Elias Schmied

Karma: 471

Elias Schmied 3 Aug 2026 20:57 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: Pause, at least after unipolarity
So you think the Great Stagnation manifested that quickly (it’s generally taken to start in the 70s), and in military tech to boot? (to develop better ICBM interception). That feels a bit implausible to me since nuclear bombs became so much more powerful. It feels more like an offense-defense balance intrinsic to the technology + coordination of exactly the type that he didn’t expect (the ABM treaty capping defense systems). But I feel a bit out of my depth here.

Elias Schmied 3 Aug 2026 20:36 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: Pause, at least after unipolarity
I don’t know what probability we should translate to his statement that “unless something quite unforeseen occurs”. 90% maybe
I assume you mean 10% on “something unforeseen”? Opus 5 estimates “5% and possibly less”, for what it’s worth.
I think he would be surprised that in 2000 hydrogen bombs were still the most powerful weapons
To be fair, nuclear bombs in 2000 were a thousand times more powerful than in 1951.
I think you’re underselling how much of Russell’s concern was the apparent instability of the equilibrium at the time, even without further technological progress:
“If things are allowed to drift, it is obvious that the bickering between Russia and the Western democracies will continue until Russia has a considerable store of atomic bombs, and that when that time comes there will be an atomic war.”
It doesn’t seem like this is conditional on further technological progress. The passage you’re quoting is specifically about human extinction, not about world war.

Elias Schmied 3 Aug 2026 20:14 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: Pause, at least after unipolarity
Didn’t know about the plankton thing either and I asked Claude, it’s actually pretty interesting.
On the general historical point, it’s something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time—for me, it’s on the Pareto frontier of how important of a question it is vs how little explicit study it has received. I think it’s more thorny than it might first appear, because while the “maximal size/power” of entities increases (companies and economies of scale, nations and the consolidation process that you mention), there is also some vague intuition that technology and the information age has given some power back to flexible, smaller entities like startups or the individual. (see e.g. this old Claude chat).
As of now, I feel relatively undecided and want to think more about it.

Elias Schmied 3 Aug 2026 19:20 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Pause, at least after unipolarity
Come on, that’s obviously not what Russell meant. His prediction was clearly extremely flawed. This is consensus—Opus 5 agrees with me.

Elias Schmied 3 Aug 2026 14:56 UTC
15 points
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on: Pause, at least after unipolarity
I’ve been kind of moved by Richard Ngo’s argument (e.g. here and in this thread) that the seeming naturalness of unipolarity might be a semi-ideological artifact of centralized solutions being easier to imagine. I’d be curious to hear you say how you think Bertrand Russell’s similar infamous 1950 prediction of either a global war or a world government (or population collapse) by 2000 went wrong, and what the key dissimilarity to your prediction of unipolarity is.

Elias Schmied 31 Jul 2026 8:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment on: Probabilities are not the right concept
Really interesting post, thanks for linking. Hm, but this is still a simplicity thing, so I don”t think anyone would classify it as a caring measure. Like, the non-arbitrariness is still intended to be objective.

Elias Schmied 30 Jul 2026 0:54 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: davidad’s comment on: Imprecise beliefs: a tiny introduction
Ah, I thought there was some larger scenario intended.

Elias Schmied 29 Jul 2026 22:59 UTC
1 point
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on: Imprecise beliefs: a tiny introduction
The offer doesn’t even need to be coming from Omega for the d20 to be a permissible choice
Did you mean to introduce Omega before this?

Elias Schmied 29 Jul 2026 20:39 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: Infinite ethics and UDASSA
That makes sense to me at first glance, thanks.

Elias Schmied 29 Jul 2026 19:56 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: Infinite ethics and UDASSA
Cool, thanks for looking into it! But wouldn’t the program that locates our obelisk / the world summoning text also take a while? If it’s one of the natural short description length programs like “find the largest obelisk” or “find the most common string”, then it might take extremely long since you’d have to run the universe very far into the future. (I may be missing something obvious).

Elias Schmied 29 Jul 2026 19:27 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: Infinite ethics and UDASSA
I’ve only talked to Fable about it, so I don’t have a favorite explanation. (and I can’t say I actually understand it).
Schmidhuber is the other guy (other than Tegmark) that influenced the everything-list people and Wei Dai, to my understanding. But he eventually switched from a simplicity prior to a simplicity+speed prior. It seems interesting and underexplored on LessWrong. But it also seems, at first glance, less motivated than a pure beautiful Solomonoff induction thing. So I don’t know.

Elias Schmied 29 Jul 2026 17:32 UTC
3 points
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on: Infinite ethics and UDASSA
Coming back to this again—still really useful, thank you. The obelisk and world-summoning points are quite strong.

Have you looked into Schmidhuber’s speed prior at all? It seems to at least ward off those. (although other problems remain, of course).

Elias Schmied 29 Jul 2026 17:15 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment on: Probabilities are not the right concept
Hm, interesting point. What are these epistemological norms, out of curiosity? (Feel free to just link me to something you’ve already written.)

Elias Schmied 27 Jul 2026 22:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MinusGix’s comment on: Stop doing decision theory without metaphysics
Sure, it’s a continuum—I’m down to bite the bullet that probabilities are very slightly metaphysical too. But believing your own reality might be impossible / changing the past / caring about alternate realities is a huge difference in degree—intuitively like 100x more metaphysical than probabilities, or something like that.

Elias Schmied 27 Jul 2026 22:34 UTC
1 point
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on: FDT is not directly comparable to CDT and EDT
Just came across this post! It has a lot of similarities to my recent post Stop doing decision theory without metaphysics (although I allow myself more sociological speculation).
I think I give FDT more credit than you, though—I do think there is an intuitive and objective sense in which it performs better. It’s just that metaphysics is needed to articulate it / make it fully precise. (In other words, the study of decision theory naturally leads to metaphysics.)

Elias Schmied 27 Jul 2026 14:22 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: StellaAthena’s comment on: An OpenAI model left notes about how to evade containment; we need more details
Thanks, this is useful.

Elias Schmied 27 Jul 2026 14:21 UTC
1 point
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on: An OpenAI model left notes about how to evade containment; we need more details
Thanks for writing this!

Elias Schmied 23 Jul 2026 10:48 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: E. P. Cooper’s comment on: Stop doing decision theory without metaphysics
I don’t have the time to read this in depth, but AFAICT your objections to both meanings of the word “theoretical” route through your belief that decision theory will/should be used to program an AI? Yeah, I’m quite skeptical of that—I think superintelligence will reason in the same high-level, informal, embedded, bounded way that we do (even if with a lot more capability to put towards e.g. doing BOTECs).

Elias Schmied 22 Jul 2026 10:48 UTC
−2 points
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in reply to: MinusGix’s comment on: Stop doing decision theory without metaphysics
I didn’t have the motivation to read this deeply, but I think my reply is just
What you’re really saying (like Nate Soares here, ctrl-F “metaphysically”) is “You need to consider crazy metaphysics (imagining you’re in a hypothetical impossible reality) to make decisions in a reasonable way”, and like… yes, exactly. That’s de facto a metaphysical stance. “It makes things easier if we imagine this” is not a decisive argument for a metaphysical claim that permits you to leave it unstated as if it’s obvious.
You’re being uncooperative by not calling it metaphysics, since, under the normal meaning of metaphysics, it just is (moreso than normal decision theory).
(I probably won’t reply again if you reply is super long, btw)

Elias Schmied 22 Jul 2026 10:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: E. P. Cooper’s comment on: Stop doing decision theory without metaphysics
Thanks, this is useful.
I remain unconvinced though that these arguments make it more than a theoretical issue.
the problem is that we don’t have a principled way to do this (to single out “which part of a computation” corresponds to computing that parity).
But we know this is possible, or at least meaningful, in principle—obviously some part of the computation is computing the parity.
These seem like arguments that logical counterfactuals (especially doing them as an embedded agent) are important on a theoretical level—which I buy—but not that logical updatelessness is a deeper metaphysical issue. Why can’t I just philosophically “quarantine” logical updatelessness by saying “ah, I might be wrong about this logical fact, therefore the reality where it’s wrong might be real and I might be in a universe where I’m deluded”? Obviously this leads to difficulties about how to implement this on a technical level, but philosophically what is the issue? I’m never considering impossible realities to be metaphysically real while I reason like this.
EDIT: I no longer endorse some of this specific phrasing.