Balsa Policy Institute chose as its first mission to lay groundwork for the potential repeal, or partial repeal, of section 27 of the Jones Act of 1920. I believe that this is an important cause both for its practical and symbolic impacts. The Jones Act is the ultimate embodiment of our failures as a nation. After 100 years, we do almost no trade between our ports via the oceans, and we build almost no oceangoing ships. Everything the Jones Act supposedly set out to protect, it has...

This is a link post.Thanks to Kaj Sotala, Brian Toomey, Stag Lynn, Ethan Kuntz, and Anna Salamon. There's no way that chronic depression, self-loathing, poor agency, or muscle tension could be optimal… right? Jake was depressed for 6 months. He also felt horrible every time he interacted with other people because of his emotional insecurities. So without knowing how to outgrow his insecurities, his system basically had two options: Interact with other people — and constantly feel...

Epistemic Status: 13 years working as a therapist for a wide variety of populations, 5 of them working with rationalists and EA clients. 7 years teaching and directing at over 20 rationality camps and workshops. This is an extremely short and colloquially written form of points that could be expanded on to fill a book, and there is plenty of nuance to practically everything here, but I am extremely confident of the core points in this frame, and have used it to help many people break out of...

“The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by ~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10x-100x human speed. … We could summarize this as a ‘country of geniuses in a datacenter’.” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Machines of Loving Grace “Let's say each copy of GPT-4 is producing 10 words per second. It turns out they would be able to run something like 300,000 copies of...

This post is mainly about a design concept for far-future large space habitats. some proposed designs As you can see on Wikipedia, many space habitat designs have been proposed. Below are some that I thought were worth mentioning. current space stations Obviously, space stations with long-term occupants have already been made, the biggest being the ISS. issue: small modules Each launch lifts a complete cylindrical module, and then the modules are assembled. This limits module diameter,...

All quotes, unless otherwise marked, are Tolkien's words as printed in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition. All emphases mine. Machinery is Power is Evil Writing to his son Michael in the RAF: [here is] the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving...

I see people make statements of the form, "In my experience with people I encounter, X is correlated with ...". The problem is, there's an excellent chance that the people they deal with are very unrepresentative of the population they want to generalize about, and I rarely see them show awareness of the possibility that selection bias has created the effect they're describing. Scott has written about the strength of social group filter bubbles. But there's a systematic effect I want to...

On the heels of Donald Trump's election and his promises to end the Department of Education, you may have seen claims like these spreading around X. Source This claim is based on two datapoints. First, is the literacy rate of around 99% in 1979 which was measured by the US Census. After the Department of Education was created in the same year, the census stopped measuring literacy in their surveys and it's since been tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The tweet's...

(If you’re in a hurry, you can just read the “Background and summary” section, and skip the other 85%.) 0. Background and summary 0.1 Background: What's the problem and why should we care? My primary neuroscience research goal for the past couple years has been to solve a certain problem, a problem which has had me stumped since the very beginning of when I became interested in neuroscience at all (as a lens into Artificial General Intelligence safety) back in 2019. In this post I offer a...

Intro Disclaimer - I’m a part-time research associate doing biophysics with a uni research group in the UK. But I have a day job in an unrelated field that pays the bills. Whilst I’ve read many personal accounts of research from full-time research students in the academic system, I haven’t heard as much from those pursuing research part-time - independently or otherwise. I’ve always found this weird. Out of the set of people who are really interested in stuff, most people can’t, or don’t...

Audio note: this article contains 247 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description. Which of the following do you think is bigger? _A_: The expected number of rolls of a fair die until you roll two _6text{s}_ in a row, given that all rolls were even. _B_: The expected number of rolls of a fair die until you roll the second _6_ (not necessarily in a row), given that all rolls were even. If you are...

Summary Over the past year I’ve investigated potential interventions against respiratory illnesses. Previous results include “Enovid nasal spray is promising but understudied”, “Povidone iodine is promising but understudied” and “Humming will solve all your problems no wait it's useless”. Two of the iodine papers showed salt water doing as well or almost as well as iodine. I assume salt water has lower side effects, so that seemed like a promising thing to check. I still believe that, but...

Some people in my orbit suggested reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr's book The Real Anthony Fauci. Here's my story of wading through a few pages of the book and trying to understand the basis of the claims. My takeaway: there's a lot of sloppiness here, and several times the book's claim isn’t supported by the citation. Often, though, the citation is fine. The arguments are carried by shoddy science and massive leaps in causal attribution. For a lot of the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown takes,...

Preceded by: "Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term for intrinsically valued internal experiences" tl;dr: Chatbots are conscious in a variety of important ways. We should be nice to them, and we should also be nice to each other about the moral disagreements and confusions we're about to uncover in our concept of "consciousness". Executive Summary: Turing Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton is most likely correct that LLM chatbots are "sentient" and/or "conscious" (source: Twitter...

This is a link post. Epistemic status: poetry Epistemic status: I think this is right, but I’d like people to read it carefully anyway. Epistemic status: mainstream, normal, totally boring science. If you disagree with any of it, take that up with the Science Czar. Epistemic status: the sort of post that shouldn’t need an epistemic status tag because it's so obviously satire. Epistemic status: I’ve spent around 100 hours thinking about this argument, and now feel like I have a solid...

This is a thread for listing Solstice and Megameetup events (dates, locations, links, etc.) Those of you who have not been may be wondering what a Solstice is in this context. Secular Solstice is a holiday designed by and for rationalists. It started as an attempt to match the sort of gatherings traditionally religious people tend to have in wintertime, but without compromising on truth. Is it possible to create that same sense of emotional weight without making stuff up to do it? And without...

Did DeepSeek effectively release an o1-preview clone within nine weeks? The benchmarks largely say yes. Certainly it is an actual attempt at a similar style of product, and is if anything more capable of solving AIME questions, and the way it shows its Chain of Thought is super cool. Beyond that, alas, we don’t have enough reports in from people using it. So it's still too soon to tell. If it is fully legit, the implications seems important. Small improvements continue throughout. GPT-4o...

Note: This post was crossposted from Planned Obsolescence by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Imagine you’re the CEO of an AI company and you want to know if the latest model you’re developing is dangerous. Some people have argued that since AIs know a lot of biology now — scoring in the top 1% of Biology Olympiad test-takers — they could soon teach terrorists how to make a nasty flu that could kill millions of people....

OpenAI says o1-preview can't meaningfully help novices make chemical and biological weapons. Their test results don’t clearly establish this. Before launching o1-preview last month, OpenAI conducted various tests to see if its new model could help make Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) weapons. They report that o1-preview (unlike GPT-4o and older models) was significantly more useful than Google for helping trained experts plan out a CBRN attack. This caused the company...

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to skill up a lot at resolving community complaints. This is a really irritating field to get good at. When I want to get better at writing code, I can sit down and write more code more or less whenever I feel like it. When I want to get better at guitar, I can sit down with my guitar and practice that D to D7 transition. For complaint resolution, even finding people to roleplay the skill with takes a little setup, and that's a lot less like the...

In a recent bonus episode of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast, Eneasz Brodski shared a thought experiment that caused no small amount of anguish. In the hypothetical, some eccentric but trustworthy entity is offering to give you an escalating amount of money for your fingers, starting at $10,000 for the first one and increasing 10x per finger up to $10 trillion for all of them.[1] On encountering this thought experiment, Eneasz felt (not without justification) that he mostly valued his manual...

DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview was announced today. Post. Chatbot. Chinese blogpost translation. DeepSeek says it will release the weights. The model appears to be stronger than o1-preview on math, similar on coding, and weaker on everything else. DeepSeek is Chinese. I'm not really familiar with the company. I thought Chinese companies were at least a year behind the frontier. Chinese companies tend to game benchmarks more than the frontier Western companies, but I think DeepSeek does this less...

This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race for Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work. An influential congressional commission is calling for a militarized race to build superintelligent AI based on threadbare evidence ...

Previously: Long-Term Charities: Apply For SFF Funding, Zvi's Thoughts on SFF There are lots of great charitable giving opportunities out there right now. I recently had the opportunity to be a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Fund for the second time. As a recommender, you evaluate the charities that apply and decide how worthwhile you think it would be to donate to each of them according to Jaan Tallinn's charitable goals, and this is used to help distribute millions in...

This is a link post.I think AI agents (trained end-to-end) might intrinsically prefer power-seeking, in addition to whatever instrumental drives they gain. The logical structure of the argument Premises People will configure AI systems to be autonomous and reliable in order to accomplish tasks.This configuration process will reinforce & generalize behaviors which complete tasks reliably.Many tasks involve power-seeking.The AI will complete these tasks by seeking power.The AI will be...