We surely now:
Small typo
Steven
Karma: 38
Redwood City, USA—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
Wouldn’t there be even cheaper ways to satisfy preferences about living humans? A fake, cheap version which satisfies that preference would probably be possible in the same way that a preference for a pet can be satisfied by a plush toy. Wanting humans or uploads but not being able to satisfy that desire with something fake seems like it isn’t how many of our actual desires work
You can keep talking more. You can repeat the proper analysis for your vaccine, talk about your own behavior, talk about why other people analyzing your behavior is either good or bad. You don’t have to concede the public square to someone else because you’re concerned they will misinterpret things and in fact these examples seem like situations where you can and should talk your way out of them
Redwood City – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2025
Isn’t the theory that consultants add value by saying true obvious things? If you realize you’re surrounded by sycophants, you might need someone who you’re sure won’t just tell you that you’re amazing (unless the consultant is also a yes man and dooms you even harder)
Thanks for writing this. I’m not sure I’d call your beliefs moderate, since they involve extracting useful labor from misaligned AI by making deals with them, sometimes for pieces of the observable universe or by verifying with future tech.
On the point of “talking to AI companies”, I think this would be a healthy part of any attempted change although I see that PauseAI and other orgs tend to talk to AI companies in a way that seems to try to make them feel bad by directly stating that what they are doing is wrong. Maybe the line here is “You make sure that what you say will still result in you getting invited to conferences” which is reasonable but I don’t think that talking to AI companies gets at the difference between you and other forms of activism.
I think you’re pretty severely mistaken about bullshit jobs. You said
At the start of this post we mentioned “bullshit jobs” as a major piece of evidence that standard “theory of the firm” models of organization size don’t really seem to capture reality. What does the dominance-status model have to say about bullshit jobs?
But there are many counter examples of this not being a real concept. See here for many of them: https://www.thediff.co/archive/bullshit-jobs-is-a-terrible-curiosity-killing-concept/
How would a military which is increasingly run by AI factor into these scenarios? It seems most similar to organizational safety a la google building software with SWEs but the disanalogy might be that the AI is explicitly supposed to take over some part of the world and maybe it interpreted a command incorrectly. Or does this article only consider the AI taking over because it wanted to take over?
Huh, did you experience any side effects?
I think discernment is not essential to entertainment. If people really want to learn what a slightly off piano sounds like and also pay for expert piano tuning, then that’s fine, but I don’t think people should be looked down upon for not having that level of discernment.
How would the agent represent non-coherent others? Like humans don’t have entirely coherent goals and in cases where the agent learns that it may satisfy one or another goal, how would it select which goal to choose? Take a human attempting to lose weight, with goals to eat to satisfaction and to not eat. Would the agent give the human food or withhold it?
One thing I find weird is that most of these objects of payment are correlated. The best paying jobs also have the best peers also have the most autonomy also have the most fun. Low paid jobs were mostly drudgery along all axes in my experience
Thanks for the summary. Why should this be true?
The fact that sympathy for hedonic utilitarianism is strongly correlated with intelligence is a somewhat worrying datapoint in favor of the plausibility of squiggle-maximizers.
Embracing positive sensory experience due to higher human levels of intelligence implies a linearity that I don’t think is true among other animals. Are chimps more hedonic utilitarian than ants than bacteria? Human intelligence is too narrow for this to be evidence of what something much smarter would do
Thank you for writing this. My girlfriend and I would like kids, but I generally try not to bring AI up around her. She got very anxious while listening to an 80k hours podcast on AI and it seemed generally bad for her. I don’t think any of my work will end up making an impact on AI, so I think basically the CS Lewis quote applies. Even if you know the game you’re playing is likely to end, there isn’t anything to do since there are no valid moves if the new game actually starts.
I did want to ask, how did you think about putting your children in school? Did you send them to a public school?
What does impossible mean in the context of clock neurons?
impossible in the first few moves.
What causes them to be unable to fire?
Q. What is generalization really for? What does it offer you?
Based on the vibe of the post, it seems like you’re trying to point at the concept of “being able to do many things”. I guess generalization isn’t ‘for’ anything, it’s a concept. For an agent, generalization is a method of being able to achieve an outcome based on limited past experience without needing to waste resources figuring out strategies it could have made if only it could generalize better. I can’t really tell based on what you said what I’m supposed to answer with “What does it offer you?”. Like, generalization offers me the ability to recognize bad chess moves in new scenarios that I haven’t seen, or it offers me the ability to take over the universe based on limited knowledge of physics. I don’t know where you’re trying to limit the word
I would add “finish it”. Many projects don’t actually get finished, you skip the last working set etc etc
I think this is in tension with the idea that green can be conservation of what he was talking about where spirituality is the idea of facing the other. That means that cutting down a redwood cuts away the other and the awe that you would feel in favor of your own power. Green isn’t a Buddhist view of the world, it’s the idea that there is a boundary between you and other and the other is worth regarding
This seems like an odd choice to me, could you share the prompt for conversations checking for violations? I think it’s worth making sure that Claude doesn’t have a non-neutral understanding of its own constitution where other models might disagree