I agree with much of Leopold’s empirical claims, timelines, and analysis. I’m acting on it myself in my planning as something like a mainline scenario.
Nonetheless, the piece exhibited some patterns that gave me a pretty strong allergic reaction. It made or implied claims like:
a small circle of the smartest people believe this
i will give you a view into this small elite group who are the only who are situationally aware
the inner circle longed tsmc way before you
if you believe me; you can get 100x richer—there’s still alpha, you can still be early
This geopolitical outcome is “inevitable” (sic!)
in the future the coolest and most elite group will work on The Project. “see you in the desert” (sic)
Etc.
Combined with a lot of retweets, with praise, on launch day, that were clearly coordinated behind the scenes; it gives me the feeling of being deliberately written to meme a narrative into existence via self-fulfilling prophecy; rather than inferring a forecast via analysis.
As a sidenote, this felt to me like an indication of how different the AI safety adjacent community is now to when I joined it about a decade ago. In the early days of this space, I expect a piece like this would have been something like “epistemically cancelled”: fairly strongly decried as violating important norms around reasoning and cooperation. I actually expect that had someone written this publicly in 2016, they would’ve plausibly been uninvited as a speaker to any EAGs in 2017.
I don’t particularly want to debate whether these epistemic boundaries were correct—I’d just like to claim that, empirically, I think they de facto would have been enforced. Though, if others who have been around have a different impression of how this would’ve played out, I’d be curious to hear.
Nonetheless, the piece exhibited some patterns that gave me a pretty strong allergic reaction. It made or implied claims like: * a small circle of the smartest people believe this * i will give you a view into this small elite group who are the only who are situationally aware * the inner circle longed tsmc way before you * if you believe me; you can get 100x richer—there’s still alpha, you can still be early * This geopolitical outcome is “inevitable” (sic!) * in the future the coolest and most elite group will work on The Project. “see you in the desert” (sic) * Etc.
These are not just vibes—they are all empirical claims (except the last maybe). If you think they are wrong, you should say so and explain why. It’s not epistemically poor to say these things if they’re actually true.
It’s not epistemically poor to say these things if they’re actually true.
Invalid.
Compare:
A: “So I had some questions about your finances, it seems your trading desk and exchange operate sort of closely together? There were some things that confused me...”
B: “our team is 20 insanely smart engineers”
A: “right, but i had a concern that i thought perhaps—”
B: “if you join us and succeed you’ll be a multi millionaire”
A: ”...okay, but what if there’s a sudden downturn—”
(I don’t understand your usage of “sic” here. My guess from the first was that you meant it to mean “he really said this obviously wrong thing”, but that doesn’t quite make sense with the second one).
Sic is short for the Latin phrase sic erat scriptum, which means thus it was written. As this suggests, people use sic to show that a quote has been reproduced exactly from the source – including any spelling and grammatical errors and non-standard spellings.
I was only familiar with sic to mean “error in original” (I assume kave also), but this alternative use makes sense too.
FWIW I was also confused by this usage of sic, bc I’ve only ever seen it as indicating the error was in the original quote. Quotes seem sufficient to indicate you’re quoting the original piece. I use single quotes when I’m not quoting a specific person, but introducing a hypothetical perspective.
tbf I never realized “sic” was mostly meant to point out errors, specifically. I thought it was used to mean “this might sound extreme—but I am in fact quoting literally”
I would broadly support a norm of ‘double quotation marks means you’re quoting someone and single quotes means you are not’.
The sole reason I don’t do this already is because often I have an abbreviated word, like I did with ‘you’re’ above, and I feel like it’s visually confusing to have an apostrophe inside of the pair of single quotes.
Maybe it’s worth just working with it anyway? Or perhaps people have a solution I haven’t thought of? Or perhaps I should start using backticks?
For my taste, the apostrophe in “you’re” is not confusing because quotations can usually only end on word boundaries.
I think (though not confidently) that any attempt to introduce specific semantics to double vs. single quotes is doomed, though. Such conventions probably won’t reach enough adoption that you’ll be able to depend on people adhering to or understanding them.
(My convention is that double quotes and single quotes mean the same thing, and you should generally make separately clear if you’re not literally quoting someone. I mostly only use single quotes for nesting inside double quotes, although the thing I said above about quote marks only occurring on word boundaries make this a redundant clarification.)
(crossposted to EA forum)
I agree with much of Leopold’s empirical claims, timelines, and analysis. I’m acting on it myself in my planning as something like a mainline scenario.
Nonetheless, the piece exhibited some patterns that gave me a pretty strong allergic reaction. It made or implied claims like:
a small circle of the smartest people believe this
i will give you a view into this small elite group who are the only who are situationally aware
the inner circle longed tsmc way before you
if you believe me; you can get 100x richer—there’s still alpha, you can still be early
This geopolitical outcome is “inevitable” (sic!)
in the future the coolest and most elite group will work on The Project. “see you in the desert” (sic)
Etc.
Combined with a lot of retweets, with praise, on launch day, that were clearly coordinated behind the scenes; it gives me the feeling of being deliberately written to meme a narrative into existence via self-fulfilling prophecy; rather than inferring a forecast via analysis.
As a sidenote, this felt to me like an indication of how different the AI safety adjacent community is now to when I joined it about a decade ago. In the early days of this space, I expect a piece like this would have been something like “epistemically cancelled”: fairly strongly decried as violating important norms around reasoning and cooperation. I actually expect that had someone written this publicly in 2016, they would’ve plausibly been uninvited as a speaker to any EAGs in 2017.
I don’t particularly want to debate whether these epistemic boundaries were correct—I’d just like to claim that, empirically, I think they de facto would have been enforced. Though, if others who have been around have a different impression of how this would’ve played out, I’d be curious to hear.
(crossposted to the EA Forum)
These are not just vibes—they are all empirical claims (except the last maybe). If you think they are wrong, you should say so and explain why. It’s not epistemically poor to say these things if they’re actually true.
Invalid.
Compare:
A: “So I had some questions about your finances, it seems your trading desk and exchange operate sort of closely together? There were some things that confused me...”
B: “our team is 20 insanely smart engineers”
A: “right, but i had a concern that i thought perhaps—”
B: “if you join us and succeed you’ll be a multi millionaire”
A: ”...okay, but what if there’s a sudden downturn—”
B: “bull market is inevitable right now”
Maybe not false. But epistemically poor form.
(😭 there has to be a better way of doing this, lol)
(I don’t understand your usage of “sic” here. My guess from the first was that you meant it to mean “he really said this obviously wrong thing”, but that doesn’t quite make sense with the second one).
I mean that in both cases he used literally those words.
I was only familiar with sic to mean “error in original” (I assume kave also), but this alternative use makes sense too.
FWIW I was also confused by this usage of sic, bc I’ve only ever seen it as indicating the error was in the original quote. Quotes seem sufficient to indicate you’re quoting the original piece. I use single quotes when I’m not quoting a specific person, but introducing a hypothetical perspective.
tbf I never realized “sic” was mostly meant to point out errors, specifically. I thought it was used to mean “this might sound extreme—but I am in fact quoting literally”
I would broadly support a norm of ‘double quotation marks means you’re quoting someone and single quotes means you are not’.
The sole reason I don’t do this already is because often I have an abbreviated word, like I did with ‘you’re’ above, and I feel like it’s visually confusing to have an apostrophe inside of the pair of single quotes.
Maybe it’s worth just working with it anyway? Or perhaps people have a solution I haven’t thought of? Or perhaps I should start using backticks?
For my taste, the apostrophe in “you’re” is not confusing because quotations can usually only end on word boundaries.
I think (though not confidently) that any attempt to introduce specific semantics to double vs. single quotes is doomed, though. Such conventions probably won’t reach enough adoption that you’ll be able to depend on people adhering to or understanding them.
(My convention is that double quotes and single quotes mean the same thing, and you should generally make separately clear if you’re not literally quoting someone. I mostly only use single quotes for nesting inside double quotes, although the thing I said above about quote marks only occurring on word boundaries make this a redundant clarification.)