My median expectation is that AGI^[1] will be created 3 years from now. This has implications on how to behave, and I will share some useful thoughts I and others have had on how to orient to short timelines.

I’ve led multiple small workshops on orienting to short AGI timelines and compiled the wisdom of around 50 participants (but mostly my thoughts) here. I’ve also participated in multiple short-timelines AGI wargames and co-led one wargame.

This post will assume median AGI timelines of 2027 and will not spend time arguing for this point. Instead, I focus on what the implications of 3 year timelines would be. 

I didn’t update much on o3 (as my timelines were already short) but I imagine some readers did and might feel disoriented now. I hope...

A new article in Science Policy Forum voices concern about a particular line of biological research which, if successful in the long term, could eventually create a grave threat to humanity and to most life on Earth.

Fortunately, the threat is distant, and avoidable—but only if we have common knowledge of it.

What follows is an explanation of the threat, what we can do about it, and my comments.

Background: chirality

Glucose, a building block of sugars and starches, looks like this:

But there is also a molecule that is the exact mirror-image of glucose. It is called simply L-glucose (in contrast, the glucose in our food and bodies is sometimes called D-glucose):

This is not just the same molecule flipped around,...

Once I talked to a person who said they were asexual. They were also heavily depressed and thought about committing suicide. I repeatedly told them to eat some meat, as they were vegan for many years. I myself had experienced veganism-induced depression. Finally, after many weeks they ate some chicken, and the next time we spoke, they said that they were no longer asexual (they never were), nor depressed.

I was vegan or vegetarian for many consecutive years. Vegetarianism was manageable, perhaps because of cheese. I never hit the extreme low points that I did with veganism. I remember once after not eating meat for a long time there was a period of maybe a weak, where I got extremely fatigued. I took 200mg of modafinil^[1], without having any build-up resistance. Usually, this would give me a lot...

“Just expose yourself to more social situations!” — Ah yes, you felt anxious the first 100 times, but the 101st will be the breakthrough!

“But exposure works!” people yell from across the street. “Like for fear of snakes - you know, those things you see once a year!”

Uh, it’s pretty rational to fear things you have little experience with. But social anxiety… you interact with people everyday! Why would anything change after the first 100 attempts?

I don’t doubt that a couple of exposures can often reduce anxieties. However, if you still feel anxious even after hundreds of social situations and years of trying... then maybe your fear is actually doing something presently useful and you should reconnect with your intuitions.

At a 100% eye contact workshop I led earlier this year, most...

I’ve updated quite hard against computational functionalism (CF) recently (as an explanation for phenomenal consciousness), from ~80% to ~30%. Of course it’s more complicated than that, since there are different ways to interpret CF and having credences on theories of consciousness can be hella slippery.

So far in this sequence, I’ve scrutinised a couple of concrete claims that computational functionalists might make, which I called theoretical and practical CF. In this post, I want to address CF more generally.

Like most rationalists I know, I used to basically assume some kind of CF when thinking about phenomenal consciousness. I found a lot of the arguments against functionalism, like Searle’s Chinese room, unconvincing. They just further entrenched my functionalismness. But as I came across and tried to explain away more and more...

Similar to other people's shortform feeds, short stuff that people on LW might be interested in, but which doesn't feel like it's worth a separate post. (Will probably be mostly cross-posted from my Facebook wall.)