That doesn’t seem true in my experience. For example I recently wanted to post a comment asking a question about the new book that’s been heavily promoted and I found, only after writing it out, that So8res inexplicably banned me from commenting.

And I can’t see any other place where I could post a specific question about that book “equally well”.

If most other commentators all accept seeing each other’s input… then why should a small minority’s opinion or preferences matter enough to change what the overwhelming majority can see or comment on, anywhere on this site?

I can’t think of any successful forum whatsoever where that is the case, other than those where the small minority is literally paying the majority somehow.

If it was a whitelist system where everyone is forbidden from commenting by default there might be a sensible argument here… but in the current norm it can only cause more issues down the road.

Over the long time frame there will definitely be some who exploit it to play tricks… and once that takes hold I’m pretty sure LW will go down the tubes as even for the very virtuous and respectable… nobody is 100% confident that their decisions are free from any sort politiking or status games whatsoever. And obviously for Duncan I doubt anyone is even 95% confident.

Good evals are better than nothing, but I don't expect companies' eval results to affect their safeguards or training/deployment decisions much in practice.

This seems to be a bit circular.

Who gets to decide what is the threshold for “good evals” in the first place… and how is it communicated?

I agree it’s strange to see a lot of writing effort put into something with such basic argumentation mistakes… it really seems disturbingly similar to lightly edited LLM output.

Though to be fair many posts on LW nowadays seem to make really weird assumptions and/or jumping intermediate steps.

Can you clarify what exactly is the argument you used? For why the extinction risk is much higher than most (all?) other things vying for their attention, such as asteroid impacts, WMDs, etc…

After an unknown amount of political influence was expended…. so I don’t really see how this is useful information, unless there’s some way to know all the players involved and approximately gauge the influence expended for each?

How do you know “the field is wide open” in the first place? 

It seems to take a lot of political influence to get any change pushed through at all… even for minor technical amendments to regulation, which  suggests it is a very closed field for anyone not willing to spend a lifetime of their political capital (and that of their closest million friends) on it.

There clearly are bots capable of typing this out… unless you’ve never browsed through twitter/X before? (which seems very implausible considering your >6y old account)

A meaningful non bot explanation would contain some reason(s) for the opinion. I don’t think you need me to enumerate but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: Usually provided in the form of a logical argument, linked sources, comparison, etc… 

Suprisingly 6 different users downvoted a straightforward comment without explanation… so I imagine that also indicates a bot problem which has to be factored in, (or at least users replicating bot behavior)