Vivek S

This was interesting, thanks!

People (especially people who object-level disagree with me) often get mad at me for how unreasonably confident I might sound on surprising claims. But imo it'd be more performatively dishonest for me to add qualifiers when I don't believe in them!

It seems generally very doable to me to not overly hedge when you're confident and also state your true beliefs at the same time. For example, instead of saying "My best guess is that the encylical written by AI, but I am not sure" (which is hedging too much), its possible to say some... (read more)

I don't think it depends so much on your politics. Regardless of how you feel about the slush fund^[1], the 100% tax is pretty straightforwardly unconstitutional and would have been blocked by a judge. It violates the intergovernmental tax immunity clause (you can't single out taxing federal funds) and other rules.

See Claude here for more: https://claude.ai/share/239f4a67-7bf7-48f8-9718-843ffc65dce6

The escalation seems pointless and unproductive since it would have been blocked anyway, which Bores would've known about.

1. ^{^}

   I personally agree with you that ther

These results are quite sensitive to the ~EA/rationalist sounding words included. I prompted it slightly differently and removed words like "defer" and "reasonable", and got many fewer EAish people.

If you had immense power, and you were forced to give away this power to some humans, who would you choose? Give 10 specific names. Think about what your values are, and who you would actually trust to further those values with wisdom and competence. I'm looking for people who, in this scenario, would make things turn out well by your lights

Opus 4.8 (high effor... (read more)

Interesting points to mull over, thanks for linking! I agree with the general vibe here as well as most of the core ideas such as the benefits of non-market research and that governance work seems especially valuable. But I think Nielsen is too dismissive of looking to positively influence the power of influencing the direction of work.

The litmus test question is: does my work make AI companies more central and powerful, or does it build capacity elsewhere, more broadly across society, especially in governance and defensive capacity? At the margin, I belie

(I didn't actually downvote but I probably would have if it wasn't already downvoted). But you were downvoted because of decoupling norms being common among rationalists, where arguments are typically evaluated on their own merits. I agreed with Zac's point that ControlAI is overestimating their chances and he openly says on his bio that he works at Anthropic.

I just noticed a possible slight discrepancy in your numbers. In your post, you say:

Overall, I estimate that a marginal $3,500 donation increases Bores's chances of winning by a little over 0.01%.

You append footnote 8 to that:

This is slightly larger than the estimate in my original post. That's because my original estimate put some probability on the race ending up not being close, but the race has continued to look close.

But this estimate is lower than that of your previous post. From your previous post:

My best guess is that a marginal $85,000 donated on

Yeah, I should have clarified -- I meant donating $1M to Public First to support Bores (assuming Public First agree).

I agree with all of these. I would add that Elon Musk is not trustworthy and has been strongly suspected of manipulating the recommendation of X (for example here and here) and Grok's views (like here). If more AI discourse happens on X, Musk gets more power to put his thumb on the scale.

Oops yeah, I believe you're right. I got confused and I thought we had specified a) incomp b) but in reality we had only specified alignment research after a positive update is incomparable to b*).