- Stigma, trust, and good outcomes when thinking about Team Pause vs Team The Only Way Out Is Through: “Stunting growth now in the development of artificial intelligence just makes the probability of a bad future outcome more likely, as the people who are prosocial and thoughtful are more likely to be discouraged from the field if we attach a stigma to it. My view is that most people are good and care about others and our collective future. We need to maintain this ratio of “good people” in AI research. We can’t have this become the domain of malevolent actors. It’s too important for humanity.” [Marginal Revolution]
- “I can say that if there was a plane where I had radical uncertainty, or 90% confidence, on its ability to land safely, I would not get on that plane. If you said ‘but you will eventually get on a plane at some point’ I would say all right, let’s work on our air travel technology and build a different plane. If you told me ‘yes we might not have to put everyone on Earth into this radically uncertain plane now but we definitely are going to do it with some plane, eventually, might as well do it now, I’d probably get to work on airplane safety.” [Zvi substack on second link in #1]
- Reminder that some regulations right, wrong, or indifferent socialize cost through private firms passing along costs to consumers: “One way or another, the public, or some part of it, will have to bear the cost of unlimited deposit insurance. The clearer it is that you and I and all of us are on the hook whenever any bank’s hunger for yield leaves any deposit unbacked, the more likely we are to adopt actually sensible policy, like disentangling the deposits and payments system entirely from private risk investment.” [Interfluidity drafts]
- Liberalism’s slowness as feature-not-bug in comparison to fascism [Interfluidity drafts]
- And Tanner Greer on “If we look at the Iraq War as the young rightists do, as a project conceived in secret by a cabal of neoconservative officials hell-bent on promoting democracy abroad whatever the costs, then the conflict’s historical lessons are obvious and have largely been realized. But if we see the invasion of Iraq through a different lens, the lens of civilizational stakes, vitalist drives, and a class of enervated urbanites who yearn to restore meaning and manhood through heroic state action — well, then it is not clear to me we have learned any lessons from our experience in Iraq after all.” [National Review]
Wednesday Misc and Stuff
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