I would guess it does somewhat exacerbate risk. I think it's unlikely (~15%) that alignment is easy enough that prosaic techniques even could suffice, but in those worlds I expect things go well mostly because the behavior of powerful models is non-trivially influenced/constrained by their training. In which case I do expect there's more room for things to go wrong, the more that training is for lethality/adversariality.

Given the present state of atheoretical confusion about alignment, I feel wary of confidently dismissing these sorts of basic, obvious-at-first-glance arguments about risk—like e.g., "all else equal, probably we should expect more killing people-type problems from models trained to kill people"—without decently strong countervailing arguments.

It seems the pro-Trump Polymarket whale may have had a real edge after all. Wall Street Journal reports (paywalled link, screenshot) that he’s a former professional trader, who commissioned his own polls from a major polling firm using an alternate methodology—the neighbor method, i.e. asking respondents who they expect their neighbors will vote for—he thought would be less biased by preference falsification.

I didn't bet against him, though I strongly considered it; feeling glad this morning that I didn't.

Thanks; it makes sense that use cases like these would benefit, I just rarely have similar ones when thinking or writing.

I also use them rarely, fwiw. Maybe I'm missing some more productive use, but I've experimented a decent amount and have yet to find a way to make regular use even neutral (much less helpful) for my thinking or writing.

I don't know much about religion, but my impression is the Pope disagrees with your interpretation of Catholic doctrine, which seems like strong counterevidence. For example, see this quote:

“All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children.... There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian."

And this one:

The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings. This divine wisdom is the source from which the right to freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected, as too the imposition of a cultural way of life that others do not accept.

I claim the phrasing in your first comment ("significant AI presence") and your second ("AI driven R&D") are pretty different—from my perspective, the former doesn't bear much on this argument, while the latter does. But I think little of the progress so far has resulted from AI-driven R&D?

Huh, this doesn't seem clear to me. It's tricky to debate what people used to be imagining, especially on topics where those people were talking past each other this much, but my impression was that the fast/discontinuous argument was that rapid, human-mostly-or-entirely-out-of-the-loop recursive self-improvement seemed plausible—not that earlier, non-self-improving systems wouldn't be useful.

Why do you think this? Recursive self-improvement isn't possible yet, so from my perspective it doesn't seem like we've encountered much evidence either way about how fast it might scale.