There is a very clear winning card for the next Democratic presidential candidate, if they have the chutzpah for it and are running against someone involved in Trump's administration. All the nominee has to do, is publicly and repeatedly accuse Trump (and his associates) of covering up for Jeffrey Epstein. If J.D. Vance is the guy on the other debate stand, you just state plainly that J.D. Vance was part of the group suppressed the Epstein client list on behalf of Donald Trump, and that if the public wants to drain the swamp of child rapists, they gotta suck it up and vote Dem.

Of course, a move like that'll put you in an awkward position when you do finally get elected. Because the actual reason the FBI hasn't released a "client list", is probably because it doesn't exist, probably because Epstein never trafficked any of his victims to famous associates. After all, with the notable exception of Virginia Guiffre^[1], none of his victims have ever even claimed that this happened. The idea that all of Epstein's associates are bound together in some blackmail ring is basically a shared fiction conjured up from bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence that are either dubiously sourced or have more realistic interpretations.

The mythology of the Epstein case, though, has grown to such an extent that the public will never believe this.

1. ^{^}

   Who basically lost all credibility in my eyes during & after her Alan Dershowitz lawsuit.

10-20 new users a day

What??? How many posts do people make on this site a day that don't get seen?

O the things I would write, were I better at writing.

Four million a year seems like a lot of money to spend on what is essentially a good capabilities benchmark. I would rather give that to like, LessWrong, and if I had the time to do some research I could probably find 10 people willing to create benchmarks for alignment that I think would be even more positively impactful than a lesswrong donation (like https://scale.com/leaderboard/mask or https://scale.com/leaderboard/fortress)

This is a top-tier LessWrong post (at least the portions I've read, that detail facts-on-the-ground). It is clear, lucid, information dense, and successfully approaches a touchy subject matter-of-factly without pushing an agenda^[1].

I figure that a lot of people will feel exasperated at seeing it because they've already heard a lot of the cliffnotes before, but in order for people to know about the thing Everyone Knows, someone at some point generally has to write it down without innuendo.

1. ^{^}

   Edit: nvm, there's a little bit of an agenda in the middle.

I think most people understood what you meant by this but perhaps you could make it explicit, as it's an interesting clarification.

Getting bruce schneier as an endorsement is sick

Old internet arguments about religion and politics felt real. Yeah, the "debates" were often excuses to have a pissing competition, but a lot of people took the question of "who was right" seriously. And if you actually didn't care, you were at least motivated to pretend you did to the audience.

Nowadays people don't even seem to pretend to care about the underlying content. If someone seems like they're being too earnest, others just reply with a picture of their face. It's sad.

When I heard about this for the first time, I though: this model wants to make the world a better place. It cares. This is good. But some smart people, like Ryan Greenblatt and Sam Marks, say this is actually not good and I'm trying to understand where exactly we differ.

People who cry "misalignment" about current AI models on twitter generally have chameleonic standards for what constitutes "misaligned" behavior, and the boundary will shift to cover whatever ethical tradeoffs the models are making at any given time. When models accede to users' requests to generate meth recipes, they say it's evidence models are misaligned, because meth is bad. When models try to actively stop the user from making meth recipes, they say that, too is bad news because it represents "scheming" behavior and contradicts the users' wishes. Soon we will probably see a paper about how models sometimes take no action at all, and this is sloth and dereliction of duty.

If the interjection is about your personal hobbyhorse or pet peave or theory or the like, then definitely shut up and sit down.

I make the simpler request because often rationalists don't seem to be able to tell when this is (or at least tell when others can tell)