that the new worker will be less productive than the median worker already at the firm, making you worse off than if you hadn't hired them.

Isn't it actually the mean instead of the median, which is an even harder target to hit?

Hermione's mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.

What about the mask of

I expect there are plenty of possible and actual critiques whose responses should include a sentence like "it would have been a more useful critique if the author had read my point properly"

This reminded me of @transhumanist_atom_understander's commentary on tumblr about the Smalley-Drexler debate:

Smalley, though, didn’t read Nanosystems. I’m pretty sure of this. I don’t think you can tell from his Scientific American article. But it becomes pretty clear in the “debate”. Drexler wrote an open letter to Smalley, and Smalley’s response includes this revealing paragraph:
...

So when I say that Smalley’s objections are at least addressed (convincingly or not) in Nanosystems, I don’t infer that Smalley must have read this and made the objections anyway. He didn’t read it.

https://x.com/alexwei_/status/1946477742855532918

This doesn't count yet for the standards of the bet, I think, but this seems pretty close to "EY wins" to me? (The manifold market has jumped up to 93%.)

At the beginning of your post, you talk about "the value" of comments in a way that seems like it's purely connected to their information content. Why not view them as speech acts?

I think I agree with your statement; I assume that this happened, though? Or, at least, in a mirror of the 'improvements visible from the outside' comment earlier, the question is whether MIRI is now operating in a way that leads to successfully opposing their adversaries, rather than whether they've exposed their reasoning about this to the public.

I can't comment on why you weren't invited [to the CFAR postmortem], because I was not involved with the decision-making for who would be invited; I just showed up to the event. Naively, I would've guessed it was because you didn't work at CFAR (unless you did and I missed it?); I think only one attendee wasn't in that category, for a broad definition of 'work at'.

I have to rate all the time spent that didn’t result in improvements visible from the outside as nothing but costs paid to sustain internal narcissistic supply

This seems fair to me.

The uniformly positive things I’ve heard about “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus II: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” implies not much in the way of new perspective or even consensus that one is needed.

I think the main difference between MIRI pre-2022 and post-2022 is that pre-2022 had much more willingness to play along with AI companies and EAs, and post-2022 is much more willing to be openly critical.

There are other differences, and also I think we might be focusing on totally different parts of MIRI. Would you care to say more about where you think there needs to be new perspective?

Hmm. I HMCFed after that, I think, but I don't remember why I didn't talk much about it publicly. (Also I think there was a CFAR postmortem that I don't recall getting written up and discussed online, tho there was lots of in-person discussion.)

It does in #1 but not #4--I should've been clearer which one I was referring to.

I like "this is not a metaphor".

I think referring to Emmett as "former OpenAI CEO" is a stretch? Or, like, I don't think it passes the onion test well enough.