It is sometimes good to avoid coming across as really weird or culturally out of touch, and ads can give you some signal on what's normal and culturally relevant right now. If you're picking up drinks for a 4th of July party, Bud Light will be very culturally on-brand, Corona would be fine, but a bit less on-brand, and mulled wine would be kinda weird. And I think you can pick this sort of thing up from advertising.

Also, it might be helpful to know roughly what group membership you or other people might be signalling by using a particular product. For example, I drive a Subaru. Subaru has, for a long time, marketed to (what appears to me to be) people who are a bit younger, vote democrat, and spend time in the mountains. This is in contrast to, say, Ram trucks, which are marketed to (what looks to me like) people who vote Republican. If I'm in a context where people who don't know me very well see my car, I am now aware that they might be biased toward thinking I vote democrat or spend time outdoors. (FWIW, I did a low-effort search for which states have the strongest Subaru sales and it is indeed states with mountains and states with people who vote democrat).

Recently I've been wondering what this dynamic does to the yes-men. If someone is strongly incentivized to agree with whatever nonsense their boss is excited about that week, then they go on Twitter or national TV to repeat that nonsense, it can't be good for seeing the world accurately.

Sometimes what makes a crime "harder to catch" is the risk of false positives. If you don't consider someone to have "been caught" unless your confidence that they did the crime is very high, then, so long as you're calibrated, your false positive rate is very low. But holding off on punishment in cases where you do not have very high confidence might mean that, for most instances where someone commits the crime, they are not punished.

If you want someone to compress and communicate their views on the future, whether they anticipate everyone will be dead within a few decades because of AI seems like a pretty important thing to know. And it's natural to find your way from that to asking for a probability. But I think that shortcut isn't actually helpful, and it's more productive to just ask something like "Do you anticipate that, because of AI, everyone will be dead within the next few decades?". Someone can still give a probability if they want, but it's more natural to give a less precise answer like "probably not" or a conditional answer like "I dunno, depends on whether <thing happens>" or to avoid the framing like "well, I don't think we're literally going to die, but".

He says, under the section titled "So what options do I have if I disagree with this decision?":

But beyond [leaving LW, trying to get him fired, etc], there is no higher appeals process. At some point I will declare that the decision is made, and stands, and I don't have time to argue it further, and this is where I stand on the decision this post is about.

Yeah, seems like it fails mainly on 1, though I think that depends on whether you accept the meaning of "could not have done otherwise" implied by 2/3. But if you accept a meaning that makes 1 true (or, at least, less obviously false), then the argument is no longer valid.

This seems closely related to an argument I vaguely remember from a philosophy class:

1. A person is not morally culpable of something if they could not have done otherwise
2. If determinism is true, there is only one thing a person could do
3. If there is only one thing a person could do, they could not have done otherwise
4. If determinism is true, whatever someone does, they are not morally culpable

Seems reasonable.

Possibly I'm behind on the state of things, but I wouldn't put too much trust in a model's self-report on how things like routing work.

Of course many ways of making a room more fun are idiosyncratic to a particular theme, concept, or space.

I think fun is often idiosyncratic to particular people as well, and this is one reason why fun design is not more common, at least for spaces shared by lots of pepople. For me, at least, 'fun' spaces are higher variance than more conventional spaces. Many do indeed seem fun, but sometimes my response is "this is unusual and clearly made for someone who isn't me".

But maybe this is mostly a skill issue. The Epic campus looks consistently fun to me, for example.

AI Impacts looked into this question, and IMO "typically within 10 years, often within just a few years" is a reasonable characterization. https://wiki.aiimpacts.org/speed_of_ai_transition/range_of_human_performance/the_range_of_human_intelligence

I also have data for a few other technologies (not just AI) doing things that humans do, which I can dig up if anyone's curious. They're typically much slower to cross the range of human performance, but so was most progress prior to AI, so I dunno what you want to infer from that.