Congratulations.

I have heard that it is very good, is that true?

Isn't the rumour that he has many IVF+embryo-selected kids with different women? (Is there a better source for this?)

Yeah, fair enough. I don't count Musk as a rationalist rationalist. He's just very confused about anything that doesn't give you real-world feedback quickly. He's a weird case of a human who is exceptional in a ≤4-year time horizon and then has median human thinking abilities for anything beyond that. (Though noteworthy that he has taken no steps towards technical solutions for the birth rate issue, which, ya know, revealed preferences…)

If I were to steelman… hm. If every nation was at South Korea levels in 200 years we'd likely be back to pre-industrial revolution levels of technological & industrial development because lots of tacit knowledge that is required to keep civilization going is stored in people's heads, and can't be squeezed into fewer people, furthermore declining population leaves less slack for R&D because everyone is busy caring for mostly-nonproductive elders instead of innovating. This might plausibly start by 2050 or so, so unless one has fairly long AI timelines it is a non-issue.

I guess any AI pause that goes that far out has a similar issue, unless we allow for genetic engineering+exowombs to proliferate (and even then it feels like a toss-up to me, bracketing more AI progress).

The biggest issue I see with Pigouvian taxes is that they're computationally tricky to estimate. Who knows what downstream effect in the big chain of causality this particular person/action had! Pollution/carbon taxes are an easy exception.

Aside, a bit off topic: Even if we could compute Shapley values, Shapley values suffer from combinatorial explosion. (Things other than Shapley values or approximating them might work.)

Yeah… seems right. I could cop out with "ah, the number of bit erasures by a program matters, not just whether it did", but I don't have any good reason for believing this.

A lot of the rationalist discourse around birthrates don't seem to square away with AGI predictions.

I think whenever I've seen people worry about birth rates, they either

1. Excluded AGI as a relevant factor ("unless AGI happens, low birth rates will matter"), or
2. They weren't people who thought AGI was a relevant factor (either because it's too far out, or because they think robotics is hard, or something else)

Curious if you have counter-examples of people who think AGI soon and low birthrates are an issue.

Re: psychedelic enthusiasts.overstating effects. I recommend going for the primary sources and looking up testimonials from cluster headache patients!

Yeah… I'm trying to beware surprising and suspicious convergence here. "Local psychedelics enthusiasts discover that psychedelics are the cure to the worst conditions known to humanity, more at 11."

This is, in some sense, a cheap and kind of mean heuristic, but I wanted to flag the suspicion. I might go and read some testimonials, but nothing beats a good ol' RCT ^[1] . I don't want to be the person who's like "you need more research before you advocate" and I'm looking forward to putting DMT-variants head-to-head in an experiment with known medical treatments for cluster headaches.

1. Actually not true, we could & should try to design successors to the RCT, but they'll go in the direction of "Thompson-sample from the posterior distribution in some bandit setup" as opposed to "more anecdata". ↩︎

I haven't used it quite enough yet to make a good assessment. Let me report back (or ping me if I don't and you're still curious) in a few weeks.

Does any DMT variant work here? Since you mentioned psilocybin working, and most people mean NN-DMT when they say "DMT". Since some DMT variants have lighter psychedelic effects. Claude 4.5 Sonnet, when pressed, claims that 4-AcO-DMT would be the least disruptive.

(I'm a bit worried that psychedelics enthusiasts are a very exited about using psychedelics to treat this hellish condition, and might not be maximally balanced in evaluating the evidence.)

1. I found this funny.
2. I have no clue if this is LLM-written or not.