I mostly view the 10% pledge as a social commitment device rather than a sensible rule for how much to donate.
strikes me as missing the fact that small donors can spend much more cognition evaluating per unit dollar and are less heavily optimized against, so there are many high EV opportunities which can ~only be picked up by small-scale donors. Especially within-network donations to support projects that are too early stage or speculative to pass grantmaker bars.
And wouldn't you expect those fitness defects to evolve away over time reasonably well? Seems like the kind of thing that would be a ton of individually minor distributional shifts which would have normal selection gradients over them, if you had a decent population running for a while?
Plus now they don't have to maintain their usual set of anti-viral defenses, which probably frees up a lot of novel design options, plus some genetic space and metabolic resources? I'd mostly expect that within a year or two of large-population (say a large scale commercial bioreactor) they strongly out-compete normal bacteria.
we’re 10–30 years away, but: Only $500 million to $1 billion could potentially be sufficient and accelerate this timeline
This is not great. However, the virus immunity is a huge part, maybe the majority of, the issue for getting competitive advantage for wrecking the biosphere and unlike mirror life, virus immunity is very commercially valuable. And it's not a future projection, this was made in 2024 and the containment strategy seems kinda not the thing you want to bet the biosphere on.
I've been doing this self-funded for quite a few years[1] and would be enthusiastic to talk to anyone who gets this position, to swap models and contacts.
I vouch for Severin being highly skilled at mediating conflicts.
Also, smouldering conflicts provide more drag to cohesion execution than most people realize until it's resolved. Try this out if you have even a slight suspicion it might help.
Also we're currently working with an artist to make a much upgraded background image. Happy to connect you if you're able to collect up some funding and would like a nice professional map.
Canary for whether I have been threatened with legal action over this post, and I guarantee that I will post any attempted threats in the comments.
it's up for me, not sure why the host would have gone down then up again, is it still looking down for you?
Mostly like the post, but;
strikes me as missing the fact that small donors can spend much more cognition evaluating per unit dollar and are less heavily optimized against, so there are many high EV opportunities which can ~only be picked up by small-scale donors. Especially within-network donations to support projects that are too early stage or speculative to pass grantmaker bars.
ops, yup, fixed link.
And wouldn't you expect those fitness defects to evolve away over time reasonably well? Seems like the kind of thing that would be a ton of individually minor distributional shifts which would have normal selection gradients over them, if you had a decent population running for a while?
Plus now they don't have to maintain their usual set of anti-viral defenses, which probably frees up a lot of novel design options, plus some genetic space and metabolic resources? I'd mostly expect that within a year or two of large-population (say a large scale commercial bioreactor) they strongly out-compete normal bacteria.
This is not great. However, the virus immunity is a huge part, maybe the majority of, the issue for getting competitive advantage for wrecking the biosphere and unlike mirror life, virus immunity is very commercially valuable. And it's not a future projection, this was made in 2024 and the containment strategy seems kinda not the thing you want to bet the biosphere on.
I think the people concerned about mirror life have a much more urgent warm up, right now: New Synthetic E. coli Is Immune to Bacteriophage Infection
Changelog
New Features:
Language Updates:
Accessibility
If they set up an every.org page it looks straightforward? e.g. select stock on this
I've been doing this self-funded for quite a few years[1] and would be enthusiastic to talk to anyone who gets this position, to swap models and contacts.
This has produced https://www.aisafety.com/ (including the map of AI Safety, list of funders, and the events&training newsletter) https://aisafety.info/ (including a RAG chatbot powered by the Alignment Research Dataset we maintain) https://alignment.dev/ https://www.affi.ne/ plus lots of minor projects and a couple more major ones upcoming.
I vouch for Severin being highly skilled at mediating conflicts.
Also, smouldering conflicts provide more drag to cohesion execution than most people realize until it's resolved. Try this out if you have even a slight suspicion it might help.
Also we're currently working with an artist to make a much upgraded background image. Happy to connect you if you're able to collect up some funding and would like a nice professional map.