I mean, if Paul doesn't confirm that he is not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI like Cullen O' Keefe did, we have our answer.

In fact, given this asymmetry of information situation, it makes sense to assume that Paul is under such an obligation until he claims otherwise.

I just realized that Paul Christiano and Dario Amodei both probably have signed non-disclosure + non-disparagement contracts since they both left OpenAI.

That impacts how I'd interpret Paul's (and Dario's) claims and opinions (or the lack thereof), that relates to OpenAI or alignment proposals entangled with what OpenAI is doing. If Paul has systematically silenced himself, and a large amount of OpenPhil and SFF money has been mis-allocated because of systematically skewed beliefs that these organizations have had due to Paul's opinions or lack thereof, well. I don't think this is the case though -- I expect Paul, Dario, and Holden all seem to have converged on similar beliefs (whether they track reality or not) and have taken actions consistent with those beliefs.

If your endgame strategy involved relying on OpenAI, DeepMind, or Anthropic to implement your alignment solution that solves science / super-cooperation / nanotechnology, consider figuring out another endgame plan.

I love the score of this comment as of writing: -1 karma points, 23 agree points.

I think it is useful for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say "Hey, this information you are consuming, its from <this source that you don't entirely trust and have a complex causal model of>".

Enforcing social norms to prevent scapegoating also destroys information that is valuable for accurate credit assignment and causally modelling reality. I haven't yet found a third alternative, and until then, I'd recommend people both encourage and help people in their community to not scapegoat or lose their minds in 'tribal instincts' (as you put it), while not throwing away valuable information.

You can care about people while also seeing their flaws and noticing how they are hurting you and others you care about.

Similarly, governmental institutions have institutional memories with the problems of major historical fuckups, in a way that new startups very much don’t.

On the other hand, institutional scars can cause what effectively looks like institutional traumatic responses, ones that block the ability to explore and experiment and to try to make non-incremental changes or improvements to the status quo, to the system that makes up the institution, or to the system that the institution is embedded in.

There's a real and concrete issue with the amount of roadblocks that seem to be in place to prevent people from doing things that make gigantic changes to the status quo. Here's a simple example: would it be possible for people to get a nuclear plant set up in the United States within the next decade, barring financial constraints? Seems pretty unlikely to me. What about the FDA response to the COVID crisis? That sure seemed like a concrete example of how 'institutional memories' serve as gigantic roadblocks to the ability for our civilization to orient and act fast enough to deal with the sort of issues we are and will be facing this century.

In the end, capital flows towards AGI companies for the sole reason that it is the least bottlenecked / regulated way to multiply your capital, that seems to have the highest upside for the investors. If you could modulate this, you wouldn't need to worry about the incentives and culture of these startups as much.

I had the impression that SPAR was focused on UC Berkeley undergrads and had therefore dismissed the idea of being a SPAR mentor or mentee. It was only recently that I looked at the website when someone mentioned that they wanted to learn from this one SPAR mentor, and then I looked at the website, and SPAR now seems to focus on the same niche as AI Safety Camp.

Did SPAR pivot in the past six months, or did I just misinterpret SPAR when I first encountered it?

fiber at Tata Industries in Mumbai

Could you elaborate on how Tata Industries is relevant here? Based on a DDG search, the only news I find involving Tata and AI infrastructure is one where a subsidiary named TCS is supposedly getting into the generative AI gold rush.

My thought is that I don’t see why a pivotal act needs to be that.

Okay. Why do you think Eliezer proposed that, then?