So I know somebody who I believe is capable of altering Trump’s position on the war in Iran, if they can find a way to talk face-to-face for 15 minutes. They already have really deep connections in DC, and they told me if they were somehow randomly entrusted with nationally important information, they could be talking with the president in at least 2 hours. I’m trying to decide if I want to push this person to do something or not (as they’re normally kind of resistant to taking high-agency type actions, and don’t have as much faith in themselves as I do). Anyone have any advice on how to think about this?

You didn’t really misinterpret it. I was using the term in a looser way than most would, to mean that you don’t need a fine-grained technical solution, and just a very basic trick is enough for alignment. I realize most use the term differently though, so I’ll change the wording.

Attention can perhaps be compared to a searchlight, And wherever that searchlight lands in the brain, You’re able to “think more” in that area. How does the brain do that? Where is it “taking” this processing power from?

The areas and senses around it perhaps. Could that be why when you’re super focused, everything else around you other than the thing you are focused on seems to “fade”? It’s not just by comparison to the brightness of your attention, but also because the processing is being “squeezed out” of the other areas of your mind.

This is potentially a follow-up to my AI 2027 forecast, An “Optimistic” AI Timeline, depending on how hard people roast me for this lol.

Are there any open part-time rationalist/EA- adjacent jobs or volunteer work in LA? Looking for something I can do in the afternoon while I’m here for the next few months.

Oh no, it should have been A1! It’s just a really dumb joke about A1 sauce lol

Reminds me of Internal Family Systems, which has a nice amount of research behind it if you want to learn more.

Thanks! Is there any literature on the generalization of this, properties of “unreachable” numbers in general? Just realized I'm describing the basic concept of computability at this point lol.

Is there a term for/literature about the concept of the first number unreachable by an n-state Turing machine? By "unreachable," I mean that there is no n-state Turing machine which outputs that number. Obviously such "Turing-unreachable numbers" are usually going to be much smaller than Busy Beaver numbers (as there simply aren't enough possible different n-state Turing machines to cover all numbers up to to the insane heights BB(n) reaches towards) , but I would expect them to have some interesting properties (though I have no sense of what those properties might be). Anyone here know of existing literature on this concept?