• They very briefly discuss automated AI alignment research as a proposal for mitigating AI risk, but their arguments against that plan do not respond to the most thoughtful versions of these plans. (In their defense, the most thoughtful versions of these plans basically haven't been published, though Ryan Greenblatt is going to publish a detailed version of this plan soon. And I think that there are several people who have pretty thoughtful versions of these plans, haven't written them up (at least publicly), but do discuss them in person.)

Am a bit confused by this section - did you think that part 3 was awful because it didn't respond to (as yet unpublished) plans, or for some other reason?

there is very much demand for this book in the sense that there's a lot of people who are worried about AI for agent foundations shaped reasons and want an introduction they can give to their friends and family who don't care that much.

This is true, but many of the surprising prepublication reviews are from people who I don't think were already up-to-date on these AI x-risk arguments (or at least hadn't given any prior public indication of their awareness, unlike Matt Y).

This is a valid line of critique but seems moderately undercut by its prepublication endorsements, which suggest that the arguments landed pretty ok.  Maybe they will land less well on the rest of the book's target audience?

(re: Said & MIRI housecleaning: Lightcone and MIRI are separate organizations and MIRI does not moderate LessWrong.  You might try to theorize that Habryka, the person who made the call to ban Said back in July, was attempting to do some 4d-chess PR optimization on MIRI's behalf months ahead of time, but no, he was really nearly banned multiple times over the years and he was finally banned this time because Habryka changed his mind after the most recent dust-up.  Said practically never commented on AI-related subjects, so it's not even clear what the "upside" would've been.  From my perspective this type of thinking resembles the constant noise on e.g. HackerNews about how [tech company x] is obviously doing [horrible thing y] behind-the-scenes, which often aren't even in the company's interests, and generally rely on assumptions that turn out to be false.)

I don't believe that you believe this accusation.  Maybe there is something deeper you are trying to say, but given that I also don't believe you've finished reading the book in the 3(?) hours it's been released, I'm not sure what it could be.  (To say it explicitly, Said's banning had nothing to do with the book.)

Yeah, sadly this is an existing bug.

Thanks, fixed!

Mod note (for other readers): I think this is a good example of acceptable use of LLMs for translation purposes.  The comment reads to me^[1] like it was written by a human and then translated fairly literally, without performing edits that would make it sound unfortunately LLM-like (perhaps with the exception of the em-dashes).

"Written entirely by you, a human" and "translated literally, without any additional editing performed by the LLM" are the two desiderata, which, if fulfilled, I will usually consider sufficient to screen off the fact that the words technically came out of an LLM^[2].  (If you do this, I strongly recommend using a reasoning model, which is much less likely to end up rewriting your comment in its own style.  Also, I appreciate the disclaimer.  I don't know if I'd want it present in every single comment; the first time seems good and maybe having one in one's profile after that is sufficient?  Needs some more thought.)  This might sometimes prove insufficient, but I don't expect people honestly trying and failing at achieving good outcomes here to substantially increase our moderation burden.

1. ^{^}

   With the caveat that I only read the first few paragraphs closely and poked intermittently at the rest.

2. ^{^}

   This doesn't mean the comment will necessarily be approved, but if I reject it, it probably won't be for that reason.

He did not say that they made such claims on LessWrong, where he would be able to publicly cite them.  (I have seen/heard those claims in other contexts.)

Curated!  I found the evopsych theory interesting but (as you say) speculative; I think the primary value of this post comes from presenting a distinct frame by which to analyze the world, one which I and probably many readers either didn't have distinctly carved out or part of their active toolkit.  I'm not sure if this particular frame will prove useful enough to make it into my active rotation, but it has the shape of something that could, in theory.