MichaelDickens

Karma: 1,422

MichaelDickens 10 Sep 2025 14:20 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Yes, AI Continues To Make Rapid Progress, Including Towards AGI

All of them, or just these two?

There were just four reasons right? Your three numbered items, plus “effectful wise action is more difficult than effectful unwise action, and requires more ideas / thought / reflection, relatively speaking; and because generally humans want to do good things”. I think that quotation was the strongest argument. As for numbered item #1, I don’t know why you believe it, but it doesn’t seem clearly false to me, either.

MichaelDickens 10 Sep 2025 4:55 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Yes, AI Continues To Make Rapid Progress, Including Towards AGI

For example, the leaders of AGI capabilities research would be smarter—which is bad in that they make progress faster, but good in that they can consider arguments about X-risk better.

This mechanism seems weak to me. For example, I think the leaders of all AI companies are considerably smarter than me, but I am still doing a better job than they are of reasoning about x-risk. It seems unlikely that making them even smarter would help.

(All else equal, you’re more likely to arrive at correct positions if you’re smarter, but I think the effect is weak.)

Another example: it’s harder to give even a plausible justification for plunging into AGI if you already have a new wave of super smart people making much faster scientific progress in general, e.g. solving diseases.

If enhanced humans could make scientific progress at the same rate as ASI, then ASI would also pose much less of an x-risk because it can’t reliably outsmart humans. (Although it still has the advantage that it can replicate and self-modify.) Realistically I do not think there is any level of genetic modification at which humans can match the pace of ASI.

That all isn’t necessarily to say that human intelligence enhancement is a bad idea; I just didn’t find the given reasons convincing.

MichaelDickens 10 Sep 2025 1:42 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: anaguma’s comment on: Yes, AI Continues To Make Rapid Progress, Including Towards AGI
That shouldn’t matter too much for stock price, right? If Google is currently rolling out its own TPUs then the long-term expectation should be that Nvidia won’t be making significant revenue off of Google’s AI.

MichaelDickens 9 Sep 2025 23:29 UTC
17 points
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on: Yes, AI Continues To Make Rapid Progress, Including Towards AGI
This caught me off guard:

all of which one notes typically run on three distinct sets of chips (Nvidia for GPT-5, Amazon Trainium for Anthropic and Google TPUs for Gemini)

I was previously under the impression that ~all AI models ran on Nvidia, and that was (probably) a big part of why Nvidia now has the largest market cap in the world. If only one out of three of the biggest models uses Nvidia, that’s a massive bear signal relative to what I believed two minutes ago. And it looks like the market isn’t pricing this in at all, unless I’m missing something.

(I assume I’m missing something because markets are usually pretty good at pricing things in.)

MichaelDickens 9 Sep 2025 23:10 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: CallumMcDougall’s comment on: chanamessinger’s Shortform

I think this community often fails to appropriately engage with and combat this argument.

What do you think that looks like? To me, that looks like “give object-level arguments for AI x-risk that don’t depend on what AI company CEOs say.” And I think the community already does quite a lot of that, although giving really persuasive arguments is hard (I hope the MIRI book succeeds).

MichaelDickens 8 Sep 2025 19:20 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform

I see no justification here for going to the meta-level and claiming they did not think for 5 minutes

Michaël Trazzi’s comment, which he wrote a few hours before he started his hunger strike, isn’t directly about hunger striking but it does indicate to me that he put more than 5 minutes of thought into the decision, and his comment gestures at a theory of change.

MichaelDickens 8 Sep 2025 18:58 UTC
17 points
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in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform
I don’t strongly agree or disagree with your empirical claims but I do disagree with the level of confidence expressed. Quoting a comment I made previously:

I’m undecided on whether things like hunger strikes are useful but I just want to comment to say that I think a lot of people are way too quick to conclude that they’re not useful. I don’t think we have strong (or even moderate) reason to believe that they’re not useful.

When I reviewed the evidence on large-scale nonviolent protests, I concluded that they’re probably effective (~90% credence). But I’ve seen a lot of people claim that those sorts of protests are ineffective (or even harmful) in spite of the evidence in their favor.[1] I think hunger strikes are sufficiently different from the sorts of protests I reviewed that the evidence might not generalize, so I’m very uncertain about the effectiveness of hunger strikes. But what does generalize, I think, is that many peoples’ intuitions on protest effectiveness are miscalibrated.

[1] This may be less relevant for you, Mikhail Samin, because IIRC you’ve previously been supportive of AI pause protests in at least some contexts.

ETA: To be clear, I’m responding to the part of your post that’s about whether hunger strikes are effective. I endorse positive message of the second half of your post.

ETA 2: I read Ben Pace’s comment and he is making some good points so now I’m not sure I endorse the second half.

MichaelDickens 7 Sep 2025 20:12 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: peterbarnett’s Shortform
I’m ambivalent on how good/bad it is to, say, manage AI investments for a generic company pension plan. I think it’s more straightforwardly bad to manage AI investments for someone whose goal is to accelerate ASI development and downplay concerns about alignment risk.

I don’t know what Aschenbrenner or his allies will do with their wealth but I wouldn’t be surprised if they used it for things like lobbying against AI safety regulations, in which case it’s not clear that an AI safety donor would be able to do enough to cancel out those harms. And based on what I’ve seen from his public behavior, I strongly suspect that he’d be willing to lie about this to AI safety people to get them to invest/work with him.

MichaelDickens 4 Sep 2025 19:46 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Reuben Adams’s comment on: Reuben Adams’s Shortform
I looked and all I could find was quotations on quotation aggregator websites, on both DuckDuckGo and Google. The inability of either engine to find an original source kind of makes me think the quote was fabricated.

MichaelDickens 4 Sep 2025 19:43 UTC
14 points
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in reply to: testingthewaters’s comment on: peterbarnett’s Shortform

I will also note that “if I don’t do it, they’ll just find somebody else” is a generic excuse built on the notion of a perfectly efficient market.

The existence of the Situational Awareness Fund is specifically predicated on the assumption that markets are not efficient, and if they don’t invest in AI then AI will be under-invested.

(I don’t have a strong position on whether that assumption is correct, but the people running the fund ought to believe it.)

MichaelDickens 4 Sep 2025 19:39 UTC
18 points
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in reply to: Guive’s comment on: peterbarnett’s Shortform
Mostly indirect evidence:
- The “Situational Awareness” essays downplayed AI risk and encouraged an arms race.
- This is evidence that the investors in Aschenbrenner’s fund will probably also be the sorts of people who don’t care about AI risk.
- It also personally makes Aschenbrenner wealthier, which gives him more power to do more things like downplaying AI risk and encouraging an arms race.
- Investing in AI companies gives them more capital with which to build dangerous AI. I’m not super concerned about this for public companies at smaller scales, but I think it’s a bigger deal for private companies, where funding matters more; I don’t know if the Situational Awareness fund invests in private companies. The fund is also pretty big so it may be meaningfully accelerating timelines via investing in public companies; pretty hard to say how big that effect is.

MichaelDickens 4 Sep 2025 15:44 UTC
40 points
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in reply to: Jonas Hallgren’s comment on: peterbarnett’s Shortform
I don’t know the situation, but over the past couple years I’ve updated significantly in the direction of “if an AI safety person is doing something that looks like it’s increasing x-risk, it’s not because there’s some secret reason why it’s good actually; it’s because they’re increasing x-risk.” Without knowing the details, my prior is a 75% chance that that’s what’s going on here.

MichaelDickens 3 Sep 2025 19:23 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
Ah, I see the problem. Daniel must have a very a sophisticated decision theory indeed to know that $10 is better than $5!

MichaelDickens 3 Sep 2025 17:50 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
What sort of context would you use this meme in? This feels like a response to the “bad things are actually better than good things” position that people sometimes take, but I don’t know who would say $5 is better than $10

MichaelDickens 20 Aug 2025 5:36 UTC
5 points
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on: America Is Missing Its Bretton Woods Moment For Global AI Governance
- Why is United States dominance over global affairs a good thing? The article takes it as given but it’s not clear to me that it’s true.
- Is increasing US influence over global AI governance a good EA cause? If so, why?
- I’m sort of confused about exactly what policy recommendations this article is making.

MichaelDickens 15 Aug 2025 18:57 UTC
14 points
5
on: Spending Too Much Time At Airports
This mostly fits with my personal experience. The part where I differ the most is this:

The correct play is usually to take advantage of the isolation and lack of distractions. That makes some activities actively great to do.

The way my brain works means that I find planes to be a distraction-heavy environment:
- There’s loud background noise.
- There are people sitting right next to me, in the zone that I would normally consider “my personal space”.
- Flight attendants frequently walk down the aisle to pass out snacks or collect trash. If I can see a flight attendant coming toward me, even if they’re still 5+ minutes away, a mandatory minimum of 25% of my brain’s clock cycles are dedicated to anticipating their arrival.
I can listen to music or “light” podcasts on a plane, but I have a hard time focusing on intellectually-demanding podcasts or books or movies or work, basically anything that requires sustained attention.

For the same reason, I can’t really enjoy being at the airport because I’m anticipating that I will have to get on a plane soon. But I still tend to leave for the airport early because if I’m at home, I’m anticipating that I will have to leave for the airport soon, which isn’t any better.

MichaelDickens 11 Aug 2025 21:14 UTC
7 points
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on: How Does A Blind Model See The Earth?
This is cool. Interesting to see how some models are wrong in certain particular ways: Qwen 72B is mostly right, but it thinks Australia is huge; Llama 3 has a skinny South America and a bunch of patches of ocean in Asia.

MichaelDickens 11 Aug 2025 16:14 UTC
12 points
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on: My Least Libertarian Opinion: Ban Exclusivity Deals*
It sounds like you and I are fairly politically aligned. For me, my libertarian streak is not just about preventing authoritarianism in government, but preventing authoritarianism anywhere. Both your and Aella’s proposed policies increase government power, but (arguably) decrease authoritarianism overall by restricting the power of monopolies.

More broadly I think restricting monopoly power is one of the most defensible uses of government authority.

(Right now I think the US government, and most developed-country governments for that matter, are simultaneously too powerful and too unwilling to take antitrust action.)

MichaelDickens 9 Aug 2025 0:45 UTC
2 points
−2
in reply to: Sinclair Chen’s comment on: Sinclair Chen’s Shortform
He’s not depriving himself of sleep, he’s just following an unusual sleep schedule, right? Which I would guess is not a big deal for longevity (AFAIK the research is agnostic on this question but I’m not too familiar with the research).

Not exercising is a big deal, though.

MichaelDickens 9 Aug 2025 0:29 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
Also by “Trump doesn’t do anything completely insane”, I don’t really mean “Trump behaves incompetently.” I was thinking more along the lines of “Trump does something out-of-band that makes no rational sense and makes the situation much worse.”