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What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like

Israel as a nation state has an ongoing national security issue involving Iran. For the last twenty years or so, Iran has been covertly developing nuclear weapons. Iran is a country with a very low opinion of Israel and is generally diplomatically opposed to its existence. Their supreme leader has a habit of saying things like "Israel is a cancerous tumor of a state" that should be "removed from the region". Because of these and other reasons, Israel has assessed, however accurately, that if Iran successfully develops nuclear weapons, it stands a not-insignificant chance of using them against Israel. Israel's response to this problem has been multi-pronged. Making defense systems that could potentially defeat Iranian nuclear weapons is an important component of their strategy. The country has developed a sophisticated array of missile interception systems like the Iron Dome. Some people even suggest that these systems would be effective against much of the incoming rain of hellfire from an Iranian nuclear state. But Israel's current evaluation of the "nuclear defense problem" is pretty pessimistic. Defense isn't all it has done. Given the size of Israel as a landmass, it would be safe to say that it's probably not the most important component of Israel's strategy. It has also tried to delay, or pressure Iran into delaying, its nuclear efforts through other means. For example, it gets its allies to sanction Iran, sabotages its facilities, and tries to convince its nuclear researchers to defect. In my model, an argument like "well, what's the point of all this effort, Iran is going to develop nuclear weapons eventually anyways" would not be very satisfying to Israeli military strategists. Firstly, that the Iranians will "eventually" get nuclear weapons is not guaranteed. Secondly, conditional on them doing it, it's not guaranteed it'll happen the expected lifetime of the people currently living in Israel, which is a personal win for the people in charge. Third

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A non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein

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Open sourcing a browser extension that shows when people are wrong on the internet

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Open sourcing a browser extension that shows when people are wrong on the internet

Example of OpenErrata nitting the Sequences I just published OpenErrata, a browser extension that investigates the posts you read using your OpenAI API key, and underlines any factual claims that are sourceably incorrect. It then saves the results of the investigation so that whenever anybody else using the extension visits...

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Be skeptical of milestone announcements by young AI startups

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Most successful entrepreneurship is unproductive

Suppose Fred opens up a car repair shop in a city which has none already. He offers to fix the vehicles of Whoville and repair them for money; being the first to offer the service to the town, he has lots of happy customers. In an abstract sense Fred is...

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Beware LLMs' pathological guardrailing

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Female sexual attractiveness seems more egalitarian than people acknowledge

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Is the political right becoming actively, explicitly antisemitic?

Before I voice some really normie, stereotypically overblown concerns on LessWrong, let me state a couple things about myself: * I'm a non-Jewish white man * I've never been concerned about race relations before * I don't think of myself as the kind of person who gets overly politically activated...

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Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

About nine months ago, I and three friends decided that AI had gotten good enough to monitor large codebases autonomously for security problems. We started a company around this, trying to leverage the latest AI models to create a tool that could replace at least a good chunk of the...

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What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like

Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

A non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein

Open sourcing a browser extension that shows when people are wrong on the internet

lc

Open sourcing a browser extension that shows when people are wrong on the internet

Be skeptical of milestone announcements by young AI startups

Most successful entrepreneurship is unproductive

Beware LLMs' pathological guardrailing

Female sexual attractiveness seems more egalitarian than people acknowledge

Is the political right becoming actively, explicitly antisemitic?

Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like

Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit

A non-magical explanation of Jeffrey Epstein

Open sourcing a browser extension that shows when people are wrong on the internet

Open sourcing a browser extension that shows when people are wrong on the internet

Be skeptical of milestone announcements by young AI startups

Most successful entrepreneurship is unproductive

Beware LLMs' pathological guardrailing

Female sexual attractiveness seems more egalitarian than people acknowledge

Is the political right becoming actively, explicitly antisemitic?

Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit