The grass that can be touched is not the true grass.

What convinced me this made sense? 

• One of EA's most popular and profitable games is The Sims, which famously benefits from Sim irrationality. In The Sims 5, there will be bold and new exciting ways for your Sims to behave, and they'll be able to use our memetic virality model to have controversies and factional alignment. (Generating scissor statements is ethical so long as you're doing it in Simlish.)
• EA is investing in the hypothesis that bad writing drives underperformance. Having ratfic writers and philosophers look at Mass Effect 3 could have turned that from a disappointing series-ender (did you play Andromeda?) to a resounding triumph, and Dragon Age: Veilguard, despite being positively reviewed in general, was panned for its weak writing and became inflamed in culture war controversy. We've thought a lot about how misbehaving gods would act, in a way that I think would have made for a more compelling story and user experience.
• I didn't expect we could do anything relating to EA's flagship sports games (FIFA, NHL, Madden, etc.), but what astonished me was the potential to do the reverse. I don't know if we'll be able to get Gwern 2025 out in time, but look forward to Gwern 2026. They were practically salivating at the idea of being able to take a normally annual product, tied to sports schedules that won't be adjusted by advancing AI progress, and adapt it to a domain which, as part of an overall hyperbolic growth curve, will generate enough new content for a new release in ~half the time every new release. 

The short version is they're more used to adversarial thinking and security mindset, and don't have a culture of "fake it until you make it" or "move fast and break things".

I don't think it's obvious that it goes that way, but I think it's not obvious that it goes the other way.

This project is extremely neglected, since normal people don’t seriously consider whether orcas might be that smart.

Ok, but matters is not what normal people are doing, but what specialists are doing. Why not try to do this as part of Project CETI?

It looks like you only have pieces with 2 connections and 6 connections, which works for maximal density. But I think you need some slack space to create pieces without the six axial lines. I think you should include the tiles with 4 connections also (and maybe even the 0-connection tile!) and the other 2-connection tiles; it increases the number by quite a bit but I think will let you make complete knots.

I haven't thought deeply about this specific case, but I think you should consider this like any other ablation study--like, what happens if you replace the SAE with a linear probe?

And then a lot of the post seems to make really quite bad arguments against forecasting AI timelines and other technologies, doing so with... I really don't know, a rejection of bayesianism? A random invocation of an asymmetric burden of proof?

I think the position Ben (the author) has on timelines is really not that different from Eliezer's; consider pieces like this one, which is not just about the perils of biological anchors.

I think the piece spends less time than I would like on what to do in a position of uncertainty--like, if the core problem is that we are approaching a cliff of uncertain distance, how should we proceed?--but I think it's not particularly asymmetric.

[And--there's something I like about realism in plans? If people are putting heroic efforts into a plan that Will Not Work, I am on the side of the person on the sidelines trying to save them their effort, or direct them towards a plan that has a chance of working. If the core uncertainty is whether or not we can get human intelligence advancement in 25 years--I'm on your side of thinking it's plausible--then it seems worth diverting what attention we can from other things towards making that happen, and being loud about doing that.]

Instead, the U.S. government will do what it has done every time it’s been convinced of the importance of a powerful new technology in the past hundred years: it will drive research and development for military purposes.

I think this is my biggest disagreement with the piece. I think this is the belief I most wish 10-years-ago-us didn't have, so that we would try something else, which might have worked better than what we got.

Or--in shopping the message around to Silicon Valley types, thinking more about the ways that Silicon Valley is the child of the US military-industrial complex, and will overestimate their ability to control what they create (or lack of desire to!). Like, I think many more 'smart nerds' than military-types believe that human replacement is good.

The article seems to assume that the primary motivation for wanting to slow down AI is to buy time for institutional progress. Which seems incorrect as an interpretation of the motivation. Most people that I hear talk about buying time are talking about buying time for technical progress in alignment.

I think you need both? That is--I think you need both technical progress in alignment, and agreements and surveillance and enforcement such that people don't accidentally (or deliberately) create rogue AIs that cause lots of problems.

I think historically many people imagined "we'll make a generally intelligent system and ask it to figure out a way to defend the Earth" in a way that I think seems less plausible to me now. It seems more like we need to have systems in place already playing defense, which ramp up faster than the systems playing offense. 

My understanding is that the Lightcone Offices and Lighthaven have 1) overlapping but distinct audiences, with Lightcone Offices being more 'EA' in a way that seemed bad, and 2) distinct use cases, where Lighthaven is more of a conference venue with a bit of coworking whereas Lightcone Offices was basically just coworking.