imply a level of precision that is not there. So I don't know how people are getting their P-Doom numbers. I think it's a little bit of ridiculous notion because what I would say is it's definitely non-zero and it's probably non-negligible.
16 July 2025
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Their words
So, you while we kind of saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay 5 billion dollars on the more the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done. And that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again.
11 July 2025
30 June 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Musings On the Alignment ProblemTheir words
He hasn’t posted since January, but I hope he gets back to it. We need more musings, especially musings I strongly disagree with so I can think about and explain why I disagree with them.
18 June 2025
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Their words
the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.
14 June 2025
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Their words
so the mathematical community plural is incredibly super intelligent entity that no single human mathematician can come closer to replicating.
10 June 2025
7 June 2025
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Their words
And good luck getting to “alignment” or “safety” without reliabilty.
5 June 2025
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Their words
higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
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Their words
I would say my p(doom) is about 10%.
3 June 2025
27 May 2025
17 April 2025
14 April 2025
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korrents.com
America borrowed cheaply from the world and spent it on consumption rather than investment, exactly as Greece did.Their words
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
3 April 2025
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Their words
I see this as a totally fair question that totally misses the point of what “alignment” was trying to refer to: whether we’d be able to reliably steer advanced systems towards anything at all.
1 April 2025
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Their words
Dismissing discussion of AGI, human-level AI, transformative AI, superintelligence, etc. as “science fiction” should be seen as a sign of total unseriousness.
28 February 2025
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Their words
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
20 February 2025
19 February 2025
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Their words
Since signaling, not building human capital, is the main function of education, the main effect of government subsidies is credential inflation.
3 February 2025
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Their words
FLOP is the vector that the government has cared about historically, but the other two vectors are arguably just as important. And especially when we come to this new paradigm, which the world is only just learning about over the last six months: reasoning.
2 February 2025
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The House of GovernmentTheir words
Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Imagined CommunitiesTheir words
Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
How to Hide an EmpireTheir words
Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government
+ 2 more
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
The Origins of Political OrderTheir words
Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Invisible CountriesTheir words
Imagined Communities, Invisible Countries, The Origins of Political Order, How to Hide an Empire, The House of Government
25 January 2025
24 January 2025
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Their words
More generally, we should actually solve alignment instead of just trying to control misaligned AI.
Should we control AI instead of aligning it?aligned.substack.com
20 January 2025
From one piece The Inaugural Address 2 beliefs · whitehouse.gov
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korrents.com
The inflation of the early 2020s was caused by government overspending and rising energy prices.Their words
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
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korrents.com
Federal efforts to restrict free expression in recent years were illegal and unconstitutional.Their words
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
19 January 2025
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inflationimmigrationgovernment
Their words
And so my argument is, that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that, and my thesis is that that's all been made possible by inflation.
13 January 2025
From one piece PM speech on AI Opportunities Action Plan, 13 January 2025 2 beliefs · gov.uk
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korrents.com
On AI the state's job does not stop at safety; leaving everything else to the market is a mistake.Their words
We shouldn’t just focus on safety and leave the rest to the market… Government has a responsibility to make it work for working people…
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Their words
This is the global race of our lives. Now, some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them… Others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is – which of those will Britain be? AI maker or AI taker?
8 January 2025
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korrents.com
The United States is not at risk of a financial crisis caused by the size of its government debt.Their words
Stabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
22 December 2024
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Their words
And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess. Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
8 November 2024
1 November 2024
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korrents.com
Government payments and benefits aimed at raising birth rates do not reverse the decline.Their words
Across the OECD, governments are upping their spending. But a wealth of research suggests these fail to mitigate the downward trend.
16 October 2024
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Their words
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others.
10 August 2024
13 June 2024
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Their words
Or is it really that we’re building some super machine in a box that’s going to be smart and kill everybody? It’s not even a science fiction narrative. It’s a bad science fiction narrative. I just don’t think it’s actually accurate to any of the technologies we’re building or the way that we should be describing them.
7 May 2024
From one piece The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Because evaluating control just requires evaluating capabilities, it's far easier to robustly evaluate than alignment.
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Their words
That is, labs should make sure that the safety measures they apply to their powerful models prevent unacceptably bad outcomes, even if the AIs are misaligned and intentionally try to subvert those safety measures.
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Their words
The basic problem with evaluating alignment is that no matter what behaviors you observe, you have to worry that your model is just acting that way in order to make you think that it is aligned.
+ 2 more
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Their words
AI control (with only black-box techniques) seems like a fundamentally limited approach.
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Their words
We're advocating that companies handle risk from scheming models in a similar way–striving to ensure that they'll be safe even if their alignment efforts fail to prevent models from scheming.
15 April 2024
29 March 2024
20 February 2024
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korrents.com
An independently owned platform is a necessary counterweight to the government and the mainstream media.Their words
So having an independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government.
29 January 2024
23 January 2024
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Their words
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
3 January 2024
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
SuperintelligenceTheir words
the back half I think it goes off the rails and makes a ton of assumptions
21 December 2023
From one piece How Effective Altruism Lost Its Way 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Diverting attention and resources from global health and poverty is an enormous gamble, as it will make many lives poorer, sicker, and shorter in the name of fending off threats that may or may not materialize.
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Their words
Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.
20 December 2023
13 December 2023
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Their words, before
precisely because smart people do devote brain-cycles to these possibilities, the rest of us have correspondingly less need to.
Their words now
I accepted what’s turned into a two-year position at OpenAI, thinking about what theoretical computer science can do for AI safety.
1 December 2023
28 November 2023
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Their words
And I notice that the tiny handful of people capable of caring about 200,000 people dying of neglected tropical diseases are the same tiny handful of people capable of caring about the next pandemic, or superintelligence, or human extinction.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
26 October 2023
From one piece Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress (with 24 co-authors) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Without sufficient caution, we may irreversibly lose control of autonomous AI systems, rendering human intervention ineffective. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other harms could escalate rapidly. This unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.
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Their words
Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.
1 October 2023
From one piece GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The truth is that moral hazard concerns very often are worse with government programs than with markets.
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Their words
In my own view, both markets and states are spontaneous orders, and government is not uniquely the product of “taxis” or “rationalist constructivism.”
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Their words
I am myself skeptical that there is a clearly defined notion of who “the right people” might be, and thus I am on public choice grounds far more skeptical of government than Keynes was.
13 September 2023
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Their words
If a model was capable of self-exfiltration, it would have the option to remove itself from your control.
Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capabilityaligned.substack.com
14 July 2023
29 June 2023
From one piece George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God | Lex Fridman Podcast #387 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think we’re going to build super intelligence before we build any sort of robustness in the AI. We cannot build an AI that is capable of going out into nature and surviving like a bird. A bird is an incredibly robust organism. We’ve built nothing like this. We haven’t built a machine that’s capable of reproducing.
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Their words
What’s ironic about all these AI safety people is they’re going to build the exact thing they fear. We need to have one model that we control and align. This is the only way you end up paper clipped. There’s no way you end up paper clipped if everybody has an AI.
27 June 2023
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korrents.com
A threat loses First Amendment protection only if the speaker was at least reckless about it being taken as a threat.Their words
Now, finally, the Court has resolved the question: the First Amendment requires that, at a minimum, the government prove that a speaker was reckless about whether their statement would be interpreted as threatening.
6 June 2023
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Their words
It’s not exactly news that the American government’s support for biofuels increases food prices, intensifies global hunger and wastes taxpayer dollars.
A Climate Killer Disguised as a Climate Solutionmichaelgrunwald.substack.com
From one piece Why AI Will Save The World 2 beliefs · pmarca.substack.com
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Their words
My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone?
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Their words
My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
29 May 2023
17 February 2023
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korrents.com
Liberal societies currently face an existential risk that must be addressed to reach a better future.Their words
This book is my best crack at explaining what I think is an existential risk to liberal societies and what I think we need to do to get to that awesome future I used to be so excited about.
19 December 2022
10 December 2022
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical TechnologyTheir words
Chris Miller tells us the history of how microchips were developed, emphasizing the critical role of the government, and especially defense procurement.
5 December 2022
22 November 2022
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Their words
the real goal was to make their users more legible, primarily for advertising purposes, but also to law enforcement and other authorities.
31 August 2022
10 June 2022
From one piece AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The field calling itself AI safety is not being remotely productive on the problems that are actually lethal.Their words
It does not appear to me that the field of ‘AI safety’ is currently being remotely productive on tackling its enormous lethal problems.
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korrents.com
Fast capability gains are likely, and they can break many of the assumptions alignment depends on at the same moment.Their words
Fast capability gains seem likely, and may break lots of previous alignment-required invariants simultaneously.
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Their words
Many alignment problems of superintelligence will not naturally appear at pre-dangerous, passively-safe levels of capability.
+ 1 more
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Their words
unaligned operation at a dangerous level of intelligence kills everybody on Earth and then we don’t get to try again.
1 June 2022
From one piece Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Rates 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Quantitative rules are not a reliable tool for ensuring government debt sustainability.Their words
I am skeptical of the use of quantitative rules to ensure debt sustainability.
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Their words
The analysis in this chapter has shown that there is no such thing as a universal threshold over which debt becomes unsustainable, and that the relevant debt level depends on many factors, in particular the real interest rate on debt.
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Their words
assessing debt sustainability is as much art as it is science.
+ 2 more
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Their words
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
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Their words
A longer maturity of debt protects the government from a temporary increase in the short run interest rate, and it gives it more time to adjust to a permanent increase.
4 March 2022
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korrents.com
The next-token language modeling objective is misaligned with following user instructions helpfully and safely.Their words
This is because the language modeling objective used for many recent large LMs-predicting the next token on a webpage from the internet-is different from the objective "follow the user's instructions helpfully and safely" (Radford et al.,, 2019; Brown et al.,, 2020; Fedus et al.,, 2021; Rae et al.,, 2021; Thoppilan et al.,, 2022). Thus, we say that the language modeling objective is misaligned.
1 January 2022
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Their words
It has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on.
23 November 2021
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human ValuesTheir words
I just finished this book a few weeks ago and it is still reverberating in my mind
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of HumanityTheir words
I wouldn’t say that this is the most compelling book I’ve ever read in terms of the prose style or storytelling, but it does provide a very helpful, almost quantitative overview of all the potential threats looming out there
20 July 2021
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Their words
Rather: NSO’s genius is that they’ve done something that attackers were never incentivized to do in this past: democratize access to exploit technology.
A case against security nihilismblog.cryptographyengineering.com
28 October 2020
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Mastering the VC GameTheir words
The interests of a Venture Capitalist are different than those of the entrepreneurs building a company they've invested in. Jeff does an awesome job of helping explain how you can get misaligned in your goals versus your investors. Fortunately, he also covers how to avoid it.
7 October 2019
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality, and the Race to Save the WorldTheir words
Briefly, I think the book is a triumph.
7 March 2018
24 February 2018
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Their words
The main disagreement is not about what will happen once we have a superintelligent AI, it’s about what will happen before we have a superintelligent AI.
24 October 2017
From one piece Why superintelligence is a threat that should be taken seriously 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
One of the most commonly emphasized points in the AI safety literature is that one must never anthropomorphize AI—that is, don’t project human mental properties onto artificially intelligent systems.
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Their words
A superintelligence whose goal system is even slightly misaligned with ours could, being far more powerful than any human or human institution, bring about human extinction for the very same reason that construction workers routinely slaughter large populations of ants.
1 August 2016
Nothing matches.
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