positiveFuture

Karma: 52

positiveFuture 10 Sep 2026 11:10 UTC
6 points
0
on: positiveFuture’s Shortform
EA and the AI safety community are fumbling the “Coxon-NavierStokes” opportunity to raise awareness.

The debate I see on X/mastodon/substack/traditional social networks is maybe interesting for 3% of the population:
- 1% finance bros that are going to write down everything we say as nerd paranoia
- 1% people already familiar with the problem, that either already agree or disagree
- 1% that maybe can start doing something about it
Often, when we talk about AI-safety with technical people already familiar with AI, it is a struggle to convince them that there are dangers in the developments of more powerful AIs.
On the contrary, when I talk with old middle/high-school friends, or family friends, it is a completely different story. Often I get asked if it is still possible to stop/kill “the AI” just when I explain that we are training it to become as good as us at our jobs. No even need to start talking about HuggingFace, rogue AIs, RSIs.
This is a big part of the population, that successfully held back / slowed down vaccines, electric vehicles, nuclear energy… It may be the unusual ally for Less Wrong, but they have a great track record for fighting their battles. Are we sure it is better to organize an AI-safety conference / a workshop at LightHaven than to just invest in tiktok/facebook ads against AGI? There are so many voters that are so ready to throw themselves against the AI labs, but just have no idea of even a tiny part of what is happening.
Of course, the things we already do are important, I am just exaggerating to convey the point, but the fact is that if we want laws and regulation, we need to provide politicians with good reasons to implement them. Bernie Sanders is already against them, and midterms are in two months: if the AI-safety debate became more widespread, this is the right timing to turn AI-safety into a bipartisan issue.

positiveFuture 28 Aug 2026 8:45 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them
Yes, I agree that 1 is generally best.
Regarding 3, I agree that for some people, and I can include myself among them, making sense of this untrusted advice can be fun and part of the game. However, for some people, at least in my experience, this just doesn’t work. For sure, the outside of the game, initial explanation can at least make them keep their guard higher though.

I actually didn’t know the eurogame genre (as a word) and, after reading about it, I realize why games like Catan or Carcassonne are my preferred choice when playing with a diverse mix of players. They indeed allow the strongest players to have a good game despite bad decisions from the weaker ones, and also allow the weaker ones to do their thing without being crippled too early.
In my previous comment I was mainly thinking about Risk.

positiveFuture 27 Aug 2026 13:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them
I think the issue is with the level of the players.

I completely agree with you in settings in which all the players are at a similar level, or at least have a somewhat complete understanding of rules and strategies. I will very much enjoy the social manipulation game. The point is that by manipulating you cause other people to play a sub optimal but still rational strategy, and the focus of the game remains playing with a good strategy.

Sometimes, however, there are some new people, that don’t remember all the rules, and have no idea about the right strategies: for me manipulating this kind of person is off limits. Since they don’t really know what they are doing, you can convince them to make completely stupid moves. At that point, the influence you have on the “dummies” provides you a better edge than any strategy (or even luck) that you may have in the game.
In this second case, if we all commit to “manipulate the dummies”, what’s even the point of having the game? Let’s just put it back in the box and lie to each other. When there are inexperienced players, imo, you need to have some sort of gentlemen agreement about not manipulating them.

positiveFuture 27 Aug 2026 11:25 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Psy-Kosh’s comment on: The Apologist and the Revolutionary
Good comment. You saved me from some bad 15 minutes. I was already thinking about how feasible it would be to keep cold water bottle and propipette on my desk while working.

positiveFuture 25 Aug 2026 8:46 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gbear605’s comment on: Why So Many Cookie Banners?
Yes, exactly! It would be so nice to not be babysat on the internet.

If I want to save a product, I will use the save function, or save the link. If I close a page in the middle of something, it is because I am no longer interested, and I want to restart from scratch the next time.

positiveFuture 16 Aug 2026 13:15 UTC
1 point
0
on: What is it good for? But actually?
I don’t find it surprising at all.

A big % of people spends much less time than the visitors of this website examining the rationality of their actions. They just do things because of instinct and feelings. I don’t have a good source for this, other than my eyes every single day.
I would guess that it is because of evolution, but my impression is that people simply like being part of a clan and defending it. People, without external motivation, convince themselves to hurt and kill each other because of sport affiliation, suburb in which they hang out, schools they attend. I am not surprised that governments, with the help of mild economic incentives, strong use of propaganda, and the availability of an at least theoretically more noble goal, manage to produce some volunteers.

positiveFuture 31 Jul 2026 8:26 UTC
44 points
37
on: Big-World Intuitions
Good post, but I am curious about your thinking for :

> when you expect that you’re going to run into the same people over and over again for a long time to come, it’s wise to be consistently trustworthy and helpful even if you could get an advantage in the short run by betraying someone; the long-term costs to your reputation, and the costs of making a habit of doing something that’s usually destructive, vastly outweigh any short-term advantage you could gain this one time.

Isn’t this the small world case? Following the pattern, my big world example would be: “when there are so many people around that you rarely meet the same person twice, you should scam people as much as you can”. Or do I have a different interpretation of small/big world?

positiveFuture 28 Jun 2026 10:19 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Why are adversaries assumed to be incapable of responding to AI risk?
I think the point is that there aren’t just two black and white possibilities:
- get extinct by developing superintelligence,
- stop AI R&D.
I would argue that it is much more difficult to understand at which point the AI is too dangerous to be improved than to understand at which point YOUR AI is “better enough” than YOUR ENEMY’S AI (China or the US) to provide you some strategic advantage. Under this premise, if your adversary is rational, once you stop your AI R&D, he may realize that his optimal choice is to do just a bit more R&D and only then stop, in order to get some strategic advantages out of it, and still avoid the catastrophic risk of extinction.
If both adversaries consider the other two possibilities:
- develop “just a bit more AI” to catch up with the other country,
- develop “just a bit more AI” to get some strategic advantage over the other country...
they can push the Nash equilibrium into “get extinct by developing superintelligence”.
On the other hand, I’d say that in order to hope for some international cooperation you need to have some more nuance (maybe GPT-5.5 level) and model the fact that possibly both good and bad guys in their heart believe to be the good guys, don’t want to see the world burn, and may be happy to take a leap of faith and stop/regulate AI R&D in the same way as we did for weapons/pollution: not in pursuit of their selfish interest, but because it is good for the world.