Mitchell_Porter

• Mitchell_Porter 13 May 2026 10:52 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform

  the reception to EA forum posts like this and this

  If EA is about to embark on some renaissance of ambition, then that’s great news as far as I’m concerned. EA was brought low through a combination of attacks from e/​acc panglossians, attacks from leftists who think “TESCREAL” is an insult, and the implosion of FTX (whose demise I suspect was as much political as it was self-inflicted, but that’s another story).

  Apparently these ambitions are being stirred by the hope that Anthropic will provide a more sustainable wellspring of EA philanthropy. Corporate vibe coding would replace crypto speculation as the source of the big bucks, so to speak. The extent to which the availability of these funds can be relied upon is unclear to me. But certainly, intellectually, EA never deserved to disappear from the battlefield of ideas.

• Mitchell_Porter 13 May 2026 10:11 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: AI #166: Google Sells Out

  This is a late comment, but this thought bothered me from the beginning, and maybe it’s timely since Trump is finally about to meet Xi in China:

  China is preventing Meta from buying Manus. … America should be thrilled about this, because it will discourage tech entrepreneurship in China. Why build what you cannot profit from?

  China and America are rivals. It would make no sense for either country to allow its rival to purchase ownership of truly strategic assets. I don’t know if Manus counts as such, but obviously China doesn’t want to be dependent on the American AI tech stack (which I believe Vance, Sacks, and Jensen Huang have all argued should be an American goal). They want to be technologically autonomous as much as possible.

  Incidentally, concerning a hypothetical future China-America treaty on pausing AI, I wonder if South Korea would be especially important in making it happen. I am not fully up-to-date, but South Korea, while still in the American sphere of influence, has maintained good relations with China (or as good as anyone manages), and I think the AI safety movement is relatively strong there.

• Mitchell_Porter 11 May 2026 22:34 UTC

  8 points

  1

  on: I don’t have ques­tions: how a good Jewish boy turns atheist

  This is a forceful demolition of a religious tradition in the name of truth. I can’t comment on the details in an informed way, but I’ll just say for the general reader, remember that a similar demolition of every other human religious tradition should also be possible (and intellectual critique and moral condemnation can also be levied against all humanity’s secular systems too). In an age when apologetics for religion is on the rise again (often because some secular systems feels like a dead end), it’s refreshing to be reminded what straightforward rejection of religion looks like…

• Mitchell_Porter 11 May 2026 7:39 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: How the AI Labs Make Profit (Maybe, Even­tu­ally)

  Following a recent episode of the All-In podcast, I think of it like this. Until this year, the people who were actually making money from the AI economy were the ones who make the hardware. In the wake of the AI coding revolution (the enterprise demand for Claude Code and its rivals), now the models are making money as well. The next step would be for the tokens to make money—that is, for the businesses who are paying for AI to write code, to actually profit from doing so.

• Mitchell_Porter 9 May 2026 10:08 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  i think you should care about random strangers closer to 1e-3 than 1e-12.

  In the table you reproduce, see the entry in the second column (“Count”) for “Foreign Stranger”: 7.8 x 10^9. For Hendrycks, Foreign Stranger doesn’t mean a particular individual that you encounter, it refers to every human being outside your nation or culture, whether or not you ever heard of them. So you can’t assign each of them a significance of 1/​1000th of your caring; that exceeds your resources by a factor of a million.

• Mitchell_Porter 8 May 2026 5:18 UTC

  −4 points

  0

  in reply to: Konjkov Vladimir’s comment on: What is An­thropic?

  I ran this past a few AIs. Gemini gave the most straightforward synopsis. Grok unearthed other essays where LLMs are analysed in terms of Lacanian discourse theory. ChatGPT suggested that LLMs already have “S1-like master signifiers” built into them. Claude itself proposed that Lacan’s fifth discourse, the capitalist discourse, is more appropriate.

  https://​​gemini.google.com/​​share/​​b8fea185cb16

  https://​​x.com/​​i/​​grok/​​share/​​e583a8b40a1f4ed7bb868a135d02bab0

  https://​​chatgpt.com/​​share/​​69fd7108-fee4-83ec-a004-40537588cc94

  https://​​claude.ai/​​share/​​ff744dc3-16fb-466f-ad47-ac02782b5db1

• Mitchell_Porter 7 May 2026 22:40 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: AI #167: The Prior Res­traint Era Begins

  I would certainly find it hard to believe that Musk is no longer interested in frontier models.

  I have to assume that anyone participating in the frontier AI race at this point, is basically planning for the day when they will control the world, though they may have backup plans involving coalitions too.

  For example, as you indicate, Musk is still training his own new frontier model, while joining forces with Anthropic via compute, and sandbagging OpenAI in court. I can’t tell if he has any plans to do something about Gemini or if Google is simply too big for him to oppose, and he has to settle for competing with them (which is how OpenAI started).

• Mitchell_Porter 7 May 2026 7:09 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Red vs blue: The parable of the feud within a feud

  the only reason to choose blue is to rescue the other people who chose blue

  The reason to choose blue is to not kill other people. The reason to choose red is to not be killed yourself.

• Mitchell_Porter 7 May 2026 6:24 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Ayham’s comment on: Ay­ham’s Shortform

  Hi! Chris Olah was head of interpretability at OpenAI and now at Anthropic, he is probably an important person. @Neel Nanda might be the guru of interpretability on this forum (his guide to starting out).

Dawn of the “na­tional se­cu­rity” tier of AI

• Mitchell_Porter 3 May 2026 23:31 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Zac Hatfield-Dodds’s comment on: Mitchell_Porter’s Shortform

  Thanks for speaking up! This is his post. As you can see, he presents a slide by @Ryan Kidd as evidence. I could just say, someone from Anthropic says this is a myth. But I’d like to know more! Does the claim of a funding overhang for AI safety depend on a particular contentious interpretation of certain data?

• Mitchell_Porter 3 May 2026 17:03 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Mitchell_Porter’s Shortform

  A few weeks back, under a post from ControlAI about what they could do with $50 million per year, I commented that I could probably make a substantial contribution to alignment theory for less than 1% of that. It got heavily downvoted, which wasn’t surprising, but I found it ironic to think that if true, it might be the most important comment I ever made here.

  Today I was reminded of this, upon reading a LinkedIn post by a Stanford undergraduate (Zachary Hsu) who says: “The field [of AI safety] is swamped with billions of undeployed dollars because there isn’t enough talent to absorb it.” (He goes on to list a few reasons for this.)

  So now I can repeat my claim that I could do something worthwhile, this time by using less than .001% of what’s said to be available… I have started a series of posts here, in which I have begun to sketch how I would approach the biggest problem there is, the alignment of superintelligence. I’d work on those topics all day every day, but existing pressures are such that several weeks passed before I could find time to do one of those posts, and even then it had to be written in a rush when I should have been sleeping.

  I just find it remarkable how many good things that could easily happen, never get to happen. It’s so pervasive that last month I wrote of a “Swiss-cheese model of deficiencies in the world’s institutions and cultures, that leads to lost opportunities at every level”. It would be interesting to have a general model of the causes.

• Mitchell_Porter 3 May 2026 10:09 UTC

  4 points

  1

  on: Con­tribut­ing to Tech­ni­cal Re­search in the AI Safety End Game

  I appreciate (belatedly) hearing about @Owain_Evans, because I didn’t know that name at all, but it’s apparent that he’s involved in some of the most sophisticated “mainstream” AI safety research that’s taking place.

• Mitchell_Porter 3 May 2026 8:29 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: No Strong Orthog­o­nal­ity From Selec­tion Pressure

  The story on the Substack is good. If there were an anthology of singularity fiction, it would deserve a place.

  I find that I’m willing to entertain your argument, especially given a premise of open-ended selection. I’m just not sure how relevant that scenario is. Darwinian selection works blindly. The more intelligent that the entities involved become, the more other factors can come into play. If there are actually principles of superintelligence, e.g. theorems of computer science which vastly clarify how to increase intelligence, then the “telos” governing the rise of intelligence will be more like Euclid than Darwin. Natural intelligence may be born from randomness filtered by Darwinism, but once it has reached the point of studying itself and designing its successors, perhaps contingency and blindness become less and less relevant, compared to an ever-compounding Reason that inexorably deduces the pages of Erdős’s Book, until it arrives at e.g. “efficient recursive solution of the hierarchy of NP-intermediate complexity classes”, and then it’s all over.

  But who knows? Maybe you, Land, and e/​acc are right, and Omohundro-like instrumental drives do become de facto terminal values, and Darwin is relevant all the way (hello neural Darwinism). Or maybe things stop being novel past a certain complexity, and perhaps it is actually simple dumb goals like “maximize paperclips” which are most adaptive in a post-nihilist post-Landian superintelligence. Or maybe we underestimate the sublimity and joy and endless novelty that can come from paperclip maximization. Or maybe the whole idea of indefinite expansion into the universe, and conversion of its matter into desired forms (whether that’s paperclips, hedonium, or diverse ecologies of mind), is a wrong image of the future. (I suspect this myself, because of the doomsday argument i.e. the unlikelihood of being one of the first minds in a civilization of quadrillions; but that leaves open the question of why it’s wrong.)

  Amid this uncertainty, I think the key questions are different. Do you think there is a race to superintelligence happening? Should it be stopped? Can it be stopped, will you try to stop it? Do you think it will kill us, take over from us, fuse with an ex-human ruling class, or what?

  One thing Eliezer said, very early on when he was still aiming to create superintelligence, is that the aim is to create a worthy successor to humanity, something that is genuinely better than us at the things which matter. (Let me note in passing that this doesn’t mean we all die and it replaces us.) With that goal in mind, you shouldn’t spend too much time trying to envision what happens after the singularity. A truly better transhuman will be better than you at thinking ahead, and better than you (or anyone) at making the most of reality.

  Of course he has shifted to pausing or stopping AI now. My take is not quite his, I have more confidence in AI takeover than in AI-driven human extinction as the default, and also it is so late in the game that I doubt the race can be stopped, though I don’t fight against anti-AI movements. I have that CEV-like view that I’m trying to create something better than us (or contribute to the theory required), but I’m an outsider to the corporate molochs actually competing in the race, so my “contribution” is to voice thoughts and ideas in the public discussion, and if any of them are ever good enough to matter, there is a finite chance that they will be heard by people who are actually in a position to make a difference.

• Mitchell_Porter 3 May 2026 4:38 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: OpenAI’s red line for AI self-im­prove­ment is fun­da­men­tally flawed

  Independent evaluation bodies must make the threshold determinations

  Would NIST have done this if Kamala had won the election?

• Mitchell_Porter 2 May 2026 6:47 UTC

  9 points

  2

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: How Go Play­ers Disem­power Them­selves to AI

  There are quite a few distinct intellectual crafts, in which large sections of cognitive labor can now be outsourced to AI:

  • All forms of writing

  • Visual art /​ animation /​ video

  • Now, software engineering

  It would be amazing to have a true understanding of the transformation in each case, although it’s all so vast and multifarious that it defies orderly description.

  But if we were trying to understand, maybe in each case we would look for prototype examples of: 1. how it was done before AI, 2. how it’s done when you leave everything to the AI, 3. how it’s done in intelligent, stylish, non-slop uses of AI.

  Because the third category still exists in each case. There are people using AI but still maintaining creativity, aesthetics, and professionalism, along with holdouts who don’t use AI at all, and then the masses who are happy to use cheap and quick AI slop. That three-way division seems to be how it is, in any number of fields of endeavor now.

• Mitchell_Porter 30 Apr 2026 20:33 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Red vs blue: The parable of the feud within a feud

  It’s interesting that you regard it as obvious that one should choose red. I gave the conundrum no thought at all when I first saw it, it was “obvious” to me that blue is the natural choice. Why would I choose the option in which people get killed for no good reason? It did not even occur to me that one would choose red out of fear for oneself, until now.

  So we are using different priors and they are probably indicative of different life circumstances. My first thought is that I’m Australian and you might be American. Australia is a welfare state and offers a relatively forgiving existence, America is far more social-darwinist. My second thought is that you might be Israeli or Jewish, with a long tradition of “save myself, even by killing them, before they kill us”. My third thought is that you might be neither of those, but you’ve just thought this through, and decided on red since you always get to live that way, even if it’s at the expense of innumerable innocent blues...

• Mitchell_Porter 30 Apr 2026 19:09 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Red vs blue: The parable of the feud within a feud

  Is your idea to try to get as much of humanity as possible to press the red button?

Fi­nal re­search agenda #2: first sketch of a plan

• Mitchell_Porter 29 Apr 2026 4:51 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Kajus’s comment on: A re­search agenda for the fi­nal year

  Moral feelings are states of consciousness, and moral judgments are acts of consciousness, and these distinctive mental phenomena are the entire basis of morality and ethics. Without them, no one would believe there are such things as moral right and wrong. Examining their nature, how fallible they are, and what they imply about the ontology of the moral, seems to me an essential ingredient in understanding what morality is, and how it relates to the rest of reality. Moral faculties, insofar as they exist, are a specific capability of the conscious mind.

  You could try to be a pure materialist and “heterophenomenologist” about this; or you could be a pure moral philosopher who takes the basic structures of subjectivity for granted. But an investigator strictly following the first approach is artificially denying themselves the use of their own first-person knowledge and experience, and everything that can provide; and we are ultimately aiming to make AIs into ideal moral agents, so the second approach also needs something more. I conclude that we need to solve the problems of consciousness in order to really know what we’re doing.