TFD

Will AI make ev­ery­thing more cor­re­lated?

• TFD 16 Apr 2026 15:27 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: StanislavKrym’s comment on: You Aren’t in Charge of the Over­ton Win­dow; Poli­tics Is Not In­te­rior Design

  I only addressed the defund the police issue because it is used as an example in the OP, I’m not trying to describe critics of the slogan in general. “Inappropriate use of strategy”, is my way of describing the view set forth in the OP, because I think it relates to people “speaking strategically” vs “just saying what they think”.

• TFD 16 Apr 2026 15:25 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: You Aren’t in Charge of the Over­ton Win­dow; Poli­tics Is Not In­te­rior Design

  Apologies, I tried to make this clear: I am referring to “high-dimensional discourse chess” that requires asserting or assuming “we can model how public acceptability shifts and cleverly intervene to steer those shifts.” That’s not about communicating an idea, it’s about the goal of convincing people of something in order to have them react in order to change the pubic acceptability of another thing.

  No need to apologize, the point of having discussions is th hash these things out, right? And any error or misunderstand may also me mine rather than yours.

  The thing that I find confusing is I feel like I get the vibe that is meant, but I don’t understand what the brightline or criteria are for when something is acceptable vs violates some norm. “High-dimensional discourse chess” to me kind of leans into this rather than clarifying the issue. I get that sense that people mean to address discursive strategies that in some way misleading, bad faith, “not truth-seeking”, or similar “vibes”. But in my view, whether these aspects apply to a person’s statements or a group’s rhetoric are likely to be contested, and the disagreement about those meta-questions are likely to have a high degree of overlap with the underlying object-level disagreement. I am worried that this causes a dynamic where people who disagree on the undelying issue often get into meta-debates about who is doing bad discource stuff, and that this is often unproductive.

  It seems you are saying something similar; you dislike the current system, and say it should be replaced instead of reformed, but don’t have a clear argument for the details.

  I strongly disagree with proponents of the “defund the police” slogan. Literally nothing I said has anything to do with my views on policing. I brought it up purely to address it in the context of your OP, as an example of the phenomenon under discussion. My personal interest in this has nothing to do with the defund the police example itself, and I think this goes to my concern about how meta-discussions often tend to meander to unproductive topics.

  That said, I’m curious what you think that supporters of the slogan would feel about your argument. My suspicion is that they wouldn’t think that the issue is as clean cut as you describe. I will avoid trying to describe what arguments they might make since I don’t want violate my own advice and get into the weeds on a topic that I view as a sideshow, but hopefully you can see my point here. When people have strong disagreements, accusations of meta-level bad behavior that seems obvious to a person on one side of the underlying issue may not seem as obvious to someone on the other side.

  And I wasn’t guessing about EA either; I have been in the room, repeatedly, when senior people in EA talked about shifting the Overton window on AI risk. So yes, don’t accuse others of doing this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t call them out when they say they are doing it!

  Part of my interest in these discussions is that I have zero interactions with anyone in the EA/​Rationalist spheres other than reading stuff online and in more recent years doing my own posting. I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I find statements like this very interesting and informative because I would like to understand what is going on to the extent I can. I find this difficult however, because I often find myself in the situation where when the statements being evaluated are public, I feel like people sometimes are overreading them. My read of many public statements that attract allegations of inappropriate discourse game playing is that they often appear to be downstream of disagreements on the object-level issues.

  So yes, don’t accuse others of doing this, but that doesn’t mean you can’t call them out when they say they are doing it!

  I’m not really sure how to take your statement as not being an accusation of EAs doing the thing you are criticizing. Are you saying that pronenent EAs would read what you have said here and publicly say “yes, we are doing this”? If not, I don’t think it really makes sense to say you are just calling out what they say they are doing. I understand you have non-public information here and of course you would use all the information you have access to to inform your own views. The thing that is difficult for me, as someone working off of only public info, is how to come to my own understanding of what is going on. If these people aren’t openly saying what they are doing, I can’t rely on “but they are saying it!” as something that shows that the behavior in question is over the line.

  Edit: I appear to be rate-limited, so I will add my clarifications here (hopefully that isn’t breaking any rules, appologies if so), and then comment once the limit is up (this and all below was added after the subsequent comment).

  I don’t think there is a bright line, there’s just a point being made about a gradient where discourse chess is on one side, and talking about object level facts in on the other. And I pointed out that on the chess side, people suck at getting what they want.

  Perhaps I misunderstood you then. My perspective is something like this:

  Speed of a car on a highway is a gradient, but if you are caught speeding, for practical purposes we might break down that gradient into buckets. If you are going 61 mph in a 60 zone, I have zero problem. If you are going 200 mph in a 60 zone, I have zero problem with you doing time in prison. Somewhere in there is a “messy middle” where people might reasonably disagree, but the disagreement is within acceptable parameters. Maybe I try to stay with 10 mpg of the speed limit but for you its 15. We disagree, but its a prison vs no-prison magnitude of disagreement. Even if think you should stay below 70 I don’t think 71 deserves jail time.

  The impression I got from your post, which may be mistaken, is that you think people who behave in a way that is too strategic are doing something that is bad or wrong. It seemed to me like you thought that “crossing a line” in this regard is or should be a norm-violation. I’m of the view that while in any given case what a person does along these lines might not be ideal, it shouldn’t be considered a norm violation. I think it is often very messy to distinquish strategic/​gameplaying/​intended-overton-shifting speech from “just saying what you think”. You could write something that to you feels like you are just putting your best understanding of the truth out there, but which someone else feels like is being too strategic. I think when people speech, they should avoid the “norm-violating” versions of strategic speech but shouldn’t focus too much on whether or not their speech is strategic or not.

  So I agree that imputing this type of behavior, as an accusation, is worrying, but that’s different than pointing out when the behavior was in fact intentional.

  For clarity, when I say it seems like you’re making an accusation, I’m not saying this accusation is wrong. If a person says “I saw so-and-so commit this crime” that is accusing that person of a crime. Its not bad to correctly accuse people of things! My issues is I feel like its often unclear what the accusation is, or (like I in this case I think?) if there even is an accusation. To me it seemed like you were saying that some EAs did an intentially bad thing, and it was bad of them to do it, I’m trying to understand if that is correct or not basically (and if you are saying they did something bad, what that thing is).

• TFD 16 Apr 2026 13:35 UTC

  7 points

  2

  on: You Aren’t in Charge of the Over­ton Win­dow; Poli­tics Is Not In­te­rior Design

  I’m somewhat confused by what people mean by “strategic” in these discussions. It seems to me like there are aspects of communication that I would call “stategic” but are uncontroversial. I would suggest the “grown not crafted” idea from IABIED. I think this is a extremely succinct and effective way to communicate the underlying technical idea, but of course expressing the idea in more technical language would also be truthful (arguably even more so). The difference isn’t that the “grown not crafted” way of communicating the idea is more truthful, but (I would infer) that it is predicted ot be more helpful in allowing others to understand the idea, even if they aren’t already famiiar with relevant technical knowledge. In other words, it is a more strategic way of communicating the idea.

  I don’t think that example is particularly controversial, but I think these discussions are meant to also apply to statements that are highly contentious and subject to adversarial dynamics. When we consider statements that are more in those domains, I think we enter a kind of “messy middle” where the truthfulness of a statement is much more contested and it isn’t necessarily as easy to seperate the core content from the communication strategy.

  Let’s take the “DEFUND THE POLICE” example from the post. I definitely believe that some people engage in the “window-stretching” as you describe. But I could also imagine proponents of the slogan saying something like this:

  “I genuinely believe that current policing practices are so unjust that the police deserve to be defunded. It would be better for policing to be reformed to correct these injustices while still carrying out legitimate policing functions. But saying I want to “defund the police” is genuinely true under the current system. If I only advocated for more centrist reforms that would actually be misleading about what I believe and trying to fit my beliefs into the overton window, not the other way around. Its extremely important to use slogans like “DEFUND THE POLICE” when you actually believe in them because the powerful simply ignore centrist calls for reform. They need to know how strongly we actually feel about this. Calling for measures such as defunding is the only way to have our voices heard”.

  I think such a view lives in this messy middle. People who agree are likely to see it as genuine while critics will be tempted to claim inappropriate use of stategy. The issue of whether the person who holds this view is being “truthful” essentially collapses back into the underlying object-level issues. Those who agree on the object-level will also agree of the meta question of whether what the person is doing is acceptable, and the reverse for someone who disagrees.

  As I allude to here I think the best approach is to simply argue over the object-level question, and leave aiside the dicussions about whether someone is being stategic, how truth-seeking they are, if they are “gaslighting” etc.

• TFD 15 Apr 2026 22:41 UTC

  1 point

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

  I think it would likely make a difference if you primarily had in mind the step where an AI system generates some text or video vs when a human user receives the generated content and communicates it further.

  For the output generation itself my sense is there are various arguments out there and it will likely get litigated in various contexts but its unclear how it will pan out. Some arguments this is protected are arguments similar to the ones that came up in the Moody v NetChoice SC case (although Barrett explicitly calls out in a concurrence that AI might change the analysis), as well as the possibility that the rights of human “listeners” would be protected.

  My take here is that this issue is likely to be important but is very much in flux and its worthwhile to think about how AI policy and legal actions can held this move in a positive direction, given that early cases on this topic could be highly influential on this area of law.

  For human users who repost AI generated content, my gut instinct is that this is likely to be viewed as normal speech, with the AI part not changing things all that much necessarily. I think this would mean any regulations would need to address existing 1A exceptions (fraud, defamation etc.) or meet strict scrutiny.

• TFD 13 Apr 2026 20:55 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: The policy sur­round­ing Mythos marks an ir­re­versible power shift

  Since the release of ChatGPT, at any given time, anyone on the planet with a few bucks could access the current most capable AI model, the SOTA.

  I do think you are correct that what is going on with Mythos strongly suggests that AI companies will be more likely to withhold models and/​or capabilities in the future, and that this is potentially very concerning.

  On the other hand, I’m not sure that the quoted statement is strictly true. AI companies may have internal “helpful only” models or internal models with fewer safeguards that aren’t made publicly available. Likewise with everything that is going down between Anthropic and the current admin we know that they made available a special system (“Claude Gov”) to the military, which presumably has fewer safeguards compared to publicly available models.

• TFD 13 Apr 2026 20:48 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet)’s comment on: Stop­ping AI is eas­ier than Reg­u­lat­ing it.

  But one way of trying to define the limits of the “magic wand” here would be: You get to magically choose a policy to be adopted, but you don’t get to magically control people’s behavior afterwards. So if you want to get people to limit AI uses, your policy needs to deal with their potential incentives to do otherwise.

  That makes sense to an extent. If I can summarize my understanding of your point, for purposes of understanding how enforceable a policy is, we assume that the policy is implemented and than analyze enforcement. We want to do this to decompose the difficulty of implementing the policy from the question of post-implementation enforcement. Assuming that both stopping and regulating were implemented, you give reasons to believe that regulation would be harder to enforce. Is that correct?

  The part I don’t understand is how that relates to your conclusions at the end:

  Note that “Stopping AI is too hard, we need to regulate it in a different way instead” is not on the list.

  Where the list is of “the coherent points of view available”. I don’t think this follows because something can be “hard” for non-enforcement reasons. So someone can coherently believe that regulation has non-enforcement advantages and enforcement-related disadvantages, with the advantages outweighing the disadvantages (relative to stopping). This seems entirely coherent to me (which isn’t to say that I agree with it).

  If the statement I quote above has an implicit (only as it relates to enforcement) attached, then I don’t really understand what it means beyond the fact that if someone accepts your argument, they are in fact accepting your argument. The conclusion becomes almost tautological, such that it doesn’t really seem to relate to coherence to me (because someone who disagrees probably disagrees with an earlier step in your argument).

• TFD 13 Apr 2026 11:18 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Stop­ping AI is eas­ier than Reg­u­lat­ing it.

  Also, when I say “it’s easier”, what do I mean? Well, there are a few ways in which stopping is hard. I’d separate technical and incentive challenges from political challenges, and I’m setting aside political challenges, because I think we should be clear about what should happen and why, and then seek to accomplish it politically.

  I’m definitely sympathetic to this idea, but I wonder how to apply it in practice. For example, it seems to me like a critic of your position could say the following:

  By your own reasoning, it seems like what “should happen” under this standard is regulation rather than stopping. You argue that regulation would allow the realization of the benefits of AI but might not acually be safe. But it seems like the reasons why regulation would not be safe are themselves political. They follow from some actor making a decision to do a particular thing that isn’t safe (using AI in an unsafe way contrary to their agreements), even though it is technical possible for them to do otherwise (they could just comply with the agreements). If regulation potentially realizes a higher benefit (due to the additional benefit of using AI safely), by this standard, isn’t it what “should happen” since we could seek to accomplish compliance with international agreements politically, by convincing the countries in question that it is in their own best interests to comply?

  You might say that ths is about their “incentives” rather than politics, but what’s the difference? Why is failure to comply with an international agreement apolitical while the decision of whether to make the agreement is political? If someone believes that it will be hard to make international agreements to stop AI because countries will have incentives against this, does that mean that those considerations now fall under “incentives” and thus count for purpose of determining whether stopping is “hard”?

I want the deal that the US Govern­ment got

• TFD 26 Mar 2026 21:24 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Dis­patch from An­thropic v. Depart­ment of War Pre­limi­nary In­junc­tion Mo­tion Hearing

  On X Roger Parloff mentioned that the topic of “the Pickering framework” came up. It isn’t 100% clear to me what was said but this seems to raise the possibility of the 1A issues being considered using Pickering Balancing. Do you recall this coming up, and could you add any context?

Assess­ing het­ero­gene­ity in METR’s late 2025 de­vel­oper pro­duc­tivity experiment

• TFD 14 Mar 2026 12:26 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: robo’s comment on: Don’t ac­cuse your in­ter­locu­tor of mak­ing ar­gu­ments that aren’t rooted in evidence

  I’m not a lawyer so I won’t claim deep understanding of legal procedure but I have heard of the phrase. I don’t understand the relevance, I’m not trying to speak to a courtroom context here, although I can understand if you feel that my post is a bit too glib and paints with too broad a brush, ignoring special cases. My intention was more to address (in a humorous manner) a pattern I see in random conversations or inforemal debates as opposed to contexts where there are actual “rules of evidence” that are established to apply. In fact, I think part of the pattern that I am trying to speak to is that people sometimes import concepts from places like courtrooms and try to apply them where they aren’t appropriate. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” being a common example. In normal conversation you shouldn’t have to follow rules of “admitting” evidence to the conversation in my view, and invoking legal concepts often just masks the underlying disagreement.

Don’t ac­cuse your in­ter­locu­tor of mak­ing ar­gu­ments that aren’t rooted in evidence

Does the First Amend­ment pro­tect An­thropic from Hegseth?

We are all le­gal re­al­ists now

• TFD 21 Feb 2026 19:17 UTC

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  in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: Ponzi schemes as a demon­stra­tion of out-of-dis­tri­bu­tion generalization

  Correct, fixed. Thanks!

Ponzi schemes as a demon­stra­tion of out-of-dis­tri­bu­tion generalization

• TFD 18 Feb 2026 10:50 UTC

  1 point

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  on: Cor­re­la­tion Does in Fact Im­ply Causation

  I’m using ‘imply’ in an empirical rather than logical sense

  I feel like this is using the word somewhat differently than is meant by the phrase you are discussing. I’ve always interpreted “correlation doesn’t imply causation” to mean that if X and Y are correlated you can’t necessarily say that X → Y or Y → X (probably based on some prior about the direction like timing), not that correlation is somehow completely unrelated to causation.

• TFD 18 Feb 2026 10:43 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Cor­re­la­tion Does in Fact Im­ply Causation

  The causal relationships within them are cyclic, putting them outside the scope of Reichenbach’s principle and Pearl-style causal analysis.

  When we start introducing time into the mix I think it can be helpful to be somewhat more particular about how we define variables in a causal setting. When you have limited time resolution measurments of a quantity over time you can view it as a single “variable” that has is involved in a causal cycle. But you could also “unroll” this cycle in time and view the quantity at each time as a seperate variable. If you do this it seems to me like Pearl-style causal analysis generally holds. Even if X and Y have a montonic pattern over time with prior time points of each series causing its later time points but no causal interaction between them, the X(t)s and Y(t)s aren’t correlated with each other, and the pattern over time is fully explained by the causal structure. This makes sense in a Pearl-style analysis because you would have an SCM for the series that looks something like X(t) = f(X(t-1, t-2, ….)), which is treating the X(t)s as seperate variables. The correlation over time of X and Y isn’t a correlation between variables in this model, it involves mixing different variables together. If we treat them seperately it seems like the Pearl-style analysis still works and makes no prediction errors, and in fact has the advantage of being robust to potential interventions.

  While (3) gets a mention from time to time, none of the papers I have seen on extending causal analysis to cyclic systems have (IMO) made much progress.

  Although I won’t claim to understand all the claims and concepts fully, I’ve found this paper to be interesting and helpful in this regard, and to me some of the concepts seem to have connections to the persective I offer above.

• TFD 10 Feb 2026 17:07 UTC

  5 points

  2

  in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform

  For clarity, I’m not trying to make the case for or against consequentialism/​virtue ethics, I’m just trying to respond to the narrow point that I quoted. I don’t think people should choose an approach to ethical decision making based primarily on this one specific point.

  If you care about the consequences of your crypto philanthropy strategy, your performance on those consequences can be contradicted empirically. But so what if the contradiction arrives in the form of your bankruptcy, along with blemishing the reputation of the movement you were trying to support?

  I think this is consistent with my point. From what I can tell SBF continues to claim that he was acting with good intentions and high integrity, despite being convicted for fraud, which I think most people would reasonably assume demonstrates a strong lack of those characteristics. This seems like it might be a case of self deception about one’s own virtues. This is the kind of thing I meant when I said it seems like this is a quintisentially example of self deception. From what I can tell it is extremely common that people who aren’t virtuous still think of themselves as virtuous.

  It seems to me like a lot of people involved in the SBF scandal admit that it was bad and that they made strategic mistakes by trusting SBF, but they often don’t say that this is related to virtue failures on their part, such as lacking integrity or honesty. In other words, they admit to their actions potentially having bad consequences as the result of evidence about those consequences, but don’t admit to these events shedding light on their virtues or character.