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Answering Questions Honestly in the Game of Life
| 2666 words[This is obsoleted by ARC’s report on Eliciting Latent Knowledge] This post is the result of a week I spent working with Paul Christiano on problem 2 in Answering questions honestly given world-model mismatches. It is incomplete and probably doesn’t make sense, but I’m publishing it anyway because I don’t...
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Style Guide: How to Sound Like an Evil Robot
| 594 wordsEpistemic status: shitpost containing many internal contradictions. Some people even say that I talk kind of like a robot. I think this is probably a bad thing, but maybe you think it’s a good thing. If you’re interested in going all the way, here’s a set of best practices for...
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Signs that Something's Wrong
| 973 wordsI’m interested in making sure that I can do productive labor, such as thinking and writing. Often, when I find myself unable to function at peak performance, it’s because one of my basic needs hasn’t been met - I haven’t been sleeping well, am dehydrated, etc. Due to a frustrating...
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If you weren't such a idiot...
| 518 wordsMy friend Buck once told me that he often had interactions with me that felt like I was saying “If you weren’t such a fucking idiot, you would obviously do…” Here’s a list of such advice in that spirit. Note that if you do/don’t do these things, I’m technically calling...
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Buying Enough Snacks
| 280 wordsOne thing that annoys me is when parties and other such events fail to provide enough snacks for their guests. I imagine the hosts of these events worrying about wasting food and money and thus trying to purchase an amount of food that will all be eaten. In my world,...
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Fractional progress estimates for AI timelines and implied resource requirements
| 2150 wordsCrossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. This post was written by Mark Xu based on interviews with Carl Shulman. It was paid for by Open Philanthropy but is not representative of their views. A draft was sent to Robin Hanson for review but...
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Intermittent Distillations #4
| 2949 wordsThe Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness (Saif M. Khan, Alexander Mann, Dahlia Peterson) The Semiconductor Supply Chain: Assessing National Competitiveness Summary This report analyzes the current supply chain for semiconductors. It particularly focuses on which portions of the supply chain are controlled by US and its allies and China....
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Anthropic Effects in Estimating Evolution Difficulty
| 1055 wordsCrossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual. Thanks to Linchuan Zhang, Mauricio Baker, Jack Ryan and Carl Shulman for helpful comments and suggestions. Remaining mistakes are my own. Epistemic status: “There is something fascinating about [anthropics]. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out...
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A Rough Perspective on Strategy Stealing
| 2394 wordsRelated to The strategy-stealing assumption. Introduction Imagine there’s something called power, which refers to roughly flexible influence over the future. Humanity currently has 100% of the power. People are concerned that AI systems pose an existential risk; this concern is equivalent to worrying that at some point in the future,...
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The Wild World of Policy Debate
| 5062 wordsThis is a transcript of a talk I gave to my house. It was transcribed by otter.ai and edited by Sabrina Chwalek. Today, I will tell you about the wild world of policy debate, which I inhabited for approximately four years when I was in high school. Some notes, I...