davekasten

• davekastenMar 22, 2025, 10:14 PM

  13 points

  10

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: On the Ra­tion­al­ity of Deter­ring ASI

  I think I am too much inside the DC policy world to understand why this is seen as a gaffe, really. Can you unpack why it’s seen as a gaffe to them? In the DC world, by contrast, “yes, of course, this is a major national security threat, and no you of course could never use military capabilities to address it,” would be a gaffe.

• davekastenMar 22, 2025, 8:41 PM

  20 points

  7

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: On the Ra­tion­al­ity of Deter­ring ASI

  I particularly appreciated its coverage of explicitly including conventional ballistic escalation as part of a sabotage strategy for datacenters

  One thing I find very confusing about existing gaps between the AI policy community and the national security community is that natsec policymakers have already explicitly said that kinetic (i.e., blowing things up) responses are acceptable for cyberattacks under some circumstances, while the AI policy community seems to somehow unconsciously rule those sorts of responses out of the policy window. (To be clear: any day that American servicemembers go into combat is a bad day, I don’t think we should choose such approaches lightly.)

• davekastenMar 19, 2025, 4:32 AM

  6 points

  3

  on: Boots the­ory and Sy­bil Ramkin

  I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that Sam Vimes is a copper, and sees poverty lead to precarity, and precarity lead to Bad Things Happening In Bad Neighborhoods. The most salient fact about Lady Sybil is that she never has to worry, never is on the rattling edge; she’s always got more stuff, new stuff, old stuff, good stuff. Vimes (at that point in the Discworld series) isn’t especially financially sophisticated, so he narrows it down to the piece he understands best, and builds a theory off of that.

• davekastenMar 18, 2025, 10:43 PM

  14 points

  7

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  You can definitely meet your own district’s staff locally (e.g., if you’re in Berkeley, Congresswoman Simon has an office in Oakland, Senator Padilla has an office in SF, and Senator Schiff’s offices look not to be finalized yet but undoubtedly will include a Bay Area Office).
  
  You can also meet most Congressional offices’ staff via Zoom or phone (though some offices strongly prefer in-person meetings).
  
  There is also indeed a meaningful rationalist presence in DC, though opinions vary as to whether the enclave is in Adams Morgan-Columbia Heights, Northern Virginia, or Silver Spring.*

  
  *This trichotomy is funny, but hard to culturally translate unless you want a 15,000 word thesis on DC-area housing and federal office building policy since 1945 and its related cultural signifiers. Just...just trust me on this.
  
  

• davekastenMar 18, 2025, 6:40 PM

  20 points

  5

  on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  The elites do want you to know it: you can just email a Congressional office and get a meeting

• davekastenMar 11, 2025, 2:26 PM

  13 points

  9

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  I think on net, there are relatively fewer risks related to getting governments more AGI-pilled vs. them continuing on their current course; governments are broadly AI-pilled even if not AGI/​ASI-pilled and are doing most of the accelerating actions an AGI-accelerator would want.

• davekastenMar 11, 2025, 3:10 AM

  130 points

  11

  on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  The Trump administration (or, more specifically, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, but they are in the lead on most AI policy, it seems), are asking for comment on what their AI Action Plan should include. Literally anyone can comment on it. You should consider commenting on it, comments are due Saturday at 8:59pm PT/​11:59pm ET via an email address. These comments will actually be read, and a large number of comments on an issue usually does influence any White House’s policy. I encourage you to submit comments!
  
  regulations.gov/​document/​NSF_FRDOC_0001-3479… (Note that all submissions are public and will be published)
  
  (Disclosure: I am working on a submission for this for my dayjob but this particular post is in my personal capacity)
  
  (Edit note: I originally said this was due Friday; I cannot read a calendar, it is in fact due 24 hours later. Consider this a refund that we have all received for being so good at remembering the planning fallacy all these years.)

  What links here?

  • Whether gov­ern­ments will con­trol AGI is im­por­tant and neglected by Seth Herd (Mar 14, 2025, 9:48 AM; 24 points)

• davekastenMar 5, 2025, 12:06 AM

  8 points

  3

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: The Mil­ton Fried­man Model of Policy Change

  I think there’s at least one missing one, “You wake up one morning and find out that a private equity firm has bought up a company everyone knows the name of, fired 90% of the workers, and says they can replace them with AI.”

• davekastenMar 4, 2025, 1:10 AM

  14 points

  7

  on: The Mil­ton Fried­man Model of Policy Change

  This essay earns a read for the line, “It would be difficult to find a policymaker in DC who isn’t happy to share a heresy or two with you, a person they’ve just met” alone.
  
  I would amplify to suggest that while many things are outside the Overton Window, policymakers are also aware of the concept of slowly moving the Overton Window, and if you explicitly admit you’re doing that, they’re usually on board (see, e.g., the conservative legal movement, the renewable energy movement, etc.). It’s mostly only if you don’t realize you’re proposing that that you trigger a dismissive response.

• davekastenFeb 11, 2025, 9:49 PM

  25 points

  4

  on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  Ok, so it seems clear that we are, for better or worse, likely going to try to get AGI to do our alignment homework.
  
  Who has thought through all the other homework we might give AGI that is as good of an idea, assuming a model that isn’t an instant-game-over for us? E.G., I remember @Buck rattling off a list of other ideas that he had in his The Curve talk, but I feel like I haven’t seen the list of, e.g., “here are all the ways I would like to run an automated counterintelligence sweep of my organization” ideas.
  
  (Yes, obviously, if the AI is sneakily misaligned, you’re just dead because it will trick you into firing all your researchers, etc.; this is written in a “playing to your outs” mentality, not an “I endorse this as a good plan” mentality.)

  What links here?

  • Ebenezer Dukakis's comment on Prospects for Align­ment Au­toma­tion: In­ter­pretabil­ity Case Study by Jacob Pfau (Mar 28, 2025, 1:48 AM; 1 point)

• davekastenFeb 8, 2025, 10:23 PM

  0 points

  −3

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: nikola’s Shortform

  Huh? “fighting election misinformation” is not a sentence on this page as far as I can tell. And if you click through to the election page, you will see that the elections content is them praising a bipartisan bill backed by some of the biggest pro-Trump senators.

• davekastenFeb 6, 2025, 7:59 PM

  8 points

  1

  in reply to: aog’s comment on: nikola’s Shortform

  Without commenting on any strategic astronomy and neurology, it is worth noting that “bias”, at least, is a major concern of the new administration (e.g., the Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee is actually extremely worried about algorithmic bias being used for housing and financial discrimination and has given speeches about this).

• davekastenFeb 6, 2025, 3:20 PM

  7 points

  1

  in reply to: Nikola Jurkovic’s comment on: nikola’s Shortform

  I am not a fan, but it is worth noting that these are the issues that many politicians bring up already, if they’re unfamiliar with the more catastrophic risks. Only one missing on there is job loss. So while this choice by OpenAI sucks, it sort of usefully represents a social fact about the policy waters they swim in.

• davekastenJan 24, 2025, 4:46 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  I am (sincerely!) glad that this is obvious to other people too and that they are talking about it already!

• davekastenJan 23, 2025, 6:45 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Joey Yudelson’s comment on: [Cross-post] Every Bay Area “Walled Com­pound”

  I mean, the literal best way to incentivize @Ricki Heicklen and me to do this again for LessOnline and Manifest 2025 is to create a prediction market on it, so I encourage you to do that

[Cross-post] Every Bay Area “Walled Com­pound”

• davekastenJan 20, 2025, 3:07 PM

  8 points

  5

  on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  One point that maybe someone’s made, but I haven’t run across recently: if you want to turn AI development into a Manhattan Project, you will by-default face some real delays from the reorganization of private efforts into one big national effort. In a close race, you might actually see pressures not to do so, because you don’t want to give up 6 months to a year on reorg drama—so in some possible worlds, the Project is actually a deceleration move in the short term, even if it accelerates in the long term!

• davekastenJan 17, 2025, 4:01 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Rasool’s comment on: [Cross-post] Wel­come to the Es­say Meta

  Ooh, interesting, thank you!

[Cross-post] Wel­come to the Es­say Meta

• davekastenJan 16, 2025, 9:18 PM

  5 points

  0

  on: dav­ekas­ten’s Shortform

  Incidentally, spurred by @Mo Putera’s posting of Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep annotations, I want to remind folks that Vinge’s Rainbows End is very good and doesn’t get enough attention, and will give you a less-incorrect understanding of how national security people think.