RHollerith

Karma: 2,966

Richard Hollerith. 15 miles north of San Francisco. hruvulum@gmail.com

My probability that AI research will end all human life is .92. It went up drastically when Eliezer started going public with his pessimistic assessment in April 2022. Till then my confidence in MIRI (and knowing that MIRI has enough funding to employ many researchers) was keeping my probability down to about .4. (I am glad I found out about Eliezer’s assessment.)

Currently I am willing to meet with almost anyone on the subject of AI extinction risk.

Last updated 26 Sep 2023.

RHollerith 6 Mar 2026 3:11 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: TsviBT’s Shortform
The objections River made apply to the thing you linked, too: namely to stay in a low-earth trajectory for any significant fraction of one orbit requires a speed of 28,000 km/h and more importantly all of that speed must be tangential (“horizontal”). It is expensive in energy to get rid of that tangential component of momentum, and most of it must be gotten rid of in order for the warhead to intersect the Earth’s surface with any accuracy.

(Yes, ICBM’s reach that speed, too, or close to it, but only when the direction of travel is close to straight down. I.e., the tangential component of velocity never gets above a few 1000 km/h.)

Yes, it gets a lot cheaper to get rid of speed when the vehicle is designed to interact with the atmosphere like the Space Shuttle was, as opposed to just shooting through it like a bullet or an ICBM warhead is, but that does not support your point (Tsvi) because such vehicles are the subject of intense study by all the advanced militaries (under the name “hypersonic glide vehicle”) and I have seen no signs that any nation is willing to forswear investment in or deployment of this new class of weapons.

In the decades during which hypersonic glide vehicles were infeasible, River is probably correct in asserting that there was no military advantage to be got from either nukes on satellites or fractional orbital bombardment systems.

RHollerith 5 Mar 2026 17:37 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: TsviBT’s Shortform

is concerned that Russia is seeking to deploy nuclear weapons in space

This was forseeable when SpaceX decided to takes sides in the Ukraine conflict since Russia does not have (and probably cannot afford to create) a constellation of anything like the number of satellites in the Starlink constellation.

RHollerith 16 Feb 2026 21:40 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Linch’s Shortform
Scientists worry a lot that their work will be ignored, which causes them to immitate the style and form of previous impactful works, which explains Newton’s choice of Latin and his choice of proofs in the geometric tradition to present results that he came up with using more calculational and more analytic methods. When I read Principia I felt the author was trying to explain clearly and as simply as possible, but sticking to established expository forms to avoid the work’s being rejected due to too much novelty.

RHollerith 1 Feb 2026 20:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Oliver Daniels’s comment on: An Explication of Alignment Optimism
Increasing the volume of alignment research helps only if alignment research does not help capabilities researchers, but my impression is that most alignment research that has been done so far has helped capabilities researchers approximately as much as it has helped alignment researchers. Just because a line of research is described as “alignmnent research” does not automatically cause it to help alignment researchers more than capability researchers.

In summary, I don’t consider your (a) a cause for hope because the main problem is that increasing capabilities to the point of disaster (extinction or such) is easier than solving the alignment problem and your (a) does not ameliorate the main problem much if at all for the reason I just explained.

RHollerith 31 Jan 2026 22:32 UTC
5 points
1
on: An Explication of Alignment Optimism
Suppose AI assistants similar to Claude transform the economy. Now what? How is the risk of human extinction reduced?

Yes, alignment researchers have become more capable, and yes, the people trying to effect an end or a long pause of AI “progress” have become more capable, but so have those trying to effect more AI “progress”.

Also, rapid economic change entails rapid changes in most human interpersonal relationships, which is hard on people and according to some is the main underlying cause of addictions. Addicts aren’t likely to come to understand that AI “progress” is very dangerous even if they are empowered by AI assistants.

Your argument supports the assertion that if AI “progress” stopped now then we’d be better off then we would’ve been without any AI progress (in the past), but of course that is very different than being optimistic about the outcome of AI tech’s continuing to “progress”.

RHollerith 25 Jan 2026 20:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
My worry is one or two people loyal to the red team leave the site, which makes people on the blue team feel more free to use the site to criticize the red team, causing more red teamers to leave (and attracting blue-team zealots who filter everything through an ideological lens) in a positive feedback loop ending in a site with the same problem as Bluesky already has and many subreddits already have, namely, the zealots produce large quantities of low-quality writing, which drowns out the high-quality contributions and discourages many who can make high-quality contributions from even starting to contribute.

ADDED. Since LW is currently very far from Bluesky, perhaps it would’ve been more persuasive for me to argue that if LW were to start to have even half as many low-effort political comments as Hacker News, many would probably stop reading LW, or at least that is my worry.

RHollerith 25 Jan 2026 1:34 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tslarm’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer

RHollerith 25 Jan 2026 1:02 UTC
3 points
−13
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Shortform Feed

you used the word “government” but to be clear, the supreme court and the states are also the government!

In British English, “the government” means the executive branch, and the entire thing (including the judiciary and the legislature) is called the state.

And while I have your attention allow me to echo the person you are replying to, namely, it would be ideal if a reader could not even tell from your comments which party you prefer (since you run the site) and great grandparent is pretty strong evidence for which one.

RHollerith 14 Jan 2026 14:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
I made the same prediction a month ago:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tsconpYZiPAQc7CHQ/?commentId=QzWaC7Efejzu29b4h

RHollerith 13 Dec 2025 15:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: rhollerith_dot_com’s Shortform
Maybe I failed to write something that reasonable people could parse.

RHollerith 11 Dec 2025 22:15 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: rhollerith_dot_com’s Shortform

“The prediction market”? I am confused what you mean by that.

I mean a technology and its implementations similar to how “the telephone” refers to a technology.

RHollerith 11 Dec 2025 22:07 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: rhollerith_dot_com’s Shortform
I should have written, “I wouldn’t be surprised if prediction markets start growing much faster than they have been growing over the last 3 decades or so”, to avoid taking a position on whether they are not currently important.

RHollerith 11 Dec 2025 7:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: rhollerith_dot_com’s Shortform
$20B in what? Annual revenue (i.e., mostly fees added to transactions) of the companies that run the markets? Assets under management? Amount deposited by traders at a particular moment in time? Valuation of the companies that run the markets?

RHollerith 11 Dec 2025 2:51 UTC
4 points
0
on: rhollerith_dot_com’s Shortform
For decades, people have been saying that the prediction market has the potential to become economically important, yet it remains unimportant. I would not be surprised if it becomes important over the next 4 years thanks to broadly-available AI technology.

Let’s define “economically important” as a state of affairs in which there continues to be at least $50 billion riding on predictions at every instant in time.

First of all, AI tech might make prediction markets better by helping with market-making and arbitrage. Second, a sufficiently robust prediction market might turn out to be the most cost-effective way for an owner of an AI service like ChatGPT to make certain kinds of improvements to the AI service with the result that owners of AI services become a major source of investment in and of revenue for the prediction markets.
What links here?
- RHollerith's comment on Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform by Daniel Kokotajlo (14 Jan 2026 14:36 UTC; 3 points)

RHollerith 1 Nov 2025 22:01 UTC
7 points
4
on: Shouldn’t taking over the world be easier than recursively self-improving, as an AI?
Yes, even an AI that has not undergone any recursive self-improvement might be a threat to human survival. I remember Eliezer saying this (a few years ago) but please don’t ask me to find where he says it.

RHollerith 23 Oct 2025 18:15 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Haiku’s comment on: Which side of the AI safety community are you in?
Parenthetically, I do not yet know of anyone in the “never build ASI” camp and would be interested in reading or listening to such a person.

RHollerith 9 Oct 2025 13:43 UTC
7 points
−4
on: Are We Leaving Literature To The Psychotic?
I’m basically not worried about this.

Google Search has proven pretty OK at preventing spam and content farms from showing up in search results at rates that would make Google Search useless despite the fact the spammers and SEO actors spend billions of dollars per year trying to influence the search results (in ways that are good for the SEO actor or his client, but bad for users of Google Search).

Moreover, even though neither OpenAI, Anthropic nor DeepSeek had access to the expertise, software or data Google was using to filter this bad content from search result, this bad content (spam, content farms and other efforts by SEO actors) has very little influence (as far as I can tell) on the answers given by the current crop of LLM-based services from these companies.

A creator of an LLM is motivated to make the LLM as good as possible at truthseeking (because truthseeking correlates to usefulness to users). If it hasn’t happened already, then in at most a couple of years LLM’s will have become good enough at truthseeking to filter out the kind of spam you are worried about even though the creator of the LLM never directed large quantities of human attention and human skill specifically at the problem like Google has had to do over the last 25 years against the efforts of SEO actors. The labs are also motivated to make the answers provided by LLM services as relevant as possible to the user, which also has the effect of filtering out content produced by the psychotic people.

RHollerith 9 Oct 2025 1:46 UTC
4 points
2
on: You Should Get a Reusable Mask
Also useful for filtering out the smoke from forest fires although it gets tedious to wear one all day for days in a row, so in addition to a mask it is nice to own an air purifier with a HEPA rating or a MERV rating for when you are indoors.

RHollerith 5 Oct 2025 19:31 UTC
11 points
2
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
It tends to be bad (or at least costly) to have a rule that has the property that violations of the rule cannot reliably be detected, which leads to the question of how you propose to detect LLM-written content.

RHollerith 4 Oct 2025 17:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: StanislavKrym’s comment on: faul_sname’s Shortform
We’re discussing whether the US could have stopped the Soviet nuclear program in the late 1940s or early 1950s (to see whether that sheds any light on how practical it is to use military power to stop AI “progress”) so what is the relevance of your comment?

But since we’ve started on this tangent, allow me to point out that most of the public discussion about nuclear war (including by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists) is wildly wrong because no one had any strong motivation to step into the discussion and correct the misinformation (because no one had a strong motive to advance arguments that there should be a nuclear war) until the last few years, when advocates for AI “progress” starting arguing that AI “progress” should be allowed to continue because an aligned superintelligence is our best chance to avert nuclear war, which in their argument is the real extinction risk—at which time people like me who know that continued AI “progress” is a much more potent extinction risk than nuclear war acquired a strong motive to try to correct misinformation in the public discourse about nuclear war.