The reason why EY&co were relatively optimistic (p(doom) ~ 50%) before AlphaGo was their assumption "to build intelligence, you need some kind of insight in theory of intelligence". They didn't expect that you can just take sufficiently large approximator, pour data inside, get intelligent behavior and have no idea about why you get intelligent behavior.
General meta-problem of such discussions is that direct counterargument to "LLMs are safe" is to tell how to make LLM unsafe, and it's not a good practice.
governments being worse at alignment than companies would have been
How exactly absence of regulation prevents governments from working on AI? Thanks to OpenAI/DeepMind/Anthropic, possibility of not attracting government attention at all is already lost. If you want government to not do bad work on alignment, you should prohibit government to work on AI using, yes, government regulations.
Whoops, it's really looks like I imagined this claim to be backed more than by one SSC post. In my defense I say that this poll covered really existing thing like abnormal illusions processing in schizophrenics (see "Systematic review of visual illusions schizophrenia" Costa et al., 2023) and I think it's overall plausible.
My general objections stays the same: there is a bazillion sources on brain differences in transgender individuals, transgenderism is likely to be a brain anomaly, we don't need to invoke "testosterone damage" hypothesis.
I don't understand why you need to invoke testosterone. Transgender brain is special, for example, transgender women have immunity to visual illusions. Anecdotally, I have friends with gender identity problems who do not make gender transition because it's costly and they don't have it this hard, they are STEM-level smart and they are not susceptible to visual illusions. So, assuming that this phenomenon exists (I don't quite believe your twitter statistics), it's likely explainable by transwomen innate brain structure.
The other weirdness in your hypothesis is that puberty blockers is a quite recent therapy and it's not ubiquous - most intellectually accomplished transwomen are likely to have standard male puberty. Even low-T male have mindboggingly large amount of testosterone compared to female, which implies really weird dose-dependency between testosterone and IQ in puberty.
There are plenty of stupid and/or distracting behaviors testosterone can push you for without any kind of "chemical brain damage", not only sex. Testosterone is likely to make you seek social status and status-seeking is notoriously incompatible with intellectual pursuits. I don't know my testosterone levels, but I have plenty of concussions due to my tastes for physical activity and I consider myself pretty average, stereotypical male. I suspect that concussions is the first direct source of male brain deterioration and testosterone is related here because it induces risk-seeking. The second and third, I think, smoking and drinking, and non-surpisingly, it's another sort of typical risky teenage male activity.
It's really weird hypothesis because DHT is used as nootropic.
I think the most effect of high T, if it exists, is purely behavioral.
I always thought that in naive MWI what matters is not whether something happens in absolute sense, but what Born measure is concentrated on branches that contain good things instead of bad things.
Timothy Lee struggles to ground out everything in the real world.
Timothy Lee: The last year has been a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. Inside the AI world, there’s non-stop talk about the unprecedented pace of AI improvement. But when I look at the broader economy, I struggle to find examples of transformative change I can write about.
Electricity wasn't in wide industrial usage until 1910s, despite technology being very promising from the start. The reason was differenct infrastructure necessary for steam-powered and electric factories.
I think the same with LLMs: you need specific wrapping and/or experience to make them productive, this wrappings are hard to scale, so most of surplus is going to dissipate into consumer surplus + rise of income of productive workers.
The simplest (in conceptual sense) way to integrate AI in economy is to make it self-integrating, i.e. instead of having humans thinking which input AI need to get and where output will be directed, you should have AI agent which decides for itself.
I mean, the problem is if it works we won't hear about such people - they just live happily ever after and don't talk about uncomfortable period of their life.