Compared to what? How many countries had a more extensive political participation? Of course, slavery was an abyssal horror, but it was almost universally accepted until 1807. 

Until that date America was the most democratic country in the world

So from 1787 to 1807? 

Except that the french revolution happened during this same period, and Robespierre abolished slavery in french colonies in 1792. Of course, napoleon reestablished it in 1802, so we can say that america was the most democratic country from 1787-1792 and then from 1802-1807. Hardly a great case for the machinery of freedom. 

I don't agree that longtermism has been "overwhelmingly good". Your evidence for this is a blog post which specifically and deliberately only cherry picked "good" things. It's fairly easy to make the opposite case that EA helped jumpstart the current day AI arms race, which has resulted in a lot of current day and potential future real world harms. 

I think this is a really fun short story, and a really bad analogy for AI risk. 

In the story, the humans have an entire universes worth of computation available to them, including the use of physical experiments with real quantum physics. In contrast, an AI cluster only has access to whatever scraps we give it. Humans combined will tend to outclass the AI in terms of computational resources until it's actually achieved some partial takeover of the world, but that partial takeover is a large part of difficulty here. This means that the fundamental analogy of the AI having "thousands of years" to run experiments is fundamentally misleading.

Another flaw is that this paragraph is ridiculous

A thousand years is long enough, though, for us to work out paradigms of biology and evolution in five-dimensional space, trying to infer how aliens like these could develop. The most likely theory is that they evolved asexually, occasionally exchanging genetic material and brain content. We estimate that their brightest minds are roughly on par with our average college students, but over millions of years they’ve had time to just keep grinding forward and developing new technology.

You cannot, in fact, deduce how a creature 2 dimensions above you reproduces from looking at a video of them touching a fucking rock. This is a classic neglect of ignoring unknown information and computational complexity: there are just too many alternate ways in which "touching rocks" can happen. For example, imagine trying to deduce the atmosphere of the planet they live on: except wait, they don't follow our periodic table, they follow a five dimensional alternative version that we know nothing about. 

There is also the problem of multiple AI's: In this scenario, it's like our world is the very first that is encountered by the tentacle beings, and they have no prior experience. But in actual AI, each AI will be preceded by a shitload of less intelligent AI's, and also a ton of other independent AI's independent of it will exist. This will add a ton of dynamics, in particular making it easier for warning shots to happen. 

The analogy here is that instead of the first message we recieve is "rock", our first message is "Alright, listen here pipsqueaks, the last people we contacted tried to fuck with our internet and got a bunch of people killed: we're monitoring your every move, and if you even think of messing with us your entire universe is headed to the recycle bin, kapish?"

I'm mainly taking issue with the "machinery of freedom" claim and the idea that the US is uniquely free. I would say the US is more free than average, but it's hardly exceptional.

The US gave women the right to vote in 1919, whereas Australia had it since 1902, the UK had it in 1918, etc. And of course, there wasn't universal right to vote until the civil rights movement. 

Looking further back, while slavery was widespread, many other countries were much better than the US on this issue: the uk (no saint) banned it in 1807, over half a century before the US went to war with itself over the issue. 

I'm happy to credit washington with support of democracy, but this idolisation just seems a little weird to me. 

The US was clearly not a "machinery of freedom" before 1865, given that slavery was legal. So if it ever became a machinery of freedom (I struggle to think of when that would be), it was  a hundred years after washingtons presidency, and I hesitate to give him credit for it. 

Finally, I'm not convinced that praise of effective leaders like Washington, Madison, and Churchill is neglected in at least American public education and discourse (but this may have changed since my childhood).

I agree with the rest of your comment, but I don't like "neglectedness" being applied in this context. MLK jr, for example, is certainly not "neglected" of praise, but I think his writings and methods still have a lot to teach us. 

I'd say a better argument against washington is that he was a slaveowner and did not stop the spread of slavery when he had the power to do so. I'm not sure "turn a blind eye to the great evils of your day" is a great lesson to be learned. 

I think you have a responsibility to talk with an appropriate level of sensitivity and respect when talking about a subject like the holocaust (which killed family members of people on this forum), and I don't think just saying "the holocaust was horrible" twice meets this bar. 

I think the greater threat to travel agents was the rise of self-planning travel internet sites like skyscanner and booking.com which make them mostly unnecessary. If travel agents have survived that, I don't see how they wouldn't survive LLM's: presumably one of the reasons they survived is the preference for talking in person to a human being.

If someone claims to have competencies A-F required to be an operation manager, they should have some way of proving that they actually have competencies A-F. A great way for them to prove this is to have 4 years of experience as Operations Manager. In fact, I struggle to think of a better way to prove this, and obviously a person with experience is preferable to someone with no experience for all kind of reasons (they have encountered all the little errors, etc).  As a bonus, somebody outside of your personal bubble has trusted this person. 

EA should be relying on more subject matter experience, not less. 

Secondly, I'm not sure the "soldier mindset" is really the right way to describe what a lawyer does anyway. A lawyer has to be able to defend someone well even when they might privately believe that they are guilty. The ability to do this well seems like it would require a "scout mindset" way of thinking, rather than a "soldier mindset" one.

I see "soldier mindset" being described as akin to "motivated thinking" (eg here), and I think it's a stretch to say that a prosecution lawyer is not doing motivated thinking (in that trying to prove one thing true is their literal job). 

And yeah, for the reasons that you stated, if you can't trust people to be impartial (and people are not good at judging their own impartiality), setting up a system where multiple sides are represented by "soldier mindset" can legitimately be better at truth-seeking. Most episodes in scientific history have involved people who were really really motivated to prove that their particular theory was correct. 

My real point, though, is that this "soldier vs scout" dichotomy is not the best way to describe what makes scientific style thinking work. You can have a combination of both work just fine: what matters is whether your overall process is good at picking out truth and rejecting BS. And I do not think merely trying to be impartial and truthseeking is sufficient for this. "scout mindset" is not a bad thing to try, but it's not enough.