All of Nicholas Kross's Comments + Replies

Looking at aspects of the internal culture of these organizations is useful to predict harder to measure aspects of how healthy an organization is, and how much good it can ultimately do

This also could've helped with other orgs over the years, where the "culture" stuff turned out to have important signal. E.g. FTX, Leverage Research.

EDIT: Due to the incoming administration's ties to tech investors, I no longer think an AI crash is so likely. Several signs IMHO point to "they're gonna go all-in on racing for AI, regardless of how 'needed' it actually is".

For more details on (the business side of) a potential AI crash, see recent articles by the blog Where's Your Ed At, which wrote the sorta-well-known post "The Man Who Killed Google Search".

For his AI-crash posts, start here and here and click on links to his other posts. Sadly, the author falls into the trap of "LLMs will never get to reasoning because they don't, like, know stuff, man", but luckily his core competencies (the business side, analyzing reporting) show why an AI crash could still very much happen.

I'm a Definooooor! I'm gonna Defiiiiiiine! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I like circles, though my favorites are (of course) boxes and arrows.

It's an anti-procrastination tool!

TIL that a field called "argumentation theory" exists, thanks!

Reading this quickly on my lunch break, seems accurate to most of my core points. Not how I'd phrase them, but maybe that's to be expected(?)

Agreed. IMHO the only legitimate reason to make a list like this, is to prep for researching and writing one or more response pieces.

(There's a question of who would actually read those responses, and correspondingly where they'd be published, but that's a key question that all persuasive-media-creators should be answering anyway.)

Yeah I get that, I mean specifically the weird risky hardcore projects. (Hence specifying "adult", since that's both harder and potentially more necessary under e.g. short/medium AI timelines.)

Is any EA group funding adult human intelligence augmentation? It seems broadly useful for lots of cause areas, especially research-bottlenecked ones like AI alignment.

Why hasn't e.g. OpenPhil funded this project?: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing

There's a new chart template that is better than "P(doom)" for most people.

Have long hoped someone would do this thoroughly, thank you.

Much cheaper, though still hokey, ideas that you should have already thought of at some point:

• A "formalization office" that checks and formalizes results by alignment researchers. It should not take months for a John Wentworth result to get formalized by someone else.
• Mathopedia.
• Alignment-specific outreach at campuses/conventions with top cybersecurity people.

Maybe! I'm most interested in math because of its utility for AI alignment and because math (especially advanced math) is notoriously considered "hard" or "impenetrable" by many people (even people who otherwise consider themselves smart/competent). Part of that is probably lack of good math-intuitions (grokking-by-playing-with-concept, maths-is-about-abstract-objects, law-thinking, etc.).

Yeah, we'd hope there's a good bit of existing pedagogy that applies to this. Not much stood out to me, but maybe I haven't looked hard enough at the field.

We ought to have a new word, besides "steelmanning", for "I think this idea is bad, but it made me think of another, much stronger idea that sounds similar, and I want to look at that idea now and ignore the first idea and probably whoever was advocating it".

Good points, thanks! (Mainly the list part)

Thank you! Another person pointed this out on LW.

This post/cause seems sorely underrated; e.g. what org exists can someone donate to, for mass case detection? It has such a high potential lives-saved-per-$1,000!

OK, thanks! Also, after more consideration and object-level thinking about the questions, I will probably write a good bit of prose anyway.

How would you respond to essays that are substantially or mostly in the form of bullet-points, lists, tables, and other information organization methods besides prose? (Prior discussion here, here, and here, to get a sense of why I'm interested in doing this.)

These details help, thank you!

I have a question.

IF:

• we can submit multiple entries (but only one will win), AND
• judging is based on 67% uncovering considerations and 33% clarifying concepts,

THEN, would you prefer if I:

• make one large entry that puts all my research/ideas/information in one place, OR
• make several smaller entries, each one focusing on a single idea?

(Assuming this is for answering one question. Presumably, since multiple entries are allowed, I could duplicate this strategy for the other question, or even use a different one for each. But if I'm wrong about this, I'd also like to know that!)

\d{1,5}\s\w.\s(\b\w*\b\s){1,2}\w*. (Source)

Enough cheating at business, we must cheat at League next

It is more dramatic to break the curfew tho

Comment

I was almost too lazy to even write my post this year, please TLDR this setup and explain how I can receive money and social status and other personal gains thank you

I respectfully disagree.

I hereby request funding for more overwrought posts about the community's social life, as they are a cost-effective way to do this.

I feel targeted 📝📝📝📝📝📝📝

TLDR: 📝📝📝📝📝📝📝📝

Buy enough darkweb stimulants to move up a rank in League.

We can stop Big Chicken with Big Fox. Big Malaria can be prevented with Big Net.

Finally, leftists will ally with us!

This is interesting, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to listen to it. Maybe make transcripts of these audio versions?

Send to my PayPal plz

Buy illicit nootropics for everyone in the community. They can't stop us all!

Guys i fixed the formatting :3

Wait is the lazy susan built into the table itself? Now that's flexible career capital!

I want to ask for a source, but I'm not sure how to source this (maybe like an FLI tax form?). Where did that news outlet's document come from? Did they make it up? EDIT: nvm, found their actual statement.

Agreed, with the caveat that people (especially those inexperienced with the media and/or the specific sub-issue they're being asked about) go in with decent prep.This is not the same as being cagey or reserved, which would probably lower the "momentum" of this whole thing and make change less likely. Yudkowsky, at some points, has been good at balancing "this is urgent and serious" with "don't froth at the mouth", and plenty of political activists work on this too. Ask for help from others!

This font is coursing through my veins and increasing my IQ thank you

Strong agree, hope this gets into the print version (if it hasn't already).

Personal feelings: I thought Karnofsky was one of the good ones! He has opinions on AI safety, and I agree with most of them! Nooooooooooo!

Object-level: My mental model of the rationality community (and, thus, some of EA) is "lots of us are mentally weird people, which helps us do unusually good things like increasing our rationality, comprehending big problems, etc., but which also have predictable downsides."

Given this, I'm pessimistic that, in our current setup, we're able to attract the absolute "best and brightest and also most ethical and also most e... (read more)

I think I agree with both of these, actually: EA needs unusually good leaders, possibly better than we can even expect to attract.

(Compare EA with, say, being an elite businessperson or politician or something.)

Ah, thank you!

paraphrased: "morality is about the interactions that we have with each other, not about our effects on future people, because future people don't even exist!"

If that's really the core of what she said about that... yeah maybe I won't watch this video. (She does good subtitles for her videos, though, so I am more likely to download and read those!)

Agree, I don't see many "top-ranking" or "core" EAs writing exhaustive critiques (posts, not just comments!) of these critiques. (OK, they would likely complain that they have better things to do with their time, and they often do, but I have trouble recalling any aside from (debatably) some of the responses to AGI Ruins / Death With Dignity.)

Agreed. When people require literally everything to be written in the same place by the same author/small-group, it disincentives writing potentially important posts.