Thanks for the thoughtful reply Anthony.

1. Fair point that the sequences do not strongly default towards inaction. I think the evidence gains from action mean that it 'is' favored, but this is an empirical prediction about the world, which I think you disagree with.

2. If increased information reduces our unawareness, that decreases the relevance of cluelessness arguments, no? In particular, the set of actions with overlapping credal sets would be reduced, and so there would be more dominated actions we could rule out for consideration. Unless you're making an argument that the information learned is too small to meaningfully constrain our predictions in expectation. In which case sure, that's an empirical claim I disagree with, but it is logically consistent.

3. I think most importantly we have an empirical disagreement about both how clueless we are of the longterm impacts of our actions, and how difficult it is to reduce that cluelessness. I'm trying to think about cruxes that might resolve that.

I think you disagree that increased predictive capability in shorter time horizons generalizes to long-time horizons [1]. For me, seeing bad short & medium term predictions 'would' cause me to give more credence to unawareness arguments. But you seem to have prevented the opposite evidence from swaying you in the other direction (unless I'm misunderstanding).

Like, what is something you could see happen tomorrow that would make you say 'whoa, we actually can know the long-term consequences of our actions'? Would it take something as extreme as https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6FmqiAgS8h4EJm86s/how-to-convince-me-that-2-2-3?

[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZTz9BKxCys5DgaHQJ/ama-anthony-digiovanni-author-of-the-challenge-of?commentId=bcaWd275R3PXgivma)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ptQsRsreA5JWZEAF4/open-nuclear-winter-fable-written-satire

If you want to give it a read. IMO funnier than the Anthropic parody (although some parts miss), less funny than Open Asteroid Impact.

OOC, have you asked Fable to try to write a satire with 'Open Asteroid Impact' as a reference class? I had it do one for ALLFED, and IMO it was pretty funny. Much funnier than 'METR Time Horizon 2.0' (although I'm not sure how hard this post was optimizing for humor), pretty comparable to Open Asteroid Impact.

If you've tried this yourself with Fable and still feel it comes up short, that would be a little surprising to me.

Happy to share the example if you'd like, IMO it had a good degree of joke substructure. IE, strongly funny individual lines, good references, relevant puns.

It's also very possible that the humor is of a variety that quickly saturates & you're already saturated on it. Similar to how most folks find 'Cards Against Humanity' pretty funny the first time you play it, and then it goes downhill extremely sharply.

"The graph lists Microsoft Excel 1.0, but the benchmarks must have been run on a modern version of Excel. The worksheet limit of Excel 1.0 was only 16,384 rows rather than 1,048,576, plus it lacked many of the functions of modern Excel, so it would presumably fail more tasks."

This is beautiful. Thank you.

Personally I thought this was a B- shitpost. If it was just a quick take of exactly the tldr text I would give it a B+. So IMO not bad, but I think I also read less LLM text than you so I'm probably not annoyed as quickly by it.

Thanks for putting this together! IMO it is very helpful, and encouraged me to look at IFP's proposal program.

Do you see cluelessness to be decreasing, steady, or increasing?

As in, are we getting better are predicting longterm outcomes or do you think we are no better than centuries ago?

One vote for decreasing cluelessness: improved epistemic practices such as RCTs, peer review, more advanced statistics, and prediction markets. There used to be many actions which we were deeply unsure about the near-term consequences of (ex. is bleeding this patient a good idea), and now our best predictions seem justifiably more confident. The evidence for improved long-term predictions seems less obvious, but still directionally improving.

Thanks! And very much my bad for missing the instructions, apologies!

Ah thanks! Presumably I can just submit this via the form then, or am I SOL?

I think making predictions (and learning how they go) for the short & medium term future will help us be much more calibrated on our predictions for the long-term future. So all the work on prediction markets etc probably give us better insight there.

I'm not sold on some sort of Great Reflection style pause, but it also doesn't seem like a crazy idea.

I frankly have not thought hard about how acausal influence changes how we should act. I don't have good recommendations. Being kind & having a wide circle of empathy feels pretty robustly good, but I won't pretend to have justified that from the lens of acausal negotiations.