Denver
Joined June 2007
We don't know how governments work. We can't predict how they might behave. We can't stop them from misbehaving. We can't ensure we stay in control if they do misbehave. The fields addressing these 4 issues are called political science, oversight, institutional design, and constitutional limits. There are foundational questions that remain unresolved in these fields, despite centuries of effort. We cannot rely on solving these questions on a deadline.
We don't know how AI systems work. We can't predict how they might behave. We can't stop them from misbehaving. We can't ensure we stay in control if they do misbehave. The fields of research addressing these 4 issues are called interpretability, testing, alignment, and control. There are foundational research questions that remain unresolved in these fields, despite many years of effort. We cannot rely on solving these questions on a deadline.
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I feel like the extent of the government/NGO Internet censorship apparatus is extensively underrated by people interested in AI safety, in particular how it pattern matches to calls for neutral third parties to people of the political persuasion who were targets of the censorship
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Replying to @tszzl
I basically agree that for any capability level that’s OSed, we should thenceforth assume there will be ubiquitous rogue agents at that capability level. I think if this happens 3 months behind the frontier, the damage will either (1) occur and be extremely noticeable and traceable and we can react based on future evidence, or (2) not occur and so we get to keep the current positive OS status quo. Either way, the correct move right now is to separate pacing from any notion of OS-restriction, loudly and repeatedly. OS-misuse-restriction should be treated as a completely separate policy discussion that can get litigated down the line based on what actually happens.
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Are there any tools that consistently get agents to simplify codebases? Have you ever seen a tool cut 20% of code out of a system while maintaining externally-visible behavior? Not dead code etc., but actual design simplification.
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mbz retweeted
when you watch a movie and some catastrophic failure happens in some system and the computer says like "containment breached" and you're like well how bad could it be if the UX has a specific error state for that flow
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You're playing a game of chess. While you're playing someone delivers a scathing but intentionally misleading critique of your opponent's play. Whose side is this bystander on? It feels foolish to even ask, they're helping your opponent. Yet, in politics we fall for it.
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There's an old joke in systems biology called "How Biologists Fix a Radio." A biologist, tasked with figuring out why a radio doesn't work, removes components one by one and catalogs the result. Remove this transistor: the radio makes a horrible screeching sound. Conclusion: this is the "horrible screeching transistor." Remove another component: the radio goes silent. Conclusion: this is the "silence transistor." This is essentially what we do with genomics. We see which genes are mutated in cancer and assume they must be "cancer genes." We see which genes are differentially expressed and assume they must be "important." But correlation is not causation, and a parts list is not a circuit diagram. You can have a complete inventory of every resistor, capacitor, and transistor in a radio and still have no idea how it plays music.
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mbz retweeted
people misunderstand the icarus story. the problem was not that he flew too high. it's that the wings were made of beeswax, which offered very little resistance to heating. with modern materials he would have had no problems. we can fly as close to the sun as we want now
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Replying to @feelsdesperate
They're Overton Window washers.
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Finding out what Socrates found out a few thousand years ago.
The fact that one can get an LLM to put together a cogent-sounding argument in favor of virtually any position has left me feeling cynical about human debate and discourse. That it’s (almost) all a game wholly sealed inside language itself without tether to the world.
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As Ron Paul said, we could defend the United States with submarines and all our troops back home. As Abraham Lincoln said, the combined armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River in a trial of a thousand years—if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. The Iran war is not necessary to defend Americans. It’s a war of choice.
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Transgenderism is an ongoing project of attempting to normalize a bizarre subculture built around esoteric pseudo-medical practices from the outermost fringe of human extremity and make it compulsory for every American to join that subculture and to make that subculture the mainstream culture of the Western world. One requires only the most cursory understanding of the pioneering figures responsible for the mainstreaming of transgenderism -- who they were and what their motives were -- to understand this as a matter of certainty. It is as if ascetics who scourge themselves with whips in public or amputee fetishists began teaching their beliefs to young schoolchildren and recruiting them to join their ranks. One is forced into the strange position of referencing practices that are not more bizarre than transgenderism -- that are indeed arguably less bizarre -- to make an analogy in an attempt to restore some semblance of sanity and proportionality to our thinking about this. The normalization has already gone far enough that the whole culture suffers from vertigo where it is unable to orient itself in space or time. Giving the same off-label cancer drugs that are used to chemically castrate adult sex offenders to pubescent children who have been brainwashed to fear the decisive stage of mental, physical, and emotional maturation that resolves gender dysphoria in children in most cases is self-evidently an act of madness and medicalized child abuse unmatched by anything in the history of modern medicine. It took the self-lobotomization of the American professional and managerial classes for our truth-seeking apparatus not to see this fact that is self-evident to any normal person with normal human instincts. This self-lobotomization occurred across mainstream institutions of all kinds -- all it required was the incantation of a few odious euphemisms, the manipulation of rewards and punishments, and confident claims by various authorities that self-evidently ludicrous claims were in fact settled science. Now we are in phase one of recognizing that there was never any science to any of it. It was all a lie told by cultists who managed to infiltrate and corrupt society's knowledge-generating, certifying, and enforcement apparatus -- it was the most outrageous of all such possible lies, so outrageous that nobody could believe that anyone would attempt it, much less succeed, unless there was some actual substance behind it, some real grounds for epistemic and moral confidence. There was none.
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My view of journalists is similar to my view of cops: their institution is vital to a free and fair society, and they rely on public trust, and they've developed this culture that arrogantly —almost gleefully— flaunts breaking this trust at every opportunity.
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A key feature of the case for the war in Iraq was the Neocon campaign to convince the American people that then Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki was lying about the immense difficulty that lay ahead
Here come more leaks from Iran’s second favorite “media” source, Axios, after Al Jazeera — whomever is leaking from the administration should be fired and prosecuted. axios.com/2026/02/23/iran-st…
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I think for a lot of people, it started with the government cover-up of Jimmy Savile for decades. That has never been effectively dealt with, so the perception of exploitation and corruption continues. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) also exposed a shameful pattern: elite UK institutions - from Parliament and political parties to the Home Office - repeatedly turned a blind eye to credible child sex abuse allegations against prominent figures. MPs like Peter Morrison (Thatcher’s aide) and Cyril Smith were rumoured or known to have sexual interests in children, yet shielded from police action by prosecutors, whips' offices, and party loyalty that prioritised image over justice. Also, 114 Home Office files on historical abuse claims from 1979–99 vanished - destroyed, lost, or "not found" - including Geoffrey Dickens’ explosive dossiers naming alleged Westminster abusers passed to top officials. Whips hoarded MPs' secrets to control them, honours flowed to suspects, and inquiries slammed "institutional complacency" that valued status over child safety for decades. Systemic protection of the powerful. Shocking failure.
It will never not be incredible how desperate people are to believe in mass child rape. When did you decide your worldview would be vindicated by the mass rape of children? Why do you yearn to discover that masses of children have been raped? Seriously, what is wrong with you?
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this is the *least* humane proposal for immigration enforcement. not even Trump and Vance are suggesting this, as it would be squarely targeted at the most law abiding, productive illegal immigrants, and completely irrelevant for criminals. perfect Jason tweet
All of this violence, death, wasted money and division would be avoided if we simply fined the businesses hiring illegal aliens. Ask yourself why the 47th administration hasn’t taken this obviously better path.
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