DAL

• DAL 29 Jan 2026 0:45 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: dynomight’s comment on: dynomight’s Shortform

  There are some other prediction markets on Manifold/​Metaculus that address the question more directly but they’re small.

  Some economists have argued that you should look at long run real interest rates—the idea being that AGI boosts the return on capital, so bondholders should demand higher rates in order to lock up their money in bonds.

  I think it’s pretty hard to infer much from the stock prices of tech companies because it’s kinda ambiguous what AGI would do to those companies (and depends on what exactly counts) plus sub-AGI advances in AI can confuse the price effect. Nvidia, for example, is the market’s favorite AI play but AGI in the “dominates humans at all white collar work” sense is almost certainly bad for Nvidia because then the AGI can just design better chips than Nvidia engineers (but then factor in that Nvidia has invested in a whole web of other AI companies so maybe that pushes the other way, and so on and so on).

  One thesis here is that white-collar replacement AGI is bearish for fabless semiconductor companies but bullish for the fabs—so maybe if Nvidia starts tanking while TSMC starts rising?

  The valuations of the frontier labs are maybe better, but it’s hard to tell if the market is predicting AGI or just placing bets on OpenAI becoming the next Alphabet.

  Another idea is that AGI is very bearish for the value of white collar human capital generally, and thus especially for the higher ed sector. In basically any scenario, AGI is the apocalypse for your average university. You can’t really trade those in equity markets, but maybe something like interest rates on university debt or credit default swaps?

• DAL 28 Jan 2026 15:27 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: DAL’s Shortform

  I was very struck by the following claim in Dario Amodei’s recent essay:

  I don’t think it is too much of a stretch (if we get a “country of geniuses”) to imagine AI companies, semiconductor companies, and perhaps downstream application companies generating ~$3T in revenue per year, being valued at ~$30T, and leading to personal fortunes well into the trillions.

  [Following is in a footnote]: The total value of labor across the economy is $60T/​year, so $3T/​year would correspond to 5% of this. That amount could be earned by a company that supplied labor for 20% of the cost of humans and had 25% market share, even if the demand for labor did not expand (which it almost certainly would due to the lower cost).

  This is really not much money. I read this as making a claim about the value of the sector as a whole, though it’s possible he’s saying that an individual company will achieve that kind of valuation, in which case the sector as a whole might be some multiple higher.

  The current market cap of publicly traded tech companies is a bit over $40 trillion on revenue of about $7 trillion. So if the prediction is interpreted as being about the AI sector as a whole, then he’s forecasting it will be smaller than the current tech sector. Depending on how expansively one defines the AI sector, we are already definitely within an order of magnitude of $30 trillion in valuation, and perhaps as much as halfway there.

  If he’s describing projections for a single company, then obviously that’s more significant, but it’s still pretty low and not something that could really be classed as “transformative”—this would be a company with a market cap a little under 7x of Nvidia’s current value ($4.6 trillion) and revenue about 8x of Alphabet ($385 bn). It’s a little sticky to compare this to a GDP number, but it suggests that a “country of geniuses” in a data center would be producing economic value somewhere in between current France and Italy.

  Perhaps this is just a throwaway line, or perhaps the Anthropic legal team made him scrub out another prediction that could be interpreted as promising Anthropic investors fantastical returns. Another possibility is that he thinks the returns on AI will overwhelmingly flow outside the sector itself. But, these figures just seem really, really low for a world-transforming technology and that makes me wonder about his beliefs.

• DAL 27 Jan 2026 14:52 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Arjun Panickssery’s comment on: Habryka’s Short­form Feed

  The PM is less hindered by the independent judiciary than the president. The PM in a Westminster system also exerts greater control over the individual legislators via his party than in the American system. The PM can serve for an unlimited time, and call elections at strategic moments, while Trump is limited to two terms. All these things increase the power of the PM and the risk of oppressive rule in Westminster-style parliamentary systems.

  None of those are inherently features of a parliamentary (or even Westminster-style) government. Those are all separate institutional choices you can make in either setup.

  With this, you focus too narrowly on this specific minority-rule “seizure of power” scenario rather than the relative power of the offices more generally.

  Sorry, I thought we were discussing the possibility of collapse into authoritarianism, in which case some kind of seizure of power is the relevant question? The claim I was making above is relevant to this, and not to other bad things that might happen.

  As to the “power of the offices,” I do want to re-emphasize what I said earlier which is that you have to make a separation between the powers of the office (i.e., those vested in the office itself) and the typical powers of the officeholder (i.e., additional power that is typically held by the person holding the office but not as a consequence of holding the office). Much of the power of the typical prime minister flows from the fact that they are also the leader of a legislative majority. The matched comparison would be some kind of situation where the American president is also the speaker of the house and the Senate has been reduced to a ceremonial role (and if you want to match Britain in particular to the US, you also have to match other unrelated features like federalism and the strength of judicial review).

• DAL 26 Jan 2026 23:06 UTC

  14 points

  9

  in reply to: Arjun Panickssery’s comment on: Habryka’s Short­form Feed

  The U.S. president holds a weaker office than the heads of government in most other countries. The Canadian and British PMs and the French presidents definitely seem stronger

  It matters exactly what you’re comparing here.

  An American president is typically less effectual than a British PM, but the office is stronger. That is, the PM receives basically no power qua PM whereas the American presidency directly comes with considerable constitutional power.

  If you were randomly dropped in by some process as the US president tomorrow, you’d immediately be a very powerful person and you’d hold those powers for a considerable length of time. If you were randomly dropped in as British PM, you’d be removed in a confidence vote in an instant.

  The PM in a parliamentary system can typically get a great deal more done than the US president but that’s a selection effect really—being the PM means you also commanded a Parliamentary majority in order to get there, so of course you face less gridlock. The legislative branch doesn’t typically want to stop you. But, if the legislature suddenly does want to stop you, you’re gone immediately.

  Can you explain your thinking here more and how it connects to the idea of constitutional risk?

  Suppose the executive wants to seize power. If the legislature supports that, then it’s going to be a relatively easy thing to do in either a presidential or a parliamentary system. Whatever constraint there has to come from somewhere else.

  The distinction between the two systems really only matters if the legislature opposes the seizure. Under a parliamentary system, they have an easy remedy—trigger a no-confidence vote and get rid of the problematic leader. Under a presidential system? Removing the leader is hard, and if you get into some kind of fight otherwise the president has all kinds of levers to pull. Which turns nasty (and those kind of moments of conflict also potentially create an opening for the military or someone else to seize power). It’s clearly better to be in a parliamentary system in that situation.

  I was also referencing above the classic essay “The Perils of Presidentialism” by Juan Linz, which lays out a much more sophisticated set of arguments.

• DAL 23 Jan 2026 16:42 UTC

  17 points

  3

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Short­form Feed

  At the end of the day, the rule of a law is a Tinker Bell situation (it only survives if we believe in it). Long-term constitutional stability under a presidential system of government is also quite exceptional. The standard argument is that the US is the only successful case of long-run constitutional stability under a presidential argument (though, depending on how you define long-run, you might throw in Costa Rica today). We’re very lucky that we’ve believed for so long.

  I’d add a couple more factors into your analysis, though.

  One thing you leave out is mass public opinion, and all the various ways that can be effective—demonstrators in the streets, general strike, cessation of quasi-voluntary compliance in all the areas where the government requires it, and so on, perhaps insurgency or terrorism in extremis. Layer onto that the various additional actions available to economic elites. The real hope for the Supreme Court is that the public takes its side in some extreme crisis, and that a clear ruling on its part serves as the focal point to kick all of that off.

  It’s pretty unlikely that the US military would be willing to crack down in that scenario. But even if it were, it doesn’t have the capacity to operate a police state. Most of our military capabilities aren’t geared towards that (something like a B-2 bomber or an aircraft carrier just really isn’t so helpful) -- the infantry forces of the US military aren’t even numerous enough to take over for the existing cadre of state and local police (assuming they walk off in this scenario) much less to do some kind of large-scale repression on top of maintaining ordinary law and order.

  Another factor (in less extreme scenarios) is that the courts, in their ordinary and apolitical capacity, are extremely valuable to the government. A collision that ends up destroying the courts takes a lot of the economy with it because large chunks of the economy are underpinned by the existence of a rule of law system governing economic transactions. And the courts are also necessary to keep the trains running on criminal justice and so on. A surgical attack on the courts that disables them only on the political issues while keeping all of that running is very difficult to mount, especially in the face of their concerted resistance. Even autocrats find it useful to have a functional court system (and our own legal tradition emerged as a tool of the British monarchy)

  On a lot of lower stakes stuff, this is really what matters, especially when the actions the government wants to take flow directly through the courts. There are a lot of issues in terms of criminal procedure where the executive would have pretty wide public support for violating the constitution (e.g., in surveys, a substantial majority of Americans favor rolling back various rights constitutionally granted to criminal defendants). Similarly, a pretty sizable chunk of Americans on either side seem to actively favor imprisoning political opponents on trumped up charges and no one is going to take to the streets if it happens. But, because the criminal process runs straight through the courts, you can’t really get those things done without blowing up the system. And that’s a big step to take.

  Another consideration here is the power the courts have over lawyers. So long as the executive branch is still playing the game with reference to the rules (however fast and loose it’s being with those rules), the lawyers advancing its positions are subject to judicial discipline and, therefore, face personal consequences like disbarment. If the executive has decided to go all-out, that stops mattering. But in a lesser constitutional crisis, those people are still thinking about those interests and that exerts a lot of pressure in the rule of law direction. Likewise for the willingness of the courts to continue extending the government the presumption of regularity.

  Circling back on the military, a couple of points:

  1. A military willing and able to rule through force usually wants to do so on its own behalf. What does it need the unpopular civilian dictator for? So, it’s a pretty hard ask to make even if the military is not committed to any underlying values that preclude it unless there’s a really deep loyalty to the leader.

  2. Getting your military to fire on civilians is really hard, especially in a military culture like ours.

  3. The constitutional/​rule of law/​democratic norms in the US military are all pretty strong culturally. So is a norm against involvement in partisan or domestic issues (that don’t pertain directly to the military itself).

  4. A particularly crucial constituency within the military in such hypothetical is the JAG Corps (the military’s own internal lawyers). JAGs are very integrated into decision-making and have managed over the last few decades to achieve very high status within the military. [a somewhat troubling aside is that the Trump administration purged the JAG leadership shortly after taking office]. In general, American lawyers inclusive of JAGs are especially committed to rule of law and things like following court orders.

  As a closing though, the scenarios that worry me the most don’t involve outright defiance and clashes. The smart way of doing things is a little more subtle (and in the current moment also leverages the fact that the Supreme Court is willing to give the administration considerable benefit of the doubt). The Supreme Court’s own precedents have also handicapped it in that it has declared a variety of the legal tools you’d want in a crisis to be beyond its own powers and invented a lot of technicalities for the president to play to his own advantage.

• DAL 21 Jan 2026 15:43 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: yams’s comment on: DAL’s Shortform

  Thanks for the recommendation btw. I take it from your comment that you’re involved in writing this?

  I ended up using a version of this from the Center for AI Safety that I edited down for length (basically taking the intro, the front end of each section, and then most of the “Rogue AIs” section).

  My context here is assigning this to undergraduates in a survey course where AI is being discussed among other serious future threats. Some things I didn’t like about it for that purpose (that may or may not have anything to do with your own target audience):

  • The argumentation style is very heavy on quoting other people’s arguments. A reaction I want a student to have to that is something along the lines of, “Why am I reading this, rather than those underlying sources, then?”

  • The general use of quotations and sources aligns more with op-ed norms than academic norms. That is, isolated quotations from various people or reports are used without an attempt to explain their independent perspectives and the extent to which they do or don’t share your conclusions.

  • There’s also a lot of line blurring between quite distinct positions (especially as to quoting people who are advancing much weaker conclusions as evidence for your stronger ones). We would be compelled to have a long discussion about whether the sources are used in a responsible way and whether they really support the argument, and whether something like a remark made by an expert as a minor point in an interview should really be used as evidence, and so on. That’s just not what I’m looking to do.

  • There’s a real tension in the purpose of the essay. There’s an oscillation between the 90% risk of extinction idea and the “the risks are high enough we need an off switch” which are radically different things. A major problem in undergraduate writing is to make really over the top claims that are much bolder than necessary to prove the overall point. To the extent the point here is “we need an off switch,” this essay is very guilty of that and so represents a bad example in the war on claiming more than necessary when building arguments.

  • I think the Stockfish argument is really unhelpful to you. I can understand what you’re trying to say there after thinking about it, but the immediate intuition when you bring this up is the opposite. That is, Stockfish seems to be a well-designed system that was given a clear goal by its designers, pursues that goal as intended, and causes no trouble for anyone. It’s not winning at chess by cheating or blackmailing you or anything like that. If you want to shut it down, you just do that. And statements like the one that Stockfish doesn’t capture your pieces because it hates them are just weird because they’re arguing against nothing. The point that it will “wipe the floor with you” also, I think, triggers nothing for someone who is young and not especially into chess and who probably thinks of computers being really good at chess as a really ordinary and uninteresting state of affairs.

  • For my purposes in particular, I’d like to see a bit more on the geopolitics.

• DAL 12 Jan 2026 17:28 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Eliz­a­beth’s Shortform

  I think the confusion here is purely semantic rather than substantive. “Treaty” can mean one of two things:

  1. A written, binding agreement between states under international law regardless of what it’s called (see the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties)

  2. The subset of #1 that, for symbolic reasons, are styled as “Treaties”

  “Vibes” govern whether or not something is in Category #2, and there are a lot of things in Category #1 but not Category #2. But, Category #1 is not a vibes thing. See the Circular 175 procedure and associated law and regulations. There are various pedantic ways of referring to Category #1 if you want more precise vocabulary (e.g., “treaties and other [binding] international agreements”).

• DAL 8 Jan 2026 13:58 UTC

  10 points

  4

  in reply to: davekasten’s comment on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  Another factor here is that artists are mostly self-employed, so you don’t see headlines like “ArtCo closes factory; lays off 3,500 workers.” Instead, a diffuse group of people spread all over the country just have a harder time finding work.

• DAL 7 Jan 2026 14:23 UTC

  15 points

  0

  on: DAL’s Shortform

  Can anyone recommend a ~15 page introduction to AI existential risk that would be appropriate for a general audience with a non-technical background? Ideally, something with a degree of grounding in the current moment (i.e., with something to say about LLMs, chips, China, etc.) rather than a purely abstract take.

• DAL 6 Jan 2026 16:45 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Thomas Kwa’s Shortform

  In 2026, most of your long-term financial risk comes from your job being automated, which will plausibly happen in the next 5 years. If this happens, your salary will go to zero while the S&P 500 will probably at least double (assuming no AI takeover)

  I’m not sure this is true. In a scenario featuring widespread automation of white collar work, you’re going to have all kinds of churn in the economy and it’s really unclear how that translates into stock market winners and losers. Many people seem to assume that the big winners will be incumbent tech giants, in which case, yea, the S&P 500 will go way up. But big economic changes are often good for upstarts rather than incumbents, and it’s worth pointing out that all the frontier labs today other than Google are a) privately held and b) relatively recently founded. The profits from automating your job might well flow to some startup that doesn’t even exist yet, and that same startup might kill off the giants of the S&P.

• DAL 23 Dec 2025 15:30 UTC

  44 points

  6

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Eliz­a­beth’s Shortform

  I assume we’re talking about the House here (the Senate is a little different)?

  Definitionally the average member of the House is going to have ¹⁄₄₃₅ of the legislative influence, which is just not a lot. Back in the Congressional good old days, there was a lot of specialization. Legislation was mostly delegated to committees (and often by committees to subcommittees) where an individual voice matters numerically. So, an individual member could specialize in a particular issue area and end up having quite a bit of influence on that area, even if very little outside it. But, committees are effectively dead now, so the legislative power is concentrated in the leadership.

  There’s a lot of other stuff that members do, though. Legislation has never been the majority of the job. Congress also does oversight of executive agencies and constituent service. Individual members also spend a great deal of time engaging in politicking directed at outside audiences, fundraising and retail politics. I’ve worked in a couple of different Congressional offices, and the members were always extremely busy (there’s a conventional wisdom that nowadays a lot of new members just don’t do that stuff and are instead totally focused on social media; in at least some cases, that’s true).

  Over the last few decades, power has flowed out of Congress entirely and into the executive branch and the courts. Because Congress barely legislates anymore, the field is open for executive action on major policy questions, checked mostly by whether or not the courts will let the president do it. A huge amount of power has also built up in the ways that the courts interpret old statutes. Back in the good old days, Congress would pass a law, the courts would interpret it, and if Congress didn’t like that interpretation, they’d rewrite the law. Now, they don’t do that, and so the judicial interpretation just becomes the law indefinitely. The Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha also killed off Congress’s most important method for restraining the executive branch.

  So, what changed in Congress?

  Democrats held a continuous majority in the House for 40 years (1955-1995) and a Senate majority for that period save for an interlude in the early 80s. Partisan control of the White House alternated, but Republicans controlled the White House for the majority of that era, including an unbroken 12 year stretch under Reagan and Bush I. Everyone settled into an equilibrium based on bipartisanship. It didn’t make much sense to wait around for unified government to enact your agenda because it might never come. Because of their dominance, Congressional Democrats were also strongly incentivized not to let too much power flow to the executive. Specialization through committees and horse trading thrived in this environment.

  In this millennium, we’ve settled into a new equilibrium where the parties alternate in power, and every newly elected president (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again) has entered power with control of Congress, and it’s well-understood that unified control of the government is on the table every four years. That means the incentive to engage in compromise legislation is basically gone (and with it the influence of rank-and-file members). Why compromise now, when you’re never more than a couple of years away from an opportunity to take power and get what you want without compromising? That puts the president in the driver’s seat as well—it’s the presidential candidate’s agenda that dominates the election every four years when you might be able to seize (or hold) power. Voters are, more or less, expecting Congress to enact that when they get there. So, there’s not a lot of room for Congressional creativity.

  The other big factor here is death of local media. Back in the good old days, an individual member of Congress could maintain a meaningful local reputation because voters largely learned about politics from the local newspaper, and the local newspaper had correspondents in DC covering the behavior of the local representative(s). A politically informed voter had a pretty good basis for understanding how their representative was different from the average member of the same party, which created the environment for ticket splitting. With the nationalization of media over the past couple decades, informed voters are instead mostly consuming political news from nationally focused outlets that have no interest in covering the role of your local Congressperson (uninformed voters aren’t consuming much either way). Save for a few people that establish a nationally salient brand (e.g., AOC), that means everyone in Congress really just blends into an undifferentiated D or R (most people can’t actually name their representative in Congress but can identify their party). If voters are just going to respond to you as a D or an R, your interests become the same as the overall interests of that party, which increasingly just reduces to a stance for or against the incumbent president. Everyone has an opinion on Donald Trump. Nobody has an opinion on your local representative. In the House, if you’re new, they’re also essentially no time to establish a specific brand, even if it were possible, because the primary for your next election will happen barely more than a year after you take office.

  Circling back around, that means that members of Congress in “swing” districts live or die in the general election with their party’s presidential candidate. So, if it’s the same party, you do whatever you can to support them which mostly just means deference to presidential wishes. If it’s the other party, you do whatever you can to oppose them, but everything just comes down to the president either way. In “safe” districts, as noted, the real election is the primary. The dynamics are slightly different there (and vary across the two parties) but never tilt in the direction of picking people who are interested in going to Congress and engaging in bipartisan compromise.

  The independent reputation issue works a little better for senators than representatives (though the other problems plague the Senate). As a senator, you have a fighting chance at establishing an independent reputation because there’s still some room for state-level media coverage, though that’s dying off too, and there are sufficiently few senators that they may be able to break through to their own voters via the national media (ask yourself how many senators you can say something distinctive about vs. how many representatives you can say something about). Having 5 years rather than 1 to engage in reputation building is also helpful.

• DAL 25 Nov 2025 3:11 UTC

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: NATO is dan­ger­ously un­aware of its mil­i­tary vulnerability

  My loose model is that increases in lethality tend, all else equal, to favor defenders. Increases in operational mobility tend to favor attackers.

  At some point in any attack, you need to cover some ground where you are exposed to enemy fire from defenders with the advantage of a prepared position. The more lethal their weapons, the harder that is and that’s true even if your weapons are also more lethal because they have the advantage of a prepared position. As currently used, drones boost lethality and they’re also uniquely good against armor which has been the offensive weapon of choice on the modern, high-intensity conventional battlefield for attackers. I guess that’s fairly close to the “standard answer” you’re giving above.

  The second bit is that drones offer no operational mobility (as currently deployed). To advance an offensive over any substantial distance, you need to move not just weapons systems but also people, platforms, and logistics forward. That is, suppose you’ve either killed your enemies or forced their retreat from some given area, you need to consolidate control over it and be able to either prepare your own defenses against counterattack or establish a forward staging point for the next attack. Mechanized or armored units do that pretty naturally; you’re bringing people and supplies with you as you go and you can immediately use them for the next steps. Drones don’t. If you’ve overrun a position with drones, there is no obvious next step save for finding a way to move people and vehicles forward, who then become vulnerable to enemy drones.

  Another piece of it—quite dependent on the present state of technology—is that jamming is effective enough that most drones are limited to the range of however far they can trail a fiber optic cable which is only a few miles. That rules out deep penetration with drones, again making it hard to follow up on any successes.

• DAL 24 Nov 2025 14:35 UTC

  55 points

  0

  on: NATO is dan­ger­ously un­aware of its mil­i­tary vulnerability

  It’s fair to criticize Western militaries for not adapting to drones more quickly, especially on the defense-industrial side. But, it’s also wrong to frame this as a NATO disadvantage in strategic terms.

  On the strategic level, you have to keep in mind that:

  1. NATO is a defensive alliance

  2. NATO strategy has always been built from the premise that NATO is weakest (relative to rivals) in ground warfare.

  3. With respect to Russia, a prolonged war of attrition overwhelmingly favors NATO.

  On point #1, what we’re seeing in Ukraine is that drones are tactically a defense-dominant weapon—that is, they make it much harder to seize territory. If there’s a way to use them in successful, high-mobility offensive operations, no one has found it. NATO’s major goal has always been to defend European territory against Russian invasion. Given the tactical balance of drones, even if Russia ends up the “drone-advantaged” side, it’s still the case that the basically defensive nature of drones and the defensive aims on the NATO side probably end up favoring NATO.

  On #2, NATO has always been built around having an edge in the air and sea (and nowadays space) compensating for relativeness weakness on the ground. Historically, NATO faced substantial disadvantages on the ground relative to the Soviets, and NATO strategy was always about finding ways to use its other edges to compensate for that. Post-Soviet Russia has never had the same kind of advantages on the ground, but this has still been the area of relative Russian strength. With respect to frontline ground forces, even post-Soviet Russia would obviously have the edge in the initial stages of any conflict and that’s been true ever since the end of the Cold War.

  Drones don’t do anything to challenge the NATO air/​sea/​space edge. Cheap drones operate at low speed, low altitude, and short range. Something that can match the speed, altitude, and range of a jet fighter is going to look a lot like (and cost a lot like) a jet fighter even it happens to be unmanned. For the same reasons, drones are a threat to naval vessels operating close to shore, but so are speedboats, and there’s no scenario where NATO is trying to put a carrier group 10 miles off the Russian coastline. The situation in constricted waterways is different, and it’s entirely possible that drones, speedboats, and perhaps speedboat drones will substantially deny naval access to the Bab al Mandab or the Strait of Hormuz. But that’s just not the Russian scenario and the only such constricted naval area there is the Baltic, where NATO controls the land.

  On #3, Ukraine is gradually losing the war because Russia has 4x the population and over 10x the GDP. In a Russia-NATO conflict, it’s NATO with the overwhelming population and economic advantages. So, if you bog down into a war of attrition, there’s no doubt NATO wins it. Again, if we see Ukraine-type dynamics, this is something that’s better for NATO than the situation a decade ago because it makes it a lot harder for Russia to seize the Baltics in a blitzkrieg and then extend a nuclear umbrella over them.

• DAL 23 Nov 2025 13:20 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Fejfo’s comment on: Fe­jfo’s Shortform

  You’re not wrong but you may be overinterpreting the significance of what you report. It is true that you can never measure something truly continuous with infinite precision. But, this isn’t that interesting because there are physical limitations on measurement that are much more relevant in any given context. The probability theory issue here (and the relevant mathematical terms if you want to follow up on this are “almost surely” and “measure zero) doesn’t say anything about measuring as precisely as you’d like; it just rules out truly infinite precision.

  I’m not a physicist, so this may not be quite right, but my basic understanding is that there are inherent physical limits on measurement precision and not merely apparatus-dependent ones. That is one can’t, in principle, measure anything shorter than a Planck length, for example.

• DAL 12 Sep 2025 17:35 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Drake Thomas’s comment on: Drake Thomas’s Shortform

  Interesting question. The “base” unit is largely arbitrary, but the smallest subunit of a currency has more practical implications, so it may also help to think in those terms. Back in the day, you had all kinds of wonky fractions but now basically everyone is decimalized, and ¹⁄₁₀₀ is usually the smallest unit. I imagine then that the value of the cent is as important here as the value of the dollar.

  Here’s a totally speculative theory based on that.

  When we write numbers, we have to include any zeros after the decimal but you never need leading zeros on a whole number. That is, we write “4” not “004″ but if the number is “0.004” there is no compressed way of writing that out. In book keeping, it’s typical to keep everything right-aligned but it makes adding up and comparing magnitudes easier, so you’ll also write trailing zeros that aren’t strictly necessary (that is $4.00 rather than just $4 if other prices you’re recording sometimes use those places).

  This means if you have a large number of decimal places, book keeping is much more annoying and you have to be really careful about leading zeros. Entering in a price as “0.00003” is annoying and easy to mess up by an order of magnitude without noticing. Thus, having a decimalized currency with a really large base unit is a pain and there’s a natural tendency towards a base unit that allows a minimum subunit of 0.01 or so to be sensible.

On Treaties, Nu­clear Weapons, and AI

• DAL 29 May 2025 13:11 UTC

  16 points

  0

  on: What was so great about Move 37?

  It’s possible for something to be a useful shorthand even if the underlying facts are dubious (e.g., the “let them eat cake” line doesn’t come from Marie Antoinette but nonetheless illuminates the situation at the time; frogs will jump out of water if you heat it gradually but this stands in for a useful concept).

  I’m not an expert-level Go player but my general sense is that Move 37 is in this same category. It was a surprising move, but it had a limited impact on the match and was not an optimal move as scored by stronger contemporary Go engines (thought it was a very good one). It didn’t shift the probability of victory, and Sedol’s move 38 was the optimal response to it as scored by Katago. It seems to have had a psychological effect because it was so surprising, but that’s possible even if a move is literally random (as famously happened with Kasparov and Deep Blue).

  You can donwload Katago and work through this yourself.

Fi­nance and AI Timelines

• DAL 15 Apr 2025 15:41 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Who wants to bet me $25k at 1:7 odds that there won’t be an AI mar­ket crash in the next year?

  This only works if you’re the only bookmaker in town. Even if your potential counterparties place their own subjective odds at 1:7, they won’t book action with you at 1:7 if they can get 1:5 somewhere else.

  Perhaps I misread OP’s motivations, but presumably if you’re looking to make money on these kinds of forecasts, you’d just trade stocks. Sure, you can’t trade OpenAI per se, but there are lot of closely related assets and then you’re not stuck in the position of trying to collect on a bet you made with a stranger over the internet.

  So, the function of offering such a “bet” is more as a signaling device about your beliefs. In which case, the signal being sent here is not really a bearish one.

• DAL 8 Apr 2025 16:52 UTC

  5 points

  −4

  in reply to: Remmelt’s comment on: Who wants to bet me $25k at 1:7 odds that there won’t be an AI mar­ket crash in the next year?

  If you think there’s a 40% chance of a crash, then that’s quite the vig you’re allocating yourself on this bet at 1:7.