Lots of people in the Bay seem to be thinking about/preparing for/making funding decisions based on the idea that lots of philanthropy will be given to AIS/EA cause areas very soon (i.e. end of year-ish). I would love for someone to write the comprehensive steel man case against this, as I think it’s probably underrated (some reasons to think they won’t give the money/it won’t be as much as some assume. Happy to comment/ speak to whoever is interested in doing this.  

Me and @Fran are co-hosting a podcast, The World Can Be Better! (hosted on Substack, also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube) In our first co-hosted episode we interview @finm about better futures, the intelligence explosion, and Fin's underrated post 'No ghost in the machine'.  We'll be recording more episodes soon. We're aiming to a) keep it accessible to an interested but non-specialist audience, and b) to talk to cool people who are working on making the world better. This is on top of full time jobs for both of us, so we're not promising weekly uploads or anything too fancy.  LMK in the comments or dm if there is someone you'd love to be a guest on our podcast! The ideal guest is a) doing good effectively in an interesting way and b) is down to joke around a bit. 

A recurring sub-theme across multiple of my research interests this year have been various forms of deception checking, particularly automated deception checking. I've gotten pretty disappointed in the space. Not all the time (eg Pangram is great), but consistently they can be bad, and bad in ways that are not obvious to outsiders or low-information buyers. If you're a deception checking company, there's a consistent tradeoff for what you can invest your resources in: 1. You can invest in better deception checking 2. You can invest in better deception. Specifically, you can invest in more and more elaborate lies about how your product totally works. Across the board[1], it seems like many companies (perhaps correctly?) decided that the profit-maximizing move is #2. This doesn't work forever -- eventually people wise up and are suspicious of the, ahem, AI Snake Oil that the deception detectors sell. And in fields where actual detectors do work (say Pangram for AI text detection), I think they eventually rise above the noise. This is probably not a field that you can keep lying forever, particularly when better alternative exist. But the lying lie detectors and the scamming scam detectors can keep lying and scamming for a long time. Every new form of deception can create a secondary grift window. The existence proof and commonality of this dynamic so far should make us be suspicious of and guard against this dynamic continuing to happen as we enter new domains in AI epistemics, and the need for novel forms of deception detection. Consider the first wave of superhumanly enhanced persuasive text and videos in the future. Afterwards, we might see an overflow of "detector" companies for superhuman manipulation, that don't work but will try to persuade low-information buyers that they totally do work (possibly with superhumanly enhanced arguments in their own favor). In the long run humanity can probably figure out which detectors actually work vs are fake, but a

My first Fable benchmark was to one-shot turning `emacs -batch -l dunnet` into a graphical adventure game and it hit the safety guardrails bc one of the puzzles involve nitroglycerine 😭

I find it icky/disappointing when things like this end up on the 80k job board. Can someone make a case why this is a high-impact job worth advertising on the job board?