The sidebar that shows all comments by author is incredibly useful (to me)!
I don’t know how long ago it was put in, but when I noticed it, it made it waaaaay easier for me to parse through big conversation trees, get a sense for what people are thinking, and zero in on threads I want to read in detail.
Thanks to whoever had that idea and implemented it!
This is really remarkable! Thanks for posting, I don’t know when I would have seen it otherwise.
Partway through, I Googled a couple passages to quickly confirm that it wasn’t some “modern blog post in an old-timey style”—it feels more specific and prescient to me than I remember Erewhon being (though Gwern’s comment makes me think I should go back and look again, or check Darwin Among the Machines).
Evans’ predictions on Trost’s arguments and overall vibe are also impressive, IMO. (E.g. “if it were not for your incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things—if you had once understood the action of any delicate machine...” ~= “actually training models gives you the insight that AI risk isn’t a thing.”) I wonder how much Evans-vs.-Trost-style conversation was already going on.
Interesting how this part turned out:
It doesn’t seem like Evans (or others at the time?) anticipated that instead of individual machines reproducing like humans, they could just run the factories / mines / etc. that produce them. Which is an odd oversight, since by that time machines were certainly used in factories to make more machines—it seems like the “reproduction via external construction” prediction should have been a lot easier to make than the “reasoning machines” prediction.
😬