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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6212 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Isn't MIRI effectively a rock with the words "don't build the AI [that takes over the world]" on it? I don't recall them building anything. By those standards I'm an AI organization too.

You would not expect a "pandemic safety organization" to create novel viruses. It's by no means trivial that an "AI safety organization" should be expected to build AIs, as opposed to brainstorming and lobbying for ways to stop anyone anywhere from building AIs.

You would not expect a "pandemic safety organization" to create novel viruses.

There have been plenty of comments here about how much the CDC and NIH were funding gain of function research, despite a Congressional ban, some of which was done in Wuhan, and some of that proposed included specific mutations later seen in a pandemic coronavirus that first appeared in Wuhan. Whether or not this was the source of said pandemic remains unproven.

Well, quite, but people who believe gain-of-function research caused COVID or might have caused COVID generally agree that gain-of-function research is in fact not the sort of thing a pandemic safety organization ought to have been doing; and that by dabbling in that sort of thing and causing COVID, they failed harder at their intended task than should have been possible. Why should we not treat AI safety organizations which insist on building AIs in the same way?

Building things is the main way you come to understand them, though. That's why textbooks have exercises.

MIRI's academic work on alignment - to the extent they published anything at all - turned out to be almost comically irrelevant because they had no idea how AI actually works and their forecasts were almost totally wrong.

Yes. Amazingly, this fact alone makes them better than every other AI organization in existence (with the possible exception of Redwood Research and METR).

Should I post payment credentials to accept donations for my own AI organization? I promise to do even less to build the AI that takes over the world.

Coefficient Giving just launched a new funding project for AI Safety orgs. They are currently begging for applications. Shoot your shot.

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