Quick Takes

religion is selling your soul a lot of people say things like "sure, religion might not exactly be totally true, but it has lots of benefits, and there really does seem to be a god shaped hole in many people, so who can really say if it's good". i think this is directionally correct but kind of cowardly. i think the correct take on religion is first that its claims are completely and utterly false; obviously the christian god doesn't literally exist, jesus never came back from the dead, etc. this is so overdone by the old internet atheists that it would be beating a dead horse to harp on further. secondly, the human condition involves a whole bunch of things that are kind of sucky. for example, the fact that we only have a very short amount of time on this planet before we die forever is utterly terrifying; or, the fact that it can be very difficult to find a source of meaning to ground our motivation in, and that it really sucks to not have a reliable foundation for motivation; or, the difficulty of connecting with other people despite differences. i claim that there is a true solution to each of these problems that involves a very difficult never ending journey of discovery of the self, understanding and connecting with your emotions, constructing intellectual frameworks, and even technological development. part of the project of civilization should be to slowly build up the cultural edifice required to solve these problems. religion is not the true solution to these problems, but rather the hacky patch that kind of helps -- you no longer fear death because you know heaven awaits you, everything is meaningful because god, and you can connect with other people over believing in god -- but in exchange you contort and utterly trash your epistemics, foreclose the possibility of solving these problems with a more epistemically sane solution (because tearing out this foundation will temporarily thrown you into epistemic chaos), and even if you somehow compartmental

There's a specific type of procrastination that is due to a 'fake pre-requisite' - I've started noticing these more often, and this has led to me unblocking myself a lot more. * Recently someone emailed me to ask about my postdoc plans, when I'm graduating, etc. That was a lot of stuff! I sat on it, because replying seemed to require having my whole future figured out first. So I let it go unread in my inbox. * It sat there for a while. I'd go back to it and see it often but not really know how to deal with it. It felt like it required a lot of mental energy to reply to this email. * ~2 weeks later I decided I was being really silly and I should probably just reply to this person. But doing so still felt pretty impossible - which felt really jarring. * Talking to Claude for a bit made me realize - I'd silently attached a fake prerequisite to it — "first, resolve [huge open question]" — that wasn't actually essential to the thing. * Once I reframed the ask to "what am I excited to do? and what do I currently know for sure?" - it became really easy to write the email. Effortless, in fact. And actually this was probably what was being asked in the first place So tl;dr * There is a tendency to think about vague, fuzzy tasks as monumentally large * Aversion is a pretty rational response to these tasks - it protects against burnout * Scoping down / reframing the task makes the aversion go away naturally!

From the postscript to Michael Nielsen's ASI existential risk: reconsidering alignment as a goal: [...]

Finally get engagement on a Twitter post about my AI research -> immediately get banned for "inauthentic behavior". Sigh.

i wonder how much the following hypothesis is true. it's obviously not completely true, but maybe there is some value in contemplating it. for most issues that people have expended a lot of effort arguing about, if you could truly impartially reason through it, run experiments, etc, the correct answer is either not that hard to figure out, or that we're pretty sure we can't know one way or the other. but the discourse is fucked because the vast majority (maybe literally all) of people have some bottom line they're already sympathetic to, and smart people can make plausible sounding arguments for any conclusion, and so truly reasoning things through impartially is both very hard to do and even if you somehow manage to do it, it's hard to signal that you did so, and anyways people with motivated reasoning will only listen to you if your answer happened to agree with theirs. the main evidence i have for this hypothesis is that there are questions where one side is overwhelmingly obviously correct if you actually think about it or look into it, and yet, there is the appearance of a balanced public debate. the main evidence against this hypothesis is that probably people who disagree also think they're overwhelmingly obviously correct, and it seems arrogant to declare that i am simply more correct, and in any case oftentimes people disagreeing are wrong but their disagreement still contains enough of a kernel of truth to be worth thinking about.

Fun comments from our latest video:

Here's a simple proposal for verifiable and enforceable slowdown that also differentially reallocates resources to alignment research (which I would see as one of if not the major benefits of a slowdown): Enforce that labs must spend at least X% of their compute on: 1. Giving inference capacity to external safety organizations. I think this substantially disincentivizes capabilities research, since external research won't be as relevant to the labs' specific architectures/pipelines and is more likely to leak, both effects thus making any capabilities research the lab tries to do via this mechanism much less likely to advantage them differentially (though of course they could still just end up doing bad safety research if they pick bad external safety orgs). 2. Internal safety research that the lab makes fully public. Again I think this substantially disincentivizes capabilities research, since any capabilities research that is fully public will be much less able to differentially advantage that lab specifically, as others can just copy it (though again of course the labs could still just do bad public safety research). I think this is much better than other slowdown proposals I've seen, since I think it's very concrete, verifiable, and enforceable—all the labs know exactly what they're spending their compute on, many employees know as well, and so whisteblowing is very possible—and it also differentially advantages alignment research by choosing conditions (external or fully public research) that make it much harder to do capabilities under those conditions but still pretty easy to do alignment. If you just say that compute has to go to some sort of nebulous "safety" purpose, that could easily be gamed, but I think the conditions above do a pretty good job of operationalizing criteria that are fairly hard to game. And even if you do get some gaming, on the margin you are still making capabilities research more costly, and thus buying yourself some additional sl