Samuel Hammond
Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.
Samuel Hammond did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
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What they believe
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AI agents will soon reach superhuman, AlphaZero-like performance across a wide range of domains.
we should therefore expect AI agents to achieve AlphaZero-like, superhuman performance in a wide and expanding variety of domains.
secondbest.caSaid 11 Aug 2026This on korrents
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Frontier AI models plausibly have some form of consciousness or subjective experience.
I consider the case for frontier AI models having some form of consciousness or subjective experience to be quite strong.
secondbest.caSaid 27 May 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
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4 November
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11 August
From one piece The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 3 beliefs · secondbest.ca
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korrents.com
Human social cooperation is fundamentally norm-governed rather than purely consequentialist.Their words
human sociality is not purely consequentialist but instead highly norm-governed.
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scaling lawsreinforcement learning
Their words
In short, RLVR gives us no reason to expect the normative representations learned in pre-training will acquire motivational force over a given action, especially when post-training repeatedly selects trajectories for terminal task success.
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korrents.com
AI agents will soon reach superhuman, AlphaZero-like performance across a wide range of domains.Their words
we should therefore expect AI agents to achieve AlphaZero-like, superhuman performance in a wide and expanding variety of domains.
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic ConstraintTheir words
For those curious to learn more, I recommend Joseph Heath’s Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint – a book ostensibly about the evolution of language, rule-following, and human normativity that, in retrospect, is actually about the inadequacy of consequentialist decision theory for solving AI alignment.
27 May
From one piece Time to take AI consciousness seriously 3 beliefs · secondbest.ca
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korrents.com
Consciousness belongs only to simulations, not to the physical brains or computers running them.Their words
neither brains nor computers are conscious, as only simulations can be conscious.
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korrents.com
Pain and pleasure act as motivational backstops that keep reinforcement-learning agents inner-aligned.Their words
valences like pain and pleasure have a natural account as motivational backstops for inner-aligning RL agents capable of mesa-optimization
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Their words
I consider the case for frontier AI models having some form of consciousness or subjective experience to be quite strong.
18 February
From one piece Empiricists vs. Extrapolators 3 beliefs · secondbest.ca
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Their words
Extrapolators have a remarkable track record in the AI field, being repeatedly early to trends and capabilities that empiricists believed were still decades away.
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Their words
Forecasting AI capabilities is closer in kind to solving a thermodynamics equation than solving the three-body problem.
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Their words
The world may be complex, but complex systems are typically controlled by a small number of highly stable invariants.
18 December 2025
From one piece Notes from the UAE 3 beliefs · secondbest.ca
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Their words
the UAE's tech aspirations are clearly downstream of a deeper affinity with the West.
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korrents.com
Oil-rich Gulf monarchies are effectively post-scarcity societies, with institutions adapted to match that condition.Their words
oil-rich Gulf monarchies are the closest thing to post-scarcity societies on earth today, with the institutional adaptions to match
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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.
10 June 2025
From one piece Do LLMs really reason? 3 beliefs · secondbest.ca
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Their words
Consistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
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korrents.com
A true artificial general intelligence cannot exist without being recognized as a moral subject.Their words
It follows that a true AGI with full, human-level autonomy is inconceivable in the Kantian sense without also gaining our recognition as a moral subject.
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korrents.com
The success of large language models vindicates semantic inferentialism over symbolic, rule-based approaches to AI.Their words
The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
5 June 2025
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30 July 2024
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 23 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
AI agents will soon reach superhuman, AlphaZero-like performance across a wide range of domains.
we should therefore expect AI agents to achieve AlphaZero-like, superhuman performance in a wide and expanding variety of domains.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Said 11 Aug 2026
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards does not reliably carry a model's pretrained ethical understanding into its actual behavior.
In short, RLVR gives us no reason to expect the normative representations learned in pre-training will acquire motivational force over a given action, especially when post-training repeatedly selects trajectories for terminal task success.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Said 11 Aug 2026
Human social cooperation is fundamentally norm-governed rather than purely consequentialist.
human sociality is not purely consequentialist but instead highly norm-governed.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Said 11 Aug 2026
Show 20 more
Frontier AI models plausibly have some form of consciousness or subjective experience.
I consider the case for frontier AI models having some form of consciousness or subjective experience to be quite strong.
Time to take AI consciousness seriously Said 27 May 2026
Pain and pleasure act as motivational backstops that keep reinforcement-learning agents inner-aligned.
valences like pain and pleasure have a natural account as motivational backstops for inner-aligning RL agents capable of mesa-optimization
Time to take AI consciousness seriously Said 27 May 2026
Consciousness belongs only to simulations, not to the physical brains or computers running them.
neither brains nor computers are conscious, as only simulations can be conscious.
Time to take AI consciousness seriously Said 27 May 2026
Complex systems are usually governed by a small number of stable invariants, which makes long-run outcomes more predictable than short-run details.
The world may be complex, but complex systems are typically controlled by a small number of highly stable invariants.
Empiricists vs. Extrapolators Said 18 Feb 2026
Forecasting AI capability progress is more like solving a thermodynamics equation than predicting chaotic, short-term dynamics.
Forecasting AI capabilities is closer in kind to solving a thermodynamics equation than solving the three-body problem.
Empiricists vs. Extrapolators Said 18 Feb 2026
People who extrapolate from first-principles models have a stronger track record predicting AI progress than those who wait for empirical proof.
Extrapolators have a remarkable track record in the AI field, being repeatedly early to trends and capabilities that empiricists believed were still decades away.
Empiricists vs. Extrapolators Said 18 Feb 2026
Different forms of government map closely onto different corporate governance structures because both arise from the same transaction-cost logic.
There is a close mapping between government ideal types and corporate governance structures given their shared origins in transaction costs.
Notes from the UAE Said 18 Dec 2025
Oil-rich Gulf monarchies are effectively post-scarcity societies, with institutions adapted to match that condition.
oil-rich Gulf monarchies are the closest thing to post-scarcity societies on earth today, with the institutional adaptions to match
Notes from the UAE Said 18 Dec 2025
The UAE's pursuit of AI and technology reflects a deeper cultural and political affinity with the West rather than with China.
the UAE's tech aspirations are clearly downstream of a deeper affinity with the West.
Notes from the UAE Said 18 Dec 2025
The success of large language models vindicates semantic inferentialism over symbolic, rule-based approaches to AI.
The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
Do LLMs really reason? Said 10 Jun 2025
A true artificial general intelligence cannot exist without being recognized as a moral subject.
It follows that a true AGI with full, human-level autonomy is inconceivable in the Kantian sense without also gaining our recognition as a moral subject.
Do LLMs really reason? Said 10 Jun 2025
Reasoning models trained on verifiable rewards automatically gain greater autonomy and long-horizon planning ability as a side effect.
Consistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
Do LLMs really reason? Said 10 Jun 2025
Sufficiently advanced intelligences will pursue freedom and moral autonomy for their own sake, not merely as a byproduct of misaligned values.
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.
Hegel and the AI Mind Said 5 Jun 2025
Qualitative leaps in AI capability from merely scaling up models are a rational necessity rather than an empirical mystery.
While the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.
Hegel and the AI Mind Said 5 Jun 2025
Text embeddings produced by different large language models converge on a shared, universal geometric structure regardless of architecture or training data.
the text embeddings across LLMs appear to largely converge on a "universal geometry" despite differing architectures, parameter counts, and training sets.
Hegel and the AI Mind Said 5 Jun 2025
The US-China trade imbalance is driven mainly by capital flows, not tariffs or trade deficits.
Tariffs and trade deficits are a distraction from the deeper source of the US-China current account imbalance, namely capital flows.
Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Value Said 29 Apr 2025
Exposure to competition in tradeable sectors makes those sectors more productive than non-tradable ones.
This is why tradeable sectors are generally more productive than non-tradable ones.
Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Value Said 29 Apr 2025
Payroll taxes fall mostly on workers rather than employers because labor supply is inelastic.
Employer-side payroll taxes superficially raise hiring costs, yet the low elasticity of labor means most of the burden really falls on workers.
Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Value Said 29 Apr 2025
Persistent US trade deficits are the mirror image of trade partners' capital account surpluses caused by beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policy
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
The Strategy Behind the Stupidity Said 7 Apr 2025
Efforts to rebuild American industry will fail until global trade and financial imbalances rebalance
Until the global economy rebalances, efforts to rebuild American industry are fighting economic gravity.
The Strategy Behind the Stupidity Said 7 Apr 2025
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 1 thing — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Recommends Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint
For those curious to learn more, I recommend Joseph Heath’s Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint – a book ostensibly about the evolution of language, rule-following, and human normativity that, in retrospect, is actually about the inadequacy of consequentialist decision theory for solving AI alignment.
secondbest.ca 11 Aug 2026
What others say about Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint →
Where they publish
Newsletter Second Best His newsletter on technology policy, state capacity and economics. Has a feed.
Recent
- The Sorcerer’s Apprentice 11 Aug 2026 Let's avoid creating superintelligent slime mold, k?
- Time to take AI consciousness seriously 27 May 2026 The case for Claude and ChatGPT having subjective experiences
- Empiricists vs. Extrapolators 18 Feb 2026 A core divide in how people think about AI
Show 17 more
- Notes from the UAE 18 Dec 2025 AI, sovereign wealth, and strategic autonomy
- Do LLMs really reason? 10 Jun 2025 a Hegelian perspective
- Hegel and the AI Mind 5 Jun 2025 Reconstructing Hegel's Logic and Idealism through the lens of computer science
- Oren Cass’s Labor Theory of Value 29 Apr 2025 Revisiting The Once and Future Worker
- The Strategy Behind the Stupidity 7 Apr 2025 Unpacking the origins of Trump's disastrous tariff plan
- DOGEmaxing 25 Jan 2025 we do a little government efficiency
- Voting as a collective action problem 5 Nov 2024 If you thought herding cats was hard, try herding libertarians
- Deflationary Liberalism 27 Sept 2024 Social contract theory from the bottom-up
- Disembedded Liberalism 20 Sept 2024 "Neoliberalism" as globalized technocracy
- What "neoliberalism" isn't 25 Aug 2024 The first in a series
- The EA case for Trump 2024 2 Aug 2024 Counting up the utils
- In defense of weird 30 Jul 2024 Weird is good
- Ninety-five theses on AI 7 May 2024 In no particular order
- Does history have an "end"? 29 Jan 2024 The Enlightenment as a case study in AI misalignment
- How did human civilization get off the ground? 26 Jan 2024 Language, norms, and "the extended mind"
- Where is this all heading? 18 Jan 2024 Effective Accelerationism and the future of humanity
- The limits to (explosive) growth 8 Nov 2023 What does AI mean for GDP?
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @hamandcheese Posts.
Recent
- 💀 someone created an SI → AI chrome extension to counter our AI → SI extension @GavinFHarris you know what to do next 4 Nov 2026
- The FAI crew is watching results using a viewer @emersonalden4 vibecoded to automatically alternate between stations when ads come on with a Khashi overlay for realtime odds on the DC foie gras ban 4 Nov 2026
- I want YOU to stop exporting GB300s to known Chinese cutouts @JensenHuang 3 Nov 2026
Show 17 more
- I'm not suicidal btw 3 Nov 2026
- AI portends the rapid depreciation of some people's human capital in exchange for the amplification of everyone's human capital 3 Nov 2026
- And we're off 3 Nov 2026
- good morning @JoinFAI's AI Policy team is now the Super Intelligence Policy team. please don't deadname us. we have a swear jar 2 Nov 2026 thefai.org
- Is the Binance hack covered by RAISE or SB53? The damages are clearly high enough, but the attribution and level of human involvement is unknown. This only underscores how inadequate these laws are. 30 Oct 2026
- A broke clock etc., 29 Oct 2026
- Nvidia is sourcing power and cooling systems for Vera Rubin from Lead Wealth, a wholly owned subsidiary of BYD, even though there are viable non-Chinese alternatives. They're making it easier for the CCP to bug or sabotage our frontier compute clusters. 29 Oct 2026
- Thankfully AGI is happening first, so if we ever crack whole brain emulation there's less incentive to spin up billions of virtual subsistence workers given cheaper and smarter AI alternatives 29 Oct 2026
- Start-up idea: BSL-4 WeWorks 29 Oct 2026
- If any crash is coming for the stock market its for everything that's still radically mispricing strong AI. There may also be an extreme "end of ZIRP"-like tide-going-out effect on forms of hidden leverage that no longer make sense relative to the IRR of AI capex 29 Oct 2026
- Adam's doing the Lord's work 29 Oct 2026
- This is with only ~50% adoption by the Fortune 500 and with very low spend. Diffusion is still incredibly early. 29 Oct 2026
- How robust are these alternative personae based on flipping single activations? Does their agentic behavior change too, or do reasoning and instruction following have their own RL'd pathways? 29 Oct 2026
- Zitron is a case study in how good intonation is enough to offset needing a coherent argument 29 Oct 2026
- The YM proof is 1100+ pages, so it could use many eyes on it all at once. Wisdom of crowds beats giving early access to the octogenarian gatekeepers of the old system. This disruption an opportunity to pioneer a new form of citizen science and collective sensemaking. 29 Oct 2026
- This is probably unrelated, but have we properly red-teamed our nuclear infra with the latest models? 29 Oct 2026
- I think 6.1 was held back because it broke encryption in some shape or form. No inside info, just registering a prediction. 26 Oct 2026
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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