It's worth saying that the fact that most arrows go up on the OWiD chart could just point to two independent trends, one of growth rising almost everywhere and another of happiness rising almost everywhere, for two completely independent reasons. Without cases where negative or zero growth persists for a long time, it's hard to rule this out. 

Those are reasonable points, but I'm not sure they are enough to overcome the generally reasonable heuristic that dramatic events will go better if people involved anticipate them and have had a chance to think about them and plan responses beforehand, than if they take them by surprise. 

"Real gdp, adjusted for variable inflation, shows dead even growth. "    I asked about gdp per capita right now, not growth rates over time. Do you have a source showing that the US doesn't actually have higher gdp per capita?

Inequality is probably part of the story, but I had a vague sense median real wages are higher in the US. Do you have a source saying that's wrong? Or that it goes away when you adjust for purchasing power? 

Usually we are the ones accussed (not always unfairly to be honest given Yudkowsky's TIME article) of being so fanatical we'd risk nuclear war to further our nefararious long-tern goals. The claim that nuclear war is preferable to us is novel at least.

Also, I don't like Scott Alexander's politics at all, but in the interests of strict accuracy I don't think he is a monarchist, or particularly monarchism sympathetic (except insofar as he finds some individuals with far-right views who like monarchy kind of endearing.) If anything, I had the impression that whilst Scott has certainly been influenced by and promoted the far right in many ways, a view that monarchism is just really, really silly was one of the things that genuinely kept him from regarding himself as fully in sympathy with the neo-reactionaries. 

"In response, Epoch AI created Frontier Math — a benchmark of insanely hard mathematical problems. The easiest 25% are similar to Olympiad-level problems. The most difficult 25% are, according to Fields Medalist Terence Tao, "extremely challenging," and would typically need an expert in that branch of mathematics to solve them.

Previous models, including GPT-o1, could hardly solve any of these questions.^[20] In December 2024, OpenAI claimed that GPT-o3 could solve 25%."

I think if your going to mention the seemingly strong performance of GPT-o3 on Frontier Math, it's worth pointing out the extremely poor performance of all LLMs including  when they were given Math Olympiad questions more recently,. though they did use o3 mini rather than o3, so I guess it's a not a direct comparison: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/reports-of-llms-mastering-math-have
"The USA Math Olympiad is an extremely challenging math competition for the top US high school students; the top scorers get prizes and an invitation to the International Math Olympiad. The USAMO was held this year March 19-20. Hours after it was completed, so there could be virtually no chance of data leakage, a team of scientists gave the problems to some of the top large language models, whose mathematical and reasoning abilities have been loudly proclaimed: o3-Mini, o1-Pro, DeepSeek R1, QwQ-32B, Gemini-2.0-Flash-Thinking-Exp, and Claude-3.7-Sonnet-Thinking. The proofs output by all these models were evaluated by experts. The results were dismal: None of the AIs scored higher than 5% overall."

What's DEAM? 

Another, very obvious reason is just that more EA people are near real power now than in 2018, and with serious involvement in power and politics comes  tactical incentives to avoid saying what you actually think. I think that is probably a lot of what is going on with Anthropic people playing down their EA connections. 

I don't think it's absolutely clear from the one-sentence quote alone that Amanda was claiming personal lack of knowledge of EA (which would absolutely be deceptive if she was obviously), though I agree that is one reasonable reading. She has her GWWC membership fairly prominently displayed on her personal website, so if she's trying to hide being or having been EA, she's not doing so very strongly. 

Depends how far left. I'd say centre-left views would get less push back, but not necessarily further left ones. But yeah fair point that there is a standard set of views in the community that he is somewhat outside.