Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Alyssa Vance's avatar

Maybe I should start a Substack. I can title it "I Told You So, You Fucking Fools" 😂

Expand full comment
collin's avatar

"And in general, there’s what looks to me like a bunch of other confusions around this supposed need for an environment, where no you can simulate that thing fine if you want to."

Can you? This maybe seems like where our disconnect is. When we fly to Mars, we create a flight plan and then we do lots of micro adjustments to stay the course. This is much easier than just getting the calculation perfect on the first shot, right? The further out in time you want to go, the bigger this disconnect is, just as a simple consequence of chaos in dynamical systems. And as soon as you combine this with entities who know they're being observed, you get adversarial dynamics and now there's not even a prize for being close, because every correlation that can easily be reversed shall be.

I agree that if environments could be reliably simulated to a sufficient level of detail there's lots of existential risk. But I've never understood where the "we can simulate that thing fine" attitude comes from, when complexity science and simple observation seem to both point to precisely the opposite.

(Fully prepared to take the L on bagels and croissants though. The honest truth is that my partner likes bagels and I like croissants so I've never taste tested both from the same source.)

Expand full comment
28 more comments...

No posts