Here are some scattered comments about the 2024 elections.
I was glad to have Manifold Markets and Election Betting Odds to watch the results. I want numbers, not encumbered by the storytellers and emotions of the news media. I also watched the odds that Nate Silver tried to update, but that was a total flop.
I see many weak hints that the polarization of the US has subsided compared to 2020.
Continue ReadingI’ve seen plenty of people recently ranting about how presidential candidate X is obviously terrible because of their position on Y. It’s often the case that if I were voting solely on Y, I’d agree that candidate X is terrible.
I see patterns suggesting that those people tend to choose X first, and then choose one or more Y’s that fit an opponent of X.
I want to push back on these patterns, and explain why I expect to be confused as to how scared I should be by the upcoming election results, by focusing on issues based on how important I’d think they were if I didn’t know who would be running.
The most important issues are at least an order of magnitude more important than typical issues, so I ought to base my vote on the most important issues if at all possible.
Continue ReadingNearly a book review: Situational Awareness, by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
“Situational Awareness” offers an insightful analysis of our proximity to a critical threshold in AI capabilities. His background in machine learning and economics lends credibility to his predictions.
The paper left me with a rather different set of confusions than I started with.
His extrapolation of recent trends culminates in the onset of an intelligence explosion:
I have canceled my OpenAI subscription in protest over OpenAI’s lack of ethics.
In particular, I object to:
I’m trying to hold AI companies to higher standards than I use for typical companies, due to the risk that AI companies will exert unusual power.
A boycott of OpenAI subscriptions seems unlikely to gain enough attention to meaningfully influence OpenAI. Where I hope to make a difference is by discouraging competent researchers from joining OpenAI unless they clearly reform (e.g. by firing Altman). A few good researchers choosing not to work at OpenAI could make the difference between OpenAI being the leader in AI 5 years from now versus being, say, a distant 3rd place.
A year ago, I thought that OpenAI equity would be a great investment, but that I had no hope of buying any. But the value of equity is heavily dependent on trust that a company will treat equity holders fairly. The legal system helps somewhat with that, but it can be expensive to rely on the legal system. OpenAI’s equity is nonstandard in ways that should create some unusual uncertainty. Potential employees ought to question whether there’s much connection between OpenAI’s future profits and what equity holders will get.
How does OpenAI’s behavior compare to other leading AI companies?
I’m unsure whether Elon Musk’s xAI deserves a boycott, partly because I’m unsure whether it’s a serious company. Musk has a history of breaking contracts that bears some similarity to OpenAI’s attitude. Musk also bears some responsibility for SpaceX requiring non-disparagement agreements.
Google has shown some signs of being evil. As far as I can tell, DeepMind has been relatively ethical. I’ve heard clear praise of Demis Hassabis’s character from Aubrey de Grey, who knew Hassabis back in the 1990s. Probably parts of Google ought to be boycotted, but I encourage good researchers to work at DeepMind.
Anthropic seems to be a good deal more ethical than OpenAI. I feel comfortable paying them for a subscription to Claude Opus. My evidence concerning their ethics is too weak to say more than that.
P.S. Some of the better sources to start with for evidence against Sam Altman / OpenAI:
But if you’re thinking of working at OpenAI, please look at more than just those sources.
Book review: A Theory of Everyone – The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going Energy, culture and a better future for everyone, by Michael Muthukrishna.
I found this book disappointing. An important part of that is because Muthukrishna set my expectations too high.
I had previously blogged about a paper that he co-authored with Henrich on cultural influences on IQ. If those ideas were new in the book, I’d be eagerly writing about them. But I’ve already written enough about those ideas in that blog post.
Another source of disappointment was that the book’s title is misleading. To the limited extent that the book focuses on a theory, it’s the theory that’s more clearly described in Henrich’s The Secret of our Success. A Theory of Everyone feels more like a collection of blog posts than like a well-organized book.
Continue ReadingBook review: Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity, by Daniel Deudney.
Dark Skies is an unusually good and bad book.
Good in the sense that 95% of the book consists of uncontroversial, scholarly, mundane claims that accurately describe the views that Deudney is attacking. These parts of the book are careful to distinguish between value differences and claims about objective facts.
Bad in the senses that the good parts make the occasional unfair insult more gratuitous, and that Deudney provides little support for his predictions that his policies will produce better results than those of his adversaries. I count myself as one of his adversaries.
Dark Skies is an opposite of Where Is My Flying Car? in both style and substance.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, by Peter Zeihan.
Are you looking for an entertaining set of geopolitical forecasts that will nudge you out of the frameworks of mainstream pundits? This might be just the right book for you.
Zeihan often sounds more like a real estate salesman than a scholar: The US has more miles of internal waterways than the rest of the world combined! US mountain ranges have passes that are easy enough to use that the mountains barely impede traffic. Transportation options like that guarantee sufficient political unity!
Continue ReadingBook review: Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Paul Scharre.
Four Battlegrounds is often a thoughtful, competently written book on an important topic. It is likely the least pleasant, and most frustrating, book fitting that description that I have ever read.
The title’s battlegrounds refer to data, compute, talent, and institutions. Those seem like important resources that will influence military outcomes. But it seems odd to label them as battlegrounds. Wouldn’t resources be a better description?
Scharre knows enough about the US military that I didn’t detect flaws in his expertise there. He has learned enough about AI to avoid embarrassing mistakes. I.e. he managed to avoid claims that have been falsified by an AI during the time it took to publish the book.
Scharre has clear political biases. E.g.:
Conservative politicians have claimed for years – without evidence – that US tech firms have an anti-conservative bias.
(Reminder: The Phrase “No Evidence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication.) But he keeps those biases separate enough from his military analysis that I don’t find those biases to be a reason for not reading the book.
Continue ReadingThis week we saw two interesting bank collapses: Silvergate Capital Corporation, and SVB Financial Group.
This is a reminder that diversification is important.
The most basic problem in both cases is that they got money from a rather undiverse set of depositors, who experienced unusually large fluctuations in their deposits and withdrawals. They also made overly large bets on the safety of government bonds.
Continue ReadingScott Alexander graded his predictions from 2018 and made new predictions for 2028.
I’m trying to compete with him. I’m grading myself as having done a bit worse than Scott.
Here’s a list of how I did (skipping a few where I agreed with Scott), followed by some predictions for 2028.
Continue Reading