I won't claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I've been in.

a medium with less limitations is strictly better for making good art, but it's also harder to identify good art among the sea of bad art because the medium alone is no longer as good a signal of quality

to be clear, a "winter/slowdown" in my typology is more about the vibes and could only be a few years counterfactual slowdown. like the dot-com crash didn't take that long for companies like Amazon or Google to recover from, but it was still a huge vibe shift

also to further clarify this is not an update I've made recently, I'm just making this post now as a regular reminder of my beliefs because it seems good to have had records of this kind of thing (though everyone who has heard me ramble about this irl can confirm I've believed sometime like this for a while now)

people often say that limitations of an artistic medium breed creativity. part of this could be the fact that when it is costly to do things, the only things done will be higher effort

also a lot of people will suggest that alignment people are discredited because they all believed AGI was 3 years away, because surely that's the only possible thing an alignment person could have believed. I plan on pointing to this and other statements similar in vibe that I've made over the past year or two as direct counter evidence against that

(I do think a lot of people will rightly lose credibility for having very short timelines, but I think this includes a big mix of capabilities and alignment people, and I think they will probably lose more credibility than is justified because the rest of the world will overupdate on the winter)

it's quite plausible (40% if I had to make up a number, but I stress this is completely made up) that someday there will be an AI winter or other slowdown, and the general vibe will snap from "AGI in 3 years" to "AGI in 50 years". when this happens it will become deeply unfashionable to continue believing that AGI is probably happening soonish (10-15 years), in the same way that suggesting that there might be a winter/slowdown is unfashionable today. however, I believe in these timelines roughly because I expect the road to AGI to involve both fast periods and slow bumpy periods. so unless there is some super surprising new evidence, I will probably only update moderately on timelines if/when this winter happens

a take I've expressed a bunch irl but haven't written up yet: feature sparsity might be fundamentally the wrong thing for disentangling superposition; circuit sparsity might be more correct to optimize for. in particular, circuit sparsity doesn't have problems with feature splitting/absorption

the most valuable part of a social event is often not the part that is ostensibly the most important, but rather the gaps between the main parts.

• at ML conferences, the headline keynotes and orals are usually the least useful part to go to; the random spontaneous hallway chats and dinners and afterparties are extremely valuable
• when doing an activity with friends, the activity itself is often of secondary importance. talking on the way to the activity, or in the gaps between doing the activity, carry a lot of the value
• at work, a lot of the best conversations happen outside of scheduled 1:1s and group meetings, but rather happen in spontaneous hallway or dinner groups