I worry, a lot, that the true gloss on the American Way of War is, roughly the meme of “every Pacific naval encounter from late 1943 onward is like the IJN Golden Kirin, Glorious Harbinger of Eternal Imperial Dawn versus six identical copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday supplied by a ship that does nothing but make birthday cakes for the other ships.”
Or, put more generally, we show up in the 4th quarter with a shit ton of gratuitously over-the-top production of every possibly-vaguely-good idea, and manage to eke out a win. See, e.g., the Civil War, WW1, WW2 (as above), Korea (kind of, long story), the Gulf War (after we fucked up the pre-war diplomacy), and the post-Surge Iraq War.
”There is no pause, so we just gotta Get a Lot of Alignment Research Done Real REAL Fast” is plausibly the real world we end up in, and I think we should have more folks optimizing for it beyond Redwood (and Anthropic???), even as terrifying as it feels.
My main project thread for the past 2 years has been mostly aiming at Get a Lot of Alignment Research Done Real Fast (in line with my beliefs/taste about what that requires). This is the motivator for the Feedbackloop-first Rationality project, and is also a driver for my explorations into using LLMs for research (where I’m worried specifically about phrases like “full handoff” because of the way it seems like LLM-use subtly saps/erodes agency and direct you towards dumber thoughts that more naturally ‘fit’ into the LLM paradigm. But I’m also excited about approaches for solving that).
But I’m focused for this year on “wake everyone up.”
I worry, a lot, that the true gloss on the American Way of War is, roughly the meme of “every Pacific naval encounter from late 1943 onward is like the IJN Golden Kirin, Glorious Harbinger of Eternal Imperial Dawn versus six identical copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday supplied by a ship that does nothing but make birthday cakes for the other ships.”
Or, put more generally, we show up in the 4th quarter with a shit ton of gratuitously over-the-top production of every possibly-vaguely-good idea, and manage to eke out a win. See, e.g., the Civil War, WW1, WW2 (as above), Korea (kind of, long story), the Gulf War (after we fucked up the pre-war diplomacy), and the post-Surge Iraq War.
”There is no pause, so we just gotta Get a Lot of Alignment Research Done Real REAL Fast” is plausibly the real world we end up in, and I think we should have more folks optimizing for it beyond Redwood (and Anthropic???), even as terrifying as it feels.
Nod.
My main project thread for the past 2 years has been mostly aiming at Get a Lot of Alignment Research Done Real Fast (in line with my beliefs/taste about what that requires). This is the motivator for the Feedbackloop-first Rationality project, and is also a driver for my explorations into using LLMs for research (where I’m worried specifically about phrases like “full handoff” because of the way it seems like LLM-use subtly saps/erodes agency and direct you towards dumber thoughts that more naturally ‘fit’ into the LLM paradigm. But I’m also excited about approaches for solving that).
But I’m focused for this year on “wake everyone up.”