Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I have read offical Iraq War after-action reports that basically concede that the United States would not have invaded Iraq if they hadn't been the only country in the world to not send official condolences after 9-11.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
It is most likely not misconduct at all, and certainly not serious misconduct. The jury instructions include, "when deciding whether to believe a witness and how much importance to give a witness's testimony, you must look at all the evidence, drawing on your own common sense and experience of life." If someone is a nurse, and they think that gives them special insight as to which side's psychiatric expert to trust, that's fair game.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
The core physical idea is:
59Co + neutron flux + energy = vaporized 60Co
Cobalt 59 and energy are dirt cheap compared to neutron flux. Cobalt 60 can be manufactured beforehand by placing 59Co in a nuclear reactor for a few months, or it can be generated on-site by surrounding a nuclear warhead with cobalt 59.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
I mostly stopped using AI to generate humorous images after they finally fixed the "generate a cartoon sponge character" loophole.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
It’s hard not to read the report in light of the “supply-chain risk” nonsense that Anthropic got into earlier this year. It’s pretty clever for them to be like, “I guess we’ll just have to pour all of this valuable intelligence onto the ground…”
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Now this is what begging for regulatory capture looks like. Two things stick out in that regard.
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The heavy emphasis on US geopolitical adversaries.
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The contrast between Anthropic-provided AI services (good) and AI services provided by other companies (bad).
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Maybe the frontier labs would do better hiring engineers who are a little less mentally fragile.
Any researcher emotionally sane either:
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Quit years ago because they understood the risks (Hinton, Kokotajlo, arguably Sutskever), or
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Doesn't understand the potential of the technology well enough to make meaningful progress (LeCunn, Chollet).
Meta AI hires normal people. Look where that's gotten them.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
I still don't think this works out. The total addressable market for AI services in a regulated innovation-skeptical licensing regime is (to within an order of magnetude) $500 billion. The total addressable market in a world where Anthropic is free to pursue unregulated recursive self-improvement is ~all economic value in the universe.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
You know, this kind of makes sense for when Anthropic lobbies against open weights, or against Chinese model use, or in favor of chip export restrictions, but I don't really see how regulating frontier capabilities research helps Anthropic's valuation.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
AI X-Risk Goes Mainstream?
Jacob Coxon:
116,400,000 views, 634,000 likes.
Evan Hubinger (head of alignment at Anthropic):
34,000,000 views, 51,000 likes.
None of this is substantially different from what certain AI industry insiders have been saying for 5-ish years now, but it's clear from the replies, quote-tweets, and engagement statistics that most people are hearing about this for the first time. Yes, there was clearly some coordination with friendly media prior to the announcement given the almost simultaneous WSJ article (whereas news outlets were initially reluctant to publish anything on the unexpected news of OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize Problem). One can take the maximally conspiratorial position that this is a 4D bankshot by Democrats to end tech innovation forever, but it was going to break through eventually.
In other words, Coffeezilla is now on the case.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Apply the intermediate value theorem. If AI started 2026 much worse than human mathematicians, and (hypothetically) by the end of 2026 AI is much better than human mathematicians, then at some point in 2026 AI capabilities pass through the point at which they are useful but still need human mathematician assistance to reach their full potential.
I think that the draft proof was itself largely written by AI, and so the controversy is about which specific group of humans pressing the, “insert coins to solve mathematics”, button gets the credit.
EDIT: Also my understanding is that the draft proof was for a related-but-not-Millennium-Prize-worthy subproblem.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I got a news alert on my laptop after the result was announced. It was for the head of the Smithsonian resigning. There’s nothing on Fox News, nothing on CNN. The media is asleep at the wheel. Normies have no idea the man-made horrors beyond our comprehension that are being built as we speak.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I have no idea what OpenAI’s internal data pipelines look like, but I think it’s best to assume that anything you type into the chatbox can and will be used against you by Sam Altman/the government/The Basilisk.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Relevant paragraph:
”We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).”
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
The problem with the Nazis wasn't that they wanted to restrict immigration and expel foreign influence. It wasn't even (really) that they hated Jews. The problem with the Nazis was that they had an expansionist foreign policy.
What is the AfD position on German Irredentism? I expect that it's not in the official platform documents that they want to annex Austria and take back Königsberg, but what do the rank-and-file voters think of these questions?
Annals of Great Friday-at-6:00PM Announcements: "Caroline Ellison Has Joined Manifund."
For those needing a refresher, Caroline Ellison was Sam Bankman-Fried's lieutenant in charge at Alameda Research, the hedge fund he used to embezzle FTX customer funds. She pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud and conspiracy charges. Manifund is an effective altruism grantmaking and infrastructure provider spun-off from Manifold Markets.
I think this is definitive evidence that no, the Effective Altruism community did not properly internalize the lessons from the FTX crisis. This is going to get a lot of bad press, and it will be easy to criticize the decision as bad optics, but this is not simply "bad optics". Aella's Twitter feed is bad optics. This is bad practice. It is bad practice to hire people with bad decisionmaking records for decisionmaking roles. It is bad practice to establish a norm of soft-landings for people culpable in major scandals.
I had sort of expected Caroline to remain a semi-public figure associated with EA/AI/rationalism after her release from prison, but I didn't expect her to get hired for a financial infrastructure job. She should be blogging for pennies on Substack or working in the bednet mines.
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