r/slatestarcodex

Last week I tried to map what expert actually think about AI and its risks. Summaries. What they actually believe, why, and the moment/video they made the claim.

Google gave me articles that were mostly paraphrasing or editorializing. YouTube was clickbait titles and clips that didn't match what I was looking for. Found a few long podcasts where the answer was probably buried somewhere, but I'm not scrubbing through three hours to find it.

And here's the thing — even if I had found a good clip, I'd have one person's view. Hinton thinks it's existential. Yann LeCun thinks that's overblown. Harrari thinks its dangerous and will erode human trust. Sam Harris is a fanboy obviously. Who else is in this debate?

The reasoning is out there. Researchers have talked through their thinking in hundreds of podcasts and interviews. But actually seeing the shape of the debate — who believes what and why, where they disagree, what the strongest arguments are on each side — feels impossible without mass effort.

Maybe this is just me. But I'm curious:

• Is it the time? Just takes too long to find anything useful.
  • You are either locked in a 3-hour podcast to maybe find a 2 min segement relevant to the idea you care about. And you have to open an other 3-hour podcast to find this same idea discussed by another expert in another podcat.
• Is it the volume? Too much information out there, no way to sift through it. Information is cheap, but truth is expensive.
• It trust? Can't verify anything, AI makes stuff up, articles misrepresent
• Is it the missing map? Can't see the actual debate, just scattered takes.

I think humans can easily hold bad ideas and find it difficult to know what's a good or bad idea.

Is this a real problem for anyone?

For the past few years, I’ve been working with a couple friends to create a healthier online dating ecosystem. People have become increasingly disillusioned with picture-focused swipe-based dating apps; it feels like they don't really work anymore.

We reasoned that we could fix a lot about the bad dynamics of dating apps with a small fix: only show a user’s pictures after you’ve seen what they wrote. To make the text visually appealing, we came up with something called a tile, which is a card where you write 7 phrases about yourself and can customize the colors and fonts. Users can browse the tiles and click on the ones that seem interesting, revealing the full profile with pictures.

We're still growing the platform, so check it out and see what you think :)

View from the Shifting Mound is a personal story of a person struggling with dissociative disorders, which segues into a lot of things Scott used to write about, and I believe would interest the denizens of this sub

For the vast majority of human history, partners have gotten together through the machinations of dense social webs. They were matched together by their parents, or residents of neighboring hamlets, or grew to know each other in shared classrooms. But if you've ever heard of "Bowling Alone," you know that these webs have been in the process of collapsing since the invention of television, and perhaps even earlier than that. You might be inclined to attribute that to how time spent being passively entertained is time that can't be spent socializing with others, but if you did, you would be missing the real root cause: that celebrities and characters in TV shows are EVIL BRAIN VAMPIRES THAT SUCK OUT YOUR ABILITY FOR EMPATHY!

Okay, not literally. But devoting mindspace to fake people really DOES prevent you from caring about the REAL people in your life, and it's because of a phenomenally terrifying little concept called Dunbar's Number. If you don't want to read that whole wiki page and find out what it is, of if you've read it and aren't seeing the connection to my point, let me lay out the central point:

Your tiny monkey brain is capable of maintaining only a strictly finite number of social relationships.

...and when you think of what the features of a social relationship actually are, you realize you're maintaining a lot of them with characters that only exist inside television shows, news reports, podcasts, and occasionally novels. Consider the following five-letter word:

Trump.

You almost certainly just had some sort of emotional reaction, even if you aren't american. You imagined a specific set of facial features, gestures, verbal tics, and mannerisms. You can probably make a decent impersonation of the relevant person. If pressed, you might even have some idea of this person's emotional state, dreams, ambitions, and fears. You have a grasp of not just their social network, but if how they relate to yours: You know which of your friends love or hate this person, and in turn which of your friends this person would like or dislike. You are, in sum, devoting an absolutely collosal proportion of your frankly limited cognitive powers towards analysing a person who you will never even have a conversation with.

...and that applies regardless of whether you even support the guy!

He's not even the only malicious tulpa living in your brain. The main character of your favorite drama actors, famous musicians, activists, even cartoons can all occupy spots that could have been people in your mind. The ultimate sins of using AI are "AI psychosis" and "AI partners"-- getting fooled into thinking your chatbot actually cares about you.

...and as the AI reference should have told you, this is a problem that is only getting worse. It used to be incredibly difficult to create these tulpas-- requiring years of indoctrination or else the consumption of long, difficult texts. But mass media let you see and hear these ghosts in the machine... And every improvement in cosmetic artifice has made these ghosts more and more hyper-palatable. Pr agents, writing teams, and makeup artists create viral illusions of beauty and power that put you completely in their thrall... Works of seductive trickery designed to convince you to care about them.

But you should not. Not even if these fakes are somehow good people. In fact, you should try especially hard to avoid the "good" ones. Because every single vtuber, fitness influencer, positivity guru, etc. you follow replaces a person in your life who would have otherwise been an actual friend.

...and as pertains to relationships, that means missing out on the chance that your partner is one of hundred-fifty people in that non-friend's mental rolodex.

Now at this point you may want to retort, "Media is my coping mechanism for loneliness." But that's only true in the same sense that meth is a coping mechanism for unhappiness. Every hit of your favorite show destroys a relationship you'll never even know you could have had. I know the withdrawal symptoms of a media diet look terrifying, but you have to get clean. You'll only lose more of yourself if you fail to do that.

All of this applies even to people who think themselves satisfied and happy with life, because your social network is not a good wholly your own, but gift shared with all your friends and loved ones. If you have unhappy and/or single friends, that might be because you missed the chance to befriend someone who could have been their friend or partner. Or maybe you're missing out on that friend-of-a-friend that could arrange one of those unlikely romantic coincidences that change two entire lives for the better.

So:

Ditch the news cycle.
Use web extensions to block the names of famous people and celebrities.
Stop watching episodic shows.
Completely eliminate ANY parasocial contact. Don't engage with fandoms, fanclubs, hate-doms, or indeed any kind of discussion group or comment section.

I would also recommend making use of the mantra, "these aren't real people," whenever you hear about something that makes you feel some type of way about any nonlocal individual. This applies even to people who are objectively real and have power over you, like politicians or upper management at your company. Yes, they can destroy you with a whim... But there's no point caring about them. How you feel about them will have zero impact on how they treat you. If you need to understand them on some level to avoid negative consequences or obtain positive ones, then seek to understand them in the way you understand a meterological or economic process. Hot air rises, increases in supply decrease prices, and your department's ritual to propriate your CEO requires that you complete inspection forms A through F and get them all dated and signed.

[Also, while I'm here, I might as well tell you my conspiracy theory about how the Flynn effect is caused by mass media. Radio and television have historically been less convincing, and therefore had an easier time supplanting the empathic abilities and social relationships of less cognitively complex people. That applied a reproductive penalty that resulted in generation-over-generation increases in intelligence. That trend is recently reversing because of a combination of entertainment types that are more palatable to smart than dumb people (e.g., video games) and the fact that palatability of media has increased to such a degree that intelligence has been drowned out by other genetic or cultural traits as being primarily protective.]

Back in 2022, Karlin said:

>The duration of the conflict will depend on the extent to which Ukrainian soldiers are prepared to fight. In conventional models, it will take several weeks, with a few thousand Russian casualties and several 10,000’s of Ukrainian casualties. However, given those very disparities – inevitable given Russia’s vast preponderance in materiel, mobility, and technology – I suspect there’s a very good chance that the collapse might happen much quicker. By moving its Embassy to Lvov, the US has already implicitly acknowledged that Russia will win, so the correct game theory move for Ukrainian soldiers is to follow their own oligarchs into defection and accept the 2-3x salary increase from joining the Russian Army. In this scenario, which is both my hope and intuition, Russian and Ukrainian military casualties will be limited to the hundreds and thousands, respectively.

Scott graded his predictions (including this one):

>Anatoly Karlin: B-

>Anatoly is a Russian nationalist who wrote Regathering Of The Russian Lands, which has become the canonical (in these circles) essay for understanding how Putin thinks.
He was totally right about what Putin would do, but his predictions about weak Ukrainian resistance are on the verge of being disproven

With buildings in Moscow on fire, refineries and Crimea in chaos, I think we'll have to say that the "predictions about weak Ukrainian resistance" were about as off-base as you can get.

I freely admit that this post is entirely motivated by an animus for warmongers.

This thread is intended to fill a function similar to that of the Open Threads on SSC proper: a collection of discussion topics, links, and questions too small to merit their own threads. While it is intended for a wide range of conversation, please follow the community guidelines. In particular, avoid culture war–adjacent topics.

Thoughts? Any stories that stand out?

edit: super high effort OC I know. Will post thoughts on some of them when time becomes available.

(June 2026)

I found this pretty high in the Google search results when Googling for an old SSC post and I figured it couldn't hurt to share it here.

Lots of good details on the complexities of jet turbine manufacturing.

"Before LLMs I believed the analogy—I think it was Yud’s—that making AI via chatbots was like making real flowers by getting really good at sculpting wax. For most of the past 25 years, I thought we’d hit RSI via RL before anything learned English.

In that regard, I see us as lucky. AGI will come from “thoughts” we can read, literally. As important, LLMs are an expensive industrial process, not conventional PC software. AI cannot trivially self-improve as it could were it mostly code—as many assumed it would be.

None of this was guaranteed. AGI was feared to happen in a basement. It was supposed to explode.

Because it doesn’t, we can let capabilities out one by one. We can see what genuinely sucks about AI. We can integrate, adjust, and live in the Kurzweilian line-fitting world.

Even if it’s been unclear at times how long our stay is, I’m grateful we’re here."

- @goodside on Twitter

I think, like Scott, a lot of people on this sub have an interest in both AI and forecasting. I'm fairly confident that over the next three years we are going to be seeing superhuman LLM forecasters because of purposeful forecasting post-training, and wrote a blog post articulating why.

It was originally meant to be a paper, but since I think this area is pretty broadly interesting I decided to write it as a blog post first, I hope the format works.

I. Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, etc. believe there is an extraordinarily powerful shadowy force in the world that organizes the assassination of people like Charlie Kirk for "speaking out" about various things like "the machinations of Israel"--but then... Alex Jones, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are alive and well, distinctly not-assassinated. They're more popular than ever and have been allowed by this shadowy force to amass huge followings on social media, raking in millions of dollars, saying the same things as and even more extreme things than Charlie Kirk was ever saying, for years on end. What on earth is their explanation for this? How is this not cognitive dissonance in the extreme? Do they think these powers aren't competent enough to kill them? Or that the powers that be just don't care about Fuentes's show--in which case, why did they care about Charlie Kirk's show?

II. They think "the jews" rule the world and control American politics and brainwash public opinion through their grip over the media, despite the fact that there has never been a jewish U.S. president, the most powerful position of influence there is, and literal self-described anti-semitism has never been more popular.

iii. They also believe jews rule the world despite the fact that jews make up only 0.2% of the world population. If you can control the entire world at a ratio of 0.2% to 99.8%... then like... uh... maybe they should??? How capable, wise, or impressive can white & other non-jewish people really be to run things if they can be the majority ethnicity and are nonetheless utterly impotent in the face of this rag tag team of like five people vs. the combined resources and intellect of billions? If you buy into a NAZI like "might makes right" or "survival of the fittest" social-Darwinian worldview, as our modern day admirers of Hitler do, how on earth do you justify putting the weak common white man in power over this genuinely impressive miniature minority group, which supposedly is pulling all the strings behind the scenes?