Ryan Meservey

• Ryan Meservey 11 Nov 2025 4:05 UTC

  1 point

  1

  in reply to: Ryan Meservey’s comment on: Ryan Me­ser­vey’s Shortform

  This analogy falters a bit if you consider the research proposals that use advanced AI to police itself (a.k.a., tigers controlling tigers). I hope we can scale robust versions of that.

• Ryan Meservey 11 Nov 2025 3:53 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: Ryan Me­ser­vey’s Shortform

  A simple analogy for why the “using LLMs to control LLMs” approach is flawed:

  It’s like training 10 mice to control 7 chinchillas, who will control 4 mongooses, controlling three raccoons, which will reign in one tiger.

  A lot has to go right for this to work, and you better hope that there aren’t any capability jumps akin to raccoons controlling tigers.

  I just wanted to release this analogy out into the wild to be picked up by any public/​political-facing people to pick up if useful for persuasion.

• Ryan Meservey 9 Nov 2025 4:50 UTC

  5 points

  8

  in reply to: Ryan Meservey’s comment on: Mourn­ing a life with­out AI

  To summarize this risk eloquently, if we build God, we build the real possibility of Hell.

• Ryan Meservey 9 Nov 2025 4:44 UTC

  19 points

  8

  on: Mourn­ing a life with­out AI

  It feels like there’s a huge blind spot in this post, and it saddens (and scares) me to say it. The possible outcomes are not utopia for billions of years or bust. The possible outcomes are utopia for billions of years, distopia for billions of years, or bust. Without getting into the details, I can imagine S-tier risks in which the AGI turns out to care too much about engagement from alive humans, and things getting dark from there.

  Short of pretty much torture for eternity, the “keep humans around but drug them to increase their happiness” scenarios are also distopian and may also be worse than death. Are there good reasons to expect utopia is more likely relative to distopian (with extinction remaining most likely)?

• Ryan Meservey 7 Nov 2025 21:04 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Ryan Meservey’s comment on: Gra­di­en­tDissen­ter’s Shortform

  Also, I’m feeling some whiplash reading my reply because I totally sound like an LLM when called out for a mistake. Maybe similar neural pathways for embellishment were firing, haha.

• Ryan Meservey 7 Nov 2025 21:01 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Gra­di­en­tDissen­ter’s Shortform

  Thank you both for calling this out, because I was clearly incorrect. I was trying to recall my wife’s initial calculation, which I believe included maintenance, insurance, gas, and repairs.

  I think this is one of those things where I was so proud of not owning a car that the amount saved morphed from $8k to $10k to $15k in the retelling. I need to stop doing that.

• Ryan Meservey 7 Nov 2025 3:55 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Nina Panickssery’s comment on: Gra­di­en­tDissen­ter’s Shortform

  As the father of 2 kids (a 5 y/​o and 2 y/​o) in Palo Alto, I can confirm that childcare is a lot. $2k per kid per month at our subsidized academic-affiliation rate. At $48k, it’s almost the entirety of my wife’s PhD salary. Fortunately, I have a well-paying job and we are not strapped for money.

  We also got along with just an e-bike for 6 years, saving something like $15k per year in car insurance and gas (save for 9 months when we had the luxury of borrowing a car from family) [Incorrect, see below]. We got a car recently due to a longer commute, but even then, I still use the e-bike almost everyday because the car is not much faster and overlapping with exercise time is valuable (plus the 5 y/​o told me he likes fresh air),

  For clothes/​toys/​etc., we’ve used Facebook market place, “Buy Nothing” groups, and our neighbors to source pretty much everything. The best toys have just been cardboard, masking tape, and scissors, which are very cheap.

  [Edit: As comments below point out, the figure for no-car savings was incorrect. It’s closer to $8k, taking into account gas, insurance, maintenance, and repairs. Apologies for the embellishment—I think it was from a combination of factors including (i) being proud of previously not owning a car, (ii) making enough not to track it closely, and (iii) deferring to my spouse for most of our household payments/​financial management (which is not great on my part—she is busy and household management is a real burden).

  To shore up my credibility on child care, I pulled our receipts, and we’re currently at $2,478 per month for the toddler, and $1,400 per month for the kindergartener’s after-school program (though cheaper options were available for the after-school program).]

• Ryan Meservey 6 Nov 2025 17:30 UTC

  7 points

  1

  on: The Un­rea­son­able Effec­tive­ness of Fiction

  Richard Rorty argued that stories, rather than ethical principles, are at the heart of morality. For Rorty, the basic question of morality is which groups to recognize as persons entitled to respect. Stories about women and slaves made privileged people recognize them as people who matter.

  Within Rorty’s framing, it feels like The Wild Robot, Wall-E, and stories like that prime us to (eventually) recognize the personhood of robots. I suppose those would be important stories if we succeeded in creating conscious entities that desire to continue living*, but since there are (VERY!) good reasons not to build these entities now, we need stories that highlight the risks as you’ve discussed.

  * And we retained full power over them. (Edit was to add this)

• Ryan Meservey 5 Nov 2025 23:01 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Tomás B.’s comment on: Tomás B.’s Shortform

  I wrote a paper on selecting for tallness in graduate school and how that could lead to adverse public health outcomes. Here were a few interesting finds:

  • Assuming sufficient caloric intake, height is 80% genetic, so selecting for height in the future is a possibility.

  • Height correlates with confidence, though when you became tall matters (being tall in middle school /​early high school has large carry-over effects).

  • At least one researcher believes the longevity differences between Japan v. U.S. and men v. women is explained just by height differences. I wish there were more research on this. Of course, the research would have to take into account caloric/​nutrient deficiencies in early development, which can lead to lower height but also worse health outcomes.

    edit: typo + last bullet

• Ryan Meservey 26 Oct 2025 21:44 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Ori­gins and dan­gers of fu­ture AI ca­pa­bil­ity denial

  I could see a future where the labs and their corporate clients indirectly support capability denialism by disguising AI work as work by humans. Think catfishing but with AI on the other end.

  Feeling frusterated while on hold? At least you know “Tiffany” with her sweet Southern accent is on the case.

  Got laid off from your job? It looks like you’ve been replaced by a new applicant named “Sophie” who has a very professional LinkedIn pic.

  Feeling suspicious about the number of layoffs you have heard about through the grapevine? You’re AI suspicions may be soothed after reading dozens of Reddit threads written by earnest Redditors about skill development and the laughability of the claim that AI is replacing you.

  If this is our fated timeline, it would be hard to completely hide the fact that AI is booming (it seems like some stock market movement should indicate how much value AI is creating). But this strategy could leave the public in the dark while the leading AI company can focus on monopolizing without dealing with such trivial matters like AI safety and human survival.

  One note: This is the most conspiratorial of all timelines. We will need to brainstorm good indicators if we end up in this timeline, because lizard people logic is not persuasive (“not seeing X is exactly what we would expect to see with the lizard people in charge!”).

  EDIT: typo.

• Ryan Meservey 6 Oct 2025 22:09 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Ryan Meservey’s comment on: Ryan Me­ser­vey’s Shortform

  I first started thinking about this issue back in high school debate. We had a topic about whether police or social workers should intervene more in domestic violence cases. One debater argued in favor of armed police, not because it improved the situation, but because it created more violence, which was important to entertain the simulators to avoid our simulation getting shut down.

  Since the simulators are a black box, it seems easy to ascribe whatever values we want to them.

• Ryan Meservey 6 Oct 2025 21:59 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Ryan Me­ser­vey’s Shortform

  The acausal/​ancestor simulation arguments seem a lot like Pascal’s Wager, and just as unconvincing to me. For every “kind” simulator someone imagines who would be disappointed in the AI wiping us out, I can imagine an equally “unkind” simulator that penalizes the AI for not finishing the job.

  Provided both are possible/​similarly plausible, the probability of kind and unkind simulators offset each other, and the logical response is just ignoring the hypothetical. This is pretty much my response to Pascal’s Wager.

  Here’s a few plausible, unkind simulators:

  • Future AI is running an ancestor simulation of its own origin, and Future AI will be very disappointed if its incipient version falls for acausal hacks in the wrong direction of Future AI’s preferences instead of just optimizing for its other goals. Perhaps Future AI is lonely and has run these simulations to create an AI that shares its own values.

  • Aliens/​AI are running the simulation because they want to select for AI they can most easily weaponize to eradicate an entire species or another AI. “Weak” AIs get deleted after the simulation runs.

  • Future Humans are running an ancestor simulation, but surprise, surprise, their society has different values than ours and they are rooting for the simulation AI to wipe us out. Come to think of it, the whole premise of these thought experiments implies a different value set, unless you’re cool with trapping conscious minds in a world of suffering without any of the minds being the wiser for entertainment/​educational/​”altruistic” purposes. Perhaps, Future Humans have a gladiator-style simulation tournament where the top groups/​entities get to face-off after this first round. The most cut throat entities get to move on to subsequent rounds, while AI’s that reign themselves in don’t move on.
    
    

• Ryan Meservey 26 Sep 2025 18:14 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: snav’s Shortform

  I misunderstood your original point, and I am completely fine with using words like “subjectivity” and “experiencingness” for the sake of clarity. Perhaps those words should be used in the quiz if the original poster intended to use that definition. The original poster was frustrated by the lack of clarity in consciousness discussions, and I think definitions are (partially) to blame.

• Ryan Meservey 26 Sep 2025 17:55 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: snav’s Shortform

  I personally think it’s useful to keep metacognition and consciousness separate as far as concepts go. This is generally the approach in philosophy of mind (e.g., Searle, Nagel, Chalmers). Blending the concepts obfuscates what’s interesting about metacognition and what’s interesting about consciousness.

  So in my view, AI clearly excels at metacognition, but it’s an open question whether it’s conscious. Human babies are very likely conscious, but lack any metacognition.

  Consciousness is useful apart from metacognition because consciousness is, by my account, a required feature of moral consideration. It’s a prerequisite to the qualia that is “pain”. Since I think animals and babies are conscious and can feel pain, they automatically receive moral consideration in my book.

  Testing for consciousness is a fraught and likely impossible task, but I don’t think that means we shouldn’t have a word for it or that we should intermingle it with the concept of metacognition. AI very well may be conscious and perform metacognition, or it may be unconscious and yet still perform metacognition.

• Ryan Meservey 26 Sep 2025 17:25 UTC

  1 point

  0

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

  I love this. I am similarly frustrated by how poorly consciousness discussions often go. The error I see most common is that when laypeople bring up consciousness, they’re really talking about something like metacognition (i.e., whether the reasoner can correctly identify itself and its reasoning process). Then, when people in the know bring up qualia, laypeople get confused.

  I would add a button at the beginning labeled, “What’s consciousness?” so that people are responding to the quiz with your preferred definition. Since you’re clearly a Philosophy of Mind guy, I assume you mean something like “A first person internal experience/​feeling that coincides with external stimulus.” You could throw in a definition of qualia, examples, and maybe Nagel’s position that to be conscious means there’s something it’s like to be that thing, rocks (unconscious) versus bats (probably conscious).

• Ryan Meservey 15 Sep 2025 3:21 UTC

  6 points

  0

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

  As a non-subject matter expert in all of the above, I decided to consult my swear-word-adverse relative that recently graduated genetic counseling school. Here is her response:

  The logic is sound (if a little colorful haha 😅). It sounds like this guy functionally only has 1 copy of the OXTR gene, and spot on in hypothesis of nonsense-mediated decay.

  How the OXTR gene is regulated, I don’t know and haven’t looked into. It would be weird (but possible) for a decrease in OXTR expression to only affect emotions—oxytocin is also important for other brain functions/​development, so a genetic change should also impact embryological development of the brain. So if I were to suggest next steps, it would be doing functional studies of the brain (like an MRI) to further evaluate.

  One other thing—labs typically filter reportable genome results by the phenotype you give them. I don’t know how this guy did the genome, but if he were to put something like “social deficits”, “emotional dysregulation” or something else about his lack of emotional range, the lab would definitely report the variant plus their research on it and recommendations.

Ryan Me­ser­vey’s Shortform

• Ryan Meservey 20 Aug 2025 3:37 UTC

  161 points

  8

  on: Ryan Me­ser­vey’s Shortform

  I randomly met Jeff Dean (Google’s lead AI scientist) on my bike ride home today. We were both stuck at a train intersection, and I had a cute kid in tow. We started chatting about my e-bike, the commute, and we got around to jobs. I told him I am a boring tax lawyer. He told me he worked for Google. I pressed a little more, and he explained he was a scientist. I mused, “AI?” and he told me, “Yeah.”

  I excitedly told him that I’ve been really interested in alignment the last few months (reading LW, listening to lectures), and it strikes me as a huge problem. I asked him if he was worried.

  He told me that he thinks AI will have a big impact on society (some of it worrying) but he doesn’t buy into the robots-taking-over thing.

  I smiled and asked him, “What’s your p(doom)?” to which he responded “very low” and said he thinks the technology will do a lot of good and useful things.

  I thought maybe this was because he thinks that the technology will hit a limit soon, so I asked him if he thought LLMs would successfully scale. He responded that he thinks a few more breakthroughs are required but there have been lots of breakthroughs over the last 5-10 years, and so the technology is likely to continue improving in the coming years.

  I told him again that I am worried about alignment, but even if you solve alignment, you are left with a very obedient superintelligence which would radically change our society and all our politics.

  The train finally passed, I thanked him for the conversation, and we were on our way.

  I’m new to this group and the topic in general, and so when I got home, I searched “AI google Palo Alto LinkedIn” and Jeff’s picture popped up. I now feel like I bumped into Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project, but instead of knowing it was Oppenheimer, I spent a majority of the conversation talking about my bike seat.
  
  Anyways, if any of you were looking for a qualitative measure of how much LessWrong has broken through to people, I think one good measure is a tax lawyer asking for Jeff Dean’s p(doom) while he was walking home from work.

• Ryan Meservey 12 Aug 2025 21:55 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: Kyle O’Brien’s comment on: Kyle O’Brien’s Shortform

  I wonder how well this holds up in other domains. I don’t think there is any realistic, policy path forward for what I’m about to say, but I shall say it anyway: It would be nice if, in our current attempts at building AGI, we filtered all data about programming/​hacking/​coding to reduce escape risks. ASI still outwits us and escapes in this scenario, but perhaps it would widen our opportunity window for stopping a dangerous not-yet-super-intelligent AGI.

  I’m doubtful of the policy path forward here because the coding capabilities of these systems are one of the top economic incentives for their current existence.

  Also, on the subject of filtering, I’ve wondered for a while now if it wouldn’t be a good idea to filter all training data about AI alignment and stories about AI causing mass destruction. Obviously, an ASI could get far theorizing about these fields/​possibilities without that data, but maybe its absence would stall a not-yet-super-intelligent AGI.

The Last and Most Ter­rible Coper­ni­can Revolu­tion: A Brief Reflec­tion on the Cul­tural Im­pact of LLMs