rename the "provable safety" area as "provable safety modulo assumptions" area and be very explicit about our assumptions.

Very much agree. I gave some feedback along those lines as the term was coined; and am sad it didn't catch on. But of course "provable safety modulo assumptions" isn't very short and catchy...

I do like the word "guarantee" as a substitute. We can talk of formal guarantees, but also of a store guaranteeing that an item you buy will meet a certain standard. So it's connotations are nicely in the direction of proof but without, as it were, "proving too much" :)

Interesting thread to return to, 4 years later. 

FYI: I skimmed the post quickly and didn't realize there was a Patreon! 

If you wanted to change that, you might want to put it at the very end of the post, on a new line, saying something like: "If you'd like to fund my work directly, you can do so via Patreon [here](link)."

Someone posted these quotes in a Slack I'm in... what Ellsberg said to Kissinger: 

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

[...]

“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.

“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”

(link)

tbf I never realized "sic" was mostly meant to point out errors, specifically. I thought it was used to mean "this might sound extreme --- but I am in fact quoting literally"

I mean that in both cases he used literally those words.

It's not epistemically poor to say these things if they're actually true.

Invalid. 

Compare: 

A: "So I had some questions about your finances, it seems your trading desk and exchange operate sort of closely together? There were some things that confused me..."

B: "our team is 20 insanely smart engineers" 

A: "right, but i had a concern that i thought perhaps ---"

B: "if you join us and succeed you'll be a multi millionaire"  

A: "...okay, but what if there's a sudden downturn ---" 

B: "bull market is inevitable right now"

Maybe not false. But epistemically poor form. 

(crossposted to the EA Forum)

(😭 there has to be a better way of doing this, lol)

(crossposted to EA forum)

I agree with much of Leopold's empirical claims, timelines, and analysis. I'm acting on it myself in my planning as something like a mainline scenario. 

Nonetheless, the piece exhibited some patterns that gave me a pretty strong allergic reaction. It made or implied claims like:

• a small circle of the smartest people believe this
• i will give you a view into this small elite group who are the only who are situationally aware
• the inner circle longed tsmc way before you
• if you believe me; you can get 100x richer -- there's still alpha, you can still be early
• This geopolitical outcome is "inevitable" (sic!)
• in the future the coolest and most elite group will work on The Project. "see you in the desert" (sic)
• Etc.

Combined with a lot of retweets, with praise, on launch day, that were clearly coordinated behind the scenes; it gives me the feeling of being deliberately written to meme a narrative into existence via self-fulfilling prophecy; rather than inferring a forecast via analysis.

As a sidenote, this felt to me like an indication of how different the AI safety adjacent community is now to when I joined it about a decade ago. In the early days of this space, I expect a piece like this would have been something like "epistemically cancelled": fairly strongly decried as violating important norms around reasoning and cooperation. I actually expect that had someone written this publicly in 2016, they would've plausibly been uninvited as a speaker to any EAGs in 2017.

I don't particularly want to debate whether these epistemic boundaries were correct --- I'd just like to claim that, empirically, I think they de facto would have been enforced. Though, if others who have been around have a different impression of how this would've played out, I'd be curious to hear.