If the hammock has a narrow V shape then you actually will just need pretty close to 50kg of force instead of 100kg.
Liron
Karma: 5,328
That is sufficient, but I personally still found it intuitively unsatisfying why the configuration let me pull with less force until I realized the same force-lightening effect is already present in a simple half-connected hammock setup.
Yep that’s what happened
Thanks for the comment. I just added a P.S. section to show how the hammock proof of concept works for fancier pulleys with higher mechanical advantage.
The figure in that diagram actually has a 500:1 advantage because he is a wizard.
I was emboldened to turn this into a LW post by a reply from @Carl Feynman on Twitter that it reminds him of his dad’s explanations.
F***ing Pulleys, How Do They Work?
We had a conflict for like a month in 2023 relating to an early PauseAI protest. I’d say we’ve avoided conflict since then :)
All I got is my personal observation that people generally don’t seem to think certain thoughts until they see someone locate the new point in thought-space for them, and give them permission to think it.
I personally feel introspectively that:
The question “Is AI going to kill everyone?” wouldn’t have entered my mind, probably not even until this late date(!), without the influence of Eliezer or a similar figure.
The question “Are many people at the AI companies, like, bad bad?” wouldn’t have been getting asked in my brain nearly as much without Holly’s influence.
I definitely understand that perspective given that I also have my disagreements with the sum total of Holly’s posts as mentioned in my comment.
And I understand the perspective of “let’s move in the right direction by taking incremental steps and having a bigger swath of the in-group as our allies so we don’t unnecessarily create a backlash”.
But there’s also something to be said for someone moving the Overton window by showing what it looks like to go way beyond the currently normal types of expressions.
Regarding myself, I agree that I’m probably one of the closest people behind Holly on the frontier of publicly judging the morality of individuals burning the remaining timeline to uncontrollable unaligned ASI. But the truth is, seeing Holly take things further creates a space (an example, a precedent, an acclimation) for me and everyone else to advance in this direction faster.
I’m one of the most independent and free-to-speak voices out there. I’m not under the constraint of sanitizing my comments like someone who works at an AI company or political or other institution. But my chosen impact strategy still comes with constraints and tradeoffs; e.g. I’m aiming to have all kinds of thought leaders accept invitations to debate on my show, including ones I strongly disagree with.
So there’s a specialization of labor where it makes sense for Holly to be on the front lines racking up people blocking her on Twitter to a higher degree than me and a higher degree than many others who have more constraints than I do.
Also, the speed at which the Overton moved is important. “Pacing the frontier” as a response to being maybe literally one new model away from permanently uncontrollable ASI isn’t adequately fast progress. I think Holly deserves credit for increasing the speed limit.
When I read Holly’s Twitter feed, I get why someone would have a gut reaction like “this is an unhinged person who’s stooping to the level of personal attacks on people who seem nice and are just trying to do their best”. I have my disagreements with the degree to which she bases her public statements about people’s character on her own subjective judgment, as opposed to explicitly reasoned-out judgments. I gave her this criticism when she came on Doom Debates, and we still disagree about it.
That said, I also often see Holly publicly post moral character judgments that I think are reasoned, and that I personally agree with. The reasoning often takes this form:
A person is currently helping push the frontier of AI capabilities, despite runaway ASI being a high imminent existential risk.
Ergo that person is doing morally bad actions.
Ergo we judge them as a morally bad actor.
I think this is a straightforwardly reasoned judgment, assuming one agrees with the world-model premises like “if anyone builds ASI anytime soon, everyone dies”.
Holly has been one of the first and still only voices who is simultaneously savvy about the underlying world model and the culture of people who share it, and publicly communicating personal moral character judgment about it. Does that mean she should stop, or that more people should start?
I remember back in 2023, it used to be highly unusual and weird to reason from the claim that AI might really, actually kill everyone soon. And still today, there’s often a “missing mood” when e.g. the same person says “oh, my P(Doom) is 70%” when asked at the end of a tech podcast interview, after spending the whole interview just talking about AI like it’s any other business topic.
Today, I’d say the Overton window has already come a long way toward taking the high-AI-x-risk worldview seriously, and is still moving steadily in the right direction. But I think Holly is still ahead of it on an important kind of “missing mood” that’s still highly unusual and weird to discuss: Really, actually morally judging people who are worsening the likely imminent AI extinction scenario.
Right now, the strongest association that comes to mind when thinking of an AI capabilities builder or researcher is something like “the elite of tech and academia”. Not like “reckless”, “unhinged”, “creepy”, “twisted”, “trading respectability for money”, or anything in the zone that I personally think is where we’d land in a rationally calibrated society. If the premise of high imminent AI x-risk is knowably true, shouldn’t it propagate into a true moral judgment about the people who advance AI capabilities?
This is an aversive thought because many of us identify as members of a certain intellectually elite, enlightened, respectful, charitable subculture, and the folks advancing AI capabilities have historically been part of our subculture, and the status quo today is still that they’re generally treated as such. But I think it’s basically right.
I see Holly as doing important work moving the Overton window toward where it needs to be ASAP: we need to be able to reach a state of common knowledge about moral judgments downstream of our shared world model when the reasoned connection is sufficiently straightforward.
As I mentioned at the beginning of my comment, I also see her as going too far in the “publicly judging people” direction by sometimes doing it on a subjective basis, i.e. without adequately reasoning it out in enough detail to lead a neutral reader to her moral conclusion. On Doom Debates, she didn’t even object to my characterization of her doing this.
But I don’t really see anyone else doing the productive kind of Overton-moving work that Holly has been doing. She did it early and often. I’ve come around to seeing her as a uniquely impactful leader making progress on this front.
I think Holly and PauseAI US are boldly moving the Overton window in the right direction with many of their morally charged public posts, but also stepping beyond where I’d draw the line about which personal moral judgments are sufficiently reasoned to meet the standards of a public post.
Alex Turner on Leaving Google DeepMind and Disagreements with Yudkowsky
Bravo, this is an extremely infrastructural contribution to our light cone.
Right, but I personally am not aware of a way someone could have a sane belief-formation process and still conclude that the probability of extinction from ASI in the next few decades is only 0.1%. That’s what I mean by it being an insane probability to assign.
I may be wrong in the domain of reasoning processes as they apply to this question—I even give a 10% chance to that claim—but I still think my view is expressed reasonably clearly by the “0.1% is a crazy value” phrasing.
Doom Debates host here. I think this post makes the case against “P(Doom)” well, and I’ll grant this:
In a hypothetical world where most people agree — as maybe most of the people reading this post do — that the probability of imminent human extinction from artificial superintelligence is something in the ballpark of 10–90%, I would totally share the view that P(Doom) is just a “dumb meme”, and that finessing whether the better answer is 30% or 70% would be a waste of a discussion/debate.
But it turns out that a large fraction of people (e.g. >1/3 of Doom Debates guests) don’t agree with that 10–90% ballpark range. They either derail on some Bayesian epistemology 101 aspect of the question, or they claim that the probability is some crazy (IMO) value like 0.1%. Furthermore, I find that their policy arguments are often downstream of whether or not their P(Doom) is in the galaxy of saneness.
One striking example is this debate between Max Tegmark and Dean Ball, which IMO became much clearer when they answered that their P(Doom)s are >90% and <0.1%, respectively. AFAICT, the difference in their policy positions is well explained as being downstream of their P(Doom)s.
Asking people their P(Doom) may only yield about 1 bit of useful information — answering in the 10-90% range, vs. expressing a lot of confidence one way or the other — but it’s a high-order bit, a starting point for triangulating guests’ positions in the high-dimensional AI x-risk belief space, which is the mission of Doom Debates. It’s for that reason (and because of the fitness of the meme) that I’ve made “What’s Your P(Doom)” a recurring segment and tagline of the show.
Stuck an iPhone camera mount to the wall of my home gym to record my form on exercises (trap bar squats, pull-ups, glute bridges, etc) then share frame screenshots with GPT-5.4 Thinking and get form analysis. This has been a game changer for me because I have hypermobile ligaments and if I don’t have perfect form I’m getting a much worse (even net negative) result, but I suspect everyone can benefit from trying this a bit.
Obvious but various health/medical problem solving, like “hey my eyes are constantly kind of dry, it’s not an emergency but how would I actually go about not having this problem”
In general I think there’s a lot of value in consciously building a habit of constantly taking advice, since high quality expert advice is now available on everything.
Thanks for that. Should be fixed now.
Interview with Steven Byrnes on His Mainline Takeoff Scenario
The post is about what “adulthood” means for goal engines, and where the vector from baby to adulthood points. Current AI safety work is only relevant to a “system that is still sufficiently baby-like”. But we should expect goal engines to be extremely mature. When you are negotiating with a human adult who is trying to maximize their company’s profit, there is no need to study the phenotype of the 3-month embryo that once scaffolded that human.
I dunno about that, except in a very general “both are simple machines” sense. Levers characteristically need less force as a function of more distance between the load and the point of application of the force, while in a pulley the distance to the load or length of the rope isn’t a key variable determining the force.