David Hornbein

Karma: 1,469

David Hornbein 5 Dec 2025 18:06 UTC
11 points
6
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
This is true of approximately every worthwhile conference and convention. In my entire life I’ve been to exactly one conference where the scheduled programming provided more than 10% of the event’s value.

David Hornbein 25 Nov 2025 23:38 UTC
38 points
25
on: Stop Applying And Get To Work
This is good advice, and is not specific to AI safety or “short timelines”. In every field I’ve ever been part of, the people who show up and start doing the stuff that they see needs doing end up accomplishing more than the people who think in terms of filling open positions and sending applications.
If someone is hiring for the work you want to do, or is offering a fellowship that seems like it’ll help you get where you want to go, then by all means apply. But the difference in mindset between people who see that stuff as the default, vs those who see it as instrumental towards their own plans, is very big.

David Hornbein 2 Oct 2025 20:07 UTC
−1 points
0
in reply to: Roman Malov’s comment on: But what kind of stuff can you just do?
Ridiculous. I have handed out cookies to strangers on the street. I have eaten cupcakes given to me by random strangers on the street. People had a good time. If there are neurotic people who feel anxious taking food from strangers then they can just walk on by. You can just do things.

David Hornbein 23 Aug 2025 3:57 UTC
98 points
68
on: Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation)
If I were a moderator, I would have banned Jesus Christ Himself if He required me to spend one hundred hours moderating His posts on multiple occasions. Given your description here I am surprised you did not do this a long time ago. I admire your restraint, if not necessarily your wisdom.
What links here?
- Said Achmiz's comment on Banning Said Achmiz (and broader thoughts on moderation) by habryka (23 Aug 2025 4:56 UTC; 12 points)

David Hornbein 14 Aug 2025 21:06 UTC
5 points
1
on: Somebody invented a better bookmark
Neat, I’ll try it out. $14 is a small price to pay for a shot at a minor ergonomic upgrade.

David Hornbein 17 Jul 2025 21:30 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Rauno Arike’s comment on: Rauno’s Shortform
Publishing anything is a ton of work. People don’t do a ton of work unless they have a strong reason, and usually not even then.
I have lots of ideas for essays and blog posts, often on subjects where I’ve done dozens or hundreds of hours of research and have lots of thoughts. I’ll end up actually writing about ¹⁄₃ of these, because it takes a lot of time and energy. And this is for random substack essays. I don’t have to worry about hostile lawyers, or alienating potential employees, or a horde of Twitter engagement farmers trying to take my words out of context.
I have no specific knowledge, but I imagine this is probably a big part of it.

David Hornbein 16 May 2025 1:08 UTC
21 points
0
on: Explaining British Naval Dominance During the Age of Sail
A good summary, but it’s worth noting that while the death penalty for failing to fight was on the books, Byng’s execution was the only time it was ever actually carried out. It’s a bit similar to how the US military legally has the authority to execute deserters, but in the past century has only ever exercised this once out of tens of thousand of sentences (Eddie Slovak during WWII).
From reading the autobiography of Lord Cochrane, an insanely aggressive and insanely successful captain during the Napoleonic Wars, my impression is that the Royal Navy was very concerned with the allocation of credit, glory, and prestige, as well as money prizes. He describes a system where officers are writing to the Admiralty headquarters to describe the meritorious or shameful actions of their peers and subordinates after every major action, and sometimes convoked courts martial to resolve disputes, as in the case of Lord Cochrane’s rival Lord Gambier. Lord Cochrane also argues that the prize system is critical to maintaining the Royal Navy’s morale and effectiveness.

David Hornbein 7 May 2025 18:22 UTC
13 points
13
in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
Overtly, OP is trying to shun Cremieux for failing to meet an assumed-widely-agreed “standard of care and compassion”. This is obviously based on OP’s belief that Cremieux’s conduct is unacceptably outside the Overton window, even if they used the word “standard” instead of the word “Overton window”. The only point of deploying phrases like “Hoo boy” and “do better” is to appeal to a social consensus. OP isn’t being sneaky here or anything, you’re just misinterpreting their dialect.

David Hornbein 20 Feb 2025 0:07 UTC
17 points
15
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
Selection bias isn’t the whole story. The median paper in almost every field is notably worse than it was in, say, 1985. Academia is less selective than it used to be—in the U.S., there are more PhDs per capita, and the average IQ/test scores/whatever metric has dropped for every level of educational attainment.
Grab a journal that’s been around for a long time, read a few old papers and a few new papers at random, and you’ll notice the difference.

David Hornbein 8 Nov 2024 21:48 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed
OKcupid is certainly a better product for hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of unusually literate people, including ~all potential developers and most people in their social circles. It’s not a small niche.

David Hornbein 13 Oct 2024 20:05 UTC
LW: 24 AF: 13
4
AF
on: My theory of change for working in AI healthtech
What does your company do, specifically? I found the brief description at HealthcareAgents.com vague and unclear. Can you walk me through an example case of what you do for a patient, or something?

David Hornbein 6 Oct 2024 20:35 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
Hm, this timing suggests the change could be a consequence of Karnofsky stepping away from the organization.
Which makes sense, now that I think about it. He’s by far the most politically strategic leader Open Philanthropy has had, so with him gone, it’s not shocking they might revert towards standard risk-averse optionality-maxxing foundation behavior.

David Hornbein 2 Oct 2024 22:48 UTC
33 points
42
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
“Open Phil higher-ups being friends with Anthropic higher-ups” is an understatement. An Open Philanthropy cofounder (Holden Karnofsky) is married to an Anthropic cofounder (Daniela Amodei). It’s a big deal!

David Hornbein 29 Aug 2024 1:18 UTC
−13 points
7
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed
I don’t recall Eliezer claiming that dath ilani characters never give in to threats. *Dath ilani characters* claim they never give in to threats. My interpretation is that the characters *say* “We don’t give in to threats”, and *believe* it, but it’s not *true*. Rather it’s something between a self-fulfilling prophecy, a noble lie-told-to-children, and an aspiration.
There are few threats in dath ilan, partly because the conceit of dath ilan is that it’s mostly composed of people who are cooperative-libertarianish by nature and don’t want to threaten each other very much, but partly because it’s a political structure where it’s much harder to get threats to actually *work*. One component of that political structure is how people are educated to defy threats by reflex, and to expect their own threats to fail, by learning am idealized system of game theory in which threats are always defied.
However, humans don’t actually follow ideal game theory when circumstances get sufficiently extreme, even dath ilani humans. Peranza can in fact be “shattered in Hell beyond all hope of repair” in the bad timeline, for all that she might rationally “decide not to break”. Similarly when the Head Keeper commits suicide to make a point: “So if anybody did deliberately destroy their own brain in attempt to increase their credibility—then obviously, the only sensible response would be to ignore that, so as not create hideous system incentives. Any sensible person would reason out that sensible response, expect it, and not try the true-suicide tactic.” But despite all that the government sets aside the obvious and sensible policy because, come on, the Head Keeper just blew up her own brain, stop fucking around and get serious. And the Head Keeper, who knows truths about psychology which the members of government do not, *accurately predicted they would respond that way*.
So dath ilani are educated to believe that giving in to threats is irrational, and to believe that people don’t give in to threats. This plus their legal system means that there are few threats, and the threats usually fail, so their belief is usually correct, and the average dath ilani never sees it falsified. Those who think carefully about the subject will realize that threats can sometimes work, in circumstances which are rare in dath ilan, but they’ll also realize that it’s antisocial to go around telling everyone about the limits of their threat-resistance and keep it quiet. The viewpoint characters start believing the dath ilani propaganda but update pretty quickly when removed from dath ilan. Keltham has little trouble understanding the Golarian equilibrium of force and threats once he gets oriented. Thellim presumably pays taxes off camera once she settles in to Earth.

David Hornbein 29 Jul 2024 16:30 UTC
4 points
4
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Richard_Kennaway’s Shortform
>Are the near-term prospects of AGI making long-term prospects like suspension less attractive?
No. Everyone I know who was signed up for cryonics in 2014 is still signed up now. You’re hearing about it less because Yudkowsky is now doing other things with his time instead of promoting cryonics, and those discussions around here were a direct result of his efforts to constantly explain and remind people.

David Hornbein 15 Jul 2024 18:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mesaoptimizer’s comment on: mesaoptimizer’s Shortform
I agree with your argument here, especially your penultimate paragraph, but I’ll nitpick that framing your disagreements with Groves as him being “less of a value add” seems wrong. The value that Groves added was building the bomb, not setting diplomatic policy.

David Hornbein 25 Apr 2024 8:39 UTC
37 points
7
on: The first future and the best future
What is the mechanism, specifically, by which going slower will yield more “care”? What is the mechanism by which “care” will yield a better outcome? I see this model asserted pretty often, but no one ever spells out the details.
I’ve studied the history of technological development in some depth, and I haven’t seen anything to convince me that there’s a tradeoff between development speed on the one hand, and good outcomes on the other.

David Hornbein 15 Apr 2024 17:55 UTC
27 points
3
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Anthropic AI made the right call
I’m coming to this late, but this seems weird. Do I understand correctly that many people were saying that Anthropic, the AI research company, had committed never to advance the state of the art of AI research, and they believed Anthropic would follow this commitment? That is just… really implausible.
This is the sort of commitment which very few individuals are psychologically capable of keeping, and which ~zero commercial organizations of more than three or four people are institutionally capable of keeping, assuming they actually do have the ability to advance the state of the art. I don’t know whether Anthropic leadership ever said they would do this, and if they said it then I don’t know whether they meant it earnestly. But even imagining they said it and meant it earnestly there is just no plausible world in which a company with hundreds of staff and billions of dollars of commercial investment would keep this commitment for very long. That is not the sort of thing you see from commercial research companies in hot fields.
If anyone here did believe that Anthropic would voluntarily refrain from advancing the state of the art in all cases, you might want to check if there are other things that people have told you about themselves, which you would really like to be true of them, but you have no evidence for other than their assertions, and would be very unusual if they were true.

David Hornbein 19 Mar 2024 18:26 UTC
6 points
27
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
Ben is working on a response, and given that I think it’s clearly the right call to wait a week or two until we have another round of counter-evidence before jumping to conclusions. If in a week or two people still think the section of “Avoidable, Unambiguous falsehoods” does indeed contain such things, then I think an analysis like this makes sense
This was three months ago. I have not seen the anticipated response. Setting aside the internal validity of your argument above, the promised counterevidence did not arrive in anything like a reasonable time.
TracingWoodgrains clearly made the right call in publishing, rather than waiting for you.

David Hornbein 19 Dec 2023 23:00 UTC
48 points
17
in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
Yes, obviously, but they use different strategies. Male sociopaths rarely paint themselves as helpless victims because it is not an effective tactic for men. One does notice that, while the LW community is mostly male, ~every successful callout post against a LW community organization has been built on claims of harm to vulnerable female victims.