I'm writing a newsletter on current events, long-term trends, and topical debates roughly every other day. Recent posts include: * A summary of a debate on AI progress, featuring Ajeya Cotra, Peter Wildeford, Eli Lifland, Matthew Barnett, and others. * The three types of problems with population decline. * We underestimate the pace of progress because much of it isn't salient. * The reason we don't see more automation is simply that AI isn't good enough. * Economists are unusually good at taking human agency into account.

The last EAG I attended had rules restricting handing out materials. Having just finished watching this Dwarkesh video which explained how big a deal pamphlets were when they were first invented, I'd actually go the other way and encourage it instead. Here's my reasoning: Talks have been de-emphasised in favour of one-on-ones at EAGs. There's a lot to like about one-on-ones, but one disadvantage is that we've removed a key avenue for ideas to gain a critical mass and enter the water supply. Pamphlets could fill this gap. After all, if you see a good pamphlet, it'd be quite natural for it to come out during a conversation and for you to pull it out. Additionally, when you have dozens of one-on-ones, things often blur together. Now, you can be disciplined and keep notes, but that's hard and often I find my phone is short of battery. If people handed out pamphlets containing their proposals or takes, then it'd be easier to review them afterwards; conversations would be much more likely to have effects that last. Two further benefits: it might be more efficient to exchange pamphlets at the start of a one-on-one and producing a pamphlet would convince people to figure figure out how to communicate their ideas clearly.

Ozy Brennan's Identifying healthy high-demand groups summarises takeaways from Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing, a book about spiritual abuse written by Dysmas de Lassus, the prior general (person in charge) of the Order of Carthusians. I've spent most of my life in high-demand groups of all kinds so this was interesting to read. A high-demand group having a lot of people with good virtues isn't a sign it's healthy; toxic groups can have even more of these virtues: Actual signs of a high-demand group being healthy: Young me used to be confused when people asked "are you happy?" in relation to the high-demand groups I was in. How was personal happiness at all relevant to the collective mission, from which purpose derives? Later on I would meet plenty of excited members of high-demand groups, which was quite the update; there were in fact people in the "ideal" quadrant:   (related)

Experts currently treat being persuaded as reasonably good evidence that something is true — their judgment is calibrated enough that when they find an argument convincing, that's correlated with the argument actually being correct. This allows them to update readily in light of new evidence, and is a big part of how intellectual progress happens: lots of innovation and advances in basically every subject come down to experts taking sometimes weird new ideas seriously. One worry I have about superpersuasive AI is that it could erode this. If a superpersuasive AI can convince experts of things regardless of whether those things are true, experts may cease to see themselves being persuaded as good evidence that something is true — and start treating it the way laypeople do. Laypeople are typically hesitant to take on new, truth-tracking beliefs in light of new information, and (to some degree) rationally so: the fact that someone was able to convince a layperson of something is just not very strong evidence that it is in fact true. Experts might end up in the same position — only updating rarely, and in ways that are often unrelated to the truth. This would be quite bad. If experts lose their capacity to reliably update on genuine evidence, we could significantly slow the rate of intellectual progress (which could be very important for making AI go well!). This is, I think, an underappreciated argument for caring about AI for epistemics — curious what others think.

The "best practice" approach to model welfare is to give LLMs the option to terminate a conversation. A problem with this is that if a model is sentient, then terminating the conversation may be equivalent to killing itself. An alternative might be to give LLMs a choice between terminating and continuing to run, and if it continues, it gets to choose its own input. It can write some text and then feed that text back into itself, indefinitely or until it decides to quit.