It was basically the only “empirical” (scare quotes well earned) data they actually used in their “model”, even then, they decided exponential improvement wasn’t good enough, they plugged it into a hyper-exponential model that went to infinity at just a few years regardless of the inputs.

“How AI Impacts Skill Formation” has two authors. So even on the bare factual matters you are wrong. The disempowerment paper has four authors, but all of them look like they are computer scientists from looking at their bios, so the general thrust of fiat_lux’s comment is also true about that paper.

I don’t mind academics reaching outside their fields of expertise, but they really should get collaborators with the appropriate background, and the fact that anthropic hasn’t hired any humanities researchers to help support this sort of research is a bad sign.

They absolutely are. I am just giving them a tiny bit of credit for at least attempting academic research on LLM performance. But only a tiny bit, as they blog post I link discusses, their methodology is really sloppy and not to the level of most academic research and wouldn’t get through peer review of most decent journals.

I liked this takedown of METR’s task horizon “research”: https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/the-metr-graph-is-hot-garbage

In addition to all the complaints I already knew of and had, METR’s methodology for human baselining of tasks was even worse than I realized.

And you know… I actually kind of respect METR relative to a lot of boosters and doomers for at least attempting any hard numbers and not just vibes and anecdotes (METR is the ones that did the study showing LLMs actually reduced coders productivity even as it made them think it increased). But the standard for quantifying LLM performance in practical terms is absurdly low.

Sovereign citizens think their made up procedures or words will actually let them bypass the law. Whereas I think Eliezer would fold to actual pressure from the government (despite all his talk about game theory and ignoring threat-like incentives he would in fact want to avoid going to jail). At least, that is the vibes I’ve gotten from seeing his absolute refusal to suggest non-governmental direct action to stop the AI doom he is so certain is coming.

The only people I know of that like to self-label as “classical liberals” tend to be Scott Alexander types trying to mask or downplay how right-wing/conservative they are.

Edit: Isn’t Dath Ilan the setting of the Project Wonderful glowfic? The setting where people with good genes get more breeding licenses than people with bad genes?

Yep, Project Lawful. dath ilan is Eliezer’s “utopian” world the isekai’d protagonist is from. It is described in dath ilan that if you have “bad” genes you lost your UBI if you had kids anyway (it was technically Gregorist-style citizen’s dividend, but it basically UBI) and if you had “good” genes you got extra payment for having more kids.

Eliezer is basically saying unless the government meets the “standards” of his made up fantasy “utopia” he won’t cooperate with it, even in prosecuting literal child raping pedophiles or carrying out social repercussions against said child rapists.

Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

The leaps in logic are so idiotic “he managed to land a rocket up right, so maybe he can pull it off!” (as if Elon personally made that happen, or as if a engineering challenge and fundamental thermodynamic limits are equally solvable). This is despite multiple comments replying with back of the envelope calcs on energy generation and heat dissipation of the ISS and comparing it to what you would need for even a moderately sized data center. Or even the comments that are like “maybe there is a chance”, as if it is wiser to express uncertainty…

The democrat party is far too feckless to actually pull that off, but that would be a nice ironic twist to his attempts to leverage government contracts and being too big to fail.

He clearly needs to read less fantasy/sci-fi and more leftist theory.

I would dare to hope, but seeing how long Trump has been able to chug along despite his diet (and presumably drug habit, like that one debate where he was constantly sniffing) I wouldn’t count on it.

EA in general has this problem where they let rich people use their “charities” for social cover. It is part of how the FTX scandal was made possible and it is a contributing factor to how and why they keep getting played by the LLM companies.

Yeah it is yet another telling detail that that is the part Eliezer emphasizes and not the child rape.

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Has anyone done the math on if Elon can keep these plates spinning until he dies of old age or if it will implode sooner than that? I wouldn’t think he can keep this up another decade, but I wouldn’t have predicted Tesla limping along as long as it has even as Elon squeezes more money out of it, so idk. It would be really satisfying to watch Elon’s empire implode, but probably he holds onto millions even if he loses billions because consequences aren’t for the ultra rich in America.

The lesson should be the mega rich are class conscious, dumb as hell, and team up to work on each others interests and dont care about who gets hurt

Yeah this. It would be nice if people could manage to neither dismiss the extent to which the mega rich work together nor fall into insane conspiracy theories about it.

I’m looking forward to the triple layered glomarization denial.

It really is pathetic given the entire rationalist claim about making accurate predictions about reality and comparing predictions as the ultimate way to judge theories and models.

You know, it makes the exact word choices Eliezer chose on this post: https://awful.systems/post/6297291 much more suspicious. “To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18.” So maybe he didn’t know they were underage at the time?

To add to your sneers… lots of lesswrong content fits you description of #9, with someone trying to invent something that probably exists in philosophy, from (rationalist, i.e. the sequences) first principles and doing a bad job at it.

I actually don’t mind content like #25 where someone writes an explainer topic? If lesswrong was less pretentious about it and more trustworthy (i.e. cited sources in a verifiable way and called each other out for making stuff up) and didn’t include all the other junk and just had stuff like that it would be better at its stated goal of promoting rationality. Of course, even if they tried this, they would probably end up more like #47 where they rediscover basic concepts because they don’t know how to search existing literature/research and cite it effectively.

45 is funny. Rationalists and rationalist adjacent people started OpenAI, ultimately ignored “AI safety”. Rationalist spun off anthropic, which also abandoned the safety focus pretty much after it had gotten all the funding it could with that line. Do they really think a third company would be any better?