Muireall Prase

She’s clearly saying that folk functionalism is downstream of that kind of wishful thinking, which it often is, not that people think AI have souls?

Fortunate not to be navigating this situation yet myself, but I don’t think I’d go out of my way to help OpenAI on this right now. Really unclear to me what the academic community gets out of it.

I’m sure you have.

I more or less stopped engaging with LW/EA a couple years ago when I became convinced anything I could do to push things in a positive direction was outweighed by my participation lending this enterprise any legitimacy.

You too can follow the rules perfectly, and I was pretty good at it, but all that walking on glass is just to avoid triggering reflexive dismissal or derailing. You sacrifice all urgency and you’re still only a curiosity, not an “epistemic peer”.

I more or less stopped engaging with LW/EA a couple years ago when I became convinced anything I could do to push things in a positive direction was outweighed by my participation lending this enterprise any legitimacy.

Fortunate not to be navigating this situation yet myself, but I don’t think I’d go out of my way to help OpenAI on this right now. Really unclear to me what the academic community gets out of it.

No comment on the workshop itself or the rest of this remarkable tweet, but “appearance of impropriety” is a staple of professional ethics! Appearances undermine public trust and give cover to bad actors. You don’t need esoteric wisdom passed down by Scott Alexander to make a case for being normal.

I think this paragraph on funding entanglement is an understatement. Open Phil made a $30 million grant to OpenAI while Christiano and Dario Amodei were employed by OpenAI, advisors to Open Phil, and living with Karnofsky, at the time engaged to Daniela. web.archive.org/web/20250106...

My most pro-cancer take is that you should think giving it the shape of a coding assistant and selling access is perverse beyond countenance whether or not you think it could be conscious.

George Kateb, Human Dignity (2014)

“But there is one thing that only humanity can do that would count as its justification in the eyes of some external judge, if there were one that was appropriately designed in accordance with the highest human standards. (Of course there is circularity in such a thought-experiment.)”

And I finished #1 in the 2025 Vox Future Perfect Contest (forecasts scored over the whole year)! I’m not sure what happened here. No especially high-scoring forecasts, but I only lost a few points on a few. I guess once in striking range you eventually get lucky on a bundle of 20-30 questions.

If they bring back the view sorted by my score I’ll post that, but I think my best question was on Russia-Ukraine peace. No special insight, and I wasn’t even particularly further from the crowd than on other questions. I just kept the forecast updated better (20 vs my median 4 updates).

This sounds like a joke, but it's literally the argument. Here's Scott Alexander, who would like you to believe Lynn's numbers have been confirmed by a preprint that averages them with data on learning outcomes and finds the result correlates similarly with measures of national development.

I tried writing one of these a few years ago, for a ~2012 version of myself that just woke up from a coma and still thinks he does something valuable for civil discourse by giving bad ideas a fair hearing—even if that's valuable, he's lying about doing it. muireall.space/acx/

Added a section. I didn't include this example to begin with because I was worried that it would trigger much more defensiveness than the other examples, particularly considering the effort Alexander puts into preempting attacks here. Maybe it will help to address that directly.

I tried writing one of these a few years ago, for a ~2012 version of myself that just woke up from a coma and still thinks he does something valuable for civil discourse by giving bad ideas a fair hearing—even if that's valuable, he's lying about doing it. muireall.space/acx/

This is not to bludgeon him for wrongthink. It's for his readers: when he says he's been freaking out, recognizes his biases, and wishes for reasons to disbelieve the study, know he was citing it favorably 7 years prior alongside his strategy to promote its "consensus" without publicly endorsing it.

I tried writing one of these a few years ago, for a ~2012 version of myself that just woke up from a coma and still thinks he does something valuable for civil discourse by giving bad ideas a fair hearing—even if that's valuable, he's lying about doing it. muireall.space/acx/

I probably should have included this, from his 2021 review of The Cult of Smart. This is about the survey that was one of his two links to evidence for "HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct" in 2014.

I tried writing one of these a few years ago, for a ~2012 version of myself that just woke up from a coma and still thinks he does something valuable for civil discourse by giving bad ideas a fair hearing—even if that's valuable, he's lying about doing it. muireall.space/acx/

Good post by @titotal.bsky.social. I’ve come to expect these forecasts to be overdetermined by a few key assumptions that are only obscured by quantitative models and parameter playgrounds, but AI 2027 seems not to even motivate those assumptions well. titotal.substack.com/p/a-deep-cri...

On what to do about “the most intractable factor militating against socially responsible science and engineering: namely, the enormous value placed on (certain kinds of) technical merit, and the disregard for those deemed not to have (those kinds of) merit.” (Mody, The Squares)