Mikhail Samin

• Mikhail Samin 18 Nov 2025 22:04 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform

  I’m very confused about how they’re evaluating cost-effectiveness here. Like, no, spending $200 on vaccines in Africa to save lives seems like a much better deal than spending $200 to cause one more $400k apartment to exist.

• Mikhail Samin 18 Nov 2025 21:08 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform

  I’m accumulating a small collection of spicy previously unreported deets about Anthropic for an upcoming post. Some of them sadly cannot publish because they might identify the sources. Others can! Some of those will be surprising to staff.

  If you can share anything that’s wrong with Anthropic, that has not previously been public, DM me, preferably on Signal (@ misha.09)

• Mikhail Samin 18 Nov 2025 11:09 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Erich_Grunewald’s comment on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform

  Yes, I’ve read their entire post. $14.4 of “social return” per $1 in the US seems incredibly unlikely to be comparable to the best GiveWell interventions or even GiveDirectly.

• Mikhail Samin 18 Nov 2025 3:25 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Mikhail Samin’s Shortform

  ‪Is there a write up on why the “abundance and growth” cause area is an actually relatively efficient way to spend money (instead of a way for OpenPhil to be(come) friends with everyone who’s into abundance & growth)? (These are good things to work on, but seem many orders of magnitude worse than other ways to spend money.)‬

• Mikhail Samin 17 Nov 2025 23:38 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Jade-nameless’s comment on: Should you donate to Light­cone In­fras­truc­ture?

  My understanding is that Habryka spent hours talking to the third party as a result of receiving the information.

  I mistakenly assumed a pretty friendly/​high-trust relationship in this context due to previous interactions with the Lightcone team and due to the nature of the project we (me and Habryka) were both helping with.

  I think the interests of everyone involved (me, Habryka, and the third party) are all very aligned, but Habryka disagrees with my assessment (a part of the reason of sharing the information was to make him talk to the third party and figure out that they’re a lot more aligned than Habryka assumed).

  I did not make the offer, because from the context of the DMs had assumed that Habryka’s problem with the idea was keeping secrets at all, for deontology-related reasons and not because of the personal price of how complicated that is. I would’ve been happy to pay a reasonable price.

  (Elsewhere, Habryka said the price would’ve been “If you recognize that as a cost and owe me a really small favor or something, I can keep it private, but please don’t take this as a given”.)

Pre­dic­tion mar­kets for so­cial de­duc­tion games

• Mikhail Samin 14 Nov 2025 0:45 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: 8 Ques­tions for the Fu­ture of Inkhaven

  Would maybe work if you have to write >500 new words every day + publish >3500 words every week, as two separate requirements.

  Or maybe add explicit requirements for polishing things?

  Working more on polishing is valuable, but I think most XP points are gained just from writing.

• Mikhail Samin 13 Nov 2025 21:32 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: How and why you should make your home smart (it’s cheap and se­cure!)

  Yay!

  The strips are normally sticky/​have built-in tape.

  I’m lazy, so I just put the LEDs on any high-up surface that points up, and I also have a strip in a large floor lamp from IKEA (I use transparent cable management thingies to attach it to rods inside the lamp. Be careful with some of the floor lamps, as th LED emits a lot of heat and some floor lamps won’t have enough air flow).

  You should probably instead buy any aluminum rail + diffuser for LED strips wide enough for your specific strip, attach the rail to the edge between the ceiling and the walls.

  At Lighthaven, they just attach a long flat thing to the walls and add and LED strip on the side pointing at the ceiling/​the walls (though they also have some strips behind diffusers).

  (I’m not doing that, because I’m lazy + occasionally move rooms.)

  How many strips you can power depends on how much power they want to eat and how much power your controller can manage and your power supply adapter can provide. The power supply adapter, indeed, plugs into the wall, but you can also find some that connect directly to the main (some of those will be more powerful).

There should be unicorns

• Mikhail Samin 5 Nov 2025 8:22 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: How to be con­vinc­ing when talk­ing to peo­ple about ex­is­ten­tial threat from AI

  Yep, pretty much! (As an example of the motion you would want to be able to make in more general/​less obvious settings.)

How to be con­vinc­ing when talk­ing to peo­ple about ex­is­ten­tial threat from AI

Taste of food

• Mikhail Samin 4 Nov 2025 4:35 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Should you donate to Light­cone In­fras­truc­ture?

  “man, please actually ask in advance next time, this is costly and makes me regret having that whole conversation in the first place. If you recognize that as a cost and owe me a really small favor or something, I can keep it private, but please don’t take this as a given”

  This would’ve worked!

  (Other branches seem less productive to reply to, given this.)

• Mikhail Samin 3 Nov 2025 23:57 UTC

  1 point

  −2

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Should you donate to Light­cone In­fras­truc­ture?

  Your message:

  ’Hypothetical scenario (this has not happened and details are made up):

  Me and [name] are discussing the landscape of [thing] as it regards to Lightcone strategy. [name] is like “man, I feel like if I was worried that other people soon try to jump into the space, then we really should probably just back [a thing] because probably something will soon cement itself in the space”. I would be like “Oh, well, I think [third party] might do stuff”. Rafe is like “Oh, fuck, hmm, that’s bad”. I am like “Yep, seems pretty fucked. Plausibly we should really get going on writing up that ‘why [third party’s person] seems like a low-integrity dude’ post we’ve been thinking about”. [name] is like “Yeah, maybe. Does really seem quite bad if [third party’s person] tries to position himself here centrally. Actually, I think maybe [name] from CEA Comm health was working on some piece about [third party’s person]? Seems like she should know [third party’s person] is moving into the space, since it seems a bit more urgent if that’s happening”. I am like “Yep, seems right”.’

  If you had asked in advance I would have rejected your request

  You didn’t say that when we were talking about it! You implied that since I didn’t ask in advance, you are not bound by anything; you did mention “I can keep things confidential if you ask me in advance, but of course I wouldn’t accept a request to receive private information about [third party] being sketchy that I can only use to their benefit?”

  (“Being sketchy” is not how I’d describe the information. It was about an idea that Oliver is not okay with the third party working on, but is okay with others working on, because he doesn’t like the third party for a bunch of reasons and thinks it’s bad if they get more power, as per my understanding.)

  I did not and would not have demanded somehow avoiding propagating the information. If you were like, “sorry, I obviously can’t actually not propagate this information in my world model and promise it won’t reflect on my plans, but I won’t actively try to use outside of coordinating with the third party and will keep it confidential going forward”, that would’ve been great and expected and okay.

  I asked to not apply effort to using the information against the third party. I didn’t ask to apply effort to not be aware of the information in your decision-making, to keep separate world-models, or whatever. Confidentiality with people outside your team and not going hard on figuring out how to strategically share or use this information to cause damage to the third party’s interests would’ve been understandable and acceptable.

• Mikhail Samin 3 Nov 2025 23:13 UTC

  −2 points

  −2

  in reply to: David Joshua Sartor’s comment on: Should you donate to Light­cone In­fras­truc­ture?

  Yeah, no, initially, I simply asked: just in case, please don’t use [the information I shared it explicitly for the purpose of enabling Oliver to coordinate with the third party] except to coordinate with the third party, expecting “sure, no problem” in response.

  Then, after hearing Oliver wouldn’t agree to confidentiality given that I haven’t asked him for it in advance, I tried to ask: okay, sure, if you have such a high cost of/​principles relating to not telling other people things, please at least don’t try to tell people specifically for the purpose of harming the third party, making it a bad idea to have tried to coordinate. He then said that nope, he wouldn’t agree to even that partial confidentiality, because if, e.g., someone was considering whether it’s important to harm the third party now rather than later and telling them the information that I shared would’ve moved them towards harming the third party earlier, Oliver would want to share information with that someone so that they could harm the third party. (And also said he already told some people.)

  (He ended up talking to the third party; but an opportunity to use the information adversarially did not turn up afaik.)

  It’s plausible that he misunderstood what I was asking for throughout, but he had no intention of avoiding making it such that me trying to coordinate with him would have been a bad idea for me.

  (See also this comment.)

• Mikhail Samin 3 Nov 2025 20:22 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: exmateriae’s comment on: How and why you should make your home smart (it’s cheap and se­cure!)

  Yep! Even small bits of making a home smarter are great!

  You can also make the light temperature natural by tracking the sun’s elevation in your location.

  The first two things that I did were making the lights wake me up and making them go red in the evening.

• Mikhail Samin 3 Nov 2025 20:14 UTC

  1 point

  −2

  in reply to: Wes F’s comment on: Should you donate to Light­cone In­fras­truc­ture?

  Great that you’ve had a positive experience!

  My post is that poeple should be careful about things he’s not explicitly committed to that are not about basic deontology (see the post). (And I don’t feel like starting a reply with “lol no” a week later was particularly good faith; friends tell me it was rude.) Our values align a lot, and yet.

  I was not confident that I would not be retaliated against (though mostly I expected that because of the social pressure, it would be very surprising if he did); but mostly, I pretty much didn’t think about it and generally, I ignore the possibility of retaliation when speaking up/​doing what’s right.

• Mikhail Samin 3 Nov 2025 3:55 UTC

  1 point

  −19

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Should you donate to Light­cone In­fras­truc­ture?

  This post focuses on communicating that! (+ being okay with hosting ai capabilities events + less important misc stuff)

Why and how you should make your home smart (it’s cheap and se­cure!)

• Mikhail Samin 2 Nov 2025 22:44 UTC

  −1 points

  −4

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Should you donate to Light­cone In­fras­truc­ture?

  (A large part of the goals of this post is to communicate to people that Oliver considers the cost of accepting information to be very high, and make people aware that they should be careful around Oliver and predict him better on this dimension, not repeating my mistake of expecting him not to do so much worse than a priest of Abadar would.)