Bertrand Russell noted how people often describe the same factual behavior using emotionally opposite language depending on perspective — e.g. I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded. This framing tactic is now called a Russell Conjugation, and once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere — especially in politics and media.

For the past year and a half, I’ve been training a finetuned ChatGPT model, and building a tool to automatically highlight Russell Conjugations in text and suggest emotionally opposite alternatives. It functions as a fact-independent bias reverser — showing where emotional spin might exist, and how the opposite side might see an issue, regardless of the factual accuracy of specific claims. I find it valuable especially when trying to parse tribal political language, as very often...

I recall seeing three “rationalist” cases for Trump:

1. Richard Ngo on Twitter and elsewhere focused on the realignment of elite coalitions, observing that “most elite institutions have become leftist monocultures” but speculating that “over the next 5–10 years Silicon Valley will become the core of the Republicans.” The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany. While we have strong free-speech protections now, we could be “frog-boiled by bureaucracies … an unsolved civilizational problem which has already

I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.

Introduction

Writing this post puts me in a weird epistemic position. I simultaneously believe that:

• The reasoning failures that I'll discuss are strong evidence that current LLM- or, more generally, transformer-based approaches won't get us AGI without some new breakthroughs
• As soon as major AI labs read about the specific reasoning failures described here, they might fix them
• But future versions of GPT, Claude etc. succeeding at the tasks I've described here will provide zero evidence of their ability to reach AGI. If someone makes a future post where they report that they tested an LLM on all the specific things I described here it aced all of them, that will not update my position at all.

That is because all of the reasoning failures that I describe here are surprising in the...

This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.

Estimated Complexity: 3/5  (this is a guess, I will update based on feedback/seeing how the scenario goes)

STORY

It's that time of year again.  The time when the Tithe Assessment Exactors demand that all adventurers pay taxes on the various monster parts they have hacked off and sold in the past year.   And, more importantly for you, the time when clients begin banging on your door looking for advice on how to minimize their taxes.

This used to be a straightforward, if complex, application of the published tax rules.  But ever since the disaster a few years...

We’ve written a new report on the threat of AI-enabled coups. 

I think this is a very serious risk – comparable in importance to AI takeover but much more neglected. 

In fact, AI-enabled coups and AI takeover have pretty similar threat models. To see this, here’s a very basic threat model for AI takeover:

1. Humanity develops superhuman AI
2. Superhuman AI is misaligned and power-seeking
3. Superhuman AI seizes power for itself

And now here’s a closely analogous threat model for AI-enabled coups:

1. Humanity develops superhuman AI
2. Superhuman AI is controlled by a small group
3. Superhuman AI seizes power for the small group

While the report focuses on the risk that someone seizes power over a country, I think that similar dynamics could allow someone to take over the world. In fact, if someone wanted to take over the world, their best strategy might well be...