I thought this was the existing standard explanation. Is this not well-known by old school LessWrongers?
There's already far too much internet writing on every conceivable topic
Yes, but completely non-ironically, the vast majority of it is not worth reading. When I find a blog from an interesting thinker that I hadn't encountered before, this is a cause for celebration, for me.
And some of the thoughtful internet writers seem to have ended up with really quite substantial influence. eg Eliezer, Scott Alexander, and Matt Yglesias, come to mind.
then the "seniority system" was instantiated, congress became senile, and FDR got unprecedented control over the war-time economy, and took the opportunity to transfer many decision making roles and bodies from congress to the executive.
I've had an inkling that a lot of things that are broken about the US political system can be traced back to congress being ineffective, which can be traced back to power being held predominantly by the most senior congresspeople. But I don't really know enough to know if this is right, or even the ways in which the "seniority system" has impacted how congress works.
But I would eagerly read a post describing how this change came about and what downstream factors it impacted.
and understanding how seriously they would take supreme court making a clear judgement (and e.g. would be open to protecting U.S. marshalls while they enforce supreme court judgement) seems like one of the most crucial questions.
I agree.
Also this is a scary question to investigate, because (on my current model, as described by this book), this is a Keynesian beauty contest—how almost everyone will act depends on how they expect almost everyone to act. Trying to get clarity about the question of how seriously the members of the armed forces take their oath to the constitution, or how they interpret the meaning of that oath, is much less of a neutral act than most exercises in figuring something out (even taking for granted that figuring stuff out often has implications for political conflicts, as the contextualizers cry, this question is particularly politically laden).
For this question more than most, the prediction market is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a prediction market, but it does seem like you should contend with the self- fulfilling nature somehow.
I feel on shaky ground here. It seems plausible to me that, if I have opportunity to, I should mostly not try to predict the answer to this question, I should mostly just try to reinforce the equilibrium of "the armed forces first loyalty is to the constitution."
Or at least, I feel like I don't have a developed philosophy of how to deal with questions that are mix of epistemic predictions and coordination-game.
To be clear: were I to take the above stance, I would continue to refrain from ever lying. Though I might also refrain from answering some classes of questions. (Also this is probably an academic point because I'm not likely to have much influence on what the US armed forces believe about what others in the US armed forces will do.)
I bet @Andrew Critch and @Richard_Ngo have thought about this question.
I think it's something like "for a lot of activities people do, they don't actually care about the activity per se, or the ostensive goal of the activity, but they do it because it's the done thing, or because that's what everyone else is doing, so it's important for socially connecting."
eg.
People want to talk about something with their coworkers around the water cooler, or with their buddies in the pub after work. They don't actually care what they're talking about very much, but they don't like being out of the loop, especially if there's a set of things that "respectable" people are supposed to know. When communities are small and communication technologies weak, the only things that there are to talk about are local events. Over time, other topics became possible as the topic of conversation, and they were more scintillating, so focus shifted from local news to national news.
(Which is an example of your #2, I think.)
I'm very glad to have read the Musk quote. I didn't know that that was still his view.
it felt he wasn't really taking the original reasons for going into AI seriously (i.e. reducing x-risk)
Whose original reasons?
It sounds like you're talking about imposing a bunch of constraints on the AI's that you're doing the handoff to, as opposed to the AIs that you're using to do (most of) the work of building the AIs that you're handing off to. According to the plan as I've understood it, the control comes earlier in the process.
The Master of the Senate covers the 50s and early 60s? I thought the seniority system in congress was younger than that.