“My first thought is, it’s not clear why you care about this. This is your first post ever, and your profile has zero information about you. Do you consider yourself a Less Wrong rationalist? Are you counting on the rationality community to provide crucial clarity and leadership regarding AI and AI policy? ”
I tried posting in the past but was limited because of the karma wall, but thanks for questioning my motives.
I am a game theorist and researcher, and yes, I consider myself broadly aligned with rationalism, though with a strong preference for skeptical consequentialism than overconfident utilitarianism. Is there no place for consequentialists here?
“Are you counting on the rationality community to provide crucial clarity and leadership regarding AI and AI policy?”
The rationalist community is extremely influential in both AI development and AI policy. Do you disagree?
“My second thought is, if a big rethink is needed, it should also include the fact that in Trump 2.0, the US elected a revolutionary regime whose policies include AI accelerationism.”
This is a) irrelevant to the post (why didn’t we update re China) and b) naive and borderline defensive.
Not very rational of you.
If you couldn’t forecast the Republicans would be in favor of less regulation, I don’t know man, you probably shouldn’t be publicly forecasting. This is more a statement about the quality of your Bayes machine than the world.
“Maybe a Chinese startup briefly got ahead of its American rivals in the domain of reasoning LLMs; but most of the contenders are still within American borders, and US AI policy is now ostensibly in the hands of a crypto VC who is a long-time buddy of Elon’s.”
This is literally cope. Go on Twitter for 5 seconds and find people freaking out about Gwen. Have you heard of Manus? Again, this says more about your estimation engine than the world.
I consider myself broadly aligned with rationalism, though with a strong preference for skeptical consequentialism than overconfident utilitarianism
OK, thanks for the information! By the way, I would say that most people active on Less Wrong, disagree with some of the propositions that are considered to be characteristic of the Less Wrong brand of rationalism. Disagreement doesn’t have to be a problem. What set off my alarms was your adversarial debut—the rationalists are being irrational! Anyway, my opinion on that doesn’t matter since I have no authority here, I’m just another commenter.
The rationalist community is extremely influential in both AI development and AI policy. Do you disagree?
It was. It still has influence, but e/acc is in charge now. That’s my take.
If you couldn’t forecast the Republicans would be in favor of less regulation
If they actually saw AI as the creation of a rival to the human race, they might have a different attitude. Then again, it’s not as if that’s why the Democrats favored regulation, either.
Qwen … Manus
I feel like Qwen is being hyped. And isn’t Manus just Claude in a wrapper? But fine, maybe I should put Alibaba next to DeepSeek in my growing list of contenders to create superintelligence, which is the thing I really care about.
But back to the actual topic. If Gwern or Zvi or Connor Leahy want to comment on why they said what they did, or how their thinking has evolved, that would have some interest. It would also be of interest to know where certain specific framings, like “China doesn’t want to race, so it’s up to America to stop and make a deal”, came from. I guess it might have come from politically minded EAs, rather than from rationalism per se, but that’s just a guess. It might even come from somewhere entirely outside the EA/LW nexus.
“My first thought is, it’s not clear why you care about this. This is your first post ever, and your profile has zero information about you. Do you consider yourself a Less Wrong rationalist? Are you counting on the rationality community to provide crucial clarity and leadership regarding AI and AI policy? ”
I tried posting in the past but was limited because of the karma wall, but thanks for questioning my motives.
I am a game theorist and researcher, and yes, I consider myself broadly aligned with rationalism, though with a strong preference for skeptical consequentialism than overconfident utilitarianism. Is there no place for consequentialists here?
“Are you counting on the rationality community to provide crucial clarity and leadership regarding AI and AI policy?”
The rationalist community is extremely influential in both AI development and AI policy. Do you disagree?
“My second thought is, if a big rethink is needed, it should also include the fact that in Trump 2.0, the US elected a revolutionary regime whose policies include AI accelerationism.”
This is a) irrelevant to the post (why didn’t we update re China) and b) naive and borderline defensive.
Not very rational of you.
If you couldn’t forecast the Republicans would be in favor of less regulation, I don’t know man, you probably shouldn’t be publicly forecasting. This is more a statement about the quality of your Bayes machine than the world.
“Maybe a Chinese startup briefly got ahead of its American rivals in the domain of reasoning LLMs; but most of the contenders are still within American borders, and US AI policy is now ostensibly in the hands of a crypto VC who is a long-time buddy of Elon’s.”
This is literally cope. Go on Twitter for 5 seconds and find people freaking out about Gwen. Have you heard of Manus? Again, this says more about your estimation engine than the world.
OK, thanks for the information! By the way, I would say that most people active on Less Wrong, disagree with some of the propositions that are considered to be characteristic of the Less Wrong brand of rationalism. Disagreement doesn’t have to be a problem. What set off my alarms was your adversarial debut—the rationalists are being irrational! Anyway, my opinion on that doesn’t matter since I have no authority here, I’m just another commenter.
It was. It still has influence, but e/acc is in charge now. That’s my take.
If they actually saw AI as the creation of a rival to the human race, they might have a different attitude. Then again, it’s not as if that’s why the Democrats favored regulation, either.
I feel like Qwen is being hyped. And isn’t Manus just Claude in a wrapper? But fine, maybe I should put Alibaba next to DeepSeek in my growing list of contenders to create superintelligence, which is the thing I really care about.
But back to the actual topic. If Gwern or Zvi or Connor Leahy want to comment on why they said what they did, or how their thinking has evolved, that would have some interest. It would also be of interest to know where certain specific framings, like “China doesn’t want to race, so it’s up to America to stop and make a deal”, came from. I guess it might have come from politically minded EAs, rather than from rationalism per se, but that’s just a guess. It might even come from somewhere entirely outside the EA/LW nexus.