Quick Takes

Something I was wrong about: credit assignment. I used to think: I‘m an altruist; it doesn’t matter whether I get credit for my contributions. Now I think getting credit is often important. In some contexts, when you do a good thing, a lot of the value comes indirectly via you getting empowered. And if others systematically steal your credit or block you from taking credit, you should be scared of the prospect that (1) you’re giving them power which they will use poorly or (2) you become dependent on them — if you’d gotten credit, then you’d be empowered and people would listen to you, but since they took credit, you’re stuck only able to exert influence by advising them, and they can stop listening to you. There’s often reasonable-sounding arguments that it’s better if someone else takes credit, but you should (1) be suspicious and (2) just pay some costs to preserve proper credit assignment.

As far as I can tell, we are currently living in a glorious space opera future... for eukaryotes. From their early origins in a hydrothermal vent the eukaryotes have spread across the galaxy (earth), forming civilisations of unbelievable complexity and titanic power (animals and humans). Megastructures (houses) and gigastructures (cities) now exist where entire orders of eukaryotes live out their lives in peace, never feeling the threat of drought or lack of ATP. Generation ships called "planes", "trains", and "boats" carry generations from gigastructure to gigastructure at timescales that dwarf eukaryote understanding. Massive galactic empires make peace and war, destroying trillions with weapons of unfathomable power, while science gets ever closer to understanding the fundamental origins of life and the means by which it operates. Recently the empires have even launched expeditions beyond the known universe, seeking to harvest ever more gigantic sources of power to fuel glorious eukaryote replication throughout the multiverse. To an average eukaryote these wonders are beyond their comprehension, but in a very real way they are still making it happen.

I am starting to viscerally feel the possibility that I might be dead in <5 years because of AI. This is pretty new: I had a brief phase like this a few years ago when I first encountered the arguments for AI x-risk. Since then, I've developed some barely-above-subconscious coping mechanisms for not being too emotionally disturbed, most of which amounted to reasons why LLMs would not scale to ASI. But these have just stopped being convincing to my emotional brain the past few weeks. I've been having nightmares and ruminating a lot. I wonder if this is in the region of how a terminally ill person feels. I am also pretty scared of the fact that this anxiety is likely to become a lot worse as capabilities increase and more of my emotional brain's cope melts away. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to accomplish with this post. Perhaps others have been feeling this way and might want to share some tips for not going insane?

PSA: Simpson's paradox by ethnicity approximately never explains health outcomes differences across states. Here's an annoying pattern of internet arguments I've come across at least half a dozen times. Alice: Southern states have worse health outcomes X than other states. Therefore they should... Bob: Woah, woah, woah. Let me stop you right there! Did you know that Southern states have more black people, and black people have worse health outcomes than white people? So we can have a situation where the health outcomes are better for every ethnicity across the board in State A while its overall results are worse than State B. What you think of as a treatment effect is actually entirely a selection effect. I am a very sophisticated statistical reasoner. __ This argument is on the face of it possible, even plausible. But every single time I looked into it (life expectancy, obesity, maternal mortality, etc), the rank order among states is essentially preserved if you only look at data for white Americans. So it simply cannot be the case that the effect is entirely selection rather than treatment. AFAICT, the case for the Simpson's Paradox explanation being correct is even weaker for cross-national differences, at least among Western countries. If the UK had the same demographics as the US, not only would the UK still have longer life expectancies than the US, but the difference will be even larger (since black Brits have a longer life expectancy than white Brits). __ Note: I'm restricting this PSA to health outcomes. Education and crime rates might be different. I'm less sure.

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My dad is 100, and worked on nuclear energy policy for the US government for 50+ years. He was one of the attendees at the co nference [1] that led to the formation of the IAEA. He is also somewhat AGI pilled. I f anyone has questions they'd like me to ask him, let me know. He'd be happy to help in any way he can. 1. ^ He attended the second of two conferences that lead to the formation of the IAEA.

Anthropic recently announced higher Claude usage limits for off-peak hours, which is everything except weekdays from 8 AM - 2 PM ET. I was surprised by the specific times here. This is night time in Asia, the tail end of the workday in Europe, and the start of the work day in North America. The beginning of the window is too early for much West Coast activity, and it winds down at 11 AM in California. That seems inconsistent with the idea that coding is driving power use? The timing seems most consistent with the period when you'd see overlapping demand from the US East Coast and from Western Europe -- neither of which are super tech heavy regions. Maybe this timing implies a lot of the power users are financial firms working on New York/London time?