DanB

Karma: 4,588

DanB 11 May 2026 16:13 UTC
6 points
3
on: International Law Cannot Prevent Extinction Either
It’s a bit of an orthogonal point, but I wrote Urgent Coordination Problems Require Narrow Mandates in response to Eliezer’s original post.

tl;dr : if you want people to accept some kind of universal mechanism to solve a coordination problem (e.g. AI development treaty), you’d better be very careful to ensure that the proposed agency has an extremely narrow mandate.

DanB 6 May 2026 16:49 UTC
7 points
1
on: It’s nice of you to worry about me, but I really do have a life

The thing that I am preaching here is that people are different, so… maybe there actually are many people like that.

There is a general ethical problem in our society: do high IQ, high human capital people with impulse control have a responsibility to model behavior that will also work for those without the positive traits? Or should the lucky upper echelon feel okay to conduct behaviors that are safe for them but risky for the lower groups?

Examples: recreational drug use, single parenting, pursuing a career in the arts, dropping out of school, polyamory, etc

UBI-dependent lifestyles will likely fall into a similar pattern. Some people will thrive; some will be destroyed by UBI. But it’s hard to legislate that some people should get UBI and others not (for their own safety/benefit).

DanB 22 Apr 2026 18:11 UTC
6 points
0
on: Posts I don’t have time to write

America invented freedom. Switzerland then took those ideals and tried to refine them. The obvious big difference: Switzerland built its system on civil rather than common law.

To me the obvious big difference is just size: Switz is 10 million, the US is 35x larger in population, and also far larger in geography. Switz is also actually federalist, instead of pretending to be, as in the US, to the extent that nobody really knows who the president is.

DanB 17 Apr 2026 20:58 UTC
6 points
2
on: Do not conquer what you cannot defend

Marcus Aurelius … was succeeded by his son Commodus.

Rephrasing of your motto: don’t build a huge empire, because eventually that empire will grow corrupt. It’s better to have an Archipelago of City-states, because when an individual city decays, it’s not a global catastrophe.

But Eliezer seems to think that we need a global regulatory agency for AI. It’s a plausible enough idea, but what happens when the agency falls into corruption like all the other crappy 3-letter agencies run by the US and the UN?

DanB 14 Apr 2026 20:37 UTC
6 points
3
on: The policy surrounding Mythos marks an irreversible power shift
This trend is actually kind of good for AI safety...? Because it means you just have to control and regulate N frontier labs, with N=4 or so, not billions of individuals who are potentially crazy.

Create a global AI non-proliferation treaty, make sure the strongest models are only available to the big labs, and make sure the big labs follow some highly cautious and bureaucratic process when rolling out a new model. It won’t be easy to implement, but it’s not inconceivable.

DanB 4 Apr 2026 17:20 UTC
6 points
0
on: The Corner-Stone
There’s a tension inherent in any critique of the American system: yes, on the one hand, we have tons of absurd bureaucracy and corporate bloat that prevents people from living up to their potential. On the other hand, we are witnessing one of the most spectacular technological breakthroughs in history, which is almost completely due to the high-IQ American tech ecosystem. So our talent wastage can’t be that bad.

I think the synthesis is that we simply have far more talent than we can effectively use. In a country of 300 million people, which can draw the best talent from around the world, IQ is simply not a scarce commodity, so squandering it on bureaucratic nonsense just isn’t a big deal in a macro sense.

DanB 4 Apr 2026 16:27 UTC
17 points
2
on: Democracy Dies With The Rifleman
Athens actually had a key military technology as well: the trireme. This was the most maneuverable warship of its time, and allowed Athens to create a naval empire (or thalassocracy). But the effectiveness of the trireme depended on having a crew of skilled rowers, who were generally middle or lower class men. So plausibly Athenian democracy was due to the importance of recruiting and engaging citizens from the lower classes to man their triremes.

DanB 27 Mar 2026 21:49 UTC
12 points
5
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Socrates is Mortal

It isn’t a sign of decline of public life or anything; people are just bad at explaining their feelings

There is a strong analogy to grammar here. Native speakers can very confidently determine whether a particular utterance is grammatical without being able to explain their reasoning in technical terms. Strong justified confidence in a conclusion does not require the ability to explain the underlying reasoning.

(as an example, try asking a native speaker to explain how to form English questions grammatically, including subject/aux inversion and do-insertion)

DanB 27 Mar 2026 21:36 UTC
4 points
0
on: Socrates is Mortal
(repost from FB comment):

There’s a lot to say in response to this, but what’s most striking to me is the gap between your interpretation of the history and mine. Your interpretation seems to be something about moral or intellectual corruption. My is a simple practical diagnosis and prescription: the Athenians should have abandoned their own empire, because it corrupted their public thinking—and did so with extreme rapidity, in the course of a few generations. I of course feel the same way about the US.

DanB 16 Mar 2026 21:00 UTC
11 points
−5
on: Compradorization
I feel that you are overfitting: asserting a more complex model than can be justified on the basis of a small number of noisy data points. Some countries developed rapidly under IMF/World Bank guidance. Some Western countries (Australia, Canada) converted a large share of their economies into extracting resources for China, and seem to be okay in spite of this. Some developing countries (Saudi, UAE) managed to grow very wealthy on the basis of resource extraction. If African problems are downstream of European colonialism, why are Indonesia and Malaysia (both extensively colonized) now squarely middle income?

DanB 12 Mar 2026 23:05 UTC
6 points
4
on: Ideologies Embed Taboos Against Common Knowledge Formation: a Case Study with LLMs
It is confusing that you are using Claude to analyze its own outputs and those of its peers. I would have preferred a close textual analysis, quoting passages from Claude and offering your comments about what is going on intellectually or computationally. What exactly is the “filler, hedging, and soft-pedaling” that you accuse the LLMs of producing?

DanB 25 Feb 2026 22:07 UTC
7 points
1
on: Why American Politics is Different Now (for Richard Ngo)
I view political polarization as a religious schism analogous to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Europe or Sunni and Shia in the Muslim world. As such, I don’t see a need to explain Woke vs Maga: it is just an example of a natural sociological phenomenon in human societies (perhaps there is a need to explain why religious schism happens in general).

DanB 24 Jan 2026 16:22 UTC
9 points
1
on: Dating Roundup #11: Going Too Meta
Don’t overlook “You’re single because of Culture War-driven gender alienation”. There is a yawning political chasm between young men and women these days, and politics is increasingly a dealbreaker for many people.

DanB 12 Jan 2026 21:54 UTC
6 points
5
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.
It’s really hard and maybe requires a lot of internal strength / grace / ego management, as well as deep cognitive flexibility.
Do you find it similarly hard to empathize with people who support the following regimes:
- Chinese Communist Party
- Iranian theocracy (now perhaps endangered)
- Russia / Putin (at least historically, Putin had very high approval ratings)
- Pre-2025 Maduro / Chavez government of Venezuela
- Islamic fundamentalist / monarchist government of Saudi Arabia

Similarly, is it hard to empathize with citizens of friendly countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, who are incomparably more xenophobic than the average Republican?

DanB 12 Jan 2026 16:20 UTC
4 points
0
on: In My Misanthropy Era
“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets—there were various affairs to settle—grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons. I admit my behaviour was inexcusable ….
Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

DanB 12 Jan 2026 16:05 UTC
36 points
−9
on: Strong, bipartisan leadership for resistance to Trump.
I think that the vast majority of people, including you, are catastrophically underestimating the seriousness of the culture war and overestimating the significance of Trump. There is a common historical pattern that could be called Short War Bias, where people mistakenly believe that a conflict can and will be won with a few decisive victories. Winning in 2028 will simply mean that you face an even more energized and radicalized conservative / MAGA base in 2032.
I see a close analogy between the culture war and the wars of religion in old Europe. Those wars lasted for centuries and involved millions of casualties (as many as the 20th century wars when normalizing for population size).
If you really want to improve the world, I would recommend a two-pronged strategy:
- Use the Pareto principle to limit the damage done by Trump in the next couple of years. Focus only on the 20% of battles that cause 80% of the damage, let him win the rest
- Try to create a political framework where the two tribes (Woke left and MAGA right) can live together without murdering each other

DanB 21 Apr 2025 1:45 UTC
3 points
−5
on: Three Months In, Evaluating Three Rationalist Cases for Trump
The overwhelming priority for EAs should be to serve as peace emissaries and advocates in the culture war.

War is an ethical inversion: acts that are plainly evil in peacetime become heroic and praiseworthy in times of war. War destroys value at a double rate: the warrior’s honor is to accept pain, suffering, and the risk of death in order to inflict those ills on his enemies. Further, in wartime the opposing parties cannot pause their hostilities to make side deals, even if those deals would be mutually beneficial (the Russians and Ukrainians are not going to pause the fighting to ink a trade deal or build a gas pipeline, even if those plans were beneficial to both sides).

If an EA could go back in time to the era of the European wars of religion, it is obvious that the ethically correct strategy would be to attempt to promote peace and understanding between Protestants and Catholics (it would be comically evil and irrational to pick a side and wage war against the other). Our current culture war of Woke vs MAGA is just another instance of this type of conflict and we must draw the same ethical conclusion.

DanB 24 Jul 2024 21:32 UTC
2 points
0
on: Raising children on the eve of AI
Good article. I would advise less emphasis on traditional schooling (reading, writing, ’rithmetic) and more emphasis on relationship intelligence and embodied intelligence (making things with your hands).

DanB 7 Apr 2024 19:15 UTC
7 points
2
on: The 2nd Demographic Transition
To me the most important graph is the one that shows both mothers and fathers started spending much more time on child-care in the 90s. What the heck happened? Did children suddenly become that much more difficult to manage? If kids really consume that much time and effort, it’s no wonder that people don’t want to have kids—it’s too much damn work!

DanB 7 Apr 2024 19:07 UTC
9 points
5
on: on the dollar-yen exchange rate
The Japanese value stability much, much more than Americans. This harms their economy in various ways:
- Firms that are losing money are kept alive
- Employees that underperform are not fired
- Seniority is prized much more than talent (if someone is promoted higher due to talent, other employees will be unhappy)
- Customers continue to patronize their known vendors due to loyalty, even if those vendors aren’t very good
- The idea of “disruption”—the holy grail of Silicon Valley—is anathema to Japanese.