Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier isn't really rational but is rat-adjacent and funny about it. Available to watch on youtube though the video quality isn't fantastic.

what technologies like bbq are we missing?

It's also my litmus test for community, if a group can't succeed at casual BBQs at all or has them but they have to be a big production I am more wary.

Many people have no context in their life where they can get feedback on socially undesirable ideas from thoughtful people so that they can potentially update them. E.g. you hear socially undesirable thing online that you suspect has some truth to it, you can't have any reasonable discussion about which aspects might be true, which might be false, and even amongst the more true parts how to navigate having that belief or what would be a wholesome framework to use to work with it, bc no feedback.

I'll give an egregious example. At one time, iodizing salt in developing countries was opposed by some NGOs on the grounds that the argument that it raised IQ was some sort of fake racist thing. A person in that environment might have wanted to be able to discuss things in a safer space than whatever environment produced that insanity.

Thanks for writing this, I indeed felt that the arguments were significantly easier to follow than previous efforts.

My personal experience was that superintelligence made it harder to think clearly about AI by making lots of distinctions and few claims.

Thank you!

Ironically, I do not know who to attribute to the notion that 'all problems are credit assignation problems.'

I've read leaked emails from people in similar situations before that made a couple things apparent:

1. Power talk happens on the phone for paper trail reasons
2. There is no meeting where an actual rational discussion of considerations and theories of change happens, everything really is people flying by the seat of their pants even at highest level. Talk of ethics usually just gets you excluded from the power talk.

I concluded this from the lack of any such talk in meeting minutes that are recorded, and the lack of any reference to such considerations in 'previous conversations' or requests to set up such meetings.

This elides the original argument by assuming the conclusion: that countermanding efforts remain cheap relative to the innovations. But the whole point is that significant shifts in costs associated with defense of a certain level can change behaviors and which plans and supply chains are economically defensible a lot.

Relatedly: people often discount improvements with large startup costs even if those costs are one time cost for an ongoing benefit. One of the worst is when it's something one is definitely going to do eventually, so delaying paying the startup cost is simply reducing the amount of time for diffuse benefits. Exercise and learning to cook are like this.