A problem I have that I think is fairly common:

1. I notice an incoming message of some kind.
2. For whatever reason it's mildly aversive or I'm busy or something.
3. Time passes.
4. I feel guilty about not having replied yet.
5. Interacting with the message is associated with negative emotions and guilt, so it becomes more aversive.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the badness of not replying exceeds the escalating 4/5 cycle, or until the end of time.

Curious if anyone who once had this problem feels like they've resolved it, and if so what worked! 

So it's been a few months since SB1047. My sense of the main events that have happened since the peak of LW commenter interest (might have made mistakes or missed some items) are:

• The bill got vetoed by Newsom for pretty nonsensical stated reasons, after passing in the state legislature (but the state legislature tends to pass lots of stuff so this isn't much signal).
• My sense of the rumor mill is that there are perhaps some similar-ish bills in the works in various state legislatures, but AFAIK none that have yet been formally proposed or accrued serious discussion except maybe for S.5616.
• We're now in a Trump administration which looks substantially less inclined to do safety regulation of AI at the federal level than the previous admin was. In particular, some acceleration-y VC people prominently opposed to SB1047 are now in positions of greater political power in the new administration.
  • Eg Sriram Krishnan, Trump's senior policy advisor on AI, was opposed; "AI and Crypto Czar" David Sacks doesn't have a position on record but I'd be surprised if he was a fan.
  • On the other hand, Elon was nominally in favor (though I don't think xAI took an official position one way or the other).

Curious for retrospectives here! Whose earlier predictions gain or lose Bayes points? What postmortems do folks have?

Note that the lozenges dissolve slowly, so (bad news) you'd have the taste around for a while but (good news) it's really not a very strong peppermint flavor while it's in your mouth, and in my experience it doesn't really have much of the menthol-triggered cooling effect. My guess is that you would still find it unpleasant, but I think there's a decent chance you won't really mind. I don't know of other zinc acetate brands, but I haven't looked carefully; as of 2019 the claim on this podcast was that only Life Extension brand are any good.

On my model of what's going on, you probably want the lozenges to spend a while dissolving, so that you have fairly continuous exposure of throat and nasal tissue to the zinc ions. I find that they taste bad and astringent if I actively suck on them but are pretty unobtrusive if they just gradually dissolve over an hour or two (sounds like you had a similar experience). I sometimes cut the lozenges in half and let each half dissolve so that they fit into my mouth more easily, you might want to give that a try?

I agree, zinc lozenges seem like they're probably really worthwhile (even in the milder-benefit worlds)! My less-ecstatic tone is only relative to the promise of older lesswrong posts that suggested it could basically solve all viral respiratory infections, but maybe I should have made the "but actually though, buy some zinc lozenges" takeaway more explicit. 

I liked this post, but I think there's a good chance that the future doesn't end up looking like a central example of either "a single human seizes power" or "a single rogue AI seizes power". Some other possible futures:

• Control over the future by a group of humans, like "the US government" or "the shareholders of an AI lab" or "direct democracy over all humans who existed in 2029"
• Takeover via an AI that a specific human crafted to do a good job at enacting that human's values in particular, but which the human has no further steering power over
• Lots of different actors (both human and AI) respecting one another's property rights and pursuing goals within negotiated regions of spacetime, with no one actor having power over the majority of available resources
• A governance structure which nominally leaves particular humans in charge, and which the AIs involved are rule-abiding enough to respect, but in which things are sufficiently complicated and beyond human understanding that most decisions lack meaningful human oversight.
• A future in which one human has extremely large amounts of power, but they acquired that power via trade and consensual agreements through their immense (ASI-derived) material wealth rather than via the sorts of coercive actions we tend to imagine with words like "takeover".
• A singleton ASI is in decisive control of the future, and among its values are a strong commitment to listen to human input and behave according to its understanding of collective human preferences, though maybe not its single overriding concern.

I'd be pretty excited to see more attempts at comparing these kinds of scenarios for plausibility and for how well the world might go conditional on their occurrence. 

(I think it's fairly likely that lots of these scenarios will eventually converge on something like the standard picture of one relatively coherent nonhuman agent doing vaguely consequentialist maximization across the universe, after sufficient negotiation and value-reflection and so on, but you might still care quite a lot about how the initial conditions shake out, and the dumbest AI capable of performing a takeover is probably very far from that limiting state.)

The action-relevant question, for deciding whether you want to try to solve alignment, is how the average world with human-controlled AGI compares to the average AGI-controlled world.

To nitpick a little, it's more like "the average world where we just barely didn't solve alignment, versus the average world where we just barely did" (to the extent making things binary in this way is sensible), which I think does affect the calculus a little - marginal AGI-controlled worlds are more likely to have AIs which maintain some human values. 

(Though one might be able to work on alignment in order to improve the quality of AGI-controlled worlds from worse to better ones, which mitigates this effect.)

Update: Got tested, turns out the thing I have is bacterial rather than viral (Haemophilius influenzae). Lines up with the zinc lozenges not really helping! If I remember to take zinc the next time I come down with a cold, I'll comment here again. 

My impression is that since zinc inhibits viral replication, it's most useful in the regime where viral populations are still growing and your body hasn't figured out how to beat the virus yet. So getting started ASAP is good, but it's likely helpful for the first 2-3 days of the illness.

An important part of the model here that I don't understand yet is how your body's immune response varies as a function of viral populations - e.g. two models you could have are 

1. As soon as any immune cell in your body has ever seen a virus, a fixed scale-up of immune response begins, and you're sick until that scale-up exceeds viral populations.
2. Immune response progress is proportional to current viral population, and you get better as soon as total progress crosses some threshold.

If we simplistically assume* that badness of cold = current viral population, then in world 1 you're really happy to take zinc as soon as you have just a bit of virus and will get better quickly without ever being very sick. In world 2, the zinc has no effect at all on total badness experienced, it just affects the duration over which you experience that badness.

*this is false, tbc - I think you generally keep having symptoms a while after viral load becomes very low, because a lot of symptoms are from immune response rather than the virus itself.

The 2019 LW post discusses a podcast which talks a lot about gears-y models and proposed mechanisms; as I understand it, the high level "zinc ions inhibit viral replication" model is fairly well accepted, but some of the details around which brands are best aren't as well-attested elsewhere in the literature. For instance, many of these studies don't use zinc acetate, which this podcast would suggest is best. (To its credit, the 2013 meta-analysis does find that acetate is (nonsignificantly) better than gluconate, though not radically so.)