Ages and orbs

This is a summary of my entry for the Open Philanthropy AI Worldviews Contest, which you can view in full here. This essay attempts to bridge a gap between abstract models of AGI timelines and inside views from the semiconductor industry. Models like those in Cotra 2020 (“Bio Anc…

The title refers to a survey regularly cited as an indicator of expert opinion on questions of race and intelligence, distributed mainly to psychologists and reported by Heiner Rindermann, David Becker, and Thomas R. Coyle. The survey is not a credible indicator of expert opinion…

In the 1992 book Nanosystems, K. Eric Drexler sketched some bounds on maximum capabilities of nanotechnology under classical physics and chemistry, alongside proposals for realizing those capabilities. The resulting picture of atomically precise manufacturing (APM)a …

When I see something criticized for selection bias, it’s almost always to caution against making inferences related to causation. In particular, the issue is almost never directly about the sample population being “unrepresentative” of a population you’re trying to make inference…

Julia is a programming language designed to get high performance with code that’s easy to read and write. It’s really good! You should try it. If you already have, here’s my list of broadly useful things to be aware of that you might miss by just diving in. I don’t mean for this …

A recent post by Thomaaas on the EA Forum describes some reasons that the risk of existential catastrophe might not go zero (or down!) in the future. I wanted to mention one other reason, which is that big worlds are hard to keep safe. For example, if catastrophe can be triggere…

In a 2014 email made public in 2021, Scott Alexander wrote to explain why he reads, writes about, and cultivates goodwill among a cluster of online writers then known as neoreactionaries.a a This label is a bit dated. As far as I can tell, these figures …

Context: I’m not a utilitarian. This isn’t why I’m not a utilitarian—it’s just me playing with some perennial debates reappearing alongside Michael Nielsen’s notes, requests for critical writing on Effective Altruism, and prompts from Open Philanthropy. I do think utilitarians (…

Steve Koonin in Unsettled notices that presenting the ratio of record daily highs to record lows can be misleading about warming’s effect on extreme heat events. (Chapter 5, “Hyping the Heat”.) That’s true enough, but I find his argument somewhere between nitpicking and weak.

The web’s big thinkers periodically revisit big questions about modernity. Why is progress slowing down? (Is it?) Why is contemporary culture inferior to past golden ages? (Is it?) Sometimes the questions are more individualistic: Where are all the geniuses? Or, more cautiously a…