Friends! Having Teddy staying with us has illustrated how possible it is to train dogs not to chase cats! Teddy has come a long way from his first night here, when our house was like an episode of Tom & Jerry. Everyone has pitched in to help. Well done to the whole Team! We worked it out together! ❤️

But man it's amazing how short history is. For A City on Mars we had a chapter (later cut) on the use of the American West as a metaphor for space colonization. I think it was Patricia Limerick who pointed out that the time between Wounded Knee and the opening of Frontierland at Disney was 65 years.

Should clarify - the primary component of lebensraum was territorial expansion. But clearing the territory of undesirables to create space for ethnic Germans was also a major element.

This shows up occasionally in climate work, which is ironic since some strands of Doomerism are used to deprioritize environmental protection in favor of, say, space colonization fantasies.

Can't wait to play this, it looks so pretty!

Whatever weird shit might be happening at like the commanding heights of effective altruism (and it does look like there’s weird shit), I do think it’s worth reiterating that the vast majority of folks who prescribe to EA are overall really good people, & the vulgar form of the argument is very true

You have to separate effective altruism (mosquito nets are a better use of funds than "raising awareness") from effective altruism (the only thing that matters is ensuring that we have a galaxy-spanning civilization of a quadrillion quadrillion people in the year 5000).

“The first step to doing good in an effective manner is to be honest about our cognitive limitations—and to take seriously the ever-present danger that even the most well-meaning and thoroughly “researched” interventions may prove to be counterproductive.”

In the real world, enduring progress comes through non-zero-sum cooperation over time, and anyone who has worked in a professional context knows that nothing makes such cooperation more difficult than the presence of egotistical men convinced they are bold risk-takers possessed of masculine energy.

you rotate the square piece when you play Tetris don't you

Tangentially, this is another example of how misogyny (like all bigotry) makes people's brains smooth. Calling this a "false binary" gives it too much credence, there's no substance here beyond the misogyny. If you think the AI pessimists are right, there are many other paths available, such as:

I don't think anyone who thinks remotely seriously about "alignment" or LLM agents doing weird/bad shit thinks this is remotely serious. But wanting to avoid a slowdown of the AI boom make a guy say weird things.

"I personally absolutely do upgrade my assessment of someone's AI alignment qualifications if I find out they go to RMN," by which username John Wentworth appears to mean Red Means No, a "consensual non-consent event" which simulates sexual assault. This is weird stuff, man!

the big questions of "what are LLMs" and "what is alignment" remain important but they are separable from the question of AI safety we can talk about safety as a systems process regardless of what the nature of the technology is, and AI companies are failing in those processes

Apple is changing macOS permissions because AI agents make broad access more dangerous. This is a mundane security problem with familiar solutions; least privilege, explicit authorization and strong access controls. Don’t give an agent broad access then rely only on “alignment” to make it behave.