solhando

Karma: 160

solhando 13 Sep 2026 20:38 UTC
8 points
−2
on: Consider how your global governance proposal is different from the EU Code of Practice
Under 5% of AI compute is hosted in the EU (as opposed to ~90% in US+China), only ~one of the frontier companies are headquartered in the EU, and the act is designed in a way that the United States (at the time the Biden administration) found very dissatisfactory, as it was seen as promoting EU interests over American interests. China was essentially not involved.
The act doesn’t even require the reporting of the Hugging Face incident as it’s currently designed, since it exempts pre-market research and testing. It also doesn’t require reporting for models used for military purposes. They are essentially limited to imposing fines, which historically have maxed out at a few billion dollars, which is not a compelling enough number to greatly alter how the AI companies behave.
If the goal is to have a regulatory framework that the frontier AI companies actually comply with, it can’t be top-down imposed by an unelected group of people in a political organization that has no jurisdiction over where the companies are based, pay taxes, and train their models.
Even if the US Code of Practice was word-for-word the exact same as the EU version, if it was willingly entered into by the US AI companies, and was under US jurisdiction, it would have an order of magnitude more credibility and enforcement power.

solhando 22 Jul 2026 12:35 UTC
1 point
−6
on: We should push for no-fault liability for actions taken by AI
The larger problem with no fault liability are the deluge of unimportant and frivolous lawsuits. Get someone in a court room whose DIY deck collapsed because of wrong advice from the free version of ChatGPT, and a jury will 100% sympathize with the poor guy with a broken leg and “mental suffering” than the trillion dollar company.
If you can win a lawsuit for drinking McDonalds coffee that’s too hot, or for getting injured when trespassing, or being negligent/lazy and getting injured at work, then the millions (billions?) of people using AI every day are going to have thousands of lawsuits per day coming up. Because so long as there’s some plausible route to assigning blame, and a law or legal precedent allowing for that blame, there will be many lawyers ready to pounce. Especially if all the ambulance-chasing lawyers lose their lobbying and self-driving cars become more common.
Think Digital Safe Harbor laws. Without them, a company like Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, etc. basically couldn’t exist. Instead of a DMCA takedown, and a garnishing of ad-revenue from a creator with copyright-infringing content, they would just sue YouTube where there’s about a million times more upside. The nuisance value of the lawsuits alone would make the internet a much worse place.
Of course there is some level of liability that would probably be good, without coming with a million unimportant lawsuits, but without that spelled out, the result will not be positive.

solhando 16 Jul 2026 17:00 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Surprising facts about the slave trade
The destruction of the civil war, the reconstruction afterwards, and the cost of transitioning social structures is definitely a confounder for your graph. Even then, there are more general reasons we might not expect total cotton production to increase despite increased efficiency per worker. The person you’re respond to didn’t provide any sources, but surely there are per-acre or per-person comparisons somewhere?

solhando 2 Jun 2026 16:40 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: ErickBall’s comment on: Lighthaven East—A Feasibility Study
This is the name of a 80k+ subscriber rightwing youtube channel. It’s claim to fame is “noticing” the ratio of different ethnic groups in owning mass-media, crime statistics, etc. Probably not a good thing to be associated with.

solhando 23 Apr 2026 22:42 UTC
22 points
5
on: Nectome: All That I Know
Wow, excellent write up!
In many ways it seems like Nectome is the other side of the coin to a company like Until Labs. Backed by Peter Thiel, their technical accomplishments in the field are basically nothing. At least judging by this interview a few months ago with their CSO. They did some very basic preservation of neural slices, but they managed to raise $58m with the intention of achieving successful organ preservation and rewarming. A good strategy since that allows them to be a biotech company first, with all the respectability and business opportunities if it works out, while aiming at human-scale cryopreservation in the long run.
It may honestly be worth discussing a partnership with them. They are flush with cash right now, their funding by characters like Thiel is largely based on that long-term mission of cryopreservation of humans, and they don’t really have any meaningful accomplishments (yet) towards that mission. What they do have, which Nectome clearly lacks, is that they’re business savvy, are good at raising money and have good PR.
I have interacted with Aurelia online a few times before in discussion related to aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, but I was always left unconvinced. This article here did quite a lot more to convince me than those interactions had.
Otherwise, it’s almost painfully obvious there’s low hanging fruit on the business/marketing/operations side that they’re not doing, which is a terrible sign for them achieving long term ambitions. Off the top of my head;
- The third picture on their home page features prominently a dog’s ass and balls. Scroll to the bottom and this is literally dead center of the page.
- There’s no high-level person who’s the “face” of the company. They should pick that person and try to do at least 2 podcasts/guest posts/interviews, etc. per month.
- There’s no “Team” page on their website. Each person and their expertise should be prominently displayed.
- There’s no “press” page or press email on their site (press@nectome.com), only their blog. This post and the Asterisk magazine article should be featured prominently. People care a more about what other people say about your business than what you have to say. Asterisk is written by Song, but it’s a level of endorsement when a publication is willing to promote you.
- There’s no “plan” page on their site. They should clearly lay out where the company is now, where it will be in “X” period of time, and where they eventually intend to reach. This lesswrong post basically lays it out well.
- There’s no layman’s explainer of their technology on their site. Only their research papers.
- Their contact button opens up your email client, it doesn’t take them to a contact page. There’s no phone number, and their contact email isn’t shown on the page.
- Their “discounted” plan seems desperate, reducing confidence in their success. With the money they received already, they weren’t able to get beyond the research stage, now they’re offering their product at a 90% discount from what their expected costs are. This is a terrible signal, and they’d probably have a much easier time raising donations from wealthy individuals, with a preservation thrown in for donations after $20k. Just really bad framing here that makes them look desperate for cash.
- They have no “membership” option, nor a sign up for updates (I guess their Substack?)
- nectome.substack.com doesn’t index on google for nectome.com. Google ranks blog articles hosted on the actual site much higher than Substack, and any benefit of a popular nectome article won’t feed back into nectome.com’s SEO. Google considers them different sites. They should be writing articles on a blog hosted within nectome.com answering easy to rank for questions. Use a Semrush 7 day free trial to identify cryonics questions/keywords) then hire a company on Upwork (pay $600 - $700 and they will easily get you on the first page of google for any term less than 30 difficulty).
- Most importantly, there’s no low-commitment way to sign up! They’re asking for $20k, which, given that they don’t have any facilities, is basically asking for nice people who believe in them? That’s fine for a few people like the author of this post, and can work if they know some very wealthy people already, but it is unlikely to get many random sign-ups.
  
  Take tomorrow.bio as an example. They have a $50/mo membership, and fund the preservation with life insurance, which for a person under 40 is quite cheap. That’s an extremely low commitment, leads to some buy-in early on, and allows them to bring those “commitments” to potential investors as customers with ongoing revenue.
  
  Tomorrow asks for a $50/mo subscription you can basically cancel anytime, and when they actually end up needing to follow through with their promise, there’s a huge life insurance payout waiting for them. Nectome wants $20k upfront, and they’re basically accepting a $230k shortfall should anyone die in the interim. This would make anyone skeptical that they really have any intention of following through. Malice or incompetence, the numbers don’t add up!
And I’m sure a lot of other stuff I’m not thinking about, as I think the above is enough for a comment. I’m critiquing them a lot here, but this post brought me a long way to believing in their method of preservation, so I genuinely do hope they succeed. Of course my advice should be taken with a grain of salt as an internet anon, but I hope @Aurelia and @CharlieT reads this. Some of my critique is opinion, but most of it is just the basics of running a business with an online presence. If I was them what I would do;
3 Days: Change the third picture. Add a “team” page with short bios and pictures. Create a press email (it can be an alias if you use g-suite or whatever). Add a “contact us” page with email, press and phone number.
7 Days: Add a plan page. Add an explainer page of the technological edge. Create a blog hosted on your site (Sanity is good for this).
30 Days: Create a “sign up” or “Learn more” or “Choose life” button or whatever that collects name, email, phone number, add membership pricing, and start speaking to life insurance agencies. Research what agency provides the service for Alcor and call them, they’re almost certainly not exclusive to Alcor. Get a list of keywords and hire an agency to get a blog post “answering” each relevant keyword ranked on the first of google. Pick your company’s “Face” and start messaging relevant podcasters, blogs, etc.
Like, most of this could be done by one person in an afternoon depending on how AI-savvy they are, let alone by a team of very smart people in a month.

solhando 10 Apr 2026 14:26 UTC
4 points
1
on: Socrates is Mortal
Excellent review.
I was a little disappointed with Zvi’s review, since it was very clearly against Callard’s Socrates, which was deconstructed and reinterpreted into something (in my opinion) very different from the actual Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s almost impossible to have an understanding of something, that is good enough to respond to, from secondhand sources that aren’t explicitly trying to explain the thing. Callard isn’t trying to give the reader a good understanding of Socrates, they’re trying to make “The Case for a Philosophical Life” (the byline of the book). So any response to Callard, that talks about “Socrates” is going to annoy people who are more informed on the subject, since the Socrates being disagreed with is a controversial interpretation of Socrates that loses much of what makes him interesting in the first place.
And then real problem is that this interpretation then supplants the “real” Socrates when Callard communicates it, other people respond to it, and the memory of the discourse of the interpreted Socrates in the audience is now this deformed version that doesn’t correspond well to the original. I wonder how many other things are like that.

solhando 1 Apr 2026 13:56 UTC
2 points
1
on: Is Bayesianism Susceptible to the Mail-Order Prophet Scam?
If someone is able to consistently predict the market, they don’t need the sort of investors they could get from mass-mailing people. The only conceivable reason they would be sending stuff to random strangers (and not like, hedge funds, banks, or billionaires) is if they’re trying to scam you.
Maybe if you looked at just the predictions, and didn’t consider the context in which someone would be sending accurate market predictions to you, then you could get tricked. In context though, there’s no plausible scenario where someone intelligent (superhuman) enough to make accurate stock picks consistently is marketing their services through the mail. They would have to be both smart enough to succeed, and dumb enough to not have access to better sources of funding, and dumb enough to not realize that their 10% weekly return strategy invalidates the need for investment in the first place. This sort of person is incompatible with the real world—intelligence is general enough.
It would be like if someone claiming to be Donald Trump starting texting you to tell you about his next Tariff. Even if your Trump got it right 6 times in a row, it’s not plausible he would be texting a random citizen his intentions. Maybe it warrants further attention since it is definitely some sort of signal, but it doesn’t warrant belief.

solhando 30 Mar 2026 14:37 UTC
1 point
2
in reply to: Error’s comment on: Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?
I’m skeptical, but I don’t know enough about the norms of the 60′s to really estimate what they were thinking.
It seems quite hard to believe that if a normal-looking experimenter is telling you to administer a lethal amount of electric shock to someone screaming (and how convincing were those screams?) in the next room, that it’s an actual lethal electric shock. If they guy who designed the experiment doesn’t seem concerned about the apparent sound of suffering, then either you’re in a one-of-a-kind torture experiment like Squid Game and everyone involved is going to be on trial for murder for no apparent gain, or the other person isn’t actually being tortured. Idk if people explicitly thought this, implicitly understood it, or actually wholeheartedly believed they were torturing someone and none of this factored into their decision making.

solhando 29 Mar 2026 16:31 UTC
5 points
0
on: Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?
Participants were led to believe that they were assisting in a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner”. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
I never understood how this was accomplished. How do you convince people participating in a psychological study (many of them Yale students) to believe that they are in an experiment where they are instructed to administer a lethal electric shock? In what world is “you murder someone” a possible outcome of an experiment?
It seems like claiming to have learned something about human nature from watching children play the Interactive Buddy game, which was quite popular in the era of flash games. I mean, maybe it says something about violent impulses, but it doesn’t say something about how people would behave if they were actually torturing some person, since the subject knows its a game. I think there isn’t a plausible experiment you can design where the subjects actually believe they are administering a lethal electric shock.

solhando 25 Mar 2026 17:13 UTC
26 points
2
on: Book Review: Open Socrates (Part 1)
Having read all of Plato, all of Xenophon (another student of Socrates) and most of Aristotle all in the past year or two, I have pretty decent context to offer some thoughts on this. Long comment incoming, and I don’t address the majority of the ideas of the post since it would get somewhat repetitive and be even longer than this.
First, this whole essay is criticizing Socrates, but it’s really only talking about Plato’s representation of Socrates. These are different things. Plato was a student of Socrates, and there’s way we can infer much about what is an idea of Socrates and what’s Plato’s, but ultimately we’re reading Plato’s dialogues, where he uses Socrates as a character in a story told to emphasize a point, or told to educate the reader on something Plato wants to communicate. We know Plato disagreed with Socrates on multiple points, as he drops him has a character in his chronologically later writings and gets into more extreme philosophical speculation. We also know from Xenophon, another student of Socrates and a sort of precursor/early Stoic, that there was disagreement about what Socrates was like. In Plato he’s living in the realm of complex logic, universal definitions, and long/confusing dialogues. In Xenophon, who also wrote Socratic dialogues, he’s much more down-to-earth and humorous. This Socrates doesn’t focus on defining what leadership is, but literally walks through the best ways to manage a household—practical advice.
This depiction was also intended for the context of education. The dialogues would be read out loud, and most of them end with an open question, and some very obvious paths of Socratic questioning remaining. The point was primarily that students would go through them together, then at the end take their own route of Socratic questioning to essentially “continue” the dialog. Some scholars disagree with this interpretation, but IMO this is quite clearly what they are. Keeping in mind that these are a learning tool to get at an idea that Plato specifically wanted to communicate can recontextualize the subtext a bit. Specifically the “wrong things are wrong” points;
1. Vice is ignorance.
2. Falling in love is an attempt to ascend to another plane of existence.
3. It is impossible to fight injustice.
4. Everyone desires The Good.
5. Treating others unjustly is worse than being unjustly treated yourself.
are all examples of philosophical positions that scholars generally believe are more from Plato than Socrates. Of course Socrates may have believed this too, but they fit very neatly into Plato’s overall system that either a) Socrates while professing ignorance did have quite a well developed system of Philosophy that Plato then mostly wrote down or b) These positions that the dialogues are implicitly trying to argue for are Plato’s. I lean towards the latter, but this is controversial among scholars.
More to the point, the dialog of Alcibiades gets a lot of attention in this essay, but the general consensus is that this wasn’t even written by Plato. It was a later work written by a student of Plato or Aristotle (or even later, students of of students of Aristotle), meaning that it is even less likely to accurately represent the methods or beliefs of the real Socrates.
The Socratic tradition we’re looking at is Socrates --> Plato’s selective interpretation of Socrates --> Plato --> Aristotle. While Plato is the most important link here, you would be left with half an understanding without Aristotle, who clarified (and disagrees) on a lot of points Plato uses Socrates to make. Importantly he often brings up Socrates as contributing two (maybe 3) main things to the practice of Philosophy;
1. Universal definition: What is noble, pious, just, etc. is apparently “known” by most of those “well-bred” in society, but when investigating the issue, the definitions offered are very contradictory. Socrates never offered Universal definitions, but he offered a way to at least determine what they’re not, and what they’re like. Essentially; “justice is like what the God’s love, but not exactly that.” The way we approach that is through -
2. Dialectic: The systematized practice of walking through both sides of a question/problem (either individually or with a conversation partner) to find contradictions, discard contradictory answers to the question, and come close to the truth. The questioner would propose a problem/question, the other side would propose a solution, and they would walk through the implications of the question to see if it agreed with or conflicted with the answerers existing beliefs. This walking from premises to conclusions was the systematization of;
3. Logic: This wasn’t put to paper until Aristotles Prior and Posterior Analytics, but Socrates is really the “first” (extant that is) example of using consistent logical operations to go from a set of premises to a conclusion. This was the basis of formal logical for thousands of years, and while not as useful in the face of modern formalized logic, can still be used successfully for complex deductions.
Now Aristotle got a lot wrong (some of his cosmology is laughably wrong) but absent the scientific method, he was the standard of “acquiring knowledge” in the west for thousands of years. And he was right quite often about a lot of things, since he applied the system of “take known premises and deduce conclusions from them, compare those conclusions to what is known by the wise or the general opinion of the many” to see if your premises match reality. This would generally hit upon the truth of things.
Second, Socrates himself didn’t live a life of pure contemplation, he was quite a lot more active than Plato alone would suggest. He was a soldier well-recognized as being able to bear cold, heat, lack of sleep on campaign better than anyone. He saved Alcibiades on campaign in a brave defense against unlikely odds, nephew and heir of Pericles, the leading Athenian statesmen of the early Peloponnesian war, who was an important figure in Athenian history in his own right (he prompted the disastrous Sicilian expedition and led the restoration of Democracy under the tyrants). Socrates was the only one to stand up against the illegal vote of executing generals who failed on campaign during the rule of the Oligarchical Athenian council of the 500. So while Plato emphasizes the life of contemplation, Socrates himself lead an active and exceptional public life.
In reference to Alcibiades;
If we take the account in Thucydides seriously, this clearly insane expedition plausibly led to the fall of the Athenian Empire to Sparta, and thereby to the fall of all of Greece and the end of its golden age.
Alcibiades himself proved a very capable general throughout his life. The Sicilian expedition failed, and he was the impetus for it, but he never got to participate in the actual expedition itself. He was tried in absentia after leaving Athens for Sicily for defacing the Hermes (almost certainly a false charge), and then fled to Sparta. It’s hard to place the blame on Socrates, or even Alcibiades, for it, since the attempt on Sicily was failed by lesser generals (leadership fell a general who was the strongest opponent to the expedition. The account of the expedition shows he repeatedly wavered between pushing forward and calling the expedition off. Indecision is the worst quality a leader can have.).
So we have an account of Socrates’ relationship with Alcibiades that was written by someone who didn’t know either of them (not Plato), and the failure of Alcibiades’ expedition was out of his hands. I find it hard to assign blame to Socrates for this.
And the practice of dialectic itself was a very valuable skill in Classical Athens. Aristotle distinguished between “Sophistry” as working towards winning arguments and creating a specific opinion in the other party and “Dialectic” as working towards truth. Sophists were relatively well respected, and prominent men would pay them huge sums to teach their children how to argue and deconstruct an argument. Pericles (and his nephew Alcibiades) gained their power through precisely their excellent rhetoric and argumentative skills. The Socratic method is that same skill as applied to pursuing truth as it was also applied to pursuing power. From this I’d say that in that context, there was practical application beyond philosophy of what Socrates taught. The method if not the substance.
But all this is perhaps less of a criticism of this essay as it is of the book. Things like;
Thinking, as Socrates understands it, is not something that happens in your head, but rather out loud, in conversation. Socrates argues that it is only by recognizing thinking as a social interaction that we can resolve a set of paradoxes as to how thinking can be open-minded, inquisitive, and truth-oriented.
are simply not correct. The Socratic method was very transparently something that didn’t have to happen out loud or in a social context. There’s many anecdotes throughout Plato and Xenophon where Socrates spends hours absorbed in thought, going over a question by himself. He repeatedly insists in the dialogues that what he’s doing to his conversation partner is simply what he does to himself, by himself.
Agnes has a very particular view of Socrates that is closest to Socrates as Plato represented him than anything else. There was a real person, who was certainly meaningfully different than this, as the Socrates we have as Agnes prefers him is a product of being filtered through Plato, and the Platonic tradition.
This is one of the reasons I prefer original sources when one has the time to read them. Secondary accounts come with a hidden agenda that is hard to distinguish.

solhando 22 Mar 2026 13:48 UTC
7 points
0
on: China Derangement Syndrome
The American sphere of care does not limit itself to a specific ethnic core. Despite recent anti-immigrant backlash, what it means to be an “American” is not tied up with your genetic makeup.
This is not true of China. You can’t “become” Chinese any more than you can change your ethnicity.
The Chinese government cares for the Chinese almost exclusively, with little concern given to anyone else, and certainly no one else can join the group of people they are concerned for. This is the sort of government that uses AI for the betterment of China, with everyone else being an afterthought. If the US wins at the very least there’s a system in place that is used to accepting people from every corner of the world into the political body.

solhando 10 Feb 2026 22:14 UTC
5 points
4
on: My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
What recipe would you recommend for someone who doesn’t have a microwave browning skillet? I’d like to try it, but I don’t want to purchase a skillet until I’ve tasted the potential myself.

solhando 5 Dec 2025 19:21 UTC
4 points
0
on: Beating China to ASI
I think answering the question of “Who can be included within political life?” is quite important to answer before deciding on whether you prefer China or not. We may very well get an ASI alligned to the interests of the nation which created it, to the detriment of others.
China is inherently a nation of Chinese people, and nominally a nation for the various minorities that are already there. The government represents the interests of this in-group, and almost never lets anyone else in. It’s essentially impossible to become a Chinese citizen for everyone but a few Chinese diaspora.
The US is nominally a European-descended nation, but is essentially universal in who can be an American and who is allowed to participate in political life. Nearly a million people are naturalized every year, and many more people with immigrant parents are born Americans. These immigrants come from every part of the planet.
Despite the xenophobic rhetoric and immigration bans that have been popular recently in the US, these are the result of immigration policy being so expansive in how many people are allowed into the country, that it changes the ethnic and religious makeup of entire cities. This indicates to me that the U.S. is clearly a nation that is willing to expand who it considers part of the nation, even if there’s pushback when this happens rapidly. In China you won’t see much anti-immigrant sentiment because they don’t allow many immigrants at all. The few who are conditionally allowed to live in China over the long term have no path to citizenship.
That’s all to say that a Chinese ASI risks being an ASI working for the interests of the Chinese people, whereas an American ASI seems like it would at least conceptually understand that everyone besides Americans aren’t completely excluded from the possibility of being part of the nation. If an ASI pursues the national interest, I’d rather it be a nation that is not exclusive to a single ethnic group to the detriment of everyone else.
If you’re an American or Chinese I think the answer is obvious. If you’re neither I think preferring American ASI makes more sense.

solhando 17 Aug 2025 15:16 UTC
19 points
0
on: Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus
The comparison between Church founders and Startup founders is accurate. In startup communities, The Purpose Driven Church is a well known manual for building startup culture, attracting dedicated employees, and raising capital. I know more than one founder who claims it was by far the most useful book for creating their company, beating out all the books that are literally about creating startups.
What links here?
- Church Planting: Lessons from the Comments by Elizabeth (16 Apr 2026 18:40 UTC; 33 points)

solhando 15 Aug 2025 14:41 UTC
1 point
0
on: Somebody invented a better bookmark
I write in the books I read so I just flip to about where I stopped underlining or taking notes.

solhando 2 Aug 2025 21:49 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Observer Effect for belief measurement
Couldn’t you just ask “What would you estimate the probability I won the lottery before I asked you this question?” Or perhaps ask it a thousand questions generated randomly, with the one you actually want to know the answer to mixed in. There would be almost no information content in that question if your oracle knew there was a 99.9% chance any given question was generated randomly.

solhando 31 Jul 2025 21:32 UTC
4 points
1
on: Follow-up to “My Empathy Is Rarely Kind”
I agree with your first post.
However, I think the part of empathy that people will say you’re missing is that you’re putting “yourself” in someone else’s shoes, which is only half of it. Imagine you were Isekai’d away into someone else’s life where you had a history of being ineffective, unaccomplished, and self-pitying, with problems that could be solved quickly with relatively little objective effort. You can probably easily imagine how you’d quickly take actions to at least fix most of the low-hanging fruit in this situation. Clean your room, get a job, do at least some exercise, remove the nail and all that.
But if you put yourself in the position of that person, including their internal mental state, possible brain chemistry issues, history of failure despite attempts to fix it, and possibly limited inherent capacities relative to yours, the situation they are in would probably seem a lot less fixable. If you put yourself exactly in their position, with the exact mental state and capacities, you would be doing the exact same things they are currently.
For the woman whose pain is “not about the nail” there has to be something going on in her own head, whether it’s some history of trauma, history of repeatedly failing to address the problem to the point it becomes painful to address it, that is stopping her from addressing the problem. Otherwise she would just fix it, no? To empathize with her isn’t then to imagine yourself if you were that woman and had a nail in your head, but to imagine what it’s like to be her, including whatever it is that’s preventing her to solve her own problem.
This sort of empathy might be more useful in understanding people, which can help you achieve your own goals better. There’s always a need to make friends and influence people after all. Otherwise you’re right in that putting yourself in other people’s shoes (the ones who demand empathy are probably more likely to be pathetic), then seeing all the relatively easy things they could do to make their lives significantly better reasonably results in what you described with your first post.

solhando 26 Jul 2025 22:09 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: MachineMeridian’s comment on: So You Think You’ve Awoken ChatGPT
Thank you for the article. I’ll give it a read.
It’s not an easy answer. I’m a self-interested person, and I realized a while ago that many of my most productive and interesting relationships, both personal and in business, are the direct result of my activity on the internet. I already waste a lot of time commenting my thoughts, sometimes in long form, so I figure if I’m going to be reacting to stuff publicly, I might as well do so in the form of a blog where others might pick up on it. If that results in something good for me, influence, relationships, demonstration of niche intellectual ability the right sort of people in this world people find interesting, then that’s not a small part of my motivation.
At the same time I have more naive views about the virtue of just doing things for their own sake. Writing is definitely an excellent tool for fixing your own thought, as it forces you to communicate in a way that makes sense to other people, thus causing your own ideas to make sense to you. The problem with this line of thinking is that I’ve never been an exemplary writer in any sense, although hopefully I am better and more self-motivated than I used to be. What I can currently write in long-form unassisted I’m not satisfied with, which causes a sort of writers block that I really hate.
I’m integrating the advice of other people into what I’m planning to do, and hopefully with enough effort I’ll be able to produce (with critique but not rewriting by AI) something that satisfied both my desire to write for its own sake, while also producing something that other people might actually want to read. Also, I have the annoying consideration of being time- efficient. I by no means spend my time maximally efficiently, but struggling through writing burns a lot of my willpower points that ends up consuming a lot of time elsewhere.

solhando 19 Jul 2025 14:24 UTC
4 points
2
on: A night-watchman ASI as a first step toward a great future
I think the night-watchman concept is interesting, and probably is the ideal goal of alignment absent a good idea of what any other goal would ultimately lead to, but this post smuggles in concepts beyond the night watchman that would be very hard for anyone to swallow.
“Keeping the peace” internationally is pretty ambiguous, and I doubt that any major nation would be willing to give up the right of invasion as a last resort. Even if prevention of rogue super intelligence is seen as desirable, if preventing it also entails giving up a large amount of your current power, then I think world leaders will be pretty reluctant. The same can be said for “underhanded negotiation tactics”, which is both ambiguous, and not something most nations would want to give up. Most tactics in negotiation are underhanded in some sense, in that you’re using leverage you have over the other person to modify their actions.
The prevention of premature claims to space seems completely unnecessary as well. If the UK actually did something like sign over parts of Canada in return for a claim to the entire Milky Way, by now such a claim would be ignored completely (or maybe a small concession would be made for altering it) considering the UK has almost no space presence compared to the US, EU, China and Russia. The Treaty of Tordesillas was frequently renegotiated by Spain and Portugal, and almost completely ignored by the rest of the world.
Essentially I think this idea smuggles in a lot of other poison-pill, or unnecessary, ideas that would ultimately defeat the practically of implementing a night-watchman ASI at all. Either extinction is on the table, and we shouldn’t be giving ASI the power and drive to settle international conflicts or it isn’t, and we should be a lot more ambitious in the values and goals we assign.
What links here?
- Nathan Helm-Burger's comment on A night-watchman ASI as a first step toward a great future by Eric Neyman (20 Jul 2025 14:12 UTC; 2 points)

solhando 11 Jul 2025 19:12 UTC
12 points
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on: So You Think You’ve Awoken ChatGPT
This post is timed perfectly for my own issue with writing using AI. Maybe some of you smart people can offer advice.
Back in March I wrote a 7,000 word blog post about The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling. It did decently well considering the few subscribers I have, but the problem is that it was (somewhat obviously) written in huge part with AI. Here’s the conversation I had with ChatGPT. It took me about 3 hours to write.
This alone wouldn’t be an issue, but it is since I want to consistently write my ideas down for a public audience. I frequently read on very niche topics, and comment frequently on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit, sometimes in comment chains totaling thousands of words. The ideas discussed are usually quite half-baked, but I think can be refined into something that other people would want to read, while also allowing me to clarify my own opinions in a more formal manner than how they exist in my head.
The guy who wrote the Why I’m not a Rationalist article that some of you might be aware of wrote a follow up article yesterday, largely centered around a comment I made. He has this to say about my Schelling article; “Ironically, this commenter has some of the most well written and in-depth content I’ve seen on this website. Go figure.”
This has left me conflicted. On one hand, I haven’t really written anything in the past few months because I’m trying to contend with how I can actually write something “good” without relying so heavily on AI. On the other, if people are seeing this lazily edited article as some of the most well written and in-depth content on Substack, maybe it’s fine? If I just put in a little more effort for post-editing, cleaning up the em dashes and standard AI comparisons (It’s not just this, it’s this), I think I’d be able to write a lot more frequently, and in higher quality than I would be able to do on my own. I was a solid ~B+ English student, so I’m well aware that my writing skill isn’t anything exemplary.
I even agree with the conclusion of this article. That when someone notices they’re reading something written or edited by AI, it’s a serious negative signal and probably not worth spending the time to read more. I even got into a discussion earlier this week with someone who used AI to edit their book expressing that exact same sentiment.
So what do I do here? I want to write things, but I don’t seem to be able to do so well on my own. What I “wrote” with AI seems to have been good enough to attract people to read it (and at the very least I think I can say all the ideas communicated were my own, not GPT’s), so why not write more with it? For someone to say it’s some of the most well written and in-depth content is somewhat depressing, since it means that the AI writing, and not my own writing, is what has attracted people, but if that’s what the people like, who am I to disagree?
As far as improving my writing style, I read frequently, I try to comment an intelligent thought on everything I read (either in the margins of a book, or the comment section underneath an essay), but what more can I do? If this is a process that won’t leave me a good writer within the next ~5 years, won’t AI just get better at writing by then anyway, so wouldn’t it make more sense to get used to utilizing AI for my writing now?
Apologies if this is unrelated, but I’ve been thinking about this since the blog post I mentioned yesterday, and the advice on the bottom of this post seems relevant to my situation.