Where I Am Donating in 2025
Last year I gave my reasoning on cause prioritization and did shallow reviews of some relevant orgs. I’m doing it again this year.
Continue readingAn unnecessarily long analysis of one line from The Princess Bride
Vizzini: Inconceivable!
Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
What did Inigo mean by this?
(Don’t laugh, this is serious.)
Continue readingWe won't solve non-alignment problems by doing research
Introduction
Even if we solve the AI alignment problem, we still face non-alignment problems, which are all the other existential problems1 that AI may bring.
People have written research agendas on various imposing problems that we are nowhere close to solving, and that we may need to solve before developing ASI. An incomplete list of topics: misuse; animal-inclusive AI; AI welfare; S-risks from conflict; gradual disempowerment; risks from malevolent actors; moral error.
The standard answer to these problems, the one that most research agendas take for granted, is “do research”. Specifically, do research in the conventional way where you create a research agenda, explore some research questions, and fund other people to work on those questions.
If transformative AI arrives within the next decade, then we won’t solve non-alignment problems by doing research on how to solve them.
Continue readingDo Disruptive or Violent Protests Work?
Previously, I reviewed the five strongest studies on protest outcomes and concluded that peaceful protests probably work (credence: 90%).
But what about disruptive or violent protests?
Peaceful protests use nonviolent, non-disruptive tactics such as picketing and marches.
Disruptive protests use nonviolent, in-your-face tactics such as civil disobedience, sit-ins, and blocking roads.
Violent protests use violence.
There isn’t much evidence on the other two categories of protest. My best guesses are:
- Violent protests probably don’t work. (credence: 80%)
- Violent protests may reduce support for a cause, but it’s unclear. (credence: 40%)
- For disruptive protests, it’s hard to say whether they have a positive or negative impact on balance. I’m about evenly split on whether a randomly-chosen disruptive protest is net helpful, neutral, or harmful.
- A typical disruptive protest doesn’t work as well a typical peaceful protest. (credence: 80%)
- Peaceful protests are a better idea than disruptive protests. (credence: 90%)
Why would God have a gender?
Classically, according to the Abrahamic religions, God is a man.
According to some more recent depictions, God is a woman. Which is a nice subversion.
But like, y’all are both a bit crazy. If there is an omnipotent Creator of the universe, then it definitely doesn’t have a gender.
When people call God “he” or “she”, this is what they’re saying happened:
Continue readingNot-Discovered-Here Syndrome
An investor is considering putting her money into a mutual fund. “I will just invest some money for the next six months,” she says, “and see how it goes.”
A philanthropist is considering donating to a charity. “I will donate some money and see how it goes.”
Harvard University is considering whether SAT scores are all that important for admissions. “Let’s make SAT scores optional and see what happens.”
A child climbs to the top of a slide and is about to jump off the edge. “Don’t jump off of that,” his mom says, “you’ll get hurt.” He jumps off the slide. He gets hurt.
Not-invented-here syndrome is when an organization unnecessarily re-invents products or tools that already exist elsewhere. The cousin of this phemonenon is not-discovered-here syndrome, in which people refuse to consider evidence unless they’ve collected it themselves.
“A wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.” Not-discovered-here syndrome is what happens when you insist on making mistakes for yourself.
Continue readingKnowing whether AI alignment is a one-shot problem is a one-shot problem
One day, I was at my grandma’s house reading the Sunday funny pages, when I suddenly felt myself getting sucked into a Garfield comic.
Continue readingWhat If Ghosts Were Real?
If we are correct about the laws of physics, then ghosts can’t exist. But some people are insistent that they’ve directly interacted with ghosts. Is there a way ghosts could exist if we modified the laws of physics a bit?
Continue readingIn Defense of the NCIS Two-People-One-Keyboard Scene
(Here is the same clip in HD, but that 2010 YouTube vibe is part of the fun)
This clip is in the running for most-mocked scene of all time, but I think it’s good, actually.
First, let’s get some things out of the way:
- The writers of NCIS know how keyboards work. (They probably used keyboards to write this scene, even.)
- The director of this episode knows how keyboards work.
- I’m going to go out on a limb and say >90% of this show’s audience knows how keyboards work.
This scene was not written this way because the writers think their audience is dumb and doesn’t know how a keyboard works. It was written this way because of the Rule of Cool.
The Rule of Cool states: an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief is proportional to how cool a scene is.
Continue readingEpistemic Spot Check: Expected Value of Donating to Alex Bores's Congressional Campaign
Political advocacy is an important lever for reducing existential risk. One way to make political change happen is to support candidates for Congress.
In October, Eric Neyman wrote Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act. He created a cost-effectiveness analysis to estimate how donations to Bores’s campaign change his probability of winning the election. It’s excellent that he did that—it’s exactly the sort of thing that we need people to be doing.
We also need more people to check other people’s cost-effectiveness estimates. To that end, in this post I will check Eric’s work.
I’m not going to talk about who Alex Bores is, why you might want to donate to his campaign, or who might not want to donate. For that, see Eric’s post.
Continue reading