Joseph Miller

Karma: 2,664

Joseph Miller 21 Apr 2026 19:50 UTC
5 points
−3
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
If you make people dislike you then you will push them away from your viewpoint whether or not your viewpoint is true.
If you make people like you then there’s a greater chance they will chance they will judge your view on the merits.

Joseph Miller 21 Apr 2026 12:22 UTC
9 points
−14
on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
In response to Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them.
I think some people should internalize that often Principles Don’t Justify Drama (Among Humans). Drama destroys future discussion and activates primal emotions that will override rational deliberation. If you want to bring people around to your viewpoint, make them like you.
If everyone died on their hill every time someone violated what they thought was an important principle, society would not function. Cooperate with people you disagree with and when you violate someone else’s principle, be thankful that they are going to cooperate with you.
The best historical example of this is probably religious toleration. Thank God for those who tolerated infidels.
Of course the art is in knowing which hills to actually die on and who you should really shun as your enemy. To get it right, you need to fully appreciate the costs.

Joseph Miller 4 Feb 2026 23:04 UTC
4 points
−3
in reply to: Oliver Daniels’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
I only have anecdata but I’ve talked to quite a few people and most people say it’s is a good idea to use the myriad of other concerns about AI as a force multiplier on shared policy goals.

Joseph Miller 4 Feb 2026 22:15 UTC
23 points
−7
on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
The next PauseAI UK protest will be (AFAIK) the first coalition protest between different AI activist groups, the main other group being Pull the Plug, a new organisation focused primarily on current AI harms. It will almost certainly be the largest protest focused exclusively on AI to date.
In my experience, the vast majority of people in AI safety are in favor of big-tent coalition protests on AI in theory. But when faced with the reality of working with other groups who don’t emphasize existential risk, they have misgivings. So I’m curious what people here will think of this.
Personally I’m excited about the protest and I’ve found the organizers of Pull the Plug to be very sincere and good to work with, but I’ve also set things up so that the brands of PauseAI UK and Pull the Plug are clearly distinct, so that our messaging remains clearly focused on the risks of future AI. For example, we have a separate signup page and we have our own demands focused on decelerating frontier development.

Joseph Miller 15 Jan 2026 16:47 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
Or even better, at the the time when a post is frontpaged, check if will actually appear on the frontpage. If it is too old and has too little karma to be seen, then use the time-since-frontpaged.

Joseph Miller 15 Jan 2026 14:20 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Lucius Bushnaq’s comment on: Simple summary of AI Safety laws
US laws:
Well firstly note that the RAISE act has $1M - $3M escalating fines explicitly built in.
But yes, my understanding is that if you pay up, you can carry on. However, they can be fined “per violation” and the law does not precisely define what this means. So the Attorney General can argue that each missed requirement / each non-complying model is a separate violation. Or if they’re feeling very aggressive, the AG could try to say that each day of non-compliance is a separate violation, but that may not hold up in court.
This is where injunctive relief could come in, to directly order a company to retract a model. As noted, this was only explicitly included in the RAISE act^[1], and that looks set to be removed. However, AGs can often get injunctions even without explicit statutory language.
EU AI Act:
No, the consequences will escalate. Fines can be periodic, the maximum fine is huge and the length of the infraction is a factor in determining the penalty.
And on top of that, companies have a duty to take “immediate corrective actions”. The Commission (with advice from the AI Office) can issue administrative orders requiring the withdrawal of a model. And ignoring that can get you into very heavy fines or criminal penalties.
1. ^
  Except on whistleblower protections, where SB 53 explicitly includes injunctive relief.

Joseph Miller 15 Jan 2026 3:15 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
Perhaps it could use time-since-frontpaged only if the karma is below some threshold.

Joseph Miller 14 Jan 2026 23:42 UTC
29 points
18
on: Joseph Miller’s Shortform
On LessWrong, the frontpage algorithm down-weights older posts based on the time-since-posted, not the time-since-frontpaged. So, if a post doesn’t get frontpaged until a few days after posting, then it’s unlikely to get many views.
LessWrong has an autofrontpager that works a reasonable amount of the time. Otherwise, posts have to be manually frontpaged by a person. In my experience, this was always quite quick, but my most recent post was not frontpaged until 3 days after it was posted, so AFAICT it never actually appeared on the frontpage (unless you clicked “Load More”).
I think the solution is to downweight posts based on the time-since-frontpaged.

Joseph Miller 7 Jan 2026 22:03 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: Simple summary of AI Safety laws
Strictly speaking, the version that passed the senate has now been put into law.
But to answer your question, no, this post describes what the bill will be like after the agreed upon “chapter amendments” have been implemented.
Footnote 4 mentions one of the changes that is expected to be made.

Simple summary of AI Safety laws

Joseph Miller, Espedair Street and PauseAI UK

7 Jan 2026 1:51 UTC

46 points

4 comments3 min readLW link

Joseph Miller 4 Jan 2026 23:52 UTC
9 points
5
on: How I stopped being sure LLMs are just making up their internal experience (but the topic is still confusing)
I would prefer this post if it didn’t talk about consciousness / internal experience. The issue is whether the LLM has some internal algorithms that are somehow similar / isomorphic to those in human brains.

As it stands this posts implicitly assumes the Camp 2^[1] view of consciousness which I and many others find to be deeply sus. But the arguments the post puts forward are still relevant from a Camp 1 point of view, they just answer a question about algorithms, not about qualia.
1. ^
  Quoting the key section of the linked post:
  Camp #1 tends to think of consciousness as a non-special high-level phenomenon. Solving consciousness is then tantamount to solving the Meta-Problem of consciousness, which is to explain why we think/claim to have consciousness. In other words, once we’ve explained the full causal chain that ends with people uttering the sounds kon-shush-nuhs, we’ve explained all the hard observable facts, and the idea that there’s anything else seems dangerously speculative/unscientific. No complicated metaphysics is required for this approach.
  Conversely, Camp #2 is convinced that there is an experience thing that exists in a fundamental way. There’s no agreement on what this thing is – some postulate causally active non-material stuff, whereas others agree with Camp #1 that there’s nothing operating outside the laws of physics – but they all agree that there is something that needs explaining. Therefore, even if consciousness is compatible with the laws of physics, it still poses a conceptual mystery relative to our current understanding. A complete solution (if it is even possible) may also have a nontrivial metaphysical component.

Joseph Miller 9 Nov 2025 23:12 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: Condensation
Even if all value is in computations (eg. everyone lives inside simulations), wouldn’t you have the same problems, just one level down? The physical world may be a type of computation and the computations may resemble the physical world.

Joseph Miller 29 Oct 2025 15:40 UTC
2 points
0
on: Stratified Utopia
So if you wanted to live forever (level 2) or have a mechanical mind / body (level 5), would you have to leave Earth?

Joseph Miller 17 Oct 2025 15:20 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform
Datapoint: I spoke to one Horizon fellow a couple of years ago and they did not care about x-risk.

Joseph Miller 26 Sep 2025 16:44 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: snav’s comment on: snav’s Shortform
Nice! I would like to see a visual showing the full decision tree. I think that would be even better for clarifying the different views of consciousness.

Joseph Miller 26 Sep 2025 13:34 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: xpostah’s Shortform
Also mentioned in The Verge. (unpaywalled)

Joseph Miller 12 Sep 2025 0:59 UTC
21 points
10
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
It doesn’t matter what IQ they have or how rational they were in 2005
This is a reference to Eliezer, right? I really don’t understand why he’s on Twitter so much. I find it quite sad to see one of my heroes slipping into the ragebait Twitter attractor.

Joseph Miller 30 Aug 2025 0:54 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Zach Stein-Perlman’s Shortform
To clarify, the primary complaint from my perspective is not that they published the report a month after external deployment per se, but that the timing of the report indicates that they did not perform thorough pre-deployment testing (and zero external testing).
And the focus on pre-deployment testing is not really due to any opinion about the relative benefits of pre- vs. post- deployment testing, but because they committed to doing pre-deployment testing, so it’s important that they in fact do pre-deployment testing.

Joseph Miller 30 Aug 2025 0:39 UTC
13 points
5
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Zach Stein-Perlman’s Shortform
3. Other companies are doing far worse in this dimension. At worst Google is 3rd-best in publishing eval results. Meta and xAI are far worse.
Some reasons for focusing Google DeepMind in particular:
- The letter was organized by PauseAI UK and signed by UK politicians. GDM is the only frontier AI company headquartered in the UK.
- Meta and xAI already have a bad reputation for their safety practices, while GDM had a comparatively good reputation and most people were unaware of their violation of the Frontier AI Safety Commitments.

Joseph Miller 30 Aug 2025 0:32 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Zach Stein-Perlman’s Shortform
1. Sharing information on capabilities is good but public deployment is a bad time for that, in part because most risk comes from internal deployment.
I’m not sure why this would make you not feel good about the critique or implicit ask of the letter. Sure, maybe internal deployment transparency would be better, but public deployment transparency is better than nothing.
And that’s where the leverage is right now. Google made a commitment to transparency about external deployments, not internal deployments. And they should be held to that commitment or else we establish the precedent that AI safety commitments don’t matter and can be ignored.

Joseph Miller

Sim­ple sum­mary of AI Safety laws

Simple summary of AI Safety laws