Its not clear to me that shutting company 1 and then shutting company 2 later in time is easer than shutting both companies at the same time in the future. I dont really wanna argue for any conclusion though.
Some “intuition pump” of where this pattern dosent hold: if you want to stop 2 snowballs from rolling down the hill stopping only 1 will make the other grow faster and you wont be able to stop it at all. Snowballs collide with eachother and slow themselves down.
taboo “knowledge”?
Our current world state is not much different from that. Just instead of “time” we have money as currency. If they end you will most likely die of hunger, not considering surviving in the forest. Just because of being used to it we dont see it as a horrible state of things, so I see being concerned specifically about AI agents as a mistake.
Btw is it clear that more control of US government on AI companies is bad for safety in the long term? Yes, locally AI can be used for ~bad, things, but it may be easier to coordinate with different countries or to slow progress down in the face of danger. Because government will be 1 agent instead of 4 companies racing with each other (even in 1 country) and is not motivated by increasing profits.
Btw is it clear that more control of US government on AI companies is bad for safety in the long term? Yes, locally AI can be used for ~bad, things, but it may be easier to coordinate with different countries or to slow progress down in the face of danger. Because government will be 1 agent instead of 4 companies racing with each other (even in 1 country) and is not motivated by increasing profits.
Comment with practically 0 infromational value (due to total absence of context) but 37 12 karma/agreement feels like “twitter” in the bad sence of this concept, not LW. Which is very sad for me as an old reader. You probably mean something related to american politics, but I suppose many users are not american and dont even have much knowledge about this things. Maybe you mean something totally different. Maybe OpenAI and antrophic drama? I cant even make sense from this.
Okay, maybe you are correct. The point about “cannibal” name is deeper though—yes, it would be kinda stupid to feed theories which you would prefer to hide. On the other hand you may find it very funny to do “crime at the light of the day”/power move or advertisement with hint (anyway no one would expect such arrogance and take it seriously) . And it’s a priory very unlikely to call your restaurant cannibal, I suppose. So I think that the name is the evidence for the crimes, in the end.
As I understand it, there is no conspiracy that Francis wasn’t a chef. It’s just not an evidence against him also doing illegal cooking. “Cannibal” name is also a quite weak evidence, of course, but in the context it still is quite notable.
In the files there are many confusing discussions about food—why would Israel premier ministers in multiple messages discuss slicing pizza with Jefry Epstein? Why would beef jerky “walk”? Why would many island visitors be so interested in this particular meal, different ways of cooking and transporting it (and weirdly not delegating much of such tasks)?
I use links mostly because I don’t see enough value in writing long texts about this question myself (and digging really hard into it).
Here’s a video with seemingly good example and analysis. And there is a longer complitation with links. There are actually hundreds of them. Same sources covered “pizza”.
As for the recipe—I haven’t seen this mail, but it can be that sometimes epstein or his friends actually had beef jerky. definitely not in the other contexts though. Or “chef and recipe” are other nicknames and we got the situation wrong.
for me it seemed like files lead to conclusions that there were tens or hundreds of people who participated or at least knew about immoral activities on the island or elsewhere. Googlable things like “beef jerky” and “cheesed pizza” code-words also suggest that scope of activities was extraordinary broad and immoral. Which is kinda confusing, I wouldnt have expected such conspiracy to exist and last.
Supposed scope of JE connections and influence might mean that elite and governments are more connected than one might expect.
One of the common and probably incorrect objections to this strategy seems to be something like “but I am interested in displaying true/rational beliefs, to attract competent people, and one with irrationality to be pro-worm won’t be moved by my logical arguments about AI anyway”.
This is probably incorrect due to “demonisation” of political enemies (many reasons of which were covered in the sequences). Notable factor of this is a pattern that people usually see some of the “loud” and maybe really irrational examples of opposing political spectrum and make overgeneralisation about irrationality of all of them. Or people can be simply overconfident about political question itself.
It may initially seem so, but in fact this strategy even gets called “buy, borrow, die”. In the end loan is practically closed without taxes as well, and feds don’t get their cut. Main factor seems to be that value of assets grows overtime, which hacks tax formula.
https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes
Or this explanation
… Actual “buy, borrow, die” planning is enormously complicated and involves dozens of tools and techniques implemented over the course of many years.
First, this type of planning is generally not economically feasible unless the taxpayer has a net worth exceeding around $300M. Why? If you’re worth less than that, you’re not going to be able to command attractive financial products from investment banks. …
One may say that such system is obviously flawed and is unlikely—but most probably it’s just a consequence of the fact that billionaires are heavily involved in law making process. (Lobbying, networking-corruption, etc)
Quoted phrase is just a big simplification.
One loophole seems to be taking a loan against stocks that a billionaire owns. This way one does not receive an income which would be taxed. All while stocks can continue to give dividends and are immune to inflation. This can be googled with public statistics.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/558352-elon-musk-explains-his-extremely-low-tax-rate/amp/
“Elon Musk paid less than $70,000 in federal income taxes between 2015 and 2017, and he did not pay anything in 2018, according to recent reports.He did pay his taxes in 2016 by exercising more than $1 billion in stock options.
He lives off loans made from his stock options, meaning he doesn’t take a salary from his company.”
Articles like one below also partially describe what goes on with taxes in big companies like Tesla. https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2025/
This may seem true “on paper” but in reality manipulations with stocks and loans systematically allow to avoid paying taxes on much of operations (through legal loopholes). As I understand it.
I am not ready to give elaborated answer by myself right now, but here is googles AI summary “Based on recent analysis of tax data, U.S. billionaires pay a much lower effective tax rate on their true economic income—often estimated between
3.4% and 8.2%—compared to the average American taxpayer, who pays closer to 13-14%. While they often face high statutory rates on salary, most billionaire wealth comes from unrealized capital gains (the rising value of stocks and assets), which are not taxed unless the assets are sold”
Of course calls for violence are bad and counterproductive. Yet for the broader question I highly recommend this video about reasons why existence of billionaires who pay very small (in proportion) amount of taxes is economically and socially really bad.
I am not talking about ideological uniformity between two countries. I am talking about events inside 1 country. As I understand, it the core of socialism economics is that government decides where resources of the country go (when in capitalism there are companies who then only pay taxes). Companies can have races with each other. With central planing it’s ~impossible. The problem of international conflicts is more of an another topic.
As of now, for example, neglect of AI safety comes (in a big part) from races between USA companies. (With some exception of china, which is arguably still years behind and doesn’t have enough compute)
I think I disagree with counter-examples. Dead Hand system was created in a conflict with other countries, it can be viewed as a mostly forced risk. While AI races within companies of a single country are more of a “self-destruction” pattern. Capitalism creates rivals (and therefore races with more risks and less global safety) within one country, more than other economic systems may do so.
.
The Soviets had the Dead Hand system, which potentially contributed to x-risk from “AI” due to the risk of nuclear warfare, not that the system was particularly intelligent.
“The people you need to soften/moderate your message to reach (or who need social proof in order to get involved) are seldom going to be the ones who can think clearly about this stuff. And we are very bottlenecked on high-quality thinking.”.
I think this is true only in a part of contexts. If we are talking about AI alignment—probably skilled mathematicians or AI researches can be very fit. At least in the directions like interpretability. And this doesn’t necessarily correlate with their desires to do societally unconventional work. Why isn’t that so?
What about the enhancement of human intelligence that was discussed here? (For example How to make superkids—LessWrong).
They probably have more than a 1% chance of success and could accelerate anti-aging research. Even if you consider the current research situation critically stalled.
Maybe analogy might be developed somehow like this: all competitors live in the same city. Inside the same walls. It`s just they try to pull horses in different districts.