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
Steven
Karma: 40
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
I have to say that this is the first essay in a long time that I read in its entirety. I really like a defense of green, since I remember talking a while ago with friends about how green couldn’t possibly be a real personality type. Surely it was just a way to be black. I think that this was a good point, especially at the end of the appendix where all of our desires come from nature, so in a sense we can’t help but be green. I do think of green as being more about equilibrium in the current state of nature while the uglier parts of nature tend to be ignored. For example, death in a green mindset looks more like peacefully passing away in ones sleep while death in a black mindset looks like very slow decay. I think basically every color can be said to exist in nature, it’s more about ones reaction to that fact that determines the color.
Super good essay, I’m glad you wrote it!
Do you have an example of a HHH dataset available on the internet, or what a few examples of what those look like?
This made me think of Carmack’s integral of value over time vs maximal value. Oftentimes, we are LARPing because LARPing is a lot easier and faster than, as you say, debug until you know exactly what went wrong. When a program crashes, you’ll get a ton of logging information, but it’s often easier to just add retries and move on. If you’re working under deadlines, you know that, in some sense, the quicker fix where you’re bumping around in the dark will work and might be just as good as the slower fix of truly understanding the reason for a crash.
This is much less helpful for your own personal understanding, but often what you are delivering is a project, not an increase in understanding. When you want to stop LARPing, you have to go very slowly, and you don’t really have time to not LARP in most areas of life. This has the bad effect of making my own personal understanding of many subjects much more shallow than I would like, but it lets me deliver projects, which is net better for my company than deeply understanding software internals. In terms of things that I am trying to deeply learn, there are really only a few areas at a time that I can actually take a shot of understanding, and I have to be sure that I actually want to understand those areas.
I found this post helpful for clarifying the concept of LARPing, in the sense of technical subjects.
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